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What are these little red dots (LRDs)?
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I’m a fan of Bing Crosby’s artistry every day of the year, and not just when he returns to the airwaves at Christmas time. But the holiday spirit inspires me to celebrate some of my favorite moments in his remarkable career—which took him from Bix to Bowie and beyond—in this story from my archives.
This is also a good time to say that you can still give a premium subscription to The Honest Broker as a holiday gift to friends and family. Or even to yourself.
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Now let’s turn to Bing….
Pop culture devours its own. The destiny of all bestsellers is to fall off the charts. Even the stars in Hollywood, like those in outer space, eventually stop shining—and it happens a lot sooner.
Consider the case of Bing Crosby. Some of my readers might not even recognize the name. But a few people still alive today can recall when Crosby was both the biggest pop singer in the world and the hottest movie star in Hollywood.
If he’s remembered nowadays, it’s only during December, when his version of “White Christmas” briefly returns to heavy rotation. Even today, it ranks as the bestselling single of all time. There aren’t many records that last eighty years, and least of all in the record business, but Crosby still sits atop this chart.
Here it is (courtesy of Wikipedia):
I’ve written about Crosby before, and will again. But today I want share four of my favorite (and very different) perspectives on Bing.
In June 1945, a US military commander in the European campaign wanted to write to Bing Crosby—to tell him how much the singer contributed to troop morale during World War II.
He had no way of reaching Crosby, so he simply addressed the letter as follows:
Mr. Bing Crosby
Wherever You Are
c/o Postmaster
New York, NY
Somehow the letter arrived at its intended destination—we know that because it survives, with a handwritten addendum from Crosby himself on top of the page, where Bing jotted “nice letter.”
Indeed, it was. I want to call attention to it because it gives a completely different angle on Crosby’s exceptionally laid-back and low-key demeanor—which you might think has nothing in common with a soldier’s day-to-day burdens. It also testifies to powers of music we’ve too often forgotten in the present day, to our detriment.
The full letter is unpublished. But in the second volume of his Bing Crosby biography, Gary Giddins shares some details. The commander, from his camp in Antwerp, wrote
of that ‘quality in your voice which strikes to the bottom of the hearts of men. I have watched it happen, often, not just in the rare case but in many many thousands of men — sitting silent, retrospective, thoughts flying back to home and loved ones.’ He emphasized the singer's ‘power to soften the heart of the man who so shortly after goes back to shoot down his brother man,’ saying it was a determinant in helping to keep ‘our boys from turning into the beasts they are asked to be.’
This, he said, was ‘something big, something too big not to have you know and understand’ — the ‘power of music, put into humble, throbbing words, as these fellows want it, need it, bow to it.’
That may be the most moving testimony to the power of a pop singer I’ve ever read. In the midst of the most savage war of the century, Bing Crosby was a touchstone of decency and humanity for the troops on the front line.
I can’t validate this next story, because I heard it secondhand or third-hand years ago, but it’s too good not to share.
The story involves Bing Crosby in the final years of his life. He was invited to sing at an event, probably for a charity or cause, and the host enlisted some young progressive jazz musicians to accompany the famous singer. The band members weren’t impressed by this aging star, who had made his reputation back in the 1920s, and decided to throw Crosby off his game.
When Bing showed up, he greeted them in his typical laidback manner, and told them he would sing some familiar old songs. But when the performance started, these young jazz players threw in every arcane substitute chord change and rhythmic displacement they could think of, further spicing up their accompaniment with Coltrane modal fills and bits of polytonality.
Much to their frustration, nothing they did that evening disrupted Bing in the least. This old, balding pop singer navigated effortlessly through every one of their advanced harmonies, never faltering or showing the slightest degree of discomfort. Even more infuriating, Bing maintained the relaxed and unflappable delivery that was a Crosby trademark. As far as the audience could tell, he was just as happy-go-lucky as ever, and maybe he was—after all, Crosby had learned the ropes as a young man alongside Bix Beiderbecke, who was as unconventional and unpredictable as any musician from the early 20th century
When the performance was all done, the musicians expected to get chewed out by Crosby backstage. Instead, Bing shook their hands, and thanked them with great warmth. He said how “cool it was to play with these young cats,” and expressed his sincere desire that they might do so again in the future.
At some point, I plan to publish an in-depth account of how Bing Crosby helped create Silicon Valley. In the meantime, here’s an extract:
Bing Crosby felt exhausted in the mid-1940s. And who could blame him? He was the most popular musician in the world—and it wasn’t just “White Christmas,” which sold more records than any other song in history. He eventually recorded some 1,600 songs, and more than forty of them reached the top of the chart. But he was just as popular in movies, winning the Oscar for Best Actor in 1944, and getting nominated again in 1945. In addition, he was tireless in touring and entertaining troops during the war.
But it was his radio show that proved too much. Because of the time difference, he had to do two different live broadcasts—and the network refused his proposal that they pre-record the later West Coast show on 16-inch transcription disks, basically a very large phonograph record. NBC had good reason for this. The sound quality on the disk recordings of that day were noticeably inferior. And the disks were cumbersome to edit—negating one of the major advantages of pre-recorded shows.
Crosby needed better recording technology. And in 1947, a stranger from Northern California made the trek to Hollywood with a big box that not only solved Bing’s dilemma, but set the wheels in motion for a whole host of later technologies.
What Jack Mullin did at MGM Studio that day is almost like a magic trick. He set up a live performance behind a curtain, and then followed it with a playback from his magnetic tape recorder. The audio quality was so true-to-life that many listeners couldn’t tell the difference. A private demonstration was arranged for Crosby at the ABC Studio on Sunset and Vine.
Crosby knew this was a huge breakthrough. But the price of a single Ampex 200-A recording machine was $4,000—more than many people paid for a home back then. In fact, the average median family income in the US that year was just $3,000. But Crosby wanted to buy 20 of these devices. He offered to pay 60% of the money up-front.
Thus, a few days later, a letter arrived in the Ampex office with a Hollywood postmark. Inside was a check from Bing Crosby for $50,000.
Ampex, according to Silicon Valley historians Peter Hammar and Bob Wilson, was later involved either directly or indirectly in the launch of “almost every computer magnetic and optical disc recording system, including hard drives, floppy discs, high-density recorders, and RFID devices.”
In other words, Bing Crosby launched the data storage business in Silicon Valley—indirectly laying the groundwork for everything from computer hard drives to cloud computing.
You could also use Bing Crosby as a case study in partnerships.
Superstars tend to be lone wolves. Even if they rise to fame as part of a band, the team frequently breaks up and stars go their separate ways. That’s true of all four Beatles, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Beyoncé, Phil Collins, Justin Timberlake, and several hundred other hitmakers.
Gilbert and Sullivan broke up after arguing over the cost of a carpet. The Dorsey brothers separated after disagreeing on the tempo of a song. Simon & Garfunkel broke up over . . . . well, that depends on which of their breakups you’re talking about. They found about 50 ways to leave their partner.
But Bing seemed to work effortlessly with other superstars without egos getting in the way. That was true from the start, when he learned from jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke. And years later he happily share the stage and movie screen with everyone from Louis Armstrong to Frank Sinatra. And late in life, he amazed rock fans by singing alongside David Bowie.
Many think that was Bing’s most unusual collaboration, but I would opt for this one (which I found on Twitter):
When you watch Bing with other superstars, you never detect even a sniff of competition or one-upmanship. I’m convinced that Bing’s adherence to the cool ethos is part of this—going with the flow was a Crosby trademark.
The most famous example is Crosby’s lifelong partnership with Bob Hope—who was not anywhere near as easygoing as Bing. Crosby was already a superstar when he first enlisted Hope to serve as emcee for a 1933 show. Eventually Hope rose to the top of the Hollywood hierarchy as the most popular comedian in the US, but Crosby never showed any signs of rivalry (although their onstage skits frequently pretended at it).
They made seven “road” pictures together, and grew closer with each one. By the time Crosby and Hope did Road to Hong Kong (1962), they actually decided to bring their wives along for the London filming, and shared a house together. “Bob’s wife, Dolores, said that was when they first realized how much they really loved each other,” explains Hope’s biographer Richard Zoglin.
One of my personal movie regrets is that Hope’s plan to make a final film with his friend never happened. Hope tried to secure adaptation rights of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, a story about two aging comedians, but got turned down. Otherwise, that movie would have served as a lovely capstone to a forty-year-plus partnership. Instead, the movie came out in 1975 starring George Burns and Walter Matthau—both remarkable comedians but without anywhere near the chemistry of Bob and Bing.
Abbott and Costello couldn’t match that longevity, and fell apart because of bickering after 22 years. Martin and Lewis broke up after exactly ten years together. Sonny and Cher got to eleven years before divorce ended their music-and-comedy success. Louis Prima and Keely Smith, who had a very similar husband-and-wife routine, only lasted nine years before they split up.
But Crosby and Hope were lifers. They joked about their schemes to upstage each other, but the reality was the exact opposite. If you haven’t seen any of the movies they made together—and you don’t have much of a chance nowadays, because Netflix doesn’t care about the history of cinema—find time to do so. You won’t be disappointed.
Two years after The Sunshine Boys, Bing Crosby left us at age 74. This master of relaxed understatement actually died on the golf course after saying these final words: "That was a great game of golf, fellas. Let's go have a Coca-Cola.”
The only time Bob Hope ever cancelled a performance was after his onscreen partner’s death. “If friends could have been made for each other,” he explained, “I would have asked for one just like Bing.”
So when you hear “White Christmas,” let it serve as a reminder of what cool is really all about. Bing’s unflappable, amicable demeanor and collaborative spirit—emblematic of coolness and jazz, in my opinion—ought to be as much of a legacy as all those hit songs. We could certainly use a dose of them every year, and (dare I say?) not just in December.
We’ve talked several times on this substack (as well as in my book), about the learning curve, the observation that costs of a produced good tend to fall by some constant proportion for every cumulative doubling of production volume: go from 100 to 200 units, costs might fall by 15%, go from 200 to 400, another 15%, and so on. Also known as “Wright’s Law” or the experience curve1, the learning curve can be described by the equation y = ax^-b, where y is the cost for the xth unit, a is the cost for the 1st unit, x is the cumulative production volume, and b is the learning exponent, which determines the rate at which costs fall. The hallmark of this sort of formula is that it makes a straight line on a log-log plot. Here, for instance, is the learning curve for transistors:
An obvious feature of the traditional learning model is that it uses a single learning rate: the amount that costs decrease every doubling stays the same. But a new paper published in the journal Advances in Applied Energy, “Variability of technology learning rates,” argues that modeling cost declines with a single learning rate isn’t really accurate. Rather, the authors propose that learning rates actually change frequently over time, and a model that can accommodate this will better predict future costs than the traditional Wright’s Law formulation.
To show this, the paper uses 87 learning curve datasets from the Performance Curve Database, which has data on cost and production volume for a variety of different products and technologies across several different industries. Most of the datasets (50) are for different chemicals, with the second largest category (21) being for energy technologies.
The paper starts by looking at how consistent learning rates are. They split each dataset into two halves, and calculate the learning rate for each half of the data. They find that there’s not much correlation between earlier and later learning rates:
The authors also note that you get similarly low correlations if you just look at the half of the datasets with the largest number of datapoints. So the low correlation between early-production and late-production learning rates doesn’t appear to be an artifact of some datasets having just a few datapoints.
I downloaded the data the authors used from the Performance Curve Database, and was able to pretty easily replicate both of these findings. There’s not a perfect match between the learning rates I calculated and what the paper authors calculated because I did a much simpler analysis, but it’s essentially the same result that there’s little correlation between past and future learning rates.
You can also get a qualitative sense of this just by looking at graphed learning curve data. Here’s all 87 learning curves, graphed. You can see that lots of these datasets aren’t following any sort of straight line, and are full of what the paper calls “break points”: places where the learning rate changes.
(Click to embiggen.)
The authors propose an alternative model to the simple, one-learning rate formulation of the learning curve. They first do a piecewise linear regression (using multiple lines, each one fitting a portion of the data) on each dataset, using some math to balance the complexity (how many different lines you use) vs the accuracy (how closely the line fits the data) of the model. They use these regressions to construct probability distributions for possible learning rates and for the spacing between break points. They then use these probability distributions to make production cost forecasts for each technology. Starting with the most recent observed learning rate, you sample a production volume at which the next breakpoint will occur. The current learning rate is extended to that breakpoint, after which you sample both a new learning rate and another breakpoint location.
Unlike Wright’s Law (which assumes learning rates are constant), this forecasting method assumes that learning rates change frequently, in a probabilistic fashion. The authors find that this forecasting method somewhat more accurately predicts future production costs than the simpler Wright’s Law model. For 30 of the technologies, the author’s piecewise linear model forecasts future costs better. For 36 technologies the forecasts are about equal, and for 21 Wright’s Law does better. But relative performance varies by category of technology. For energy technologies, about half are better predicted by the piecewise model, and about half are equally well-predicted by the two models. For consumer goods and genomics, the two models are also roughly equally accurate. And for what the paper calls “hardware” – transistors, laser diodes, DRAM, and hard drives — Wright’s Law does better.
There’re some interesting findings in this paper, but I think it’s useful to put it into context.
First, as the authors note, it’s long been known that learning curves will often deviate from a nice straight line on a log-log graph. One of the earliest systematic studies of the learning curve, “An Economic Study of the Military Airframe Industry” (published in 1957), notes that “[a]lthough the mathematical equation of the Learning Curve predicts a uniform reduction in the direct man-hours requirements per pound of airframe with each doubling of the cumulative units, there is often a tendency for the data to deviate from the theoretical line,” and goes on to describe the structure of various deviations and possible explanations for them. Likewise, “Perspectives on Experience,” an influential book on learning curves published by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in 1970 (and which is the source for much of the Performance Curve Database data), notes that “price” (what consumers pay, and what learning curve datasets often track) often deviates from predicted learning curve trends. The BCG researchers suggest that this is because learning curves predict costs, not prices, and there will be various reasons that prices might diverge from costs: a manufacturer pricing below costs early in a production run, a monopolist pricing above costs when market power allows them to, and so on. In a 1979 review of learning curve research, Louis Yelle notes that a variety of different curve shapes have been proposed, due to the fact that “the linear model does not always provide the best fit in all situations.” Baloff’s studies in the 1960s and 70s also noted that the smooth learning curve line can be disrupted by various factors.
But I’m not aware of earlier work that takes a systematic look at the deviations across a large number of different learning curves like this paper does. The most interesting finding in this paper, to me, is the observation that there’s apparently little correlation between past and future learning rates. This doesn’t completely overturn the idea of learning curves — even without constant learning rates, you still have costs falling as a diminishing returns function of cumulative production volume, which to me is the most important idea behind learning curves. But it does suggest that a simple, straight-line extrapolation will do a worse job forecasting future production costs than I previously thought. Deviations from the predicted, straight-line curve are apparently more the rule than the exception.
I’m somewhat less enthusiastic about the paper’s suggested alternative forecasting method of probabilistically selecting learning curve parameters, at least in its current form. I think the idea of drawing from a distribution of possible learning rates and distances to the next change in learning rate is interesting, but the proposed model doesn’t seem all that much better than the simpler, single learning rate model. The net advantage of the piecewise model — the number of technologies where piecewise does better, minus the number of technologies where Wright’s Law does better — is only 9 technologies out of the 87 analyzed.
A lot of research has gone into turning learning curves into more of a predictive tool, so that economists and manufacturers can accurately predict what the learning rate for some particular technology will be (or at the very least, understand the cause of deviations from the curve). This research tends to take an “inside view” of learning curves – that is, it tries to predict learning rates based on specific features of the technology or the industry that produces it, or on specific events that impinge on production. Examples of this include James McNerney et al’s 2011 paper, “The Role of Design Complexity in Technology Improvement,” which proposes a model of learning rates based on the degree of interconnectedness of the technological components in the product, and Malhotra and Schmidt’s 2020 paper, “Accelerating Low-Carbon Innovation,” which proposes a learning curve taxonomy based on a product’s complexity and its mass-producibility.
This paper, by contrast, takes more of an outside view. Instead of trying to predict learning rates based on specific features of the technology or on specific events which might trigger a change, it simply assumes that a learning curve will behave like other, similar learning curves, that learning rates will change every so often in a probabilistic fashion. I like a lot of the inside-view efforts to try and understand what drives learning curve rates. But I’m a big fan of outside view-style reasoning. So even though in practice this sort of outside view model didn’t seem to be an amazing advance over the simpler Wright’s Law model, it nevertheless seems potentially fruitful to think about learning curves along these lines.
Some people make distinctions between some of these terms, but they broadly describe the same basic phenomenon.
This the third and concluding part of my series with notes on the learnings from the 2025 Contraptions book club. Part I and Part II traced the construction of the Modernity Machine between roughly 1200 and 1600: a civilization-scale contraption that converted medieval heterogeneity into legible, interoperable order. By 1600, the machine was complete in all essential respects. This concluding part addresses what such completion actually meant, what the machine optimized for once built, the contradictions it necessarily produced, and why those contradictions could not be repaired from within.
The aim is not to declare the “end of modernity,” but to close out a rough analysis of the machine that took 400 years to build and turn on, making modernity possible, and sustained it for another 400 years, being patched in increasingly fragilizing ways along the way. And also to explore why its very success post-1600 began forcing a slow phase transition to a different kind of civilizational machinery which began to get constructed around 1600, right when the Modernity Machine got turned on. This machine, which I refer to as the Divergence Machine, is being completed and turned on as we speak, even as the Modernity Machine is starting to get decommissioned in bits and pieces worldwide. Here is a teaser picture for the overarching thesis we’re developing here.
The 1600-2000 period and the Divergence Machine that emerged in that period will be the subject of the 2026 book club.
But let’s wrap up 2025 first.
You can catch up on the closing 2025 group discussion in this transcript. What follows is my personal wrap-up.
Sloptraptions is an AI-assisted opt-in section of the Contraptions Newsletter. If you only want my hand-crafted writing, you can unsubscribe from this section.
This one is special, since I wrote the first two parts myself, then asked ChatGPT to write part 3 based on the previous parts and a brainstorm on next year’s book club. It stuck the landing probably better than I could have.
The Modernity Machine did not optimize for truth, justice, progress, or freedom—those were its legitimating narratives. What it optimized for, relentlessly and across domains, was legibility: the ability to render people, land, goods, time, belief, and violence enumerable, narratable, and interoperable at scale.
Venice, in City of Fortune, is not interesting because it was rich or republican, but because it functioned as an early, tightly integrated legibility engine: maritime logistics, double-entry bookkeeping, legal abstraction, diplomacy, and intelligence-gathering fused into a self-reinforcing apparatus. Venice: A New History fills in the same picture from another angle: stability emerges not from ideology but from procedural compression.
The horse, in Raiders, Rulers, and Traders, plays a parallel role across Eurasia: a biological technology that collapses distance, standardizes military force, and forces political units to scale or perish. The horse is legibility made kinetic.
Printing, in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, completes the transition. Knowledge becomes reproducible independent of context. Interpretation decouples from replication. Information density explodes while shared meaning lags behind. The machine acquires a memory that grows faster than any coordinating narrative.
1493 shows the planetary version of the same dynamic. The Columbian exchange is not merely ecological or economic; it is a global synchronization event. Previously isolated systems are forced into a single ledger. The machine’s jurisdiction becomes planetary even as its capacity for meaning remains local.
Seen this way, the Modernity Machine is best understood as a civilization-scale compression algorithm. For several centuries, the gains are extraordinary.
To understand what the machine displaced, it helps to look at relatively pristine end-of-medieval snapshots.
Majapahit offers such a snapshot outside Europe: a highly developed but still recognizably medieval empire, organized around courtly ritual, tributary relations, and localized legitimacy, poised at the cusp of collapse before modernity arrives in force. It represents a world not yet reorganized by legibility, still governed by face-to-face sovereignty and cosmological order.
Within Europe, The Age of Chivalry performs a similar function. Chivalry appears not as romance but as a fully articulated medieval coordination system—ethical, military, and social—already straining under pressures it cannot metabolize. This is medievalism at its most coherent, just before it becomes an anachronism.
These snapshots matter because they show what modernity did not inherit: localized legitimacy, narrative sufficiency, and bounded scale.
Once the Modernity Machine works, it produces three unavoidable byproducts.
First, excess agency. Feudal bonds dissolve, religious monopolies weaken, markets and cities proliferate. The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron are early catalogs of proliferating voices and moral standpoints. Social life becomes polyphonic. Coordination becomes harder because more people can act.
Second, excess information. Printing destabilizes epistemic hierarchy. By Montaigne’s time, the educated individual is already drowning in books. The Complete Essays read as field notes from the first generation to experience epistemic overload. Skepticism is both a philosophical stance and a coping mechanism.
Third, excess scale. Before European Hegemony and When Asia Was the World make clear that global integration predates European dominance, but modernity hardens integration into permanent structure. Local meaning cannot survive planetary circulation intact.
The machine creates more actors than it can integrate, more information than it can interpret, and more scale than it can narrate.
The lesson of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition is not that Bruno foresaw modern pluralism. It is almost the opposite. Bruno represents the last exuberant escape of medieval imagination—a crackpot magician and memory-maven operating within an anachronistic misunderstanding of Hermeticism as ancient Egyptian wisdom to hallucinate a worldview of bullshit — indifferent to truth or falsity in any modern empirical sense. His cosmological conclusions happened to resonate sympathetically with Copernican implications, but for fundamentally wrong reasons.
Bruno does not anticipate modernity; he misunderstands it. His fate marks not the birth of a new worldview, but the extinguishing of a freewheeling medieval mode incompatible with both emerging authoritarian modernism, especially ecclesiastical, and scientific empiricism. What survives of his tradition—Rosicrucianism, Masonic esotericism—persists as fringe subculture: culturally influential at times, intellectually irrelevant to the main currents of modern thought.
Bruno is thus not an early modern prophet, but a terminal medieval outlier.
Similarly, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography should not be read as the story of a proto-sociologist ahead of his time. That role is largely retrofitted by modern interpreters. In his own context, Ibn Khaldun appears more plausibly as a kind of depressed Arab Petrarch: a brilliant chronicler of decline and defender of tradition, lamenting the absence of an Islamic renaissance rather than inaugurating one.
His cyclical theory of dynasties does not launch a new science of society; it records the exhaustion of an old civilizational form. The importance of Ibn Khaldun here is diagnostic, not genealogical. He documents a world failing to enter the Modernity Machine at all, despite being in possession of many of the necessary components.
By the early modern period, narrative itself begins to fail as a unifying technology. Don Quixote stands as the European bookend to The Age of Chivalry. Quixote behaves impeccably within a dead symbolic system, and chaos results. The novel demonstrates that inherited narratives no longer synchronize action with reality.
Journey to the West stages the same problem mythically. The Monkey King embodies pure agency without moral center. Order is restored only through endless improvisation, not closure. This is not premodern innocence but recognition that containment now requires perpetual patching, a condition whose outer story is told in 1493.
Utopia remains the last sincere architectural drawing of the Modernity Machine. It assumes total legibility, benevolent coordination, stable universals, and obedient subjects. Even at publication, it is already obsolete. The social, informational, and political conditions required for utopia to function are precisely those modernity has destroyed in creating itself.
Everything after Utopia is retrofit to a completed civilizational machine, to patch problems that began appearing almost immediately after it was turned on in 1600.
By 1600, the machine has crossed a complexity threshold. More law increases rigidity without legitimacy. More reason fragments into disciplines. More planning amplifies unintended consequences. More morality polarizes rather than integrates.
This is not moral failure or intellectual laziness. It is structural. The Modernity Machine generates more differentiation than any universal framework can absorb.
The Modernity Machine does not collapse, but a new logic begins cohering at its periphery. Coordination shifts from top-down design to nudging from the margins — and increasingly, everybody is in the margins. Some just recognize it in 1600, while others are only realizing it now in 2025. Legitimacy fragments. Meaning localizes. Systems adapt without consensus. Civilization continues to function—often remarkably well—while agreeing less and less about what it is doing or why.
This is the phase transition. The machine that made convergence possible gives way to a machine that produces divergence as a default condition.
The Modernity Machine has done its job. What follows is not its negation, but the emergence of a Divergence Machine destined to replace it—a different contraption, hot-swapped piecemeal for its predecessor over 400 years, between 1600 and 2000. Optimized not for legibility and convergence, but for proliferation, adaptation, and coexistence without closure. For divergence.
That is the story of 1600–2000, which we will tackle in 2026.
The picks for the first three months have been posted on the book club page if you want to get a head start. I’ll lay out the thesis in a January kickoff post.
Another great video from Quinn Nelson. If your dumb cousin who knows you’re an Apple nerd approaches you on Christmas and says “Hey what’s going on at Apple, Bloomberg says it’s rats leaving a sinking ship over there?” and you don’t feel like explaining, just tell him to watch this video. Just the perfect explanation.
Smart, fair video from Quinn Nelson on the gap that remains between iPadOS 26 and desktop OSes. I think it’s right that there is a gap there. Apple has the Macintosh, the best desktop/workstation platform in the industry. So whatever the ideal is for iPadOS, it ought to fall short of MacOS in terms of technical capabilities, and instead offer a degree of simplicity and can’t-screw-it-up-edness that the Mac can’t match. But, some of the limitations that remain in iPadOS are just frustrating. iPadOS 26 is a huge leap forward, and I think sets the stage for Apple to address those limitations.
From a 2023 report at The Verge:
Sony highly confidential information about its PlayStation business has just been revealed by mistake. As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost of developing some of its games.
It looks like someone redacted the documents with a black Sharpie — but when you scan them in, it’s easy to see some of the redactions. Oops.
This is sort of the exception that proves the rule regarding redactions. If you redact a document digitally, you have to know what to look for (e.g. metadata) to be certain you’ve redacted everything you want to redact. If you redact a document on paper, you can just look at it, with good light and sharp eyes.
Special guest Quinn Nelson returns for a two-topic holiday spectacular: the iPad in the wake of iPadOS 26, and Apple’s executive changes as Tim Cook seemingly nears the end of his time as CEO.
Sponsored by:
Depending on how you look at it growth in Q3 was very very strong or very strong or just possibly merely strong.
Annual rates: GDP: 4.3% Real final sales to domestic purchasers: 2.9% Average of GDP & GDI: 3.4%
GDI: 2.4%
That is from Jason Furman.
The post Economic growth appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Lay pleasantly, talking to my wife, till 8 o’clock, then up and to Sir W. Batten’s to see him and Sir G. Carteret and Sir J. Minnes take coach towards the Pay at Chatham, which they did and I home, and took money in my pocket to pay many reckonings to-day in the town, as my bookseller’s, and paid at another shop 4l. 10s. for “Stephens’s Thesaurus Graecae Linguae,” given to Paul’s School: So to my brother’s and shoemaker, and so to my Lord Crew’s, and dined alone with him, and after dinner much discourse about matters. Upon the whole, I understand there are great factions at Court, and something he said that did imply a difference like to be between the King and the Duke, in case the Queen should not be with child. I understand, about this bastard.1 He says, also, that some great man will be aimed at when Parliament comes to sit again; I understand, the Chancellor: and that there is a bill will be brought in, that none that have been in arms for the Parliament shall be capable of office. And that the Court are weary of my Lord Albemarle and Chamberlin. He wishes that my Lord Sandwich had some good occasion to be abroad this summer which is coming on, and that my Lord Hinchingbroke were well married, and Sydney had some place at Court. He pities the poor ministers that are put out, to whom, he says, the King is beholden for his coming in, and that if any such thing had been foreseen he had never come in. After this, and much other discourse of the sea, and breeding young gentlemen to the sea, I went away.
And homeward, met Mr. Creed at my bookseller’s in Paul’s Church-yard, who takes it ill my letter last night to Mr. Povy, wherein I accuse him of the neglect of the Tangier boats, in which I must confess I did not do altogether like a friend; but however it was truth, and I must own it to be so, though I fall wholly out with him for it.
Thence home and to my office alone to do business, and read over half of Mr. Bland’s discourse concerning Trade, which (he being no scholler and so knows not the rules of writing orderly) is very good. So home to supper and to bed, my wife not being well … [she having her months upon her. – L&M]
This evening Mr. Gauden sent me, against Christmas, a great chine of beef and three dozen of tongues. I did give 5s. to the man that brought it, and half-a-crown to the porters. This day also the parish-clerk brought the general bill of mortality, which cost me half-a-crown more.
Footnotes
South Korea’s Innospace said it will attempt a second launch of its small rocket in the first half of 2026 after its inaugural flight failed shortly after liftoff Dec. 22.
The post Innospace plans second launch in 2026 after failure of first Hanbit-Nano rocket appeared first on SpaceNews.
An Indian LVM3 rocket launched AST SpaceMobile’s next-generation direct-to-device BlueBird satellite Dec. 23, kicking off a rollout of dozens of spacecraft built around the largest commercial communications antenna ever deployed in LEO.
The post Indian rocket launches AST SpaceMobile’s next-gen BlueBird 6 satellite appeared first on SpaceNews.
Europe has a lot on its plate these days. It’s facing a hostile Russia that has no intention of stopping with Ukraine. It’s dealing with tariffs and various other threats from an unpredictable and hostile Trump administration. And it’s struggling with internal unrest over migration from the Middle East and Central Asia. That would be enough to keep anyone occupied. But on top of all that, Europe is being buffeted by the Second China Shock.
The Second China Shock is another name for the flood of high-tech exports that China has been sending out around the world in the last few years. China’s economy is still suffering from the prolonged effects of the real estate bust that began in late 2021. In response, Xi Jinping’s government has unleashed the most expensive and wide-ranging industrial policy the world has ever seen, promoting high-tech manufacturing across a variety of sectors. Because the economy is in the doldrums, Chinese consumers themselves aren’t able to buy all the stuff that their government is paying Chinese companies to make — electric vehicles, ships, machinery, and so on. So the companies are selling that stuff overseas, anywhere they can, for cut-rate prices.
In Europe, that has manifested as a giant trade deficit with China:
This flood of Chinese exports to Europe is being boosted by several tailwinds. First, China’s currency has gotten cheaper — partly as a result of China’s weak domestic economy, and partly because the government has pushed down the exchange rate in order to pump up exports. Shanghai Macro Strategist writes:
This combination — falling relative prices in China and a weaker currency — has made Chinese goods and services extraordinarily cheap in global terms…A vivid example: a night at the Four Seasons Beijing costs roughly $250, compared with more than $1,160 in New York. The price gap is so extreme that it no longer reflects relative productivity or income levels; it reflects a currency that has become fundamentally undervalued…At these valuations, it is virtually impossible for most countries to compete with Chinese exporters. The current level of the yuan is simply too cheap to support a sustainable rebalancing of global trade.
Here’s a chart showing the yuan’s recent depreciation against the euro:
The second tailwind is Trump’s tariffs. Although Trump has backed off of most of his threats of tariffs on China, some important changes — like the end of the “de minimis” exemption for small packages — have gone into effect. And the threat of tariffs is probably prompting Chinese companies to seek other markets. As a result, Chinese exports to America are falling fast, while the country’s exports to other regions — Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America — are booming:
Some people claim that China’s surge of exports to these other countries is actually going indirectly to the U.S. Those people are wrong. As Gerard DiPippo has shown, “transshipment” to America is quite low. China simply found new customers to buy its products. Europe is the most important of those customers.
This means that although Trump’s boneheaded tariffs on allied countries have hurt U.S. manufacturing, his tariffs on China — and his threats of even higher tariffs on China — have partially insulated America from the Second China Shock. Europe as yet has no such insulation.
At this point you may ask: Who cares? China is selling a bounty of useful consumer goods to Europeans at cut-rate prices; why look that gift horse in the mouth? If a store in your neighborhood had a blowout sale, you’d enjoy it, wouldn’t you? And on top of all that, many of China’s fastest-growing exports to the EU — electric cars and such — are “green” technology that Europe has been trying to promote in order to fight climate change.
Given that Europe has so much else to worry about, why shouldn’t it just take the cheap Chinese stuff, enjoy the high-quality cars and the lower carbon emissions, accept deindustrialization, and focus on services instead? That’s basically what The Economist recommended in an article last month:
Indeed, the best hope of consolation for Europe lies not in stopping the China shock, but in weathering it. Manufacturing looms large in politics, but accounts for only 16% of the EU’s GDP, a far lower proportion than services (70%). Even in Germany its share is only 20%. The industries in which China is making inroads—cars, machinery, metals, pharmaceuticals and chemicals—account for more than 10% of the value of industrial activity in only a few European countries, notably the Czech Republic, Germany and Hungary…De-industrialisation, in other words, need not be synonymous with decay.
But as pleasant and easy as this might sound, it would actually be very foolish, for a number of reasons.
First, there’s the military angle. Health care and education and entertainment are nice things to have, but to fight a modern war you need drones, missiles, satellites, ships, planes, and vehicles of all kinds. And with Russia breathing down Europe’s throat, and America no longer a reliable ally, there is a good chance that Europe will soon have to fight a modern war against a high-tech opponent. Russia’s population is smaller than Europe’s, but its economy is now heavily oriented toward military manufacturing. Russian production is also now supported by China, whose companies are selling Russia weapons and even allegedly building weapons in Russia.
In order to resist that threat, Europe will need lots of manufacturing. That doesn’t just mean having European governments purchase ammunition and tanks from defense contractors. It means scaling up Europe’s civilian manufacturing of vehicles, electronics, chemicals, and so on, so that if Russia does start a wider war, Europe can repurpose those civilian industries for large-scale military production. If Europe allows itself to be deindustrialized, its military capabilities will be limited to whatever the government can purchase in peacetime.
The second problem is that Europe’s trade with China is increasingly unbalanced. Europe is not trading services for the flood of electric cars, solar panels, and so on that China is sending. Instead, Europe is writing IOUs. That’s what a trade deficit is — the writing of IOUs in exchange for imports. Robin Harding of the Financial Times recently warned about this unbalanced trade, in an eloquent article entitled “China is making trade impossible”:
There is nothing that China wants to import, nothing it does not believe it can make better and cheaper, nothing for which it wants to rely on foreigners a single day longer than it has to. For now, to be sure, China is still a customer for semiconductors, software, commercial aircraft and the most sophisticated kinds of production machinery. But it is a customer like a resident doctor is a student. China is developing all of these goods. Soon it will make them, and export them, itself…
[I]f China does not want to buy anything from us in trade, then how can we trade with China?…[W]ithout exports, we will eventually run out of ways to pay China for our imports.
A trade deficit is not a gift; it is a loan. That loan must be paid back. The Europeans who take out the loan may be insufficiently long-term in their thinking, effectively borrowing against their own futures to consume in the present. It’s up to government to look out for the prosperity of future generations.
On top of all that, some people think that at extremes of unbalanced trade in high-tech industries, the conventional wisdom that trade is mutually beneficial might break down. Goldman Sachs recently released a report claiming that Chinese exports will actually make Europe poorer!
Greg Ip offers his thoughts in a thread:
Fascinating and important report from Goldman Sachs. They have upgraded long-term GDP of China because of increased exports, but see this as reducing, not increasing, rest of world GDP. Chinese displacement of domestic manufacturing swamps any positives from cheaper goods…
This confirms what I have long suspected: Chinese growth does not “contribute” to global growth except in the purely arithmetic sense. It does not actually create positive feedbacks that lift other countries’ growth. That’s by design...The point of Xi's "dual circulation" is to make the world more dependent on the Chinese industrial supply chain, while making China self-sufficient, that is buying less from the rest of the world. The model is inherently "beggar thy neighbor" (as Goldman notes)[.]
How would this work? Usually, when we think of “beggar-thy-neighbor” trade policies, it’s in the context of recessions; if aggregate demand is scarce, then trade deficits can make it worse. But while China is in a demand-driven growth slowdown right now, Europe is not. So there’s not really a macroeconomic reason to think that Chinese imports are making Europeans poorer.
Instead there must be a microeconomic reason. Obviously, even unbalanced trade is voluntary — Europeans want to write IOUs for Chinese goods — and we generally think that any voluntary trade must benefit both sides, or else they wouldn’t have done it in the first place. Thus, if Chinese imports actually make Europe poorer, it must be through an externality — some kind of negative spillover effect that the Europeans who buy BYD’s cars don’t take into account when they make their purchase.
In a New York Times op-ed back in July, the economists David Autor and Gordon Hanson — who famously coined the term “China Shock” in their research with David Dorn about the effect of Chinese imports back in the 2000s — seem to argue that such an externality exists:
China Shock 2.0…is where China…is aggressively contesting the innovative sectors where the United States has long been the unquestioned leader: aviation, A.I., telecommunications, microprocessors, robotics, nuclear and fusion power, quantum computing, biotech and pharma, solar, batteries. Owning these sectors yields dividends: economic spoils from high profits and high-wage jobs; geopolitical heft from shaping the technological frontier; and military prowess from controlling the battlefield. [emphasis mine]
What might that negative externality be? One possibility is that it’s what economists call a “pecuniary externality” — not a true destruction of value, but an appropriation of economic “rents” from one country to another. Paul Krugman’s New Trade Theory shows how because manufacturing is subject to increasing returns, trade barriers can sometimes reappropriate “rents” to your own country, by allowing your companies to gain scale. In other words, right now, BYD can produce things cheaply because its customer base is really big. If European countries raise trade barriers against BYD cars, their own car companies could gain more scale and become more efficient — and more competitive — by capturing the domestic market, thus transferring some of BYD’s profits to European automakers.
Another possibility is that preserving manufacturing increases a country’s innovative capacity. Manufacturing results in “learning by doing” — a kind of research that can’t be done in a lab, but which creates real knowledge and real productivity gains. There may also be a positive externality from having a ton of engineers in a country — what Brad DeLong calls a “community of engineering practice” — because these engineers get together and swap and combine their ideas. This is probably one reason why industrial clusters like Silicon Valley are so unusually productive.
If electric cars are made in China and shipped to Europe, all the innovation will be done in China. A lot of that innovation will be in the form of a bunch of little tricks that can’t easily diffuse to other corporations and other nations; in other words, the benefits will stay in China and make profit for BYD. But if Europe manufactured EVs for itself, most of the engineers who learned those tricks would generate knowledge for Europe.
Benigno et al. (2025) call this the “global financial resource curse”. The authors argue that corporate innovative activity requires corporate profits; if all the profit is being made in China, that will naturally starve Europe of a lot of innovation.
No European consumer who buys a BYD car is thinking about economies of scale or innovative capacity; they just want a car. But the decisions of all of those car-buyers could add up to a loss of scale and innovation for European companies that left all of Europe a bit poorer as a result.
So if Europe fails to fight the Second China Shock — if it embraces the comfortable euthanasia of deindustrialization — it will be militarily weaker in the face of the Russian threat, its international financial position will deteriorate, and it may be economically poorer as a result.
Those are good reasons for Europe to fight the Second China Shock. But how? Unfortunately, as Robin Harding argues, protectionism is going to have to be part of the solution:
The difficult solution [to the Second China Shock] is [for Europe] to become more competitive and find new sources of value…That means more reform, less welfare and less regulation…Even that, however, will not be enough in a world where China offers everything cheaply for export and has no appetite for imports itself…Which leads to the bad solution: protectionism. It is now increasingly hard to see how Europe, in particular, can avoid large-scale protection if it is to retain any industry at all.
This path is so damaging and so fraught it is hard to recommend it…It would mark a further breakdown of the global trade system…Yet when the good options are gone, the bad are all that is left. China is making trade impossible. If it will buy nothing from others but commodities and consumer goods, they must prepare to do the same.
Protectionism, be it with tariffs or non-tariff barriers, is essential in order to de-risk the reindustrialization of Europe. If a German or French company knows that at any moment, China’s massive industrial policy apparatus could swoop into their industry and put them out of business, they’ll be too shy to invest. Trade barriers are important because manufacturing investment is far less daunting behind that sheltering wall.
EU tariffs and other trade restrictions should only be on China — not on any other country (unless it’s doing large-scale transshipment of Chinese-made goods). In fact, Europe can lower trade barriers with more friendly countries in order for these countries’ manufacturing industries to attain large scale. Rush Doshi calls this “allied scale”.
The EU should also pair protection with export subsidies for European manufacturers. Foreign markets are just as important as the European market, and it would be a disaster to lose those. Europe can never match the scale, speed, and tolerance for waste of China’s industrial policy. But sometimes international buyers would rather hedge their bets and buy from Europe instead of onboarding themselves into the Chinese political-economic system. Just the other day, Vietnam decided to partner with Germany’s Siemens to build its high-speed rail, instead of with a Chinese company.
Another idea is to take a page from China’s book, and encourage Chinese companies to set up joint ventures with European companies in order to sell their products into the European market — or even force Chinese companies to do this, with “buy European” rules. If BYD has its car factories in Poland or Hungary, Europeans will be learning how to make electric cars well. Some of that knowledge will eventually diffuse to domestic European companies as well. And if Europe has to fight a total war against Russia, it can just nationalize those factories and use them for military applications.
Finally, Europe should think about taking action on China’s undervalued currency. This is the approach recommended by Brad Setser and Mark Sobel, who argue that pressuring China to allow the yuan to appreciate significantly would defuse a lot of trade tensions. China’s leaders think that Japan suffered economically after a similar agreement in 1985, but the threat of losing the European market might be even scarier.
This all sounds very grim, but on the bright side, EU action against the Second China Shock could be the beginning of a newer, more stable, more balanced, more equitable global economy. Tariffs on Chinese value added would force Chinese companies to move their factories abroad, to Vietnam or Indonesia or other poorer countries, which would help those countries industrialize. They would also accelerate China’s transition to a normal economy, by temporarily increasing involution and forcing China to curb overproduction. And an appreciation of the Chinese currency would make the global financial system more stable.
But in any case, Europe has little choice at this point. It can’t afford to become a deindustrialized, service-intensive backwater — especially not in the face of all the other threats it faces. The Second China Shock must be resisted.
This was an experiment in doing two things I learned from master builder Lloyd House in making a tiny room seem non-claustrophobic:
A curved roof, which is peaceful — as opposed to say, a steep gable roof
Windows at eye level, which bring the outdoors inside visually.
I learned this from Lloyd House, who used a curved roof and eye-level windows in making a home out of a Ford Econoline truck on Hornby Island, BC, Canada (see Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter).
This little cabin is only 10 by 10 feet, but feels much larger. I made each rafter by gluing together four 16-foot long 1/4” by 4” wide redwood bender boards (typically used for curved garden path headers) in a curve plotted out by blocks on the floor, and a whole bunch of clamps.
The wall siding is redwood from a hot tub that neighbors had thrown out (couldn’t believe it when I saw the lumber stacked in front of their house) — I had it resawn to 5/8” thick at a mill in Oakland. The ceiling is 6’ long 1” by 6” fence boards from Home Depot. Flooring is used oak from Heritage Salvage in Petaluma.
In studying tiny homes, I found the typical steep roofed cabin extremely claustrophobic, and the vertical ladder to a sleeping loft a bad design.
The curved roof here was a lot of work as opposed to a simple gable, but now that it’s done, it seems well worth the effort.
Most of the building here (other than the rafters and floor) was done by Billy Cummings.
I’ll be visited by three spirits
Today is Christmas Eve. We’ll be celebrating in New York with family and friends. I advocated for a traditional NY Jewish Christmas — i.e., Chinese food — but we’ve settled on Korean for Christmas Eve and family dinner at the apartment on the day itself.
I’ve also written a Truth Social-style post wishing everyone the best, except for the haters and those suffering from Krugman Derangement Syndrome. Here it is:
OK, some of it was redacted to protect national security.
Enjoy the holidays. Back in a few days.
MUSICAL CODA
If this [MicroQuickJS] had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua. Lua was chosen based on the implementation requirements, not on the language ones... (small, fast, ANSI-C). I appreciate certain ideas in Lua, and people love it, but I was never able to like Lua, because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax and semantics without good reasons, for my taste. This creates friction for newcomers. I love friction when it opens new useful ideas and abstractions that are worth it, if you learn SmallTalk or FORTH and for some time you are lost, it's part of how the languages are different. But I think for Lua this is not true enough: it feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons.
— Salvatore Sanfilippo, Hacker News comment on MicroQuickJS
Tags: salvatore-sanfilippo, lua, redis, javascript
We have been talking about computer-aided drug discovery for well more than a decade. It used to be the case that start-ups pitched their ability to use “machine learning” to hunt for new, promising therapies. Now we call machine learning “artificial intelligence” and have a new class of start-ups claiming big science breakthroughs.
One of these new wave start-ups is Chai Discovery and its founders Josh Meier and Jack Dent join the podcast this week. (The Core Memory podcast is available on all major platforms and on our YouTube pod channel.) The company was founded in 2024 and is backed by OpenAI, Anthropic, Thrive and others. (Chai is already a unicorn.) It published a number of notable accomplishments this last year, including using its own AI model to churn out promising antibody designs at an unprecedented clip.
The first couple iterations of machine learning-aided drug discovery companies came and went without tremendous success. Chai and Nabla Bio are two of the buzziest members of this new era of AI companies. Their models really do seem to be harnessing the advances in AI to hit on potential drug targets and designs in rather profound ways. Bio-tech, in fact, seems like the place where AI may make the most stunning scientific advances first.
In this episode, we get into Chai’s intellectual roots as a research project within Facebook/Meta and how the company has gone after building its models. We also try to provide a realistic picture of the current state of AI drug discovery.
The implications of the work done by Chai, Nabla and others are far reaching. If we’re able to come up with new drug designs at this accelerated rate, we will need major changes around how drugs are tested and put through trials. The current drug testing and FDA approval system is simply not set up to move as quickly as bio-tech appears to be going.
This will be our last episode for the year, and we’re taking a tiny break between posting the next one as the Core Memory crew has a little time off. Thank you so, so much to all of you who have listened to the show in our first year. We hope you’ve enjoyed it and learned some things along the way.
Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememory
The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.
Many people don’t like modern architecture. More specifically, many people don’t like contemporary architecture, which is more accurately described as post-modern architecture. When art historians use terms like “modern art” and “modern architecture” they are referring to styles developed in the early 20th century, a movement that largely ended around 1970.
[Some might find the narrator of this modern architecture video to be annoying, but it’s actually quite informative if you stick with it.]
There’s been a recent push to have public architecture revert to more traditional styles. I have some sympathy for this movement, as unlike with art films or atonal music, the public has no way of avoiding the “consumption” of large public buildings. Some would argue that people simply need to learn that constructivism, deconstructivism and brutalism are beautiful, but I’m not sure that is always possible.
But I also have some reservations about the push for a more conservative architecture. First, attempts to recreate the past often result in kitsch. Conservatives living in Newport Beach tend to build garish McMansions that are uglier than the elegant modernist homes preferred by liberals in nearby Laguna Beach. Second, there are many different traditional styles, and proponents of traditionalism often propose styles that are a poor fit for American democracy. I fear that rather than ending up with a patriotic architecture, we’ll end up with a nationalistic architecture that is not consistent with American traditions of limited government.
Here’s Owen Hatherley:
One of the reasons why classicism has been so difficult to revive for those who regard themselves as modern and/or progressive is not that it wasn’t part of the 20th century, but precisely that it was, and specifically promoted by its cruellest political regimes. If at the beginning of the 1930s neoclassicism was still the dominant style of architecture in Britain, France or the United States, by 1939 modernism had almost fully replaced it. In Germany, Italy and the USSR, the reverse was the case, with modern movements strong in each country at the start of the decade, and comprehensively defeated at the end of it.
Here is an example of communist style architecture from Beijing:
And here’s some fascist architecture from Rome:
Throughout most of human history, government was on top and ordinary people feared the power of the state. Most average people would be intimidated to walk into a communist or fascist public building to petition the government. In contrast, America was founded on the idea that the people were on top, and government officials were “public servants”. Yes, I know that it may seem hard to believe, but Donald Trump is supposed to be our servant. He works you and me. His job is to make our lives better.
At least that was the original idea. Grand ballrooms were for European royalty, not American public servants. In the 20th century, gaudy displays of architectural excess became associated with “dictator-chic”. Here’s Peter York:
My book described the interior style of 20th-century absolute rulers, from the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz through to Saddam Hussein, via Hitler, Mussolini, Marcos, Mobutu and Bokassa. I codified the style similarities of very dissimilar people in a parody of the “Get The Look” guides seen in smart design magazines.
Among these rules of thumb: make it the biggest anywhere, with mega-hotels your inspiration; go for “repro” styles inside and out (real old stuff looks dowdy; you want bright and new); gold everywhere, from walls and furniture to taps; huge chandeliers and mirrors; giant 19th-century oil paintings—nothing earlier or later—plus portraits of yourself; oodles of shiny new marble.
American nationalists don’t tend to favor American architecture, rather they prefer styles developed in places like Greece and Italy. In contrast, consider this video of the Marin County Civic Center, designed by an American architect from my own hometown:
To me, this building seems much more welcoming than communist or fascist architecture, especially to a lowly citizen trying to petition the government over some problem they are having with bureaucrats. Better yet, it’s a patriotic architecture, invented by one of our own, not a foreign style borrowed from countries on the other side of the world. Greek columns are no more American that is a Chinese pagoda.
Yes, this is “modern architecture”, which we are frequently told is hated by the public. But guess what, Frank Lloyd Wright is actually a fairly popular architect, even with average people.
Many people insist that nationalism is just patriotism. Sorry, that’s like saying communism is just sharing food with the poor. Actual existing communism is central planning, repression and authoritarianism, and actual existing nationalism is authoritarianism, protectionism, xenophobia, antisemitism, militarism, misogyny, and teaching fake history that whitewashes a country’s past misdeeds. Actual existing nationalism and communism often adopted a particularly ugly variation of Greco-Roman architecture, keeping the intimidating grandiosity and leaving out the elegance and beauty. I’d prefer to avoid that sort of “traditional architecture”.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) may not be the best architect who ever lived, but you can make a good argument that he is the greatest—in roughly the sense that Picasso (1881-1973) isn’t the best painter but is the greatest painter. Both artists lived at roughly the same time, and over their equally long lives they pioneered many important innovations in their field—perhaps more than anyone else.
America certainly did not produce the world’s best painter, or the world’s best poet, or the world’s best playwright, or the world’s best novelist, or the world’s best composer, or the world’s best sculptor. But we did produce what is arguably the world’s greatest architect. Wouldn’t a patriotic public architecture celebrate that fact, rather than relying on boring old European styles, which when revived by second rate architects almost always end up inferior to the original?
America invented the skyscraper. The earliest examples were rather ungainly, as traditional styles did not fit a building this tall:
An American architect named Louis Sullivan realized that the style of tall buildings had to be simplified, to match their size.
Sullivan coined the widely misunderstood phrase “form follows function”. This does not mean that buildings should have no ornament, as beauty is one function of a public building. Indeed, Sullivan developed an original style of terra cotta ornament, in the art nouveau style of his time.
There are plenty of other great American architects that could provide inspiration for a patriotic architecture. Here’s Richardson’s Sever Hall:
And the interior of Louis Kahn’s Kimball Art Museum:
Form follows function far more effectively in this Kahn building than in I.M. Pei’s East wing of the National Gallery. I actually think that the Pei building is fairly attractive modern architecture—but it doesn’t work well as an art museum.
I don’t wish to see architects slavishly copy the styles of past masters. But I do believe it is reasonable to ask for a public architecture that is functional, done in styles that are accessible to the public, and consistent with the democratic traditions of past American architects such as Richardson, Sullivan, Wright and Kahn. Sorry, but this ain’t it.
Think of it this way. Would Finland be better off if their public buildings had avoided using architects like Saarinen and Aalto, and instead had relied on Greco-Roman styles? Would that make you wish to visit Helsinki? Check out this pathetic attempt to create “classical architecture” in Orange County. Talented architects wish to create something new, not recycle styles from 2000 years ago. Any attempt to do so risks producing kitsch—something like a Las Vegas casino.
While private sector architecture can be left up to the customer, the design of public buildings tends to become politicized. Unfortunately, public design review boards often end up making things worse:
This debate gets murky—aesthetics are subjective, and some now-beloved buildings and architecture styles were scorned as ugly when built. . . . It’s easy to lose patience with these aesthetic arguments. But a less-spoken aspect of the debate is that the cookie-cutter, utilitarian design of many modern buildings stem from regulations to begin with. States and municipalities have building codes that enforce a litany of aesthetic-related mandates—seldom for the better. A 2021 survey by the National Association of Home Builders found almost 60% of single-family projects had to contend with rules dictating everything from construction materials to window styles to small stuff like awnings. Design review boards often further complicate matters beyond just what’s written in the code. In Seattle, the Sightline Institute documented how the board slowed projects, making them more expensive and even regulating uses that had little to do with design. . . . The irony is that, when all is said and done, buildings often come out uglier than what would have been—as can be said of the Urbana Apartments in Seattle, pictured in the linked Sightline article. . . . One developer told The New York Times that local review, in trying to prevent radical neighborhood change, also kills truly unique designs. The only construction projects that pass are mundane ones that somewhat appeal to everyone. Seattle-based developer Maria Barrientos adds that her city’s rules enforce a uniform rather than creative standard: “Design review sometimes pushes you to monochromatic projects that are way too similar and the emphasis that you must have certain massing and design and exterior materials and cladding … I don’t know that it necessarily makes for a better neighborhood architecturally, because architectural diversity to me is the foundation of what makes a neighborhood interesting.”
Would it have been better if Venice, Italy had had an architectural review board back in 1500?
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Winslow House was viewed as radical and controversial back in 1893. Here’s the Financial Times:
Pitched low and broad, like the midwest landscape around it, it is straightforward geometrically and stretched out laterally — ideas Wright would continue to push throughout his career. That symmetrical front gives way to a complex, conglomerate rear — decorative mores that complement the garden, but don’t impose themselves on a broader public. Having said that, the design was so avant-garde at the time that Winslow allegedly avoided commuting by train for months after moving in, to avoid being teased about it.
Today, no one would even bat an eye:
(Photo by Bilyan Belchev)
There is one area where I agree with the traditionalists. When constructing a major public building that is expected to last for centuries (such as a state or national capital building), a conservative style is appropriate, as there is less risk that the building will look dated after a few decades. That doesn’t completely rule out “modern architecture”, but it suggests that any such building should use a relatively “classical” version of modernism, something with simple and elegant lines:
PS. Velazquez, Dante, Shakespeare, Bach, Proust, Michelangelo, seem like plausible choices of best in their categories, but who’s the best architect? I’m not sure. Great architecture requires so much collaboration that it’s hard for any single individual to stand out. But I cannot think of any architect that was clearly superior to Wright.
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah
This is pretty scary:
Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok (xAI), Meta AI.
For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated “executor” script designed to intercept and capture conversations. The harvesting is enabled by default through hardcoded flags in the extension’s configuration.
There is no user-facing toggle to disable this. The only way to stop the data collection is to uninstall the extension entirely.
[…]
The data collection operates independently of the VPN functionality. Whether the VPN is connected or not, the harvesting runs continuously in the background.
[…]
What gets captured:
- Every prompt you send to the AI
Every response you receive- Conversation identifiers and timestamps
- Session metadata
- The specific AI platform and model used
Boing Boing post.
Responsible gambling is often talked about like it’s a checklist: limits here, warnings there, problems solved. But real player protection isn’t a checklist. It’s a mindset — a system that understands people first and technology second. And that’s exactly what Soft2Bet is building.
In an industry where short-term engagement tactics can easily overshadow player wellbeing, Soft2Bet takes a different route. Its approach goes beyond compliance and covers everything from risk signals and fraud prevention to transparency and humane design. This isn’t lip service. It’s a strategy grounded in real behavioral insights, continuous monitoring, and ethical responsibility.
This modern perspective on player protection also aligns with wider industry thinking. Across the iGaming world, including at Soft2Bet, one thing is clear—player protection and responsible gambling are set to lead the agenda well beyond 2026.
iGaming is about entertainment. But entertainment shouldn’t come with hidden risks or blind spots. Many operators still treat safety features as add-ons — something to insert after launch. Soft2Bet views responsible gambling as the foundation, not an afterthought.
This difference matters. When gaming products are designed first and foremost to protect players, the entire experience changes — for the better.
Soft2Bet’s own insights on risk and protection, clearly explained in many published pieces on the company’s website, argue that too many potential harms get overlooked because they aren’t immediately obvious.
At Soft2Bet, responsible gambling isn’t a surface feature—it’s baked into the system. The company openly calls out a quiet truth in iGaming: the real danger isn’t always what’s visible. It’s what gets ignored. That’s why Soft2Bet goes beyond standard tools. It actively scans for subtle risks, like manipulation tactics and unchecked behaviors that many platforms overlook.
How Soft2Bet puts player wellbeing first:
Soft2Bet’s systems track patterns that go beyond simple loss limits. They track shifts in behavior—like unusual bets or sudden deposit changes—and step in early with subtle, timely interventions.
Players are not robots, and neither are their habits. Soft2Bet’s responsible gambling features don’t require users to read dense legal pages or hunt for links buried deep in settings. Players can easily find and use tools like self-exclusion, deposit limits, reality checks, and cool-off periods. No digging, no confusion.
Data is more than charts and KPIs. It reveals patterns. Soft2Bet uses analytics not just to optimize engagement but to safeguard players over time. That means flagging patterns that might look harmless in a single session, but are concerning across weeks or months.
Some brands treat player safety like a cost center. Soft2Bet sees it as an advantage. Players stick with platforms they trust and come back by choice, often bringing others with them.
Here’s why responsible gambling matters for business:
Here’s how Soft2Bet translates principles into action:
As iGaming grows up, so do the rules of the game. One thing’s clear—player protection isn’t just part of the conversation. It is the conversation. And if you ask Soft2Bet and other sharp minds in the space, that focus isn’t going anywhere.
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The post Soft2Bet Redefines Responsible Gambling for the Next Era appeared first on DCReport.org.
Earlier I posted some questions on my blog for next year: Ten Economic Questions for 2026. Some of these questions concern real estate (inventory, house prices, housing starts, new home sales), and I’ll post thoughts on those in this newsletter (others like GDP and employment will be on my blog).There is much more in the article.
I'm adding some thoughts, and maybe some predictions for each question.
Here is a review of the Ten Economic Questions for 2025.
9) House Prices: It appears house prices - as measured by the national repeat sales index (Case-Shiller, FHFA, and Freddie Mac) - will be mostly flat in 2025. What will happen with house prices in 2026?
he following graph shows the year-over-year change through September 2025, in the seasonally adjusted Case-Shiller Composite 10, Composite 20 and National indices (the Composite 20 was started in January 2000). The Case-Shiller Home Price Indices for "September" is a 3-month average of July, August and September closing prices. September closing prices include some contracts signed in May, so there is a significant lag to this data.
The Composite 10 NSA was up 2.0% year-over-year. The Composite 20 NSA was up 1.4% year-over-year. The National index NSA was up 1.3% year-over-year.
For the second time this month, a Chinese rocket designed for reuse successfully soared into low-Earth orbit on its first flight Monday, defying the questionable odds that burden the debuts of new launch vehicles.
The first Long March 12A rocket, roughly the same height and diameter of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9, lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 9:00 pm EST Monday (02:00 UTC Tuesday).
Less than 10 minutes later, rocket's methane-fueled first stage booster hurtled through the atmosphere at supersonic speed, impacting in a remote region about 200 miles downrange from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwestern China. The booster failed to complete a braking burn to slow down for landing at a prepared location near the edge of the Gobi Desert.
Links for you. Science:
New Model of Urbanization Upends Paradigm of Mayan Collapse
In Massachusetts visit, Trump’s NIH chief defends move to prioritize funding research in places like Iowa, Nebraska
In Biblical Israel, Hartebeest Still Roamed. What Led to Their Extinction?
What caused a massive die-off of penguins off the South African coast?
The Ancient Chinese Had a Different Species of Housecat
Patients can safely receive stem cell transplants from mismatched and unrelated donors, study shows
Other:
ICE Goons Pepper Spray Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva During Tucson Raid
MAGA’s Affordability Crisis Will Soon Get Worse
The Construction Industry’s Invisible Villains
Can New York City Break Wall Street’s Grip?
Andy Kim vs. the Machine—Again: The New Jersey senator is opposing his own party’s efforts to defang anti-corruption measures. In an interview, he depicted the fight as critical to regaining public trust.
Everyone is talking about affordability — and making the same mistake
Jeff Bezos’s Very Own Editorial Page
Trump pardons major drug traffickers despite his anti-drug rhetoric
How Aaron Siri Misled ACIP and the public
Bezos thinks big donation makes it okay to poison a lagoon
The System Has No Reverse
Oregon struggles to land federal counterterrorism money as Trump orders troops to stop ‘terrorists’
Tim Robinson Understands What The Boys Are Going Through (millenials are having mid-life crises)
In New Orleans and across U.S., anger over ICE raids sparks a 2nd American Revolution
The Last People Before the Internet
This Is What It Looks Like When Your Coalition Is Coming Apart at the Seams
Writing a new chapter, Boston stacks homes above libraries
AI agents and the 90% problem
Why these 2 stocks have shockingly blown away Nvidia
The GOP and the Underpants Gnomes
Ass Law
Trump’s ‘new, disturbing, and ambiguous escalation’ against liberty
Dr. Oz Tells His Federal Employees to Eat Less
Court Reform: Breaking the Corrupt Rule of the Six GOPers Is Everything
NVIDIA Isn’t Enron – So What Is It?
Southern Strategies
Alina Habba Will Stop Pretending to Be a Federal Prosecutor—for Now
Let’s call Trump’s anti-Somali hate for what it is. It’s not “heated” or “divisive.” It’s Nazi stuff.
Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz
John Noble Wilford, Times Reporter Who Covered the Moon Landing, Dies at 92
1. Redux of my old CWT with Ben Sasse.
2. The non-autistic world, vs. the autistic world.
3. Who these days is getting into the Christmas spirit?
4. Sixtieth anniversary of Chimes at Midnight.
5. Using AI, create a mini-course from a video of your choice.
6. Dutch Mongolian Jingle Bells.
The post Christmas Eve assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Finding the best crypto sports betting sites requires more than flashy bonuses or fancy graphics. The top platforms stand out through fair odds, strong security, and smooth crypto transactions. The best crypto sports betting sites combine fast deposits and withdrawals, transparent terms, and a wide range of sports markets with trustworthy operations. These qualities separate dependable platforms from those that only look appealing on the surface.
As digital currencies reshape online betting, players have more options than ever. However, not every site delivers the same level of safety or convenience. Understanding what features matter most, such as licensing, payment speed, and betting variety, helps narrow the choices to those that truly meet expectations.
This guide explains the key criteria that define top crypto sportsbooks and what features make them worth using. It also explores how user experience, security, and fair play shape the best platforms in today’s crypto betting landscape.
The best platforms for crypto sports betting focus on safety, fair play, strong odds, and rewards that keep users engaged. They protect player data, support multiple digital currencies, and create a fair and transparent environment for those who play & bet online.
Strong security protects both funds and personal data. Reputable sites use SSL encryption, two-factor authentication, and cold wallet storage to keep assets safe when people choose to play & bet online at casinos. They also follow anti-money laundering standards and require ID verification for large transactions.
Fairness matters as much as protection. Many platforms use provably fair systems that let players verify each wager’s outcome. This open approach builds trust and helps users confirm that results are not manipulated.
Privacy policies must clearly explain how data is collected and stored. A site that allows anonymous play without sacrificing compliance offers a balance between safety and discretion. Players should always review these policies before creating an account.
A strong betting site supports more than one digital currency. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Tether are common options. Broader support gives players flexibility to deposit, withdraw, and manage funds with minimal fees.
Some platforms also include newer coins and stablecoins, which help users avoid large price swings. This variety allows bettors to control their risk based on the coin they prefer to use.
The best sites update their payment systems often to include trending tokens. They also process transfers instantly, reducing waiting times between deposits and wagers. Fast and low-cost transactions make crypto betting more practical for global players.
Good odds directly affect potential payouts. A site that offers fair and consistent odds across major sports, like football, basketball, or esports, gives players better long-term value.
Diverse betting markets also matter. The top platforms cover live matches, pre-game bets, and special events. This variety keeps users engaged and allows different strategies for both casual and experienced bettors.
Transparency in odds calculation helps players trust the platform. Clear displays of margins, bet types, and payout percentages make it easier to compare one sportsbook to another.
Bonuses attract new users, but fair terms keep them. The best offers include deposit matches, free bets, and cashback rewards with simple wagering conditions. Players should read each rule to understand withdrawal limits and time frames.
Ongoing promotions and loyalty programs reward consistent play. VIP tiers often include higher limits, faster payouts, and exclusive contests. These benefits help long-term players feel valued without creating unfair advantages.
Seasonal events or sports tournaments can also feature temporary bonuses. These campaigns add extra excitement while giving users more chances to win credits or free spins.
A strong crypto sports betting site focuses on smooth payments, flexible betting choices, and a wide range of entertainment options. It gives players fast access to funds, real-time wagers, and a mix of casino and esports content that keeps the experience active and convenient.
A good crypto betting platform supports instant payouts and fast crypto withdrawals. Players expect to deposit Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other coins quickly and see their funds appear almost right away. Delays or high network fees can discourage users, so platforms must keep transactions simple and low-cost.
Security also plays a major role. Each crypto deposit and crypto withdrawal should use strong encryption and blockchain verification to prevent fraud. Some sites use two-factor authentication to add another layer of protection.
Clear transaction histories help users track every crypto payout. This transparency builds trust and reduces confusion about balances. A site that processes rapid withdrawals within minutes instead of hours gives bettors more confidence and control over their funds.
Live betting and in-play betting let users place wagers as events unfold. This feature keeps the experience active and allows bettors to respond to real-time changes in odds. A well-designed interface shows updated scores, stats, and betting lines without delay.
Speed matters because the odds can shift in seconds. A strong crypto betting app or website must refresh data instantly to avoid missed chances. Bettors value a layout that highlights key markets and supports quick bet placement.
Some platforms also include live streaming for major matches. This feature helps users follow the action directly while placing bets. Fast performance and responsive design make the difference between a smooth and frustrating session.
Many online crypto casinos now include both casino games and esports betting under one account. This mix appeals to users who enjoy switching between slots, live casino, and table games without leaving the platform.
Esports events attract younger audiences who prefer digital competition. A strong site covers popular titles with clear odds and multiple bet types. Smooth navigation between sports, casino, and esports sections helps maintain engagement.
Crypto support adds convenience. Players can use the same wallet for both crypto games and sports wagers. This unified setup simplifies account management and gives users more freedom to explore different gaming options.
The best crypto sports betting sites stand out through fair odds, strong security, and fast payouts. They use blockchain to keep transactions transparent and private, which helps users feel more confident about their bets.
A good platform also supports several cryptocurrencies and offers clear terms for deposits, bonuses, and withdrawals. This balance of flexibility and clarity helps users manage their funds more easily.
Players should review site reputation, customer support quality, and betting options before placing any wagers. By focusing on these factors, they can find a platform that fits their needs and reduces risk.
Photo: pvproductions via their website.
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Last month I was interviewed in connection with the new edition of the Chinese translation of my 2015 book Who Gets What and Why.
Here is the interview in Chinese, and translated back to English. (You can also click "translate to English" from the Chinese version, to get a more creative translation that among other things renders my name as variations on "Erwin Ross.")
Below are some excerpts from the better back-translation (from interview in English translated into Chinese, and then back to English):
"In November 2025, LatePost conducted a video interview with Roth. The interview began at 7 a.m. local time, and the 74-year-old had already arrived at his office, walking on a treadmill desk while conversing with us. A white beard, furrowed brow when deep in thought, a smiling expression, and concise communication—these are the impressions Roth gave during the conversation.
'Market design is economics confronting the external world,' Roth told us. A month earlier, his popular book on market design, Who Gets What―and Why, was republished in Chinese under the title Matching. Designing, improving, and maintaining well-functioning matching mechanisms is the work of market design. In Matching, Roth demonstrated how market design could be applied in practice to change people's destinies and the way societies operate.
...
"Alvin Roth: Significant changes have occurred in both kidney transplantation and kidney exchange. By the way, since 2015, there has been a major transformation in the approach to transplant surgeries in China. Prior to that, most organs used in transplants came from executed prisoners; now, China is developing a voluntary organ donation program, which represents a significant shift. However, China has yet to initiate kidney exchange programs.
"A new global trend is that we are beginning to experiment with cross-border kidney exchanges. This is particularly crucial for smaller countries or regions with limited numbers of kidney transplants, where some patients struggle to find compatible donors.
...
"Q: In your "Market Design" blog, you previewed a new book to be published next year titled Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work. Why did you write this book? What issues do you discuss and how do you address them?
"Alvin Roth: One issue that economists have yet to fully understand is which markets gain societal support and which ones do not. For instance, I have explored the surrogacy market. Surrogacy is legal in the United States but illegal in China. After the Chinese government relaxed its one-child policy, many people desired to have a second child, but age became an obstacle. In California, where I reside, there are agencies offering surrogacy services where Mandarin is spoken, and many clients come from China.
"This is one of the core questions I attempt to address: why are certain genuinely beneficial practices legal in some places but illegal in others? "
#######
When I search for the new edition on Google I get the following AI overview:
In the week ending December 20, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 214,000, a decrease of 10,000 from the previous week's unrevised level of 224,000. The 4-week moving average was 216,750, a decrease of 750 from the previous week's unrevised average of 217,500.The following graph shows the 4-week moving average of weekly claims since 1971.
emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.Comments are open, I thank you for your suggestions for the coming year…
The post Who would you like to see as a Conversations with Tyler guest? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
ortgage applications decreased 5.0 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending December 19, 2025.
The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, decreased 5.0 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index decreased 6 percent compared with the previous week. The Refinance Index decreased 6 percent from the previous week and was 110 percent higher than the same week one year ago. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index decreased 4 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index decreased 6 percent compared with the previous week and was 16 percent higher than the same week one year ago.
“Overall mortgage application volume fell last week, despite the slight decline in mortgage rates,” said Mike Fratantoni, MBA’s SVP and Chief Economist. “MBA expects the trends of a softening job market, sticky inflation, elevated home inventories, and steady mortgage rates will persist into the new year.”
Added Fratantoni, “Purchase application volume last week was 16 percent higher than a year earlier. We are forecasting continued, modest growth in terms of home sales in 2026.”
...
The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($806,500 or less) decreased to 6.31 percent from 6.38 percent, with points decreasing to 0.57 from 0.62 (including the origination fee) for 80 percent loan-to-value ratio (LTV) loans.
emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.
There used to be a third set of escalators, in the Cheyenne JCPenney building, but it was lost when JCPenney moved to the Frontier Mall and the escalator was removed when the old building was renovated…
What’s more interesting is the ages of Wyoming’s escalators…
In Casper, the First Interstate Bank building was built in 1958, while the Hilltop Bank opened in December 1979. The escalators were part of the original design of both buildings.
It’s not just that there are only two escalators in Wyoming, there hasn’t been a new one in 44 years.
Here is the article, but maybe there are some very new ones? Via Tommy Smokes.
The post Wyoming has as many Senators as escalators? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. In this episode we look back on the year in CWT podcast space, excerpt:
HOLMES: Yes. All right. Next question from Jumfrey Tuckins: “When was the last time you had uncontrollable laughter, and what caused it?”
COWEN: Probably the correct answer is never. Literally never in my life.
HOLMES: Aw, Tyler.
COWEN: Why should it be uncontrollable? Things just aren’t that funny. How good can something taste? Take the best sushi I’ve ever had, which was quite good. Things can taste a bit better than that, but not much. Funniness is a maximum. It does not bring me to uncontrollable laughter. That’s just the equilibrium.
HOLMES: This is consistent with how you presented yourself before, where you’ve talked about how you feel like you don’t have the extreme highs and lows of other people. You’re much more of a steady middle kind of person. Either displeasureor pleasure, you don’t get the extremes as much.
COWEN: Isn’t uncontrollable laughter in some ways a kind of displeasure? I don’t know, since I’ve never had it.
HOLMES: In the sense that sometimes, if you get tickled, sometimes you’re laughing, but you want it to stop.
COWEN: Right.
HOLMES: No, I think what that’s getting at is those times where something has just so metaphorically tickled you that you — usually, it’s with another person.
COWEN: Not going to happen. Sorry.
HOLMES: That makes me a little sad.
COWEN: Maybe just you’re not funny enough. Have you considered that?
HOLMES: Oh, shots fired, Tyler. Oh, my gosh.
COWEN: I don’t mean you, but you, collective humanity.
HOLMES: Okay, collective you. All right.
COWEN: I heard Louis C.K. live, which is the funniest show I’ve ever heard. I laughed quite a bit, but I was not close to uncontrollably laughing.
HOLMES: Do you have any theory as to why that is? When that happens, again, there’s something that you and another person are experiencing together, that you’ve realized you’ve had the same thought or same experience, and it’s just —
COWEN: I suspect it’s heritable, with apologies to Alison Gopnik.
Rrecommended, and of course this year there will be much more to come.
The post Year end CWT retrospective episode with Jeff Holmes appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
What's happening in the sky?
Lightly cleaned-up and edited Granola transcript of 2025 Contraptions book club hangout on December 19. Present: , , , , and me. I’ve added name tags where obvious or where I remember who said what. If you were there and can bind one of the open Them(n) variables to names, please post a comment and I’ll update.
ChatGPT did some compressions/omissions even though I told it to just cleanup, so here is the raw transcript (thanks Kyle) as well. For those who did the book club but couldn’t join the hangout, I invite you to add your reflections as comments.
Venkat: Anyway: twelve books, kind of done. Let’s go around—share how many you finished and some highlights. I finished eleven and a half of the official reads. I still have about a third left of 1493. I did at least three or four side reads, so I can claim more points than on the official list. I read an extra Venice book, an extra Steppe Nomads book, and a book about Buenos Aires for a trip that turned out to be connected to the reading theme. I’m counting that too. I read The Chivalric Turn—unexpectedly interesting, probably my most interesting side read. No particular standout among the official ones; they were all interesting triangulations. No favorites—learned something from all of them.
Okay, going left to right. John?
John: All right. I just unmuted. In terms of the books, I at least skimmed most of them that were on Kindle. I read the whole of City of Fortune—actually multiple times. Not sure it was a standout in terms of totally new content, but it was a compelling narrative and fun to listen to. I also got into something Kyle posted about in the chat: Before European Hegemony. Looking forward to that.
Venkat: And highlights through the year?
John: If I’m scoring myself, I’d give myself a B-plus. One interesting rabbit trail: City of Fortune got me thinking about the Renaissance—especially the “Northern Renaissance,” which feels under-discussed beyond what comes up on Venkat’s blog. One of your major claims, Venkat, is that modernity is not only a Western/Italian phenomenon, which got me brushing up on Northern Europe. There’s so much I’d never really seen clearly—especially “learning how to see,” which I think you’ve suggested is part of modernity. Northern Europe contributed a lot to that dynamic. So that side trail was a highlight for me.
Randy: I score a 10-and-a-half, plus a few bonus side reads. Favorites: I loved Before European Hegemony, and I really liked Inventing the Renaissance. Together they gave me a big “world system contraption-y” view: Before European Hegemony was more economically focused, and Inventing the Renaissance gave such a rich slice of what was going on in Italy and surrounding areas. It also disabused a bunch of notions of what the Renaissance included. Lots of fun contraptions I hadn’t really thought about—like the fractal patron-client system stuff I associated with ancient Rome, but didn’t realize persisted through the Italian Renaissance. I loved so many of them, and they’re all different. It’s been a pleasure.
Sean: I’d score myself around a nine, but a couple are halves. In the middle of the year—between Montaigne and Don Quixote—I finished Don Quixote and got halfway through Montaigne, but it was hard to recover. I finished Utopia about 20 minutes ago. And I still have to go back to 1493, which I’m enjoying. I like anything that shows Western culture depending on things like the potato, or malaria shaping where culture is the way it is. I live in Maryland—right south of me, malaria used to dominate concerns; north of me, not so much.
Being part of the book club also made a trip to Rome in the middle of the year very meaningful. Seeing the statuary and everything—it made it feel like, “oh, this really was a thing,” especially noticing what was earlier and then how Bernini takes over later. No single book seemed much better than the others. The book I was most surprised by was Monkey King—I didn’t see that coming, how much I enjoyed it.
Anish: I think I read all the books except one, which will take a few more months to finish. Besides that, I read five more books. No single one was amazing, but I found Kingdoms of Faith very nice—good orientation, especially how much depends on the period when Spain wasn’t Spain yet, and how 1493 feels like a reaction to the Muslim period in Spain.
Also, the books that led into the Asian side were nice for me personally. I moved to San Diego a couple years ago from Singapore, so I’d been exposed to many of those places, but I didn’t appreciate the historical depth until reading these. I haven’t read the “Hegemony” book yet, but I should order it; sounds like a really nice read.
Kyle: Last but not least: I read all the books at the beginning of the year, but we had a baby in August, so I dropped the book club for a while. I’m back now. I also got lucky because I’d already read 1493, so that was kind of a freebie. I’ll try to pick up Utopia over the Christmas holidays.
I read Before European Hegemony—however you pronounce that—and it was super interesting. My impression of the whole year: “modernity is already here, but unevenly distributed.” Growing up, I read lots of medieval fairy tales—my parents had books—so I had that charming sense of the past, but the people always seemed weird and foreign in their concerns and how they thought.
What surprised me was starting with the Venice book: the key characters and the history didn’t feel alien. They felt very similar to me. And that kept cropping up—different people in different places, but recognizably modern concerns.
The printing press book did a really good job of showing “the medium is the message”: how printing warped people’s brains. The same conditions—broad information, lots of decisions—existed in isolated places, but Venice was interesting because it had a huge archive and traded with everybody. An individual could sift diverse information and form a coherent view not trapped in a local cultural gravity well. Printing made that broadly possible for elites: suddenly you could have a library, read ancient and contemporary books, compare them. Then printing got cheap in the 1700s and 1800s and forced more people into that condition. And then TV obliterated any remaining pockets of people not seeing broadly selected information.
I also picked up A Secular Age by Charles Taylor—haven’t read much yet—but it seems related: tracing a shift from more religious-dominated thinking to broadly secular. I’ve always been interested in how ideas develop, so this year’s reading felt like a set of case studies for that.
Venkat: Okay, we have initial impressions. Floor is open—unmute and bring up anything you want.
A couple things for me. First, since I’m finishing 1493, it strikes me that even within “the West,” the story is unreasonably Anglo-laden. The shaping of the Americas seems much more driven by what the Spanish were doing in Central and South America, which percolated upward, rather than the Anglo story. That’s been a big reset for me, because it’s so at odds with how things are now, where those regions are much weaker.
Second, 1493 gives an interesting triangulation of China. We got an inside-out view through Monkey King—imaginative stories, telling a ninth-century story in the sixteenth century—and then the outside view through 1493: currency crisis, silver, and so on. The disconnect between inside and outside psyches was fascinating.
Third: Kyle’s point. My starting thesis was modernity’s clock should start 300 years earlier than we normally do—1200 instead of 1500. That thesis was roughly validated. But if you put numbers on “modernity is unevenly distributed,” how do you measure it?
One pair of data points: before this year I read Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities. Istanbul/Byzantium and Venice were power centers with a flippening. Early on, Venice looked up to Constantinople as the center of civilization. By 1200, it flipped: Venetians regarded the Byzantines as backward, and saw themselves as the frontier of reality. You see it in attitudes: same era, similar material capacities—ships, building, roads—but culturally it was worlds apart. Venetians were inventing bookkeeping and a kind of republican governance; Byzantines were stuck in Roman-era governance.
It suggests an exercise: define a metric for uneven modernity, run it globally from 1200 to 1600. India is interesting: I’d argue modernity arrived with Islam—gunpowder, modern courts, legal code, lots of modernization with Islamic rule. That’d be an interesting research project.
Kyle: Even in contemporary terms—last hundred years—post–World War II leadership in the Americas and Europe seemed very reality-focused. Maybe “modern” is basically “in touch with reality”: how closely are you hewing to reality, and how much of reality can you consume? Leaders now often seem like they’re in fairy tales, wandering around, losing touch with reality. World War II forced contact with reality—and there was an explosion of science and engineering, literature, and cultures unifying.
In the past, Venice was very reality-focused: out to make money, so lots of reality tests, close attention to success and failure. Plus they were in contact with Europe, the Middle East, and knew things about Asia—lots of diverse reality information flowing in. If you have enough diverse reality information, it turns your brain into a certain modern-ish kind of thinker. That might be a unified way of saying it.
Venkat: Footnote: the Indonesia book outlined that Majapahit was extremely non-reality-based—living in ghosts and magic. Interesting ships, powerful trade networks, but fairy-tale land.
Kyle: Yeah. They were good at ships, but it didn’t seem to affect them. They had tropical foods, tons of resources, the center of trading—everyone went through them—so it was all easy. It’s like the barbarian/civilized pattern: barbarians come over, people get fat and stupid, lose touch with reality, then get dominated again. Dumbified by success.
Them(1): The more monopoly you have on wealth, trade, resources, the less you need to be in touch with reality in the short run.
Kyle: Exactly.
Them(2): Another thought trail for me—this came from Inventing the Renaissance: one of the first intellectual dominoes for modernity was Petrarch (early 1300s). I knew almost nothing about him. His project was basically: we’re in decline from Rome; if we get our kids reading the classics, they’ll learn virtue and create a golden age. That kicked off a multi-generation program leading to the early Renaissance intellectual milieu—everyone reading classics—and that created more intellectual and philosophical diversity beyond what the Church provided.
Kyle: Yeah. I started a biography too. The manuscript hunting was intense: organizing trips to monasteries, searching moldy manuscripts, finding texts nobody had. It felt like an online club, but physical.
Them(3): And the Byzantines: “we found a guy who speaks ancient Greek”—then everybody learned ancient Greek.
Kyle: Yeah—that was in the printing book too.
Anish: A theme I noticed across Spain and the east books: if they could import good management, they could do it better. At some point they ran out of land, and the only way to improve was better ways of gathering wealth. Earlier it wasn’t an issue, but as constraints tightened they asked, “how can we do more with what we have?” The equatorial regions didn’t have those issues—food all the time. My hypothesis: for your scanline, the most “modern” might correlate with where management was best. I haven’t found books on that, but I also haven’t searched.
Venkat: You read Gunpowder Empires too, right?
Anish: Yes.
Venkat: That’s a good middle period: gunpowder, paper, stuff making its way to Europe. Another interesting one was the Ibn Khaldun book—almost an alt-history of how cultural settings matter. Around 1000, Islam and Europe were equally poised for modernity trajectories. Why did Islam falter while Europe took off? You get glimpses in Ibn Khaldun: a strong legal culture, due process, governance. But maybe scarcity constraints—deserts, North Africa—limited expression of what that operating system enabled. That might be a theory.
Kyle: The printing press book also contrasted Northern vs Southern Europe: the Church cracked down on printing, suppressing cultural diversity. Southern Europe is still poorer than Northern Europe. Italy and Spain were leading-edge, then it flipped over a few centuries.
Venkat: You can extrapolate that down to the Islamic belt. Islamic clergy were even more resistant to printing—the Qur’an wasn’t printed for centuries. Even when they had printing, they restricted printing the Qur’an. Something is going on there.
Kyle: The author put it plainly: a key difference is you can have multiple books open at the same time and compare them. That rapid comparison produces insights. Suppressing that comparison suppresses the ability to see problems with your current space—if it’s all you know, you can’t see it as contingent.
Randy: Adjacent point: pamphlets and letters circulate, creating a continent-scale intellectual network. Even if only a tiny percent in each city is engaged, it magnifies. More eyes, more experiments in parallel. Eisenstein contrasts not having to remember everything. I’d recently read Francis Yates on memory arts—Giordano Bruno and others. Reading those in sequence was fun, seeing Eisenstein responding.
Kyle: It’s funny—now with LLMs, I don’t write notes. I can recreate a thought by prompting a chat, so why take notes?
Venkat: Flip side: automatic transcripts and note generation. The assistant can give a summary that’s enough of a prompt, and then you can “vivify” the conversation by feeding it back into an LLM.
Kyle: Or critique everything we said and pick out the silly comments.
Venkat: Yeah.
Venkat: A couple of other thought trails. John asked me about a “postmodernity machine.” My hypothesis: a 400-year cycle, then it’s fully deployed. For modernity: 1200–1600, by 1600 modernity OS is in production in significant parts of the world. Then 1600–2000 is a plateau where modernity is dominant, but another OS is being built under it: postmodernity. Now we’re entering the era where postmodernity becomes default, and modernity declines fast—collapse is faster than construction.
Could we do a similar book club about postmodernity? Harder: more complex, more people, bigger machine. One tractable thread emerged at the margins this year: 1493 highlighted agency among enslaved people and Native Americans shaping history in the margins. Maybe postmodernity is less about building a machine and more about improvising and hacking a complex system from below—because the world becomes too complex to map, document, and govern in a “machine” way. That might be an early postmodern adaptation: living under a machine and hacking it from below.
Them (4): If we follow that line: cyberpunk fiction is a natural angle.
Venkat: Nonfiction: Henry Farrell’s Underground Empire, and Nils Gilman’s edited collection Deviant Globalization. Where leaders fail to govern complexity, organic adaptations emerge: criminal gangs, click farms, underground crypto, trafficking, smuggling. That might be an oblique way to study postmodernity.
Kyle: That matches the “declining state capacity” theme.
Them (5): Also: The Wire is a great fictional treatment.
Kyle: Another approach: how modernist regimes defend themselves—China is interesting with the Great Firewall, trying to contain complexity to keep it governable.
Venkat: Have any of you read the Dan Wang book? Breakneck?
Kyle: I started it.
Venkat: That’s the flip side: trying to force modernity to become postmodernity by pushing the accelerator. I suspect that fails.
Kyle: America is like plunging headlong—innovating into the postmodern world—while Europe and China try to keep things creaking along.
Anish: Another extreme: look at TikToks of people teaching each other how to use tools for free—or committing crime—like “how to get things off Amazon for free.” That’s where the new world is being built. Maybe a month just on social media as primary material.
Venkat: That raises a timeline issue. If postmodernity is real, it shouldn’t have started in 1950. If my thesis holds, it started 400 years ago. If slave and Native American cultures were early postmodern adaptations, what are other examples across 1600–2000?
Kyle: Spinoza comes to mind.
Venkat: Yes. Spinoza as early postmodern at the philosophical level. I read The Courtier and the Heretic (Spinoza vs Leibniz). Spinoza is postmodern; Leibniz is late modern—philosophically reactionary even if technically forward-looking. What else between 1600 and 2000?
Them (6): Maybe French Revolution visions. Romanticism too. The “wanderer above the sea of fog” type motif—announcing postmodernity.
Them (7): Quick break-in: postindustrialism is a worn term. One concrete example: positional goods. Not “can I eat,” but “is my house in the right neighborhood.” A striking case study: nightclub economies—the product is temporary status. There’s a book about the nightclub economy published by The Economist (author/title not recalled here).
Venkat: That’s a good point: democratization of positional goods. In modernity, positional goods existed but were restricted—like nobles and knights (even The Chivalric Turn has some of that). Now it’s democratized—people in slums compete over positional goods.
Also: the “economic frame” itself might be postmodern. Pre-1600, “the economy” as such didn’t exist as a conceptual lens. People understood goods and costs, vague supply/demand, but not a full “economic view.” Ibn Khaldun’s “economy” reads like alchemy—monarchical fiat framing. So early economics—maybe pre–Adam Smith or Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment—might be good on this track. The Scottish Enlightenment had postmodern characteristics.
Sean: I found an anthropology book: Beyond Nature and Culture by Philippe Descola. It argues there isn’t one nature—there are multiple notions of nature across cultures. Dense, French style, but interesting. Yuk Hui mentions it (Cosmotechnics / related).
Venkat: That’s another point: I’d take the suggestion and rewind 400 years. Hobbes and Rousseau (mid-17th century) are two different “nature” theories—Hobbesian vs noble savage. That plurality is postmodern. Pre-modern views of nature were religious myths; modernity offers a few reality-based myths; postmodernity offers a plurality.
Anish: Another angle, building on Sean: literature and gardens. There’s a pattern of the garden across the world—Islamic gardens, Japanese gardens, Victorian gardens, American parks—taking control of nature. For kings, the garden was the nightclub for a while. Then there’s a flip: from bringing a civilized nature into your boundary to building dams and administering nature outside your boundaries—terraforming instinct.
Venkat: That’s good: “garden the backyard” vs “garden the world.” Humboldt might be a symbol—going out and thinking in terms of running the world rather than running your backyard.
Venkat: Other “world processes” besides the economy and nature?
Randy: Media seems likely—French Revolution press, pamphlets, propaganda; Hearst and yellow journalism.
Kyle: Yeah: propaganda as a lens.
Sean: Noosphere and “cathexis” come up in think-tank traditions—taking theoretical concepts seriously even when not materially present. My litmus test: those feel like “resisting postmodernity” attempts—how to regain control of the machine. China might want those.
Venkat: This suggests a B-plot: some people believe you can keep building controllable machines; others think you can only adapt. That tension might guide the reading list.
I started The Unaccountability Machine (Dan Davies). It’s right on the border of whether you can build a machine you can control.
Kyle: Another lens: not just crises and disasters, but what if postmodernity succeeds—has a golden era. Modernity had golden ages. For postmodernity, Iain M. Banks’s Culture series is one of the few fictional explorations of a happy, prosperous system. He explores the edges, but you get glimpses of what “happy postmodern” might look like.
Venkat: Has anyone written a nonfiction treatment of “luxury space communism”? Banks is like “luxury space anarchy.”
Them: Star Trek is a default, but on-the-nose.
Venkat: Another theme: progress through crises vs progress through design. Modernity installation had a more planned feel—Venice administrative empire, Iberian exploration. Postmodernity feels more “agile,” fail-fast, crash-early. Colonialism itself was improvised, path-dependent, with autonomy and little oversight.
Kyle: Lots of blood and horror.
Venkat: Lots of blood—maybe like agile programming too. Move fast and break things.
Kyle: Touché.
Venkat: If modernity took 1200–1600 to install and by 1600 it was “in production,” what’s the golden age of modernity? I’d probably pick England in the late Victorian era—maybe as good as it gets. America never fully modernized—joined late, had institutional regress like slavery, leapfrogged in some ways, so it’s a weird mix: moon landings and things that look 16th century.
If our 400-year hypothesis holds, the year 2000 marks the start of postmodernity’s mature plateau. Maybe the best postmodernity can deliver is around 2150—transposing the timeline. Symbolically: Big Ben as motif for Victorian modernity; Big Ben is also a recurring motif in Mrs. Dalloway, which inaugurates modernist literature—clock entering your life.
Kyle: Mars colony gets going.
Venkat: On-the-nose symbol, but maybe. Time is another axis. Pendulum clocks are 1600 and later—Galileo principle, Huygens. Before that: water clocks, sundials, and approximate village time.
Kyle: Stories of villages ringing at different times, each with their own idiosyncratic timing.
Venkat: I have a good book on this: David Landes, Revolution in Time, on the history of the clock across the period.
Also: in the age of LLMs, I might abandon some writing projects. Next year I might do more coding and experiments with AI rather than straight writing. I’m vibe-coding a book out of my Twitter archive—impossible two years ago, now I can do it myself. It’s almost done; I’ll publish in a couple weeks.
Anyway, I don’t want to keep you too long—we’re five minutes over. This is sounding like a promising theme: emergence of the postmodernity machine through adaptation from the outside of an emergent complex beast, while retaining the 400-year develop-and-deploy hypothesis.
Kyle: It’s been really fun. I’ve tried other book clubs and never liked the books or the people or what they said. This is a good club. And it’s topical. It’s a weird time; having other people and a targeted reading list helps wrap our heads around it. Good for peace of mind—feels less chaotic than it seems.
Venkat: Yeah. Been a pleasure. This year will need more participatory development because it’s more complex—more candidate books and threads. I’ll lay out the basic thesis from this hour, then open a Google Form for recommendations: themes, books, individuals, or pointed queries we can use to find books. We might also do more months with multiple selections instead of one book.
Procedural question before we sign off: this year I did one book per month for about nine months, with a couple months of choice/pick-your-own. Did that balance feel right? Should we do more?
Kyle: The balance was good. There has to be a spine that connects everyone together so the conversation works.
Venkat: That’ll be more challenging this year, but maybe eight common reads and four with some degree of choice.
Kyle: Sounds good.
Randy: Also: the “extra credit” books worked well—didn’t make the cut, but alternate views on the same subtopic.
Kyle: For the eager beavers with weirdly large amounts of free time.
Venkat: I was questioning Anish because I think he holds the record for side reads. He said he’s been so busy, this is how he relaxes—relaxing super hard.
Anish: I didn’t read books for like seven years during startup life, and once I left I rebounded into reading. Maybe that’s part of it.
Venkat: All right. Thanks, guys. This was really fun and a good reflection on the year.
Elizabeth Lopatto, back in October, after Bari Weiss was first named editor-in-chief of CBS News by David Ellison after his acquisition of Paramount:
This is the glass cliff to end all glass cliffs. You’re Marissa Mayer at Yahoo without the Googler street cred. You’re Nancy Dubuc at Vice without the string of hit TV shows. You’re Linda Yaccarino at Twitter without the advertiser relationships. You have been hired as a sop to a Trump administration that is actively hostile to the actual free press, and you will be made to oversee wave after wave of layoffs until you quit or get fired and the entire news division is shut down in a final spasm of cost-cutting after the next inescapable media merger.
The only thing Lopatto missed in her prescient piece is that Weiss might not last long enough to still be leading CBS News by the time Ellison gets to layoffs. It’s simply untenable for a partisan propagandist to be leading a legitimate news organization. Two months into the job and Weiss has already made a complete fool of herself. Her ham-fisted (but failed) attempt to censor a fair and well-reported piece critical of the Trump administration’s deportation policies comes just one week after a televised town hall with Erika Kirk (widow of Charlie Kirk), which Weiss herself hosted, for which the commercial spots were filled by direct marketing dietary supplements and, I swear, Chia Pets.
It’s been an inauspicious two months on the job for Weiss, to say the least.
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Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios.
I got a host of very interesting responses to yesterday’s post about the tech platforms force-feeding the mass consumer market AI. I learned a lot from your responses, which included both direct personal experiences and expert perspectives on different dimensions of the topic. What is important to me about this moment is distinguishing two or three different very real things happening at once.
The first is a genuine critical mass in the development of LLM-based machine learning. This is a much better description than “AI” to my thinking, since the latter contains a vast range of meanings from simple and accurate to triumphalist and grandiose. But machine learning is real, and in recent years it’s developed real capabilities that are at least transformative in various areas of work and technology. I’m skeptical of what we’ve developed beyond this at this point but really don’t know. It could be a lot. And it will increase. I think this is the best way to understand the technology itself at this moment now.
You also have big techs hunger for the next big thing, the thing that will revive and expand the explosive growth that the tech platforms enjoyed in the first decade of the 21st century. We can see this most clearly in the momentary rage and spending sprees for the “metaverse” (lol) and to a lesser extent NFTs. The crypto fascination is part of the same equation. The platforms are dominant and very profitable. Their monopoly power is vast. But they’re not going to have growth like they had in that first decade of the century. They are mature companies. They’re monopolies. They are protecting rents more than creating dazzling new things. And the economies and milieus they come out of are based on that kind of growth. So the desire for the next thing is firing the coals of all the tech platforms, even into absurd things like the metaverse. But AI and machine learning are not absurd. They’re real. And the great mystery and, I would say, the way to make a vast fortune, either by shorting or investing, is to delineate just how much of this is paragraph one and how much paragraph two. (If a billionaire wants to pay me a lot of money I will pretend to know the mix.)
Then you have the how and the why of those at the commanding heights of Silicon Valley throwing their weight in with the global authoritarian movement. And related to that is this complicated question of how much of this is transactional and, to an extent, naive versus how much is driven by the ideological transformation of tech’s ownership class. And I mean, ownership ownership. The big, big players. It’s clearly both, and it’s clearly fluid and changing but understanding the precise mix is at the center of everything. Both the astronomical sums of wealth built up in Silicon Valley and Big Tech more broadly and the maturation of those monopolies play strongly into this political and ideological transformation for all the obvious reasons. Some of it is simply wanting to keep on Trump’s good side. Knowing the precise mix of which is one thing and which is the other is everything.
A friend of mine has this theory that the real root of the rightward tilt of the Big Tech world is rooted in the late teens of this century, and the interrelated mix of the maturation of the platform monopolies and softening of the IPO market. They are of course two sides of the very same coin. At a certain point, the incredibly well-paid tech workers making maybe half a million a year realized they were never going to catch a ride on the next big unicorn and end up in the $100 million or $100 billion ranks.
Five-hundred thousand dollars a year is not penury certainly, even if it doesn’t go as far in San Francisco as it might in Ohio or Kentucky. But it did create a kind of Silicon Valley class war in a way that had not existed before. Because the fluidity that had genuinely existed from the late 80s through the first decade of the 21st century had tightened. That made the bosses look different to the fairly fabulously well compensated workforce. As is always the case with the insecurity of wealth and the brittle grip — why are you there and I’m here? Happenstance and luck aren’t stable or reassuring answers. And if you’re worth $100 billion and people are always telling you you literally changed the world, you just don’t have a lot of patience for the griping. Why would you? And power creates griping as surely as night follows day.
How true this prism is, how much it captures and how much it helped set the stage for the rightward shift of the owners in Big Tech I don’t know. But it’s part of the equation. Monopoly power, the stasis it creates and the fabulous wealth it generates are all different parts of this elephant we, as semi-blind men, are trying to see and understand. This is part of why I’ve returned again and again to this theme of the “brittle grip” that the early 21st century ultra wealthy experience today. There is both a fabulous wealth and dominance and an insecurity that is not simply paranoia. It’s scary to be standing that high off the ground. And when you’re that wealthy and powerful a lot of people want to take your feelings and insecurities very seriously.
There are two additional points worth considering.
There’s always been a part of the tech world plotting escape, building fantasies of transcending the bonds of society and its sovereignties or even the ultimate bonds of mortality itself. That’s where “network states” come from, or the idea of building floating sovereignties out in the middle of the ocean or simply building an epic compound in New Zealand for whenever shit gets weird. Harvest from society but exit the demands of its sovereignty. Why not?
The reigning leaders of Silicon Valley venture capital today believe deeply in founder-run companies. I admit to some sympathy with this preference. And the idea comes from some genuinely good places. Don’t be the suits who were stupid enough to boot Steve Jobs out of Apple and make it a tired board room-based company that only bringing him back undid. Who can argue with that? Keep the founder, the man with the vision and the impatience in charge. My jocular comment aside, there’s a good deal of logic to that. But you don’t have to look far to see that there is a genetic similarity to that view and the pretensions of our authoritarian age. Committees may not generate genius visions. But they also less often grind people under their feet.
In any case, this is what to me makes the current questions about “AI” so interesting and genuinely important — far beyond the narrow questions of its utility and certainly the frothy nonsense about sentience and self-awareness. AI and the money being poured into it are at the center of each of these contests currently shaping the world. And to understand that world, it’s important to have the best understanding possible of what is real technological innovation and what is actually being generated by the equivocal blessings of monopoly power, the ferocious power combined with the lack of dynamism and the fading prospects of fantastical growth. Similarly, in precisely what ways are the vertiginous sensations of ultra-wealth driving our authoritarian moment in the US? And finally, how is AI — the bright shiny object at the center of the whole show — being deployed to advance the power of the authoritarians? It’s all connected together and that’s what makes it both fascinating and important.
CNN media analyst Brian Stelter, on Bluesky:
As “60 Minutes” finalized its “Inside CECOT” report last Thursday, CBS sent the White House a request for comment. A WH spokesperson responded within a few hours. The quote was not included in the “60” report — so, judge for yourself whether it should have been included or not.
WH spokesperson Abigail Jackson said “60 Minutes should spend their time and energy amplifying the stories of Angel Parents, whose innocent American children have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens that President Trump are removing from the country.”
Despite the fact that it doesn’t address a single aspect of the report, 60 Minutes should have included that statement, both to reveal the belligerent callousness of the administration, and to highlight the glaring grammatical error. In its way, the statement speaks volumes.
Christopher Goffard, reporting for the Los Angeles Times (News+ link):
When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short — who became known as the Black Dahlia — he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill.
Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a sullen 21-year-old premed student at USC, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who had expressed an eagerness to practice surgery. He was “a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression,” a military psychiatrist had concluded.
At first, Margolis did not tell detectives that he had lived with Short for 12 days at a Hollywood Boulevard apartment, three months before her January 1947 murder. [...]
A generation later and hundreds of miles north, a killer who called himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area with five seemingly random murders from 1968 to 1969, taunting police and media for years with letters and cryptograms.
The toughest to decipher was the letter he sent in April 1970 to the San Francisco Chronicle, with the words “My name is —” followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols. It came to be called the Z13 cipher, and its brevity has stymied generations of PhDs and puzzle prodigies.
Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer’s identity — and in the process solved the Black Dahlia case as well.
“It’s irrefutable,” said Baber, obsessive, hyperfocused and cocksure in manner, his memory encyclopedic and his speech a firehose of dates, locations and surprising linkages.
What a story. The circumstantial evidence pointing to Margolis seems pretty strong. What I can’t find is an explanation of Baber’s solution to the Z13 cypher. The “irrefutable” description hinges on that. There’s a new podcast, “Killer in the Code”, from author Michael Connelly that details Baber’s supposed solution tying both cases to the same guy. All the publicity about this today stems from the debut of that podcast yesterday.
Everyone who works with official PDFs in any capacity should know that if you start with a PDF containing text you want to redact, and you just place black bars atop that text and resave the file, the original text is all still there in the new PDF file. It’s the digital equivalent of putting sticky notes atop the text. You don’t even need to crack open the new PDF in a text (or hex) editor and hunt for the original text within non-human-readable PDF formatting code. You just open the PDF in Preview or Acrobat or any other PDF viewer, use the regular text selection cursor to select the text under the black bars, copy, and then paste into any other app. Everyone should know this but it keeps happening. Now it’s happened with the new batch of Epstein files released by the DOJ.
There are major differences between the Trump 1.0 and 2.0 administrations. In the Trump 1.0 administration, many of the most important officials were very competent men. One example would be then-Attorney General William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file. There are ways to properly redact a PDF digitally, but going analog is foolproof.
The Trump 2.0 administration, in contrast, is staffed top to bottom with fools.
MILAN — The European Space Agency announced plans to hire approximately 520 new staff members starting in 2026, following decisions approved at ESA’s 342nd Council meeting earlier this month. The recruitment will result in a net increase of about 400 staff, alongside the replacement of roughly 120 positions due to retirements. The move will bring […]
The post ESA to hire 520 new staff as workforce expansion begins in 2026 appeared first on SpaceNews.
In this episode of Space Minds, host David Ariosto speaks with Juan Alonso — CTO and Co-founder of Luminary Cloud and professor at Stanford University — about the rapid transformation underway in aerospace engineering.
The post How physics AI is transforming the future of space engineering appeared first on SpaceNews.
A first launch of the Long March 12A Chinese state-owned reusable rocket reached orbit late Monday, but attempted recovery of the first stage downrange failed.
The post Long March 12A reaches orbit in first reusable launch attempt, but landing fails appeared first on SpaceNews.
[Continued from yesterday. P.G.] …and slept hard till 8 o’clock this morning, and so up and to the office, where I found Sir J. Minnes and Sir W. Batten come unexpectedly home last night from Portsmouth, having done the Pay there before we could have thought it. Sat all the morning, and at noon home to dinner with my wife alone, and after dinner sat by the fire, and then up to make up my accounts with her, and find that my ordinary housekeeping comes to 7l. a month, which is a great deal. By and by comes Dr. Pierce, who among other things tells me that my Lady Castlemaine’s interest at Court increases, and is more and greater than the Queen’s; that she hath brought in Sir H. Bennet, and Sir Charles Barkeley; but that the queen is a most good lady, and takes all with the greatest meekness that may be. He tells me too that Mr. Edward Montagu is quite broke at Court with his repute and purse; and that he lately was engaged in a quarrell against my Lord Chesterfield: but that the King did cause it to be taken up. He tells me, too, that the King is much concerned in the Chancellor’s sickness, and that the Chancellor is as great, he thinks, as ever he was with the King.
He also tells me what the world says of me, “that Mr. Coventry and I do all the business of the office almost:” at which I am highly proud.
He being gone I fell to business, which was very great, but got it well over by nine at night, and so home, and after supper to bed.
According to current economic commentary, it’s all about “K”. Talk of a “K-shaped economy,” in which incomes and wealth are rising only for those at the top, has become ubiquitous. And rightly so. For high-income Americans who own a lot of stock, the past year has treated them pretty well. But for those who don’t, not so much.
However, too much of the commentary is marred by a sort of lazy cynicism. Too many of these commentaries rely on the casual assumption that it has always been thus. Or at least, that it was as true during the Biden years as it is now. But that’s not true. David Autor, Arindrajit Dube and Annie McGrew have documented that the Biden era post-pandemic economic recovery was the opposite of what we are experiencing now. In fact, during the Biden recovery wage gains for low-paid workers were much larger than for those further up the income scale. In fact, the pro-low-income worker tilt of wage gains during the Biden recovery was something we haven’t seen since the “Great Compression” of the 1940s. And that narrowing of wage gaps was due to special factors, including wartime wage policy and a rapid expansion of unions.
The chart below provides data to back up the observation that in going from the Biden Administration to the Trump Administration, we have traded an economy that disproportionately benefited low-income workers to one that disproportionately benefits the well-off (particularly those who own a lot of stocks). The graph plots the Atlanta Fed’s estimates for the rate of wage growth for two groups: workers in the bottom 25 percent of the wage distribution (blue line) and workers in the top 25 percent (red line).
During the Biden years of 2021 to 2023, low-paid workers saw consistently faster wage growth than high-paid workers. For example, in September of 2022, the wages of high-paid workers grew at an annual rate of 4%, but around 7.75% for low-paid workers as low-paid workers benefited from a tight labor market. The spread narrowed during the mid-2023 to mid-2024, as the economy slowly cooled in response to Fed interest rate hikes. By 2023 and into 2024, it was clear that the economy had achieved the desired “soft landing”: inflation was falling while employment stayed relatively strong.
In late 2024, however, the wage gains of high-paid workers began to outpace those of low-paid workers, which are barely outpacing inflation.
So the K-shaped economy is a real but relatively recent development. Why is it happening?
The proximate cause of the K-shaped economy is a weak job market. As I’ve written repeatedly, the U.S. economy has not (yet) experienced mass layoffs. Employers have, however, become very reluctant to hire new workers. Gallup asks whether now is “a good time or a bad time to find a quality job”:
Gallup’s result, consistent with other surveys like the Conference Board, shows that Americans are very pessimistic about the job market. Trump may claim that we are economically “the hottest country in the world,” but the truth is that we last had a hot labor market back in 2023-4. At this point, by contrast, we have a “frozen” job market in which workers who aren’t already employed are having a very hard time finding new jobs, a sharp contrast with the Biden years during which workers said it was very easy to find a new job.
As the Biden years show, a strong job market is good for all workers, but particularly good for relatively marginalized workers – notably low-paid service workers and, on average, Black workers. Conversely, a weak job market is bad for all workers, but historically has been worst for relatively marginalized workers.
Again, the data bear this out. Overall U.S. unemployment has been gradually rising — it’s at 4.6 percent now, up from an average of 4 percent last year. But Black unemployment has been soaring since mid-summer 2025:
The question then becomes, who froze the labor market? And here it’s likely that Trumponomics bears much of the responsibility.
The key point about Trump’s tariffs and to some extent his other policies is that they keep changing, and nobody knows what will come next. This uncertainty makes businesses reluctant to make commitments, including the commitment involved in hiring new workers: If you hire workers based on current tariffs, what happens if the Supreme Court rules those tariffs illegal, or the Trump administration picks a different country or countries as enemies?
In this sense, then, Trump may be largely, though indirectly, responsible for the K-shaped economy. His tariff and other policies have created uncertainty that has paralyzed hiring. The fact that workers are finding jobs hard to get, in turn, has hurt the employment and wages of disadvantaged groups, including ethnic minorities and low-wage workers in general.
As I said, it’s important not to give in to the lazy cynicism that asserts, without checking the facts, that the K-shaped economy is a story that extends back through the Biden years. For that kind of cynicism all too easily becomes fatalism, a sense that nothing can be done. The truth is that none of this had to happen. What we learned during the Biden years is that economic policy that promotes full employment also promotes greater equality. And we can do it again. Let’s turn this K around.
MUSICAL CODA
MicroQuickJS (aka. MQuickJS) is a Javascript engine targetted at embedded systems. It compiles and runs Javascript programs with as low as 10 kB of RAM. The whole engine requires about 100 kB of ROM (ARM Thumb-2 code) including the C library. The speed is comparable to QuickJS.
It supports a subset of full JavaScript, though it looks like a rich and full-featured subset to me.
One of my ongoing interests is sandboxing: mechanisms for executing untrusted code - from end users or generated by LLMs - in an environment that restricts memory usage and applies a strict time limit and restricts file or network access. Could MicroQuickJS be useful in that context?
I fired up Claude Code for web (on my iPhone) and kicked off an asynchronous research project to see explore that question:
My full prompt is here. It started like this:
Clone https://github.com/bellard/mquickjs to /tmp
Investigate this code as the basis for a safe sandboxing environment for running untrusted code such that it cannot exhaust memory or CPU or access files or the network
First try building python bindings for this using FFI - write a script that builds these by checking out the code to /tmp and building against that, to avoid copying the C code in this repo permanently. Write and execute tests with pytest to exercise it as a sandbox
Then build a "real" Python extension not using FFI and experiment with that
Then try compiling the C to WebAssembly and exercising it via both node.js and Deno, with a similar suite of tests [...]
I later added to the interactive session:
Does it have a regex engine that might allow a resource exhaustion attack from an expensive regex?
(The answer was no - the regex engine calls the interrupt handler even during pathological expression backtracking, meaning that any configured time limit should still hold.)
Here's the full transcript and the final report.
Some key observations:
I'm really excited about this. MicroQuickJS is tiny, full featured, looks robust and comes from excellent pedigree. I think this makes for a very solid new entrant in the quest for a robust sandbox.
Update: I had Claude Code build tools.simonwillison.net/microquickjs, an interactive web playground for trying out the WebAssembly build of MicroQuickJS, adapted from my previous QuickJS plaground. My QuickJS page loads 2.28 MB (675 KB transferred). The MicroQuickJS one loads 303 KB (120 KB transferred).
Here are the prompts I used for that.
Tags: c, javascript, nodejs, python, sandboxing, ai, webassembly, deno, pyodide, generative-ai, llms, claude-code, fabrice-bellard
I've been having an absurd amount of fun recently using LLMs for cooking. I started out using them for basic recipes, but as I've grown more confident in their culinary abilities I've leaned into them for more advanced tasks. Today I tried something new: having Claude vibe-code up a custom application to help with the timing for a complicated meal preparation. It worked really well!
We have family staying at the moment, which means cooking for four. We subscribe to a meal delivery service called Green Chef, mainly because it takes the thinking out of cooking three times a week: grab a bag from the fridge, follow the instructions, eat.
Each bag serves two portions, so cooking for four means preparing two bags at once.
I have done this a few times now and it is always a mad flurry of pans and ingredients and timers and desperately trying to figure out what should happen when and how to get both recipes finished at the same time. It's fun but it's also chaotic and error-prone.
This time I decided to try something different, and potentially even more chaotic and error-prone: I outsourced the planning entirely to Claude.
I took this single photo of the two recipe cards side-by-side and fed it to Claude Opus 4.5 (in the Claude iPhone app) with this prompt:
Extract both of these recipes in as much detail as possible
This is a moderately challenging vision task in that there quite a lot of small text in the photo. I wasn't confident Opus could handle it.
I hadn't read the recipe cards myself. The responsible thing to do here would be a thorough review or at least a spot-check - I chose to keep things chaotic and didn't do any more than quickly eyeball the result.
I asked what pots I'd need:
Give me a full list of pots I would need if I was cooking both of them at once
Then I prompted it to build a custom application to help me with the cooking process itself:
I am going to cook them both at the same time. Build me a no react, mobile, friendly, interactive, artifact that spells out the process with exact timing on when everything needs to happen have a start setting at the top, which starts a timer and persists when I hit start in localStorage in case the page reloads. The next steps should show prominently with countdowns to when they open. The full combined timeline should be shown slow with calculated times tor when each thing should happen
I copied the result out onto my own hosting (you can try it here) because I wasn't sure if localStorage would work inside the Claude app and I really didn't want it to forget my times!
Then I clicked "start cooking"!
Here's the full Claude transcript.
There was just one notable catch: our dog, Cleo, knows exactly when her dinner time is, at 6pm sharp. I forgot to mention this to Claude, which had scheduled several key steps colliding with Cleo's meal. I got woofed at. I deserved it.
To my great surprise, it worked. I followed the recipe guide to the minute and served up both meals exactly 44 minutes after I started cooking.
The best way to learn the capabilities of LLMs is to throw tasks at them that may be beyond their abilities and see what happens. In this case I fully expected that something would get forgotten or a detail would be hallucinated and I'd end up scrambling to fix things half way through the process. I was surprised and impressed that it worked so well.
Some credit for the app idea should go to my fellow hackers at /dev/fort 2 in 2009, when we rented Knockbrex Castle in Dumfries, Scotland for a week and attempted to build a cooking timer application for complex meals.
Most of my other cooking experiments with LLMs have been a whole lot simpler than this: I ask for a recipe, ask for some variations and then cook one of them and see what happens.
This works remarkably well considering LLMs have no taste buds.
I've started to think of this as asking LLMs for the average recipe for a dish, based on all of the recipes they have hoovered up during their training. It turns out the mean version of every guacamole recipe on the internet is a decent guacamole!
Here's an example of a recipe I tried recently that worked out really well. I was helping Natalie run her ceramic stall at the farmers market and the stall next to us sold excellent dried beans. I've never used dried beans before, so I took a photo of their selection and asked Claude what I could do with them:
Identify these beans
It took a guess at the beans, then I said:
Get me excited about cooking with these! If I bought two varietiew what could I make
"Get me excited" switches Claude into a sort of hype-man mode, which is kind of entertaining:
Oh, you're about to enter the wonderful world of bean cooking! Let me get you pumped about some killer two-bean combos: [...]
Mixed bean salad with lemon, olive oil, fresh herbs, cherry tomatoes - light but satisfying [...]
I replied:
OK Bean salad has me interested - these are dried beans. Give me some salad options I can make that would last a long time in the fridge
... and after some back and forth we arrived on the recipe in this transcript, which I cooked the following day (asking plenty of follow-up questions) and thoroughly enjoyed.
I've done this a bunch of times with a bunch of different recipes across both Claude and ChatGPT and honestly I've not had a notable miss yet. Being able to say "make it vegan" or "I don't have coriander, what can I use instead?" or just "make it tastier" is a really fun way to explore cooking.
It's also fun to repeat "make it tastier" multiple times to see how absurd you can get.
Cooking with LLMs is a lot of fun. There's an opportunity here for a really neat benchmark: take a bunch of leading models, prompt them for recipes, follow those recipes and taste-test the results!
The logistics of running this are definitely too much for me to handle myself. I have enough trouble cooking two meals at once, for a solid benchmark you'd ideally have several models serving meals up at the same time to a panel of tasters.
If someone else wants to try this please let me know how it goes!
Tags: cooking, devfort, tools, ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, vision-llms, vibe-coding
Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE:ICE) ... today released the November 2025 ICE First Look at mortgage delinquency, foreclosure and prepayment trends.
“While the topline delinquency numbers show a sharp increase, we’ve seen comparable spikes in prior years when November ended on a Sunday and scheduled payments didn’t post until early December,” said Andy Walden, Head of Mortgage and Housing Market Research at ICE. “Overall performance was in line with what historical patterns would suggest. That said, December data will be important to watch to confirm how quickly borrowers recover from this temporary uptick.”
Key takeaways from this month’s findings include:
• Delinquencies rose: The number of past-due mortgages rose by 275,000 from October to 2.3 million in November, pushing the national delinquency rate to 3.85% — the highest level in over four years.
• Inflow of newly delinquent borrowers: 609,000 borrowers who were current on payments in October became delinquent in November, marking the largest single-month inflow since May 2020. Rolls from 30- to 60-day and 60- to 90-day delinquency bands also increased sharply.
• Delinquencies aligned with historical calendar effects: November’s delinquency rate increase was in line with prior years when the month ended on a Sunday, which last occurred in 2014 (+61 bps), 2008 (+112 bps), and 2003 (+57 bps) — all of which exceeded this year’s 50 basis point increase.
• Prepayments declined: After reaching a 3.5-year high in October, prepayment activity retreated in November, falling 18% month over month.
• Foreclosure activity mixed: Foreclosure activity dipped in November due to seasonal and calendar effects. However, foreclosure starts (+25%), sales (+25%) and active foreclosure volumes (+21%) all remain well above last year’s levels.
emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, starting with the recent Oliver Sacks debacle. Here is one excerpt:
…as my George Mason University colleague Bryan Caplan suggests, trust literatures, not individual research studies. By a “literature,” I mean the collective work conducted by many researchers, acting in decentralized fashion, to publish and circulate the results that will best persuade other researchers.
Second, treat research articles, or their popular media coverage, as possibilities to put in your mental toolbox rather than settled truths.
Literatures are more trustworthy than individual articles because they reflect a collective effort to establish reliable results. A supposed correlation gets refereed and scrutinized dozens of times, or maybe hundreds of times. If you have a new hypothesis, other researchers have a chance to make their names by knocking it down. There are also more eyes watching, in case real-world experience delivers results at odds with what a particular theory had been postulating. Or maybe there was a simple mistake in writing the computer code behind the paper’s result. Literatures contain a variety of different ways to come to a particular conclusion, and you can see whether they end up pointing in the same general direction.
You may not have time or the background to master a complete literature on a research topic, but these days you can send well-written prompts to GPT 5.2 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5, or Gemini 3.0 for some very good summaries of any literature you want. Furthermore, you can cross-check across these different AI models for additional reliability.
This is useful advice which is rarely heeded, and learning how to interpret a research literature is one of the most important skills in intellectual life.
The post Which published results can you trust? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Splendid essay by Bilge Ebiri for The Yale Review, a meditation both on the films of Terrence Malick and several filmmakers he’s deeply influenced.
News:
The Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) announced on Thursday that Moscow was behind a cyber-attack on a Danish water utility in 2024 and a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Danish websites in the lead-up to the municipal and regional council elections in November.
The first, it said, was carried out by the pro-Russian group known as Z-Pentest and the second by NoName057(16), which has links to the Russian state.
Slashdot thread.
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Kimberly D. Bowes (born 1970) is an American archaeologist who is a professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in archeology, material culture and economics of the Roman and the later Roman world. She was the Director of the American Academy in Rome from 2014–2017.[2] She is the author of three monographs…
While she is continuously focused on the archaeology and material culture of the Roman and later Roman worlds, her research interests have shifted from late antiquity and the archeologies of religion and elite space to historical economies with a distinct focus on poverty and the lived experience of the poor. Her forthcoming study on Roman peasants in Italy reflects a greater attention to non-elites in the studies of Roman archaeology and economic history and a shift in her methodology, integrating archaeological and scientific data, anthropological theory and historical economics become.
I am a big fan of her new book Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent. So what should I ask her?
The post What should I ask Kim Bowes? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Tory Bruno, a veteran engineer and aerospace industry executive, has resigned from the top job at United Launch Alliance after more than a decade competing against the growing dominance of SpaceX, the company announced Monday.
The news of Bruno's sudden resignation was unexpected. His tenure was marked by a decline in ULA's market share as rival SpaceX competed for and won ever-larger US government launch contracts. More recently, Bruno oversaw the successful debut of ULA's Vulcan rocket, followed by struggles to ramp up the new rocket's launch cadence.
Bruno had a 30-year career as an engineer and general manager for Lockheed Martin's ballistic missile programs before taking over as president and CEO of United Launch Alliance in August 2014. He arrived as SpaceX started making inroads with its partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket, and ULA's leading position in the US launch market looked to be in doubt.
It turns out that few believe Donald Trump’s insistence that the economy is doing well for most people – any more than those same voters turned on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris a year ago.
Trump’s shouted, rat-a-tat presentation of defense economy storytelling in a presidential address this week fell flat, despite his exhortation of favored, cherry-picked economic numbers that he insisted tell a better record than what you and I experience in the supermarket, looking for jobs or housing, or clearly face in rising utility and health costs.
But then so are his claims about why Venezuela deserves to be punished, or whether millions will lost Obamacare coverage, or that everyone being picked up randomly by border agents is a criminal in hiding.
The biggest potential growth industry right now may be fact-checking.
Our legacy-come-to-fruition is that too many people don’t want to believe anything beyond their personal experience – whether in economics, vaccine safety, perceived dangers from transgender care and distaste for undocumented immigration or “weaponization” of justice against preferred candidates. Even more want news coverage that matches their pre-conceived notions about their ideological side, particularly on prices, jobs and consumer confidence.
At end of year, Trump seems to be flailing to persuade voters that he even understands the complaints, never mind coming up with useful solutions. So he turns ugly about culture issues that are easier to digest and one-off schemes to send out checks to troops from the taxes we already paid.
It’s useful to note that even when there are “facts,” – inflation and jobless numbers emerged this week – the government’s manipulation of how to count, when to count, and delayed or hidden information makes any assertion these days hard to accept at face value.
The long-promised release of the Jeffrey Epstein files seems to have backfired on the Trump administration, which sought to hold them until a congressional revolt forced their hand, and now are responding with a broad blackout pen that makes even the illegally delayed releases less than useful. Though we know Trump is mentioned repeatedly, we almost nothing of his presence in the released documents.
On prices, polling and public reaction are showing that Trump has lost trust and credibility.
Trump’s decision to offer rapid-fire presentation of his favored facts have trouble lining with lived experience. Gas prices dropped precipitously over a year ago though no one can find under $2 a gallon gas at any gas station and heating oil is up 9 percent, egg prices declined after passage of a bird flu and government infusion of a billion dollars in eggs imports, and “housing” costs will decline shortly because borrowing costs may be forced downward without reference to availability or the cost of rent and home ownership while jobs are falling.
The result is being described mostly in partisan political terms. Trump’s chosen blindness to “affordability” is seen as a fatal political blow that will result in a change in congressional majority next November, for example, or eating away now at his influence to dictate strategies foreign and domestic.
Fox News presented the Trump speech as if it were indisputable, though there were televised critics; Breitbart praised checks to military troops as a wonderful idea despite its predictable inflationary result and misuse of funds meant for military housing. Most mainstream outlets pointed out the gaps between what Trump says and what the various official and unofficial market surveys and voter polls say about the economy.
What we need, of course, is not more political cheerleading and more political spin. What we need are consistent measures of various economic trends that arrive on time and are useful for comparisons of the same measures over time. The Trump administration’s consistent strategy in economics and tariffs, immigration and crime, justice prosecutions and Homeland Security operations is to undercut, cancel and hide facts to make it more difficult to make useful comparisons – whether month to month or against previous presidential terms.
So, Trump simply asserts as true whatever he wants, whether it is about miracle cures for asthma and communicable disease, airline traffic, guns or environment. The same government that cannot count how many deportees actually had criminal records is now telling us what to believe about inflation and high prices that is not observable.
If he is only handed briefings pre-screened for spin, perhaps it’s no wonder he airs what comports with his autocratic choices.
That Trump lacks the wherewithal to question what he is handed and only has voice to insist is a bad quality for a leader.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post Even Trump Backers Don’t Believe appeared first on DCReport.org.
1. Does AI weaken the Lucas critique? And a comment from Benjamin Manning.
3. Heritage Foundation is falling apart.
4. Kalshi Research, new arm of the company devoted to research on prediction markets.
5. Travel notes from a visit to Mecca.
6. Palmer Luckey on UAPs. I am not persuaded by his explanation, but clearly he (unlike most of you) has seen the data.
7. Russian billionaire has at least one hundred children (WSJ).
8. Jason Furman on the new economic data (NYT).
9. New Substack on abundance and growth.
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
After the National Association of Realtors® (NAR) releases the monthly existing home sales report, I pick up additional local market data that is reported after the NAR. This is the final look at local markets in November.There is much more in the article.
There were several key stories for November:
• Sales NSA are down 0.5% YoY through November, and sales last year were the lowest since 1995!
• Sales SAAR (seasonally adjusted annual rate) have bounced around 4 million for the last 3 years.
• Months-of-supply is above pre-pandemic levels.
• The median price is up 1.2% YoY, and with the increases in inventory, some regional areas will see further price declines - and we might see national price declines sometime in 2026.
The median price is up 1.2% YoY, and with the increases in inventory, some regional areas will see further price declines - and we might see national price declines sometime in 2026.
Sales averaged close to 5.42 million SAAR for the month of November in the 2017-2019 period. So, sales are about 24% below pre-pandemic levels.
...
In November, sales in these markets were down 6.5% YoY. Last month, in October, these same markets were up 2.3% year-over-year Not Seasonally Adjusted (NSA). The NAR reported sales were down 7.0% YoY in November, very close to this market sample.
Important: There was one fewer working days in November 2025 (18) as in November 2024 (19). So, the year-over-year change in the headline SA data was more than the change in NSA data (there are other seasonal factors).
...
More local data coming in January for activity in December!
This release includes preliminary estimates for industrial production (IP) and capacity utilization for both October and November as well as revised estimates for May through September. IP rose 0.2 percent in November after ticking down 0.1 percent in October. On average, IP rose 0.1 percent per month across October and November, the same as the rate of increase in September and a somewhat slower average pace than the past 12 months. Manufacturing output was flat in November after dropping 0.4 percent in October. There were swings in both mining and utilities output over October and November, though, on net, both sectors posted gains. At 101.8 percent of its 2017 average, total IP in November was 2.5 percent above its year-earlier level. Capacity utilization was 76.0 percent in November, a rate that is 3.5 percentage points below its long-run (1972–2024) average.
emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.
The second graph shows industrial production since 1967.Maybe absolutely nothing?
Last week, Matthew Yglesias wrote a ridiculous piece arguing that liberals (liberals is his term) should embrace the oil and gas industries to win votes. In response, Democratic Representative Sean Casten (IL-06), on Bluesky, performed a rapid scheduled disassembly on Yglesias’ piece.
But this post is not about the merits of that reply (though they are very good). At one point in the thread, Casten wrote, “And before team Yglesias responds by saying “yeah, but it’s bad politics to run on climate and energy”… I’d point out that I’ve won 4 elections in a very purple district running on climate and energy. Pro-tip: leadership is possible! You don’t have to be stupid to win!”
At that point chartfucker Lakshya Jain came to Yglesias’ defense with this snotty tweet:
This is essentially a category error by Jain, which isn’t surprising given that he is partly responsible for wasting hundred of millions of dollars on bad strategy for the 2024 election. What is so hilariously stupid about Jain’s statement is, if someone takes controversial stands and still manages to win (this is not moneyball, so WAR doesn’t matter; to quote the Raiders’ former owner, Al Davis, just win baby), that makes him a good politician. He is maximizing the utility of his office, not his electoral margin of victory.
Suppose Democrats passed some really good legislation, and is usually the case, lots of candidates underperformed in the next election, some even lost. Would anyone view that as a failure? Nope.
There are more and more signs that Democrats may come up winners in elections in the near future. In the congressional elections and in state elections in late 2026, and possibly the presidential election in 2028. That’s good, but it has a bad side to it.
Democrats have come up short in being the champions of the people for decades. Not that they should be against the rich, but it is everyone else who need a champion. Democrats held that banner but failed to deliver. It’s the reason someone like Trump could gain a significant following. It’s the reason he is back in the White House despite having tried to overthrow the country.
The entire political fiasco of recent years should not be looked at as something to be blamed on Trump. There will always be people like that will grab the opportunity to try to enrich and empower themselves while damaging anything in their way, if they are allowed to do so. It was the job of Democratic leadership, since they were carrying the banner of champion of the people, to not allow that to happen. They dropped that ball entirely. The fiasco of recent years? It’s the Democrat’s fault.
Democrats needed to learn their lesson from that and make a dramatic change.
There have long been a few champions the party could have followed, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now there are a few more Democratic leaders who have started to get serious about a big change or at least are talking that way. There has also been a small degree of greater action for the people generally, as with the fight in Congress to maintain insurance rates in the Affordable Care Act. But the change hasn’t been nearly enough. Not enough for what people really need, and not enough to avoid some future Trump-like fake populist to gain a following again. Not like Ms. Warren would seem to enact given her frequent promotion of steps like creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which are not social programs but would significantly help people.
But now even many Trump voters are being disillusioned with him. Oof! Is that ever a loaded word. How can it possibly be that it has taken things going this far before they finally become disillusioned? And disillusioned is the word. People who have been under an illusion, finally starting to come out of it.
With that disillusionment it looks like Democrats could win some elections. They might now be able to do that without having made any real, substantial change. Leadership may feel the heat is off. No need for big change. That’s very unfortunate.
That sets up the possibility of more of a recurring cycle. Democrats get a turn in the majority in Congress, or possibly win the White House, but are ineffective, and frustratingly so (e.g., Obama). That followed by a backlash that brings MAGA-style Republicans back in charge in Congress, blocking most things that would be good for people generally. Or brings someone similar to Trump in too many ways into the White House. Perhaps J.D. Vance or some other post-Trump MAGA front person.
Democrats need such a shock that it could awaken them to the need to become truly bold, active champions of the needs of the ninety-eight percent. I take that back. I wouldn’t wish for such a shock. They’ve already had one that’s about all the country can handle. One that has darn near destroyed the country. And the leadership still hasn’t really gotten the message of what’s needed. Now if they have some wins and by luck and by default skate past the failures of the last few years without that change it just sets things up for more of the same.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post Bad News, Dems off Hook Too Easy appeared first on DCReport.org.
Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 4.3 percent in the third quarter of 2025 (July, August, and September), according to the initial estimate released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the second quarter, real GDP increased 3.8 percent.PCE increased at a 3.5% annual rate, and residential investment decreased at a 5.1% rate. The initial Q3 GDP report, with 4.3% annualized increase, was above expectations.
Due to the recent government shutdown, this initial report for the third quarter of 2025 replaces the release of the advance estimate originally scheduled for October 30 and the second estimate originally scheduled for November 26.br />
The increase in real GDP in the third quarter reflected increases in consumer spending, exports, and government spending that were partly offset by a decrease in investment. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, decreased. ...
Compared to the second quarter, the acceleration in real GDP in the third quarter reflected a smaller decrease in investment, an acceleration in consumer spending, and upturns in exports and government spending. Imports decreased less in the third quarter.
Real final sales to private domestic purchasers, the sum of consumer spending and gross private fixed investment, increased 3.0 percent in the third quarter, compared with an increase of 2.9 percent in the second quarter.
The price index for gross domestic purchases increased 3.4 percent in the third quarter, compared with an increase of 2.0 percent in the second quarter. The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index increased 2.8 percent, compared with an increase of 2.1 percent. Excluding food and energy prices, the PCE price index increased 2.9 percent, compared with an increase of 2.6 percent.
emphasis added
Always thought provoking:
Centaurs, Canaries and J-Curves: Pitfalls and Productivity Potential of AI
By Marcus Weldon
"Brynjolfsson occupies a unique position as both a Stanford University professor and the head of the digital economy lab at the Institute for Human Centered AI, which allows him the freedom to pursue analyses that are not compromised by a particular corporate or financial agenda, but are still grounded in economic reality and, at the same time, also account for the human part of the equation. Indeed, one of the primary conclusions of our conversation is that augmentation of human tasks is where the real economic gains are to be found, rather than in replacing human activity by automation, and consequently that, as he puts it, “We need to treat humans as an end and not just a means to an end.” But what is particularly striking is that this seemingly facile and human-validating imperative is anything but that: it is based on hard economic facts and rigorous analyses that are gradually revealed over the course of our conversation."
The above link also takes you to this video:
#########
Erik has been thinking about AI for a long time (even if not as long as the folks I posted about yesterday).
Another excellent post from Samir Varma, this time on the 1991 reforms in India that launched India’s second freedom movement:
Three men you’ve probably never heard of—P.V. Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia—may be the three most important people of the late 20th century.
Bold claim. Audacious, even. Let me defend it.
Here are the numbers. In 1991, over 45% of Indians lived below the poverty line—roughly 400 million people. By 2024, extreme poverty in India had fallen to under 3%.
That’s 400 to 500 million people lifted out of poverty.
The largest democratic poverty alleviation in human history.
….So there they stood.
The precipice was visible. A Hindu politician from a dusty village in Telangana who spoke 17 languages and wrote novels nobody wanted to read. A Sikh economist from a village that no longer existed, who took cold showers at Cambridge and kept dried fruits in his pockets. Another Sikh economist who’d been the youngest division chief in World Bank history and wrote a memo that would change a country.
Three men. All products of a civilization that absorbs contradictions—that somehow fits Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims and Christians and Jains and Buddhists and Parsis into one impossibly diverse democracy. A civilization where, as I’ve written before, any statement you make is true, AS IS its opposite.
India was bankrupt. The gold was gone. The Soviet model they’d followed for forty years was collapsing in real time. Every assumption that had guided Indian economic policy since independence was being revealed as catastrophically wrong.
The intelligentsia still believed in socialism. The party cadres still worshipped Nehru’s memory. The opposition would scream about selling out to foreign powers. The bureaucracy would resist losing its control. The protected industries would fight to keep their monopolies.
But the three men had something their opponents didn’t: a plan. The M Document—the years of thinking—the technocratic expertise accumulated across decades. They had political cover—Rao’s tactical genius, his willingness to let Singh take the heat while he worked the back channels. They had credibility—Singh’s Cambridge pedigree, Ahluwalia’s World Bank experience, Rao’s decades of political survival.
And they had something else: the crisis itself. The one thing that could break through forty years of socialist inertia. The emergency that made the previously impossible suddenly necessary.
Varma tells the story well. For the full history consult the indispensable The 1991 Project, full of documents, oral histories and interviews.
Hat tip: Naveen Nvn.
The post Three that Made a Revolution appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Oman feels more relaxed than much of the Middle East or Gulf, and vistas in Muscat can include the sea, white alabaster buildings, mountains in the backdrop, and some older castles.
There are plenty of foreigners around, but unlike in much of the Gulf most of the people you see are natives not migrants. English is spoken widely, and is present on most of the signs and menus. Women wear headscarves, but they are not usually veiled. The vibes are friendly and everything feels extremely safe.
Muscat is not quite “the linear city,” but most activity is located on or near one main road which stretches east-west. There is no center of town, and you find yourself going back and forth on that road multiple times a day. The plus is that you see the water and the mountains often. Nonetheless there is a monotony to getting around, and much of the town does not feel walkable.
Frequently you will see a poster of the current Sultan, next to a photograph of the previous Sultan, who ruled for fifty years. Does this dual presentation enhance or limit the credibility of the current Sultan? Was it the intent of the current Sultan, or was he somehow locked into that presentation by the interest groups and supporters of the previous Sultan?
The National Museum is very good, and shows that Oman historically, along with Yemen, has held the role of a great civilization. In fact, Oman drove out the Portuguese and then ruled Zanzibar from 1698 to 1856. That explains why the island has so many Arabic doors and motifs.
Per capita income, PPP-adjusted, clocks in at about 45k, but distribution is uneven and the country does not feel that wealthy. I cannot find a single number for median income, but I suspect it would underrate actual living standards. Even deep into the countryside you will find high-quality homes and roads, indicating that public funds are spent with some efficiency, at least relative to some comparison countries.
Misfat al Abriyeen is a small village, largely vertical, where they still use water and irrigation systems from at least two thousand years ago.
Nizwa is a town of about 80,000, about two hours from Muscat, with a much older and more traditional souk.
When driving around Oman, the Peter Gabriel soundtrack “Passion,” from The Last Temptation of Christ, is effective.
For food, try Persian at Shandiz or grilled fish at Turkish House, or Yemeni or Afghan offerings. There are several restaurants with “Omani food,” but the problem is that they are authentic, not that they are insufficiently authentic. You should try some, much of it is not bad but it is also not the best food in town. At one place they flat outright refused to bring me the dried, salted shark dish. Nor did I wish to order camel meat, which is supposed to be gamey. The soups with meat and barley are good, but basically for Omani food you wish to keep returning to the grilled fish.
Overall, Oman is an underrated travel destination. It is exotic and beautiful and comfortable, all at the same time. The further reaches of the country are renowned for hiking and birdwatching, but perhaps two days in Oman and a one day trip to the countryside is the optimal dose here?
For U.S: and many other citizens, it is easy to enter the country without a visa.
The post Muscat, Oman travel notes appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
From Matthew Graham at Mortgage News Daily: Mortgage Rates Hold Steady to Start Holiday-Shortened WeekMortgage rates are tied to movement in the bond market and bonds were close enough to Friday's levels that mortgage rates were essentially unchanged today. This keeps the average lender in the lower portion of the narrow range seen over the past 4 months. [30 year fixed 6.24%]Tuesday:
emphasis added
Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at The Verge:
60 Minutes had already begun promoting the now-censored segment online. Because it was pulled so late, it seems that CBS missed at least one platform for distribution: Canada’s Global TV. Some people used a VPN to watch it; at least one person recorded it, distributing it through an iCloud account.
The segment, which has been reviewed by The Verge, is a little shy of 14 minutes long. It features video of men, chained and bent double, being “paraded in front of cameras, pushed onto buses, and delivered to CECOT,” according to the segment’s narration. One former detainee, who CBS met in Colombia, said he was told he was “the living dead” at CECOT. After trying to seek asylum in the US, he says he was detained by customs and held for 6 months before being deported. He described horrific conditions at the prison, saying he was beaten until he bled and that he was thrown into a wall so hard he broke one of his teeth. He also described sexual assault by the guards. Another interviewed former detainee described what can only be called torture: being forced to kneel for 24 hours, and being put in a dark room, where they were beaten if they moved from the stress position. [...]
Anyway, best of luck to Weiss in playing DMCA whack-a-mole with the video of the story. The segment lives as online samizdat now. Thanks to Weiss’ censorship, it may very well wind up being the most-talked-about CBS News story this year.
There are a bunch of copies on social media, but most are video of the TV broadcast in Canada shot from an iPhone. The Internet Archive, however, has a clean copy that’s a direct screen recording. Watch for yourself.
In addition to being the most-talked-about CBS News story of the year, it’ll almost certainly be the most-watched. But CBS will get none of the views or ad revenue. There’s no better way to make people want to watch something than to tell them they shouldn’t watch it. The Streisand effect is very real.
David Folkenflik, reporting for NPR:
Just a day and a half before it was set to be broadcast, new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss pulled a planned 60 Minutes investigative segment centering on allegations of abuses at an El Salvador detention center where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants last March.
Weiss told colleagues this weekend the piece — planned for Sunday night’s show — could not run without an on-the-record comment from an administration official. She pushed for 60 Minutes to interview Stephen Miller, senior advisor to President Trump, or someone of his stature. That’s according to two people with knowledge of events at the network who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing job security.
The correspondent on the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, condemned the decision in an email to 60 Minutes colleagues on Sunday evening, saying she believed it was “not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” [...] Alfonsi wrote that she and her colleagues on the story had sought comments and interviews from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House and the State Department.
“Government silence is a statement, not a VETO,” Alfonsi wrote in the email. “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”
It is not surprising in the least bit that Weiss tried to censor a jarring report on Trump’s illegal torture prison in El Salvador. It is, perhaps, slightly surprising how dumb this attempt is. Of course it’s a good principle of journalism to allow the other side of a story to comment or be interviewed. But the idea that the other side can just decline to participate and that means you can’t run the story is like fingers-in-your-ears “I can’t hear you!” playground nonsense. You run the story and say that they declined to comment.
It’s not just that Weiss kiboshed a solid piece of reporting from 60 Minutes. It’s that the editor-in-chief of CBS News is now on the record as saying that the entire staff of 60 Minutes wanted to run an unfair hit piece on the Trump administration. The decline of CBS as an institution continues.
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