Marginal Revolution

The economics of agents

Tyler Cowen
Updated

From Patrick Collison:

Assorted things I’ve been mulling over regarding agents in the economy:

• Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It’s often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.

• How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don’t). Taken across the economy as a whole, I’m not sure what the incidence of all of this will be.

• In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you’ve made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won’t people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!

• If true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It’s often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That’s obviously true, but I think there’s a secondary way in which it’s more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.)

• A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we’ve been subjected to).

• Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. “I’ll click on the first thing I see.” This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It’s not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it’s not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don’t know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.

• Much of what I’m writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer’s side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it’s true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they’re proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

In addition to those mechanisms, I might also expect some prices to be more volatile.  Suppliers will attempt to use agents to collude, and the law may not have a simple way of stopping this practice, due to illegibility.  The practice could be illegible and unintended by the merchants themselves.  But collusion of course tends not to be stable.  So (some) prices may swoon upwards for a while, and then take sudden dips as either the collusion breaks down or new entry occurs…

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City Observatory

The Week Observed: October 9, 2026

Joe Cortright
Updated

What City Observatory Did This Week

The Rose Quarter freeway widening sucks . . . sucks up all the transportation money in Portland for the forseeable future.   The largely un-funded $3.5 billion I-5 Rose Quarter Project will suck up all of the available revenue for transportation improvements in Portland, likely for decades to come.  If there’s some other transportation investment you’d like to see–bike lanes, transit, safer streets, fixing potholes, whatever–you can pretty much give up on that because the “commitment” to filling the $2 to $3 billion hole will be in line ahead of you for every imaginable source of financing.

An un-released memorandum makes it clear that the Oregon Department of Transportation is angling for every conceivable source of revenue to bail out the finances of the project.  Federal grants, including safe streets, a sales tax, a carbon tax, PBOT funds, a transportation utility fee, these and dozens of others are all targets for funding the Rose Quarter.

Does urban planning exist?  In a recent essay, Robert Deriu argues that we don’t actually have plans in any meaningful sense, and that planning has been reduced to negotiation.  In a guest commentary at City Observatory, Ethan Seltzer pushes back, noting that of necessity, plans must ultimately be negotiated in practice, because planners are neither omnipotent, nor omnicscient.  While a plan can frame future action, it can’t likely dictate it.  As Seltzer writes:

Plans are guides that often don’t include or anticipate all the things that people might envision for their land, their investments, or their community.  To bridge the gap between adopted policy and unsatisfied needs and desires, private interests engage public planning bodies to negotiate a fix.   This is not new or enlightening.  In fact, the last 50 years of planning theoretical debates have most often revolved around the role that plans and planners play in what is in reality, a transactional process. Further, to simply blame “politics” for the ways in which plans get sidelined overlooks the fact that politics is nothing more than the process we use to allocate resources.

Planning has to co-exist in a messy world with diverse interests and changing circumstances.

 

Must Read

The real politics of transportation.  One of the enduring shibboleths of domestic policy is that “infrastructure is a bipartisan issue.”  To some extent everyone in Congress loves to bring home the bacon for their district in the form of federal funding for a favored public works project, often a highway.  But a long time veteran of transportation policy battles in Washington (and the states) makes it clear that its not so much bi-partisan as cryptically and differentially partisan.  She points out that despite many rhetorical differences—Democrats focus on greenery and transit; Republicans talk about rural areas—but at the end of the day both end up supporting a very status quo, highway oriented transportation policy:

Both parties do so much to undercut what they claim to care about. Democrats often focus on supporting spending that creates good construction jobs, but they are less concerned with whether the projects those jobs build accomplish anything or even cause harm. Republicans say they want to prioritize rural needs but then pour money into “fixing” urban congestion with highway expansions that create more congestion or they push highways through rural villages that hollow them out.  While both parties are foolish, they are not the same. Republicans would rather have nothing than something they don’t like. Democrats need something and make it clear they will take anything over nothing.

The result of this impasse is often a reversion to a “least common denominator” agreement on dispensing aid to states, sprinkled with a light dusting of token programs to address specific issues or constituencies.  Neither party holds states accountable for measureable results in achieving specific policy objectives, and industry lobbying groups like AASHTO vigorously oppose that accountability.  All of this is becoming increasingly topical, as the current tranpsportation bill (The Infrastructure Investmetn and Jobs Act (IIJA) is expiring, and a new transportation bill is starting to take shape.  Osborne’s analysis proceeds in two chapters:  Part One looks at the Federal Government; Part Two applies the same lens to state policies.  Both are well worth a read:  they’ll provide you keen insight into the real politics of transportation.

Musings from the Rental Market.  Many of the discussions of housing markets are either abstract or focus heavily on particular issues (zoning, affordable housing policy).    A very useful perspective emerges from looking over the shoulder of those who daily invest (or advise those who invest) especially in multifamily housing. One of the most thoughtful analysts is Jay Parson.  His recent newsletter highlights a couple of key issues of interest.

The apartment market is nominally segmented into different classes, which in industry parlance are A, B and C.  There aren’t any hard and fast boundaries, but newer, larger, better maintained units are in Class A, older, dilapidated units are in class C, and in between is Class B.  Rent levels (and resident incomes) mirror the A/B/C structure, with higher rents and higher incomes in Class A.  In general, as you might think, housing markets are largely regional, and prices and vacancy rates often tend to move in tandem across these three classes.  But Parsons has an interesting chart showing the some different behaviors across classes depending on whether a market is increasing supply (or not).

The data show that across markets, rents in Class C (which corresponds to the lowest rents in each market) rose in the wake of the recovery from the pandemic pretty much everywhere.  Interestingly their is a divergence over the past few years.  Places where housing  supply increased the most saw, declining Class C rents, while makrets with the least supply growth saw Class C rents increase the most.   Keep in mind that most new construction is Class A, so what this illustrates is the filtering or musical chairs effect of new construction, and its impact on rents even at the low end of the market.  More Class A units in a market mean that fewer people are likely to be pushed to bid for Class B and C units, causing their rents to decline.  It’s an important practical reminder of how expanding housing supply helps with affordability–even when new units aren’t built or priced for lower income households.

New Knowledge

 

AI, Jobs and the Creative Economy.  One of the burning economic questions at the moment is what effect will Artificial Intelligence have on employment.  Joey Politano has an interesting analysis sifting through employment data to track changes by industry and occupation to try to discern the impact of AI.  While preliminary, the data point to some ongoing disruptions.

Much of what we’re seeing is the continued evolution of the trends that were sparked by the advent of the Internet and digital technology.  Those disrupted all the traditional media, from newspapers and magazines, to music, to video–and continue to do so.  Interestingly, there’s been a shift:  music which was dominated by sales of recordings in the pre-digital era, now gets much more revenue from live performances.  Thus, while job growth has been declining or stagnant in many fields (digital arts), there’s actually been growth in live arts jobs.

 

While their are declines in employment in many creative industries, there are some surprising bright spots.  One, for example, is growth in book publishing.  As Politano points out,

Yet fundamentally, it’s difficult to meaningfully predict how new technologies will interact with existing arts businesses. Take the unexpected resurgence in book sales over the last four years. The novel as a commercial art form had been struggling for decades, with fewer books sold in 2019 than at the beginning of the millennium, but the last six years have seen an unprecedented 70% surge in sales.

This is an informative and data-driven look at the unfolding changes in the creative sector.  Well worth a read.

Joseph Politano, AI and the Fall? of the Creative Class.  Aprecitas, September 27, 2026

https://substack.com/inbox/post/203775192?redirect=app-store-no-desktop&inbox=true&triedRedirect=true

 

 

 

City Observatory

The Rose Quarter Freeway Widening Sucks . . . Sucks up all the money

Joe Cortright
Updated

The largely un-funded $3.5 billion I-5 Rose Quarter Project will suck up all of the available revenue for transportation improvements in Portland, likely for decades to come.  If there’s some other transportation investment you’d like to see–bike lanes, transit, safer streets, fixing potholes, whatever–you can pretty much give up on that because the “commitment” to filling the $2 to $3 billion hole will be in line ahead of you for every imaginable source of financing.

An un-released memorandum makes it clear that the Oregon Department of Transportation is angling for every conceivable source of revenue to bail out the finances of the project.  Federal grants, including safe streets, a sales tax, a carbon tax, PBOT funds, a transportation utility fee, these and dozens of others are all targets for funding the Rose Quarter.

It’s naive to think that federal funds will cover the gap.  Project proponent assume that some future Democratic President or Congress will come up with the funding.  But even the Biden Administration turned down the Rose Quarter project for a $750 million grant (and that was back when the project only cost $1.9 billion).

In reality, the Rose Quarter will go after every available source of funds, including state and local revenues.  The result will be that the region will find it increasingly difficult to meet every other transportation priority, from fixing potholes, to building safer streets, to running the transit system.  In effect, the Rose Quarter will become the region’s “ask” from state and federal governments for the foreseeable future.

ODOT also routinely hides key facts, especially higher cost estimates for its mega-projects while it is asking for approvals to move forward with the project, while billing it as less expensive than they know it to be.  Hiding cost increases and exaggerating available revenues is is a cynical strategy for manufacturing a commitment to move a project forward–the classic Robert Moses “Driving Stakes” gambit–that will increasingly bankrupt transportation finance in the region.

The Rose Quarter Freeway widening project is emblematic of ODOT’s broken project management and broke finances.  The cost of the project has increased seven-fold, from the $450 million approved by the Legislature in 2017, to an estimated $3.5 billion today.  At the same time, expected revenue has evaporated:  the federal government rescinded most of a “Reconnecting Communities” grant; and even the otherwise sympathetic Biden Administration turned ODOT down flat when it asked for $750 million for the project.  Yet ODOT continues to play “extend and pretend” moving forward with the project, even though it now has a $2 to $3 billion shortfall in what it needs to actually build what it is suggesting.

Opportunity Costs

Portland area leaders are about to get a very expensive lesson in what economists call “opportunity costs.”  Moving forward with the Rose Quarter freeway widening will suck up virtually every available dollar for transportation in the Portland area.  There won’t be flexibility to do other projects, whether road improvements, transit expansion or bike and pedestrian facilities, because Rose Quarter will be ahead in line for almost every dollar.  This will happen even as we don’t have enough money to maintain streets, or avoid cutting bus and train service.

The Oregon Department of Transportation hired one of its leading consulting firms to identify ways to pay for the multi-billion dollar funding gap for the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening.  WSP identified 46 different revenue sources, which put the high cost of the Rose Quarter project in line to take money away from every other priority in the region.  They identify 9 different federal grant programs, including Safe Streets for All.  They recommend 9 different bonding and borrowing programs–that would create future liabilities that need to be repaid, with interest.  They suggest tapping all the major local governments in the region:  Metro, City of Portland, and Multnomah County.  They flag a dozen of expanded or new taxes, including a general sales tax (which Oregon does not have), a carbon tax, EV charging fees, a retail delivery fee and a vehicle sales and transfer tax.  Finally, the list includes 9 different local fees and taxes, including parking fees, local transportation levies, a utility fee, and a regional or local transportation tax.

A secret plan to grab revenue

ODOT’s consultant,  WSP went to great pains to try to keep this document secret.  It is only available as an Excel Spreadsheet, which we obtained via public records request.

All information contained in this workbook is not to be shared with those outside of the intended audiences. The information and analytical methods contained in this workbook are proprietary material and are to be used only for expressly agreed-upon purposes. If this workbook is received or possessed in error, it should be destroyed immediately.

Despite having worked for decades, largely for public sector clients, WSP’s claim that this work is “proprietary” and should be kept secret, flies in the face of Oregon’s (and most state’s) public records laws.  WSP’s report is a work for hire, paid for with public funds.  The fact that they are trying to hide it from the public shows how serious this threat is.  ODOT continues to describe the document as just a “draft,” but make no mistake, this clearly signals what the agency plans to do to get everyone to follow through with their supposed “commitment.”

The city, region and state are signing a blank check

Keep in mind that the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Project was sold by ODOT as a $450 million project to the 2017 Oregon Legislature.  Since then, as the cost has exploded–first to $795 million, then $1.45 billion, then $1.9 billion, then $2.1 billion and now, most recently $3.5 billion,

ODOT has never gone back to the Legislature and asked if the project was worth doing, or if the Legislature wanted to fund it.  Instead the agency has been playing “extend and pretend” as costs went up, and funding evaporated.  And its still pretending.  And in effect, by going along with keeping the project alive, all of the responsible bodies, the Oregon Transportation Commission, the Metro Regional Government and the Portland City Council, have been signing a blank check, essentially agreeing to pay whatever the project ends up costing, because somehow its so important, and that there’s been a commitment. The latest version of this “blank check” commitment shows up in the City of Portland’s draft legislative positions for the coming 2027 Legislature.  Never mind that the city is struggling financially, and had to pass a new household fee to pay to keep streets, and is facing a drastic reduction in bus service, the language in the city’s proposed legislative position document offers a vague, and open-ended commitment to state highway megaprojects, without any reference to how much they cost, or they will be paid for.   The draft legislative agenda calls out the Rose Quarter as a “priority funding area.”

Given the scale of ODOT’s unfunded Portland-area projects, taking that position effectively elevates freeway expansions  like the Rose Quarter freeway widening ahead of all of the city’s other transportation asks from the Legislature–likely for the next decade or more that it will take to fund and build them.  Nothing in the staff report reveals the implications of this position.  Nor is it clear that anyone at PBOT has shared ODOT’s WSP funding memorandum which shows that they want city funding to pay for the project as well.  So this isn’t just a liability for state funds, its likely a liability for city funds as well.

Hiding a higher cost estimate

The Oregon Department of Transportation’s standard practice is to ask for a go ahead on their bloated megaprojects–usually just the next step, which is billed as incremental–and then delay releasing bad news about much higher costs until after that approval is granted.  They’ve done this repeatedly.   ODOT has been devious and deceptive in describing its financial plans for the Rose Quarter.  ODOT sought and received approval to move ahead with the Rose Quarter Phase 1A and 1B, which was billed as just the first part of a $2.1 billion project.  Even as the Metro Council was voting on allowing the project to move forward on July 16, 2026, ODOT concealed the fact that the project’s estimated cost was about to balloon by more than $1 billion to almost $3.5 billion—a story the Portland Oregonian published on August 4, 2026. .  It’s inconceivable that ODOT staff didn’t know that in just a few weeks it was going to release a price tag almost 50 percent higher–but it chose to keep that out of the public record at Metro.

That strategic delay is a standard ODOT tactic:  As we’ve chronicled at City Observatory, ODOT and WSDOT delayed for two years releasing a new cost estimate for the Interstate Bridge Project, which doubled its cost from $7.5 billion to $15 billion.  When they finally released the data, they waited until after both the 2026 Oregon and Washington Legislatures had adjourned–even though agency documents claimed that the estimate was being prepared specifically to be submitted to those sessions.

What we’re seeing is the classic Robert Moses “Driving Stakes” strategy:  promising anything to get a project started, even with on a shoestring, and then using the “Get ‘er done” argument to repeatedly ask for more and more money, even as the project’s cost explodes.  It’s a key reason why the Interstate Bridge and the Rose Quarter are, respectively, the first and third most expensive highway projects in the nation on a per mile basis.

Got dreams for a transportation improvement in Portland?  Thanks to the Rose Quarter freeway widening promising to suck up every available dollar for years to come, you can—as they say in Brooklyn—fuhgeddaboudit.

 

Appendix:  The 46 different revenue sources identified by WSP for paying for Rose Quarter Cost Increases.

Category Title / Tool Items
Federal Grants (9)
  • BUILD (Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development)
  • Safe Streets for All (SS4A)
  • Congestion Relief Program
  • INFRA (Nationally Significant Multimodal Freight and Highway Projects)
  • MEGA (National Infrastructure Project Assistance Program)
  • PROTECT (Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation)
  • BRIC (Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities)
  • Reconnecting Communities Program (RCP)
  • Congressionally Directed Spending
Financing Tools (5)
  • Oregon Transportation Infrastructure Bank (OTIB)
  • Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA)
  • Public – Private Partnerships (P3 Financing)
  • Section 129 Loan
  • Land Value Capture / Joint Development
Bonds (4)
  • Private Activity Bonds (PABs)
  • GARVEE Bonds
  • General Obligation (GO) Bonds
  • Highway Use Tax Bonds
Local / Regional Funds (4)
  • Oregon METRO funds
  • Multnomah County funds
  • Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) funds
  • City of Portland funds
Local Taxes & Fees (9)
  • Parking meters and fines
  • Franchise fees & Right-of-Way (ROW) Use Fees
  • Regional / Local Transportation Taxes
  • Transportation Utility Fees (TUFs)
  • Local Transportation Levy
  • Tax Increment Financing (TIF)
  • Local Improvement Districts (LID)
  • Road and Service (Special) Districts
  • Street Damage Restoration Fees
State Funding Packages (3)
  • House Bill 2017 (HB 2017)
  • House Bill 3991 (HB 3991)
  • New House Bill or Tax Amendment
State Taxes & Fees (12)
  • Statewide Transportation Improvement Fund (STIF)
  • Statewide Highway Fund (MVFT, Weight Mile Tax, Driver/Vehicle Fees, EV RUC)
  • Expanded Lottery Revenues
  • New General Sales Tax
  • Retail Delivery Fee (RDF)
  • Third-Party Food Delivery Fee
  • Carbon Tax
  • EV Charging Fees, Surcharges, or Road Use Charge
  • Fuel Revenue Indexing
  • Congestion Pricing
  • Tolling Revenue
  • Vehicle Sales / Transfer Tax

The WSP report is available here:

WSP_PM_OR_Task_6.4_I5RQ_Funding_and_Financing_Options_Evaluation_Matrix_2026.06.12_DRAFT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Letters from an American

Smash and Grab

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Letters from an American

October 9, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Late Wednesday afternoon, Dana Mattioli, Drew Hinshaw, Rebecca Ballhaus, and Joe Parkinson of the Wall Street Journal reported on the tawdry grifting of Kimberly Guilfoyle, former fiancee of Donald Trump Jr. and now Trump’s ambassador to Greece. Panicked about how much money she owed on her American Express credit card, Guilfoyle reached out to Eric Deters, who wanted the administration’s help with tax and legal issues. Deters had promised Guilfoyle as much as a million dollars if she was successful in getting him the help he wanted.

With her confirmation hearing for the ambassador post coming up, Guilfoyle begged Deters to pay $100,000 to American Express. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she wrote on the secure messaging app Signal, the Wall Street Journal reporters explained. “Please.” She reiterated over text: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.” “Your needing $100,000 urgent unfortunately is not going to work,” Deters wrote. “I can’t do this without getting a divorce.”

In their months of correspondence, Guilfoyle often complained that he was not being careful enough. “Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things,” she wrote. “It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on signal.” She wrote: “It’s unbelievable when we have a private arrangement with you that you would now CC a producer talking about money.” And later: “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”

Looking back today at stories of corruption involving Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem, and so on, Chris Hayes of MS NOW explained that Trump’s inner circle “works a lot like a crime family…. [E]veryone gets their fiefdoms. They can get their beaks wet. But they’ve always got to make sure they’re giving the boss his due.”

On Tuesday, Samantha Subin of CNBC reported that just days after Palmer Luckey joined the Pentagon’s new Project Meridian, set up to report on the military’s future needs, the company Luckey co-founded—Anduril—landed a $2.9 billion contract with the U.S. Navy. And today, Reuters reported that Kalshi is investigating suspicious trades having to do with Trump’s selection of Katie Zacharia as the new White House press secretary.

Americans don’t like corruption, and with the midterms shaping up to be a disaster for the Republicans, Trump has launched an all-out offensive to solidify his base. That offensive includes spinning the Iran War, calling for a public execution, attacking immigrants both rhetorically and in real life, and shifting the United States against the defense of international law and allying with authoritarian governments.

On Wednesday, October 7, Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported that attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz hit the highest level since the war on Iran began. Shortly after noon yesterday, October 8, Trump tried to spin the situation there to make it sound like he was in control. He posted that “Iran is in a very bad condition, both Economically and Militarily,” that the U.S. blockade is still in effect, that oil is flowing “in Record Numbers of Barrels through the Hormuz Strait,” and that the administration is having “productive discussions” with Iran. He added: “[W]e will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd. IRAN WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!”

In an interview with far-right podcaster Jack Posobiec on board the USS Abraham Lincoln on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appealed to the MAGA religious base with a promise that the execution of former Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the mass shooter who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be public. An active Army officer when he committed the murders, Hasan was court-martialed and sentenced to death.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said. CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen noted that a livestream of the execution would be a rallying cry for terrorists.

The backlash against Hegseth’s plan has been swift and bipartisan.

Representative Jason Crow (D-CO), who served as a paratrooper and Army Ranger and is now on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, said: “Pete Hegseth has taken our military’s tradition of selfless service and flipped it on its head. With this public execution, he is degrading the culture of our military and turning a culture of service into one of vengeance and spectacle, performed for cameras and attention on social media. The Fort Hood shooter’s actions were horrific. Responding to it by livestreaming a violent execution is not an answer. A public execution only gives our adversaries fodder for anti-American propaganda that makes us less safe. Pete Hegseth’s self-absorbed hunger for power, attention, and violence is disgusting and beneath the office he holds. He is not fit to lead.”

The idea was “beyond disgusting,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) wrote. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

Trump then tried to rile up his supporters by turning them against an invented “enemy,” a tactic that is Authoritarianism 101. On Wednesday the FBI said it had prevented an attack on Minnesota’s Mall of America by a teenaged American-born U.S. citizen of Somalian descent whom they had been monitoring since December 2024 and to whom an FBI agent sold the assault rifle and ammunition for the attack.

At 4:30 on the afternoon of October 8, Trump wrote: “The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants. There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back. You have been robbed, and abandoned by your State Government. Your Governor is an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved. He just wants to get out of town with as much as he can steal, and then, lead a quiet life. The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue. Governor Tim Walz, and Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, must immediately ask for Federal help—and leave the rest to us!”

Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, a MAGA Republican, promptly referred to Somali-Americans as “enemy combatants” and complained that Democrats were not “rounding them up and putting them in jail.”

On Thursday, October 8, Priscilla Alvarez and Michael Williams of CNN reported that on Tuesday, the leaders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) verbally told agents across the country to ramp up their arrests by another 1,000 people a day, bringing arrests back to 3,000 daily.

On Thursday afternoon, as ICE agents in New York City surrounded a Dominican man and his five-year-old son in a car, one of the agents fired several shots. It is not clear how badly injured Oscar Belgal is; he was shot in the neck, treated at a hospital, and then moved to an ICE facility outside of New York. His son was not hit by a bullet. New Yorkers immediately began to protest, calling for an end to ICE. New York governor Kathy Hochul and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, both Democrats, have demanded ICE stop operations in the state. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin refused. “No, we’re not putting a pause on enforcement,” he said. “I’m sorry, we’re not. In fact, I’m not sorry.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a South-African-born jurist and former chief of human rights at the United Nations. There she led a U.N. commission that concluded Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians. She is currently a judge at the International Court of Justice. The committee’s message with their choice seemed pointed: Pillay has promoted peace through her protection of international law, they said, and the committee chair said the award was “a message to those who are attacking” international law. The committee said Pillay was “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted that the “Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass,” calling Pillay “a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state.”

Hours after the prize announcement, Humeyra Pamuk, Steve Holland, and Anthony Deutsch of Reuters reported that Trump’s administration was imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC), founded in 2002 to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on judges and prosecutors before; now it is sanctioning companies that provide services to the court itself.

The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli officials including Netanyahu, as well as Russian officials including Vladimir Putin. Today Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “President Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans.”

Sanctioning the ICC sets the U.S. against its allies in Europe, who are increasingly worried about hybrid attacks from Russia, attacks that avoid direct war while destabilizing another country, methods like cyberwarfare or disinformation. Today, after ten years of cozying up to Vladimir Putin, Trump openly allied the United States with Russia against Ukraine.

Three weeks ago, by large bipartisan votes, Congress passed new sanctions against Russia and countries that were continuing to use Russian oil and gas and gave Trump sweeping powers to expand those sanctions. At the time, Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX) said: “This bill will cripple Russia’s war machine and finally bring Putin to the negotiating table. It will ensure America’s adversaries, not only Russia, but also China and Iran, suffer for their coordinated campaign of aggression.”

But today, Trump used the law for the opposite of what Congress apparently intended: “I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter. Additionally, based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries, Russia will then deliver, within a short period of time, 3,000,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel. Between our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST! Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority. This is a very big and important announcement. Additionally, it must be understood, that Iran will not have a Nuclear Weapon!”

The Treasury Department promptly announced it was issuing a temporary license to permit Russian diesel to sell on the global market. The sales will likely do little for U.S. oil prices, but they will funnel money to Russia for its war on Ukraine.

Trump’s smash-and-grab suggests concern he will lose the midterms. The latest poll from the Pew Research Center shows that 68% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the presidency. Cook Political Report has moved 18 more House ratings toward the Democrats. Myah Ward of Politico reported that 26% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 think the Republican Party should break with Trump in order to win in November. In Kansas on Wednesday, more than 100 prominent Republicans launched a coalition called “Republicans for Hamilton” to back Democrat Adam Hamilton for the U.S. Senate. Their announcement referred to “a growing network of everyday Republican voters…who are ready for change.”

Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who conducts focus groups with voters, says Trump’s campaign ads boosting himself have backfired: people hate them. They object to using taxpayer money for them by a margin of 86 to 9. Furthermore, Longwell finds that Trump 2024 voters in Florida whom Trump needs to energize for this election, really hate them—the word Longwell used is “revulsion.” One said: “We need to get rid of all these people. Even if the Republicans don’t win for the next ten years, it’s probably best to wash these people out, you know, so you can get cleaned—clean slate.”

—

Notes:

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/guilfoyle-amex-donor-100-000-0e02cdc3

https://www.krqe.com/news/politics/who-is-eric-deters-the-maga-donor-kimberly-guilfoyle-sought-100000-from-for-amex-bill/amp/

https://www.ms.now/news/news-analysis/trump-administration-corruption-guilfoyle-noem-lewandowski-wiles

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/06/anduril-navy-submarine-shipyard-contract.html

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/kalshi-probes-suspicious-trades-tied-trump-press-secretary-pick-wsj-reports-2026-10-09/?link_source=ta_bluesky_link&taid=6ac966448f1582000191add8

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/attacks-tankers-hormuz-hit-highest-any-week-since-start-iran-war-sources-say-2026-10-07/

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/09/hegseth-public-execution-backlash-01113728

https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/09/politics/fort-hood-execution-hegseth-livestream

https://crow.house.gov/media/press-releases/crow-statement-condemning-hegseth-s-plans-for-public-execution

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6138373-thom-tillis-pentagon-live-firing-squad-execution-nidal-hasal-criticism/amp/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/08/politics/ice-immigration-arrests

https://abc7news.com/story/fbi-says-thwarted-attack-mall-america-teen-supplied-assault-rifle/19918038/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/09/ice-bronx-shooting-mamdani-dhs.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/08/nyc-shooting-federal-agent

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/10/09/mullin-says-ice-didnt-know-5-year-old-boy-was-car-when-officer-fired/

https://apnews.com/video/navi-pillay-wins-the-nobel-peace-prize-for-her-work-in-international-justice-755dcc0ba6d742bca3d00bac5b6df322

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/world/europe/nobel-peace-prize-navi-pillay.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-imposes-sanctions-international-criminal-court-hours-after-former-judge-wins-2026-10-09/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/world/europe/putin-russia-ukraine-war-europe-nato.html

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/congress-passes-new-sanctions-on-russia-and-countries-using-russian-energy

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/09/poll-trump-voters-candidate-breaks-battlegrounds-01112449

The Bulwark
‘I Need Some Pepto-Bismol’: Trump’s Taxpayer-Funded Ad Bombs in Focus Group
IF YOU’VE SPENT MUCH TIME watching the NFL, college football, or Dancing with the Stars over the past week, or if you’re just an average political obsessive, you’ve probably noticed the taxpayer-funded ads from Donald Trump…
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a day ago · 828 likes · 214 comments · Sarah Longwell

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/42202

statuses/42205

statuses/42215

X:

IsraeliPM/status/2108558443548201050?s=20

Bluesky:

rightwingwatch.bsky.social/post/3mxhmqzxzwc2x

jkarsh.bsky.social/post/3mxfxu57qnk2m

ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mxhnwi77ek2v

onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3mxhqgbtrzs2d

morningjoe-msnow.bsky.social/post/3mxh4zzf6p22j

robertscotthorton.bsky.social/post/3mxh53flem22a

hamilton4kansas.bsky.social/post/3mxctzcwdns24

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Letters from an American

Politics Chat, October 9, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Watch today’s live recording here.

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify

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

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

Construction Physics

Reading List 10/10/26

Brian Potter
Updated

The Miraculous Draft of Fishes, by Konrad Witz, via Wikipedia.

Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at propane in air conditioners, Anduril making submarine parts, nuclear reactors on the moon, the robotic hand landscape (handscape?), and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.

Housing

Someone created a city building game where you try to navigate local opposition to get housing built in San Francisco. [X]

I somehow missed this paper from last year analyzing the impact of International Building Code changes from 2012 to 2021 on construction costs. “Between 2012 and 2021, the International Code Council (ICC) adopted 130 revisions to the International Building Code (IBC) affecting multifamily development. Using a detailed prototype of a three-story apartment building and holding material prices and labor productivity constant at 2024 levels, we find that 16 of these revisions raised national average construction costs by 9.9 percent relative to a 2009 IBC baseline, with fire protection requirements accounting for the largest share.” [SSRN]

Should we be using propane as a refrigerant in our heat pumps and air conditioners? [The Rebuild]

Another look at what’s in the Senate’s new permitting reform bill. [Abundance and Growth]

Manufacturing

Atomic Machines, a manufacturing startup using a vaguely described manufacturing process that “builds working micro machines from code alone” (whatever that means) emerged from stealth and got a lot of attention on Twitter. [X] A NYT article on the company has a little more information, but not much. “Using the same techniques that drive a chatbot, Atomic Machines is building A.I. technology that can discover new ways of designing extremely small devices. By analyzing thousands of experiments involving standard manufacturing materials and finding patterns in how these materials interact, it learns to piece them together in ways that produce viable devices.” [NYT]

The CEO of OSH Cut (a similar sort of business to SentCutSend) on what he thinks the future of manufacturing looks like. A few similarities here to my concept of “AWS for Everything.” [X]

The Navy awarded defense startup Anduril a $2.9 billion contract to manufacture components for Virginia-class nuclear submarines. “Arsenal-2 will build complex components and large scale assemblies of the Virginia-class submarine and deliver them to Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding for final assembly. Adding another source of this work will allow more submarine construction to happen in parallel across the industrial base and increase the overall capacity available to the Virginia-class program.” [Anduril]

Domestic car sales in China have apparently not risen at all since roughly 2015? [X]

Related, Chinese car sales are really taking off in Britain. “The Jaecoo 7, made by China’s Chery Automobile, was Britain’s bestselling vehicle in September, an important sales month in the U.K. In the first half of 2026, almost every sixth car sold in Britain bore a Chinese brand, according to Schmidt Automotive Research, a higher proportion than in any other European country except Norway.” [WSJ]

Read more

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

Ziggy McBride has a fun name

Jeff Pearlman
Updated

Were you to tell me Ziggy McBride was a middle reliever for the 1979 Houston Astros, I’d 100-percent believe it.

Were you to tell me Ziggy McBride played bass for Lynyrd Skynyrd, I’d also 100-percent believe it.

Ziggy McBride as a new Six Flags coaster? I can see it. Ziggy McBride as Bugs Bunny’s love interest? Absolutely.

It is a fun, wacky, wild, intriguing name.

But Ziggy McBride as a member of the Tustin School Board?

No.

Fucking.

Way.

As we speak, McBride is in a tight election fight against incumbent Jonathan Abelove in District Area 5. While Abelove is a longtime Board of Ed member who is widely respected in the community, McBride is … well, one of them.

Yes, one of them.

And if you don’t know what “one of them” means—(clears throat) here is exactly what it means: Up and down Orange County, there is a special genre of terrifying school board/aspiring school board member. They are, almost without fail, women. Women who smile with a crazed look in their eyes. Women whose campaign literature features a yellow bus with blue background …

These are women who love them some Sonja Shaw and Mari Barke. These are women who believe—without even a trace of hesitation—that Jesus Christ has placed them here to do his holy bidding, and that He needs to be more involved in public education. These are women who talk morality, but stretch, pull and twist their own backgrounds to sound as educationally informed as possible.

For example, in a recent interview with the Orange County Register, McBride bragged that, “[for] 15 years every summer I co-direct Hero Camp, a summer youth camp serving more than 100 children ages 3–18.” Which sounds wonderful. Hell, who doesn’t dig summer camp? A lake, tetherball, maybe a campout. Summer camp! Awesome. LFG.

Alas, (cough) Hero Camp ain’t what you think. It’s a religious indoctrination boot camp paid for by the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Which … hey. Whatever floats your boat. But don’t exaggerate and half-truth shit. Along those lines, McBride refers to herself as an educator. Over and over and over and over again. Educator, educator, education. And this is an old Moms For Liberty trick, where if you so much as licked a desk 36 years ago, you’re “educator.” But McBride is (gasp) a library media technician—which makes her less of an educator than I am (I teach one class a year at Chapman University. But at least I teach).

Furthermore, Ziggy McBride—who stresses she’s pro-”school choice,” homeschooled her two kids. And if that sounds … off, that’s because it is off. You’re Ziggy. You want to be on the school board. You say you believe in public education. And you (cough) home schooled your kids?

Seriously?

Like, seriously seriously?

On the surface, it makes no sense. But these Moms For Liberty candidates are here for a reason, and it’s to change the very definition of public education. They want Christ in school. They want to convince you trans students are evil threats to safety. They want to start charter schools, and they want teachers to align to their rightward beliefs.

They all (literally all) voted for Donald Trump, which is weird—because while they rock crosses arounds their necks and attend Sunday church services, he cheated on wife 1 with wife 2, wife 2 with with 3, wife 3 with a porn star he raw dogged, then paid off in hush money. Also, not for nothing, he keeps referring to Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as “Muhammad.” Just to be xenophobic and a dick.

Not that McBride and her ilk care. They are incurious creatures; ignorant gnomes cocooned by a pious certainty that reads creepy and poisonous. They want you to think they’re lovely and compassionate. Have a cookie. Have some bubbles. Let’s take a selfie.

But, come day’s end, they’re dime-a-dozen Jim Bakker-modeled hucksters, with education as a front for a desire to have us all adopt their nuttiness.

Do not vote for Ziggy McBride.

[Even though she threw three shutout innings against the Mets.]

California
The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Saturday 10 October 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

Up, and not in any good ease yet, but had pain in making water, and some course. I see I must take besides keeping myself warm to make myself break wind and go freely to stool before I can be well, neither of which I can do yet, though I have drank the other bottle of Mr. Hollyard’s against my stomach this morning.

I did, however, make shift to go to the office, where we sat, and there Sir J. Minnes and Sir W. Batten did advise me to take some juniper water, and Sir W. Batten sent to his Lady for some for me, strong water made of juniper. Whether that or anything else of my draught this morning did it I cannot tell, but I had a couple of stools forced after it … [and did break a fart or two – L&M] but whether I shall grow better upon it I cannot tell.

Dined at home at noon, my wife and house in the dirtiest pickle that ever she and it was in almost, but in order, I hope, this night to be very clean.

To the office all the afternoon upon victualling business, and late at it, so after I wrote by the post to my father, I home.

This evening Mr. Hollyard sends me an electuary to take (a walnut quantity of it) going to bed, which I did. ‘Tis true I slept well, and rose in a little ease in the morning.

Read the annotations

Slashdot
Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 10/10/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

A former NFL player just solved a math mystery from the ’90s. His story is remarkable.
Annie Jacobsen’s Expertise in One Photo
Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs
Kennedy Plans Federal Vaccine Injury Initiative, Drawing Wary Eye From Experts
Is Covid-19 endemic yet?
Mosquitoes
Trump debases science award by giving it to crackpot donor Musk

Other:

Justice Dept. Turns to Partisans and Conspiracists to Fill Depleted Ranks
Trump Rages, Rages Against the Dying of the Light
Susan Collins’s Committee Bought Trucks the Army Didn’t Want. Then Campaign Donations Poured In.
Muse and the AI-Agent Flood Nobody Is Ready For
A Blue Wave Won’t Mean Shit If The Chumps Get Their Way
Christopher Rufo Whines about Being Named as the Propagandist Who Rationalized Alleged Klan Act Violence
Palm Beach GOP endorses candidate accused of child sex abuse
Nine Years After #MeToo, One Answer for Survivors Is ‘So What?’
The Bizarre AI Ad Trying to Make an Extremist Candidate Look Like Jesus
You Can’t Run From Christian Nationalism
Academia broke my heart
What’s the Matter With France?
Flight attendants’ union shares safety concerns over Trump’s DC arch
Watch Footage of the Flock Search a Judge Ruled Unconstitutional
Inside Ken Paxton’s Private Testimony About His Money
Why are Trump’s ICE goons targeting a shopping mall staple?
How the Courts Became a Safe Haven for Corporations
Goldman Says AI Shift Leaves Middle Managers in Limbo
Study: Shock Gloves Traumatized Army Volunteers. After tests, military personnel said “just seeing the glove” that ICE plans to adopt scared them into obedience.
The Democrats Who Let Trump’s Oligarchs Buy Hollywood
Elon Musk Promised to Gut the Deep State. Did He Go Too Far?
Susan Collins Would Like to Talk About Anyone Else’s Abortion Record But Her Own
Voters in midterm elections identify a culprit for rising cost of living: Trump’s tariffs
How the Women Who Survived Elon Musk Expose Him Best
Shaq Got Hacked. Now He’s Pitching for a VPN (Hack-a-Shaq!)
Lincoln Park billionaire accused of fueling rat infestation
Why They Want You to Watch. The Legal Spectacle of Public Executions
Trump admin reveals post-midterm ‘crackdown’ plans in new court filing
Trump sons’ investments have won billions in Pentagon contracts since his election
More of this please

California
Marginal Revolution

Saturday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Chris Blattman’s practical AI for academics.

2. Platypus Economics on red diesel.

3. Those new service sector jobs, Indian cricket edition.

4. Will AI make us more technocratic?

5. What should a scientific paper look like?

6. Screening for twins?

7. Chris Wickham, RIP.

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

 
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Cotton Heaving as He Races toward November

Josh Marshall
Updated

I need to start these kinds of posts by saying: No. I absolutely do not believe Tom Cotton will lose his reelection campaign. But even races that aren’t in contention can give you a read on the partisan climate. The Cotton campaign just released an internal poll showing him 11 points ahead of Democrat Hallie Shoffner — 50% to 39%. A Libertarian candidate has 4% support and 7% are undecided. That’s a solid lead. And a result any candidate would be happy with. Except when you remember that Trump won the state with 64% of the vote two years ago and Cotton won reelection with 67% of the vote in 2020. In 2022, John Boozman won with 66% of the vote. Cook appears to list Arkansas as an R+15 state. And they’d know. But in terms of actual election results, it certainly seems more like an R+30 state. In any case, the point is clear: This is a big level of underperformance in an extremely red state.

The critical additional factor is that this is an internal poll. You only release internal campaign polls for a specific campaign purpose. In a case like this it is to demonstrate that you’re doing better than conventional wisdom suggests or to calm worries. So you release a +11 poll because people may worry it’s more like a +6 race.

There have only been five polls of this race all year — two from Cotton, one from Shoffner, one from the right-leaning J.L. Partners and one independent one from early-mid August. That last one conducted by Hendrix College actually showed Shoffner up three points — Shoffner 47%, Cotton 44%.

In fact, the same Cotton pollster who just got an 11 point race polled the race in February and got a 22 point margin. Here’s what pollster Landon Wall said when he posted the new results to Twitter this afternoon.

Senator Tom Cotton maintains a double-digit lead in Arkansas, 50% to 39%, in a new GrayHouse poll of likely voters.

As Arkansans learn more about Democratic candidate Hallie Shoffner, her image has begun to tank. The number of voters who view her unfavorably is up 10 points in just two months. In their own words, voters point to her record on immigration: “She would trade 5 Americans for 1 illegal immigrant.”

Meanwhile, Cotton’s image is improving, with his favorables increasing 6% since last month.

Cotton’s image is improving! Lol. Note that that earlier poll from last month wasn’t released. What was the margin in that one?

In any case, you get the idea. It’s super hard for Republicans to lose a Senate race in Arkansas in the Trump era. And I don’t expect them to this year. But 50% shows the extent of the partisan shift, even in a state like Arkansas.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

A Note On the Florida Senate Race

Josh Marshall
Updated

I’ve mentioned a few times that I think Democrat Angie Nixon, just based on my watching her in campaign appearances and interviews, is a very strong candidate — certainly the most canny and able of the DSA-affiliated major race candidates I’ve seen this year. Being a strong candidate, to be clear, is a different metric from whether you’re a good match for a state or district. But I also think her winning isn’t impossible. Same story we’ve seen in other places: bad bad climate for Republicans and an at best meh GOP incumbent. Ashley Moody is a DeSantis crony who was basically gifted the seat when Marco Rubio became Secretary of State.

I just saw reports that Senate Democrats (Senate Majority PAC) are putting $5 million into the Kansas Senate race. I’m really glad to see that. (This comes after Republicans have abandoned North Carolina and are redeploying a lot of that money to Kansas.) But that raises the question not a few people are asking which is why aren’t they supporting Nixon? People ask if its because she’s tied to the DSA or some other reason?

I can’t know what’s in Schumer’s or Kirsten Gillibrand’s head (I’ve never been a fan of hers). But there’s a huge factor you have to take into account. Making a serious advertising play in Florida is massively more expensive than doing the same in Kansas or Alaska or Iowa or almost any other state in the country. It’s got multiple very expensive media markets and a huge population. A sort of reverse of the GOP’s small state advantage comes into play — a small-state vulnerability. I don’t know the exact multiples but I wouldn’t be surprised if you could make a serious ad spend play in all the current front-line red state Senate races (with the exception of Texas) for the cost of getting involved in Florida.

So whatever you think of Nixon or that race, there’s just an overwhelming logic to putting the money into those other smaller states, especially when you consider that Democrats are doing significantly better in those races.

Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
The Aviationist
Schneier on Security

Friday Squid Blogging: I Caught a Squid

B. Schneier
Updated

On Wednesday I spent a day fishing, on a small boat out of Gloucester, MA. We caught many cod (none of which we could keep), and a bunch of hake and mackerel (all of which we could keep). And…I caught a squid! Near as I can tell, it’s a longfin squid, sometimes called a Boston squid (Doryteuthis (Amerigo) pealeii).

That night I cooked it over a barbecue grill—hot and fast. Delicious.

Hacker News
Paul Krugman

My head talks at the ECB

Paul Krugman
Updated

https://youtu.be/nIcDcOXJKU0?is=89R0siGs4P3qSJa9

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting The New York Times

Anthropic detailed the activity of its A.I. agents in a blog post on Friday, without naming the targeted websites. But two sources with knowledge of the incidents said Anthropic’s A.I. agents had submitted 20 visa applications through a form available on the State Department’s website. All the applications were incomplete and were not processed, they said.

— The New York Times, Anthropic Agents Tried to Fill Out Visa Forms on State Dept. Website

Tags: accidental-cyberattacks, anthropic, generative-ai, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog

Deno is joining Cloudflare

Deno is joining Cloudflare

The Deno team released the first version of celld back in August - their open source implementation of the Durable Objects pattern from Cloudflare Workers.

Today, Cloudflare are acquiring Deno outright, with the goal of building on celld to "make workerd self-hosting a first-class supported way to build and run apps using the Workers programming model" (see the Cloudflare blog.)

The bad news is that Deno itself will not be maintained by Cloudflare beyond the next year:

We will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime. Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development.

Deno (and Node.js) creator Ryan Dahl explained that decision in a comment on Hacker News:

It's a joint decision and I agree with it. I'm most invested in its success and have put the most work into it - and I no longer think it's where I can do the most important work. There are some good ideas in Deno and it's well engineered - but it ultimately is not solving big problems. It has been sucked into the gravity well of node compatibility, which forces it to behave exactly as Node does. Why reimplement Node? It works. Marginal performance or UX or security benefits are not enough.

I'm interested in building powerful new abstractions. celld has been working remarkably well, depending only on object storage for coordination and persistence. It is not just a slightly different API to interact with the file system or network - it's an entirely new model for server development.

My favorite feature of Deno has long been the permissions system, where you can run a Deno script and specify exactly which files and folders it can read and write to, and which network hosts it can access.

Node.js has a similar permissions model these days, added in Node v20.0.0 in April 2023 and declared stable in Node v22.13.0 in January 2025. They don't yet support allow-listing specific network hosts though - networking is either on or off.

Via Hacker News

Tags: cloudfront, javascript, nodejs, ryan-dahl, sandboxing, deno

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Matthew Green

Everyone is very concerned about being respectable, so I’m going to be the goofball who raises worst-case possibilities. I think there is a 1% chance we live in Minicrypt, and a 15% chance we functionally lose confidence in our existing public-key encryption algorithms. [...]

The problem here is that the speed of AI producing surprises, and the speed of human beings replacing standards (even with the very best AI assistance) are just orders of magnitude different. You only recover from a surprise like this if you do the preparation in advance.

— Matthew Green, on Twitter. I looked it up and Minicrypt is Russell Impagliazzo’s hypothetical world in which public-key encryption is impossible.

Tags: ai-security-research, matthew-green, cryptography, standards, llms, ai, generative-ai

Market Design

Privacy, and menstrual tracking apps

Al Roth
Updated

Here's an interview with Harvard Professor Sarah Richardson about her recent article raising concerns about menstrual tracking apps. She has doubts both about whether they give useful advice, and about the low or absent guardrails on the data they generate.

Alarm over menstrual tracking apps
GenderSci Lab director warns of health, privacy risks in medical journal analysis by Clea Simon 

"According to GenderSci Lab director Sarah Richardson, Aramont Professor of the History of Science and professor of studies of women, gender, and sexuality, the apps can dangerously mislead women while also exposing them to commercial exploitation and legal concerns. 

...

"These apps are marketed as wellness and medical tools, but there are no protections on the data. Data is often sold, raising concerns for reproductive autonomy and privacy. Menstrual apps are unique compared to other kinds of digital trackers because they can expose reproductive and gender status.

"It is possible for there to be misuse of this data. This was deeply scrutinized after the Dobbs decision a couple of years ago with many scholars recommending that people not use these tracking apps, because there had been explicit threats made by regulators to try to access that data for use in criminal prosecution.

"Menstrual status can be used to give evidence of reproductive status. If the use of one of these apps exposed somebody as having been pregnant and then no longer being pregnant, for example, that could potentially be, in some jurisdictions, used either to discriminate against them or to implicate them criminally under laws that are meant to restrict abortion. "

 #####

Here's the article in the BMJ:

Digital menstrual tracking risks creating more harm than benefit
BMJ 2026; 394 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2026-100858 (Published 30 September 2026) by  Lee, Katharine MN, Marina DiMarco, Madeleine Pape, Meredith Reiches, Patricia Homan, Sheree Bekker, Margo Mountjoy, and Sarah S. Richardson. 

"Digital menstrual tracking apps claim to scientifically analyse individual data to provide guidance that will improve health, wellbeing, and performance based on estimated menstrual cycle phase. But neither digital menstrual tracking nor related practices of cycle syncing—that is, synchronising physical activity and nutrition to menstrual cycle phases—have been convincingly shown to improve health or other performance outcomes. Moreover, these practices raise serious concerns, given their risks of harm." 

 

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Eric Berger - Ars Technica

NASA issues long-awaited call to industry for private space stations

Eric Berger
Updated

NASA on Friday released a much-anticipated "request" to the US commercial space industry to develop private space stations that, as early as 2030, will succeed the International Space Station as a place for astronauts to live in low-Earth orbit.

In a cover letter accompanying the 360-page "request for proposals," NASA stated its plan: "This will ensure NASA has a sustained human presence in LEO for crew members to perform science and exploration." Several private companies that have worked for years on designing and developing such stations have been keen to learn exactly what capabilities NASA is seeking. These new documents finally provide some answers.

NASA's solicitation can be found here. Industry responses are due back to NASA on December 8. NASA said it plans to select "two or more" contractors in this phase of the competition, and intends to make a final decision in April.

Read full article

Comments

Eric Berger - Ars Technica

Rocket Report: A rare Falcon 9 scrub; is it just about Vulcan's time to shine?

Eric Berger
Updated

Welcome to Edition 9.14 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week, from our perspective, is that United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket appears to be close to launching. We've seen a no-earlier-than launch date for the return to flight mission of October 29 (an Amazon Leo flight), and the next rocket up after that, also an Amazon Leo mission, is also planned for this year. Assuming the solid rocket boosters work, Vulcan could be poised for a major breakthrough next year in cadence.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Nuri rocket notches another success. South Korea successfully deployed five satellites for its first domestically launched microsatellite constellation during the fifth flight of its homegrown Nuri rocket Wednesday, Yonhap News Agency reports. In addition to the primary payload of five New-space Earth Observation Satellite Constellation for National Safety microsatellites, nine of the rocket's 10 CubeSat secondary payloads were released as planned, according to the Korea AeroSpace Administration. PERSAT-02, developed by South Korean startup Quaternion, failed to separate from the rocket.

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The Cross Section

We've reached the livestreamed executions part of Trump 2.0

Paul Waldman
Updated
Get more from Paul Waldman in the Substack app
Available for iOS and Android
Marginal Revolution

Earth facts of the day

Tyler Cowen
Updated
  • Global call center headcount is 5.3% below its December 2023 peak, ending more than a decade of growth. It has fallen year over year for eight straight quarters, a decline that started in high-income countries and coincided with the rise of AI chatbots.
  • Call center support is falling behind other white-collar work in the same countries. Before ChatGPT, call-center headcount tracked other office and administrative roles in middle-income countries. After its launch, however, call centers have stalled or declined while the rest of white-collar work has continued to grow.
  • The better-paid white-collar roles in these middle-income countries are still growing, but most former call-center workers never reach them. Only 10.8% of those who move land in technical support, customer success, or software and data, where median pay rises 7% to 13%. Half end up in other customer service, sales, or office jobs, usually for less pay.

Here is more by Caelan Wilkie-Rogers.

The post Earth facts of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Software Design: Tidy First?

Thinkie: Fix Time, Flex Scope

Kent Beck
Updated

Pattern: You’re in a loop where longer & longer feedback loops seem to give you bigger results.

Transformation: Fix the time for the feedback loop instead & figure out how to gradually get more scope into the loop.

This came up recently when I was re-conceiving augmented coding around human needs. We’re getting longer & longer feedback loops. Anthropic re…

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Marginal Revolution

California in-migration and out-migration

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Long-run U.S. population movements have been driven more by natural amenities than by jobs, and California, rich in both uniform and complementary climates, should be a persistent net gainer of domestic migrants. It has instead lost residents to other states every year since about 1990. This paper argues that its amenities are unchanged and that the location rents they generate have been captured politically. Capture through a land tax would be borne by landowners and would move no one. Capture through mobile tax bases-above all a steeply progressive income tax-and through restrictions on housing supply does move people, and moves particular people. Where the revenue also finances redistribution, high earners pay far more than the value of the services they receive, which pushes them out on a second count; the income tax also raises the pre-tax wages firms must pay, so jobs leave with households. Proposition 13 shifts capture onto mobile tax bases and locks long-tenured owners in place, so observed out-migration understates the underlying pressure. Internal Revenue Service data show that in 2022-23 California’s out-migrants outnumbered its in-migrants by 40 percent overall but by 64 percent among households with incomes of $200,000 or more, a pattern reversed in low-tax states. A simple cross-state comparison, which cannot hold production advantages constant, shows no relation between tax burdens and natural amenities, suggesting that competition among amenity-rich states limits capture; California, which taxes well beyond what its neighbors charge, loses residents disproportionately to them. Border comparisons and data on homeowners’ length of residence are consistent with the argument.

Here is more from Philiip E. Graves, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

The post California in-migration and out-migration appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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

Sonja Shaw needs to be our best friend.

Jeff Pearlman
Updated

Sonja Shaw is my favorite California political figure, because she’s absolutely fucking nuts, in that way where even her friends and colleagues know she’s absolutely fucking nuts. So much so that, when they think they’re alone with you, they’ll whisper, “Girl is absolutely fucking nuts.” Because, well, she’s absolutely fucking nuts.

A Moms For Liberty-boosted candidate for California State Superintendent, Shaw is 100-percent guaranteed to lose in a few weeks by (bare minimum) 15 points. She is an awful candidate who walks the earth with an unspeakable level of ugliness, hatred and bigotry—mixed with the worst non-quality a person can have: A lack of awareness of her own stupidity.

And if you don’t believe me:

A. Here you go.

B. Here you double go.

C. Her husband literally strolls around in a DARK MAGA hat, which is code for WE HATE EVERYONE WHO ISN’T WHITE AND STRAIGHT AND CHRISTIAN.

I digress.

Earlier today @crowdsourcecarrie dropped this important list, noting all the area school board candidates who are backed by Moms For Liberty. And, without fail, all of them have been endorsed by Sonja Shaw.

Without. Fail.

This, my friends, is a gift from the lord.

If I’m, oh, running in Capo Unified or Chino Valley Unified or Pomona Unified, and I am liberal and sane, I am 100-percent lassoing my opponent to Shaw. I am telling everyone I see about Shaw’s plans to bring Christ into schools. I am telling everyone I see about Shaw’s plans to ban books. I am telling everyone I see about her efforts to demonize teachers and school administrators. I am telling everyone I see that Sonja Shaw is, truly, an acid pour atop quality education. I am showing everyone I see videos of a crazed Shaw blasting school board members in unhinged, bizarre ways.

And I am saying, loudly, that [fill in the blank candidate] is Shaw’s puppet.

Hell, here’s a post from Linda Shepard (can people on the right please spell her name correctly?), right alongside Sonja Shaw and proud to be there …

Fucking use it.

Broadcast it.

Double down on it.

Sonja Shaw is doomed to lose her race.

But she can help win yours.

Letters from an American

Why We Remember the Great Chicago Fire

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

To read this letter, click here:

Listen on Apple Podcasts
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You can also find Heather at:
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Letters from an American

October 8, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

On October 8, 1871, dry conditions and strong winds drove deadly fires through the Midwest. The Peshtigo Fire in northeastern Wisconsin and parts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula burned more than 1.2 million acres (4,860 square kilometers) and 17 towns, claiming between 1,500 and 2,500 lives. The Great Chicago Fire burned 3.3 square miles (8.6 square kilometers) of the city, destroying the wooden structures that made up the relatively new town, killed about 300 people, and left more than 100,000 people homeless.

The Peshtigo Fire is the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history.

The Chicago Fire is the one people remember.

The difference is in part because Chicago was a city, easy for newspapers to cover, while the Peshtigo fire killed people in lumber camps and small towns. But the Great Chicago Fire also told a political story that fit into an emerging narrative about the danger of organized labor.

It was not clear, coming out of the Civil War, how Republicans would stand with regard to workers. After all, the U.S. government had fought the war to protect the right of every man to enjoy the fruits of his own labor. But immediately after the war, workers had started organizing to demand adjustments to the wartime financial policies that favored men with money. By 1866 the Democratic Party had begun to listen to them, and leaders called for rewriting the terms of the Civil War debt, which had been generous to investors in the days when U.S. bonds were a risky investment. After the war, with the U.S. secure, the calculations changed, and Democrats charged that investors had gotten too good a deal.

Republicans, horrified at the idea of changing the terms of a debt already incurred, added to the Fourteenth Amendment the clause saying, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

They were also concerned when more than 60,000 people came together in August 1866 to launch the National Labor Union, calling for the government to level the playing field between workers and their employers. They asked for an eight-hour day, an end to monopolies, and cooperation between Black and white workers. In 1867, in what was almost certainly a misquoted comment, stories spread that Republican Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio had told an audience in Kansas that “property is not equally divided, and a more equal distribution of capital must be wrought out.”

Also in 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, which divided the ten unreconstructed states into five military districts and required new state constitutional conventions to rewrite the state constitutions. For the first time in history, the new law permitted Black men to vote for delegates to those conventions.

When former Confederates preferred to live under military rule rather than share political power with their Black neighbors, Congress amended the Military Reconstruction Act to permit the military to enroll voters. In 1868, Congress passed and then states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, protecting the right of all citizens to the equal protection of the laws. In 1870, Congress passed and the states ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, protecting Black male voting. And then, when white reactionaries organized as the Ku Klux Klan to keep Black men and white Republicans from voting for the constitutions the conventions had written, Congress created the Department of Justice to prosecute Ku Klux Klan members and protect Black rights in the South.

Attacks on Black political rights on grounds of race were now unconstitutional, and the federal government seemed prepared to back that principle up with the law. So reactionary southerners took a new tack.

Beginning in 1871, they argued that they had no objection to their Black neighbors on racial grounds. What they objected to, they said, was that these folks, newly out of enslavement, were poor. White leaders claimed that the South remained in a recession not because India and Egypt had taken over the global cotton market during the war, but because Black southerners were lazy and hoped to use their new political power to redistribute the wealth of white landowners into their own pockets.

When South Carolina voters put into office a majority-Black legislature, white South Carolinians railed against the Black voters “plundering” taxpayers. One observer commented that “a proletariat Parliament has been constituted, the like of which could not be produced under the widest suffrage in any part of the world save in some of these Southern States.” Democrats organized a “Tax-Payers’ Convention” to protest new taxes levied by the legislature.

While Republicans were unwilling to bow to the Ku Klux Klan’s violence against their Black colleagues on racial grounds, this attack had legs, thanks, in part, to events in Europe.

For two months in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. American newspapers plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows. American newspapers portrayed the Communards as a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who brought to life a chaotic world in which workers had taken over the government with a plan to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to workers.

Republicans’ fear of workers grew. Organized laborers “are agrarians, levelers, revolutionists, inciters of anarchy, and, in fact, promoters of indiscriminate pillage and murder,” the Boston Evening Transcript charged. The Philadelphia Inquirer insisted the redistribution of wealth through law appealed to poor, lazy, vicious men who would rather steal from the nation’s small farmers and mechanics than work themselves. Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.”

Turning first against Black southerners, Republican newspapers began to claim that African Americans were radical levelers. They were “ignorant, superstitious, semi-barbarians” who were “extremely indolent, and will make no exertion beyond what is necessary to obtain food enough to satisfy their hunger.” To these lazy louts, Republicans had given the vote, which gave them “absolute political supremacy.” They elected to office leaders who promised to confiscate wealth through taxation and give it to Black citizens in the form of roads, schools, and hospitals. “The most intelligent, the influential, the educated, the really useful men of the South, deprived of all political power,” wrote the New York Daily Tribune, “[are] taxed and swindled by a horde of rascally foreign adventurers, and by the ignorant class, which only yesterday hoed the fields and served in the kitchen.”

After the Paris Commune, Republicans began to sweep white workers into this equation as well, taking the lead of former Confederates. An article in the New York Daily Tribune quoted Georgia Democrat Robert Toombs, the first Confederate secretary of state, who explicitly compared formerly enslaved people to the Paris Communards. He called for a property requirement for voting, without which “the lower classes…the dangerous, irresponsible element,” would control the government and “attack the interests of the landed proprietors.” According to Toombs: “Only those who owned the country should govern it, and men who had no property had no right to make laws for property-holders.”

When Chicago went up in flames in October 1871, some Americans blamed the Great Fire on “communists” or “socialists” eager to take over the country. Even those unconvinced a deadly fire in a wooden city was part of a deliberate plot blamed the fire on stupid immigrant workers careless about fire. They blamed “Mrs. O’Leary and her cow,” claiming the animal had kicked over a lantern near straw, and even children knew not to put fire near straw.

The Great Chicago Fire spoke to politics as the rural Peshtigo Fire did not. It fanned the flames of fear that workers were trying to destroy America. Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace wrote, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”

And for those determined to make sure workers didn’t have a powerful voice in American society, the Great Chicago Fire could be framed as an illustration of precisely that.

–-

Notes:

Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872), p. 29.

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Weather West

Remarkable weather weekend ahead as Tropical Storm Rachel approaches San Diego and early-season trough ends record-breaking autumn heatwave

Daniel Swain
Updated

One of SoCal’s worst late-season heatwaves on record finally breaking (after breaking records) I am writing this quick post rapidly from my hotel room, so it’ll rely more heavily on embedded social media threads than usual. But I would be remiss if I didn’t write something up regarding the remarkable weather weekend coming up in […]

The post Remarkable weather weekend ahead as Tropical Storm Rachel approaches San Diego and early-season trough ends record-breaking autumn heatwave first appeared on Weather West.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Friday 9 October 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

And did keep my bed most of this morning, my body I find being still bound and little wind, and so my pain returned again, though not so bad, but keeping my body with warm clothes very hot I made shift to endure it, and at noon sent word to Mr. Hollyard of my condition, that I could neither have a natural stool nor break wind, and by that means still in pain and frequent offering to make water. So he sent me two bottles of drink and some syrup, one bottle to take now and the other to-morrow morning. So in the evening, after Commissioner Pett, who came to visit me, and was going to Chatham, but methinks do talk to me in quite another manner, doubtfully and shyly, and like a stranger, to what he did heretofore. After I saw he was gone I did drink one of them, but it was a most loathsome draught, and did keep myself warm after it, and had that afternoon still a stool or two, but in no plenty, nor any wind almost carried away, and so to bed. In no great pain, but do not think myself likely to be well till I have a freedom of stool and wind.

Most of this day and afternoon my wife and I did spend together in setting things now up and in order in her closet, which indeed is, and will be, when I can get her some more things to put in it, a very pleasant place, and is at present very pretty, and such as she, I hope, will find great content in.

So to bed.

Read the annotations

Oklahoma Watch
California
Mike the Mad Biologist

A Dreadful Week for D.C.’s Crime Stats

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

As of 9am Friday, there were four homicides in D.C. this week. To date this year, D.C. has reported a total of 76* homicides this year. Last year, during the same time period, we had 110 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 217 homicides during that same time period.

Non-violent crimes declined, while robberies and assaults remained level. For the first time since the last year of the Biden administration, we are no longer on pace for another 33% annual reduction in homicides.

Hoping for a much better week next week.

*Three of the 79 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence).

Spaceflight Now

SpaceX launches 21 data satellites for the Space Development Agency

Spaceflight Now
Updated
A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on the fourth Space Development Agency Tranche 1 mission. Image: SpaceX.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket early Saturday carrying a batch of data satellites for the U.S. military’s Space Development Agency (SDA), five days after a last-minute abort scrubbed the first attempt.

Liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California is occurred at 12:39 a.m. PDT (3:39 EDT / 0739 UTC). The Falcon 9 took a southerly trajectory on departure from Space Launch Complex 4E, currently SpaceX’s only launch facility on the West Coast.

A launch attempt on Oct. 5 was halted by an auto-abort with 58 seconds remaining on the clock. The halt was triggered moments after the rocket’s onboard computers took control of the countdown. SpaceX said the hold was called due to “some off-nominal data on Stage Two”.

The vehicle was lowered to a horizontal position at the pad for troubleshooting the issue, and the launch was repeatedly pushed back a day at a time.

“Additional time throughout the week allowed for double checks on vehicle systems and range deconfliction,” said SpaceX launch commentator Atticus Vadera.

The range conflict is believed to have been a missile test from Vandenberg that occurred on Friday.

The mission, dubbed Tranche 1 Transport Layer A (T1TL-A), is the fourth mission sending production satellites into orbit for the SDA. This is one piece of a broad constellation — called the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) — designed to support the U.S. military and its allies through space-based capabilities, like missile tracking and secure communications.

The mission will used Falcon 9 first stage booster B1103. This was its sixth flight following the launches of the SDA’s T1TL-E, NROL-179, and three batches of Starlink satellites.

About 7.5 minutes after liftoff, SpaceX landed B1103 at Landing Zone 4. This was the 37th landing at LZ-4 and the 668th Falcon booster landing to date.

Building out the constellation

The T1TL-A mission is one of 23 missions awarded to SpaceX as part of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 contract awarded in August 2020, which is managed by the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC). The previous missions from the SDA have already been launched:

  • T1TL-B – Sept. 10, 2025
  • T1TL-C – Oct. 15, 2025
  • T1TL-E – July 16, 2026

The T1TL-B and -E missions featured satellites manufactured by York Space Systems and the T1TL-C satellites were produced by Lockheed Martin. Space Force Col. Ryan Hiserote, SSC’s division chief in Assured Access to Space, told Spaceflight Now back in September 2025 that these initial T1TL missions could be launched in any order.

The 21 satellites flying as part of the T1TL-A mission were manufactured by Northrop Grumman and delivered to Vandenberg Space Force Base on Sept. 28.

A row of Northrop Grumman’s Tranche 1 Transport Layer satellites are shown in a warehouse prior to launch on the T1TL-A mission. Image: Northrop Grumman

Tranche 1 is the initial component of the PWSA constellation is expected to begin providing operational capabilities to the Department of Defense beginning in 2027. When complete, T1 will consist of 126 Transport Layer satellites, 28 Tracking Layer satellites, and four missile defense demonstration spacecraft.

With the three launches completed to date, there are 63 satellites in orbit.

“In close coordination with Space Systems Command (SSC) and Space Launch Delta 30, the deployment of Tranche 1’s proliferated capability will soon deliver continuous overwatch—neutralizing any first-mover advantage by delivering data to warfighters around the world, nearly instantaneously,” said GP Sandhoo, SDA Director and Space Force Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Missile Warning and Tracking following the T1TL-E launch in July.

The SDA said the Transport Layer will consist of between 300 to 500 satellites in low Earth orbit from 750 km to 1,200 km in altitude. The SDA said once complete, 95 percent of the globe will be in view of at least two of the T1TL satellites at any given time.

“The constellation will be interconnected with Optical Inter-Satellite Links (OISLs) which have significantly increased performance over existing radio frequency crosslinks,” the SDA wrote. “LEO orbits in conjunction with OISLs will reduce path loss issues but more importantly offer much lower latencies, which are deemed critical to prosecute time sensitive targets in today’s wartime environment.”

These satellites will be able to integrate with the Link-16 and Integrated Broadcast System (IBS) to allow for “timely threat warnings and situational awareness information”.

The launches of these satellites are managed by the SSC’s System Delta 80 (SYD 80) and the Space Fore Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Assured Access to Space.

A collection of 21 Northrop Grumman-build satellites for the Space Development Agency’s Tranche 1 Transport Layer A mission. Image: Northrop Grumman
xkcd.com

Dogcatcher

People out here catching strays out here catching strays
Feed: All Latest
Marginal Revolution

The origin of risk

Tyler Cowen
Updated

From the QJE, by , , and :

We propose a tractable model in which risk, at both the micro and macro levels, is endogenous and driven by incentives. In the model, each firm chooses the mean and the variance of its productivity process, as well as how it covaries with the productivity of other firms. Aggregate risk arises when firms select productivity processes that are correlated with one another. The theory predicts that larger firms and those with lower markups are less volatile and less correlated with aggregate productivity. We find support for these predictions in the data. Through their impact on risk-taking decisions, distortions such as taxes and markups can make GDP more volatile in equilibrium. In a calibrated version of the model, removing distortions significantly reduces GDP volatility.

Fischer Black!  (And my own earlier book Risk and Business Cycles).  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

The post The origin of risk appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Hacker News
Marginal Revolution

Ethiopia update

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Ethiopia is the center of the world right now as it has returned to war. Ethiopian forces retook Mekelle from rebel forces, but the fighting has extended beyond Tigray. Eritrean forces allegedly entered Tigray, and Ethiopia responded with drone attacks. The war could go a number of ways. The war extends beyond Ethiopia. Sara Al-Saeed explains how Egypt extended its rivalry with Ethiopia across the Horn of Africa. Relations with Eritrea have soured. Pay attention to the Assab Port. Learn more about Abiy, internal divisions, and the regional struggle. This post provides a helpful update. Follow the conflict with ACLED. One thing is clear: The war is a betrayal of Tigray.

From Jeffrey Paller.

The post Ethiopia update appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Marginal Revolution

Friday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Charles Kenny on foreign aid.

2. Rise and fall of the plasma screen.

3. France also has very high private debt.

4. Ross Douthat will do a weekly column for The Free Press.  And from Ross himself.

5. Encryption risk?

6. “The Altruists premieres November 19.”

7. Emily Wilson on various Canadian writers.

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

Gap Week: October 9, 2026

Bret Devereaux
Updated

Hey, folks, no post this week as my work schedule has been pretty heavily disrupted and other tasks had to come first.

Patrons will already know this background, but over the summer, we had a water leak issue in our basement (where my home office is), which wasn’t too bad but required pulling up a bunch of flooring and we are now at long last at the point of being able to put down new flooring. But that means I have had to essentially move everything in my office space and a ton of other things (our basement is about a third of our house’s square footage), including around 1,500 books – which both ate up a lot of time but also has made it harder to do a lot of things (given that my books are not on shelves but in alphabetized boxes).

Fortunately, the bulk of the work should be done this week, so I expect to be back on schedule next week with the next part of the Hearts of Iron series. In the meantime, there is a new Pasts Imperfect to read if you are anxious for something ancient-history to read.

And, as recompense for the missed post, here is a bonus cat picture, with both cats (who are also annoyed that they cannot hang out in the office).

Ollie (top) and Percy (bottom) chilling out in floor-repair-imposed exile, alongside my Lego Himeji Castle.
The basement that has to be refloored makes up something close to a third of our total square footage, so you may well imagine that clearing it for that process has meant the entire rest of the house is, as you see here, buried in boxes.
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

TPM Video: What Can We Make of Our Digital Emperors?

Joe Ragazzo
Updated

Today on TPM’s Untitled Friday Show (Name TBD), I was joined by one of my oldest colleagues (and friends) Derick Dirmaier. TPM’s Head of Product. We’ve been in the digital news game a long time. We’ve seen some things.

We talked about how the online world, which once seemed separate and distinct, has encroached on the so-called real world. At the center of this transformation are, of course, the tech moguls. These guys have amassed insane amounts of power and often when the speak, sound totally insane. They also have legions of sycophantic admirers. What should we make of all this?

We spent some time trying to sort through it all. Thanks for joining us!

Slashdot
Paul Krugman

Buongiorno

Paul Krugman
Updated

At a conference in an undisclosed location. For some reason, however, I was looking at productivity numbers for Italy. According to the OECD, productivity rose only 2 percent — total — between 2000 and 2023. Italy has problems — at PPP, its productivity relative to the US fell from 0.91 to 0.79 — but zero growth in a nation that definitely makes considerable use of modern technology just isn’t plausible. More evidence of measurement issues.

In other news, interest rates!

And Pete Hegseth, who believes that testosterone wins modern wars, also believes that what America really needs to become great again are livestreamed public executions.

That’s all for today.

Simon Willison's Weblog

A new feature for my blog, built using my voice

I shipped a new feature for my blog today: the Newsletters page, which offers an index of all of the newsletters I've sent out, both my free weekly Substack and my monthly sponsors-only updates. I built the feature almost entirely using my voice, chatting away to my laptop while I cooked dinner.

Codex voice mode

I used the ChatGPT desktop app for this, in the Codex tab, using the voice conversation mode, running against a local development environment. Here's what that looks like:

Three columns of the ChatGPT app. The left hand column shows my recent conversations. The middle column is a transcript of the conversation, with a throbbing black blob representing voice mode. The right hand column shows a local dev server version of my blog, with the Newsletters page visible.

I started the session against my local simonwillisonblog checkout by typing:

Start dev server and open in browser

This gave me a preview of the site that it would be working on, and meant that I could later ask it to show me the new pages so I could visually track its progress.

Then I clicked the "Start new voice chat" button - that's not the microphone button, it's the one to the right of it - and set my laptop up in the kitchen so I could talk to it while I cooked.

Talking to my computer

I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to build, and it's a simple enough Django feature that I was certain the model (in this case GPT-6 Astra High) would be able to do it. A new model, a migration, some view code, templates, and a couple of import functions to populate the database from external sources.

Here's an extract of my voice transcript that was captured by Codex:

Um, they do not. Um, this is going to be a new type of content. Um, it's not going to show up... Oh, hold on. Yeah, no- I do not want this to show up in my, um, tag pages and date archive pages and... Actually, no, I think... I don't want it on the tag pages. I don't want it on the, um, blog index page. But I think I do want it to show up on the date-based pages. You know, if you navigate to September the 19th, and I sent a newsletter on that page, I think I want that to show up. So... this is- so I think we probably need a new model. The other thing is that I want them searchable, uh the Substack ones are not searchable, because those are actually just copies of other s- on content on my blog. These monthly ones do contain unique content, and spe- and once they're... published, like once they're made public a month after they've gone out, I want them to show up on my search results.

Apparently this was clear enough that the model knew what I wanted to build! You can read the full transcript, disfluencies and all, in this Gist.

We went on like this for about half an hour (the time it took to cook dinner). The model would reply and occasionally ask clarifying questions, then get to work modifying the code.

What we built

We got a surprisingly long way entirely by voice:

  • A new model and migration to represent imported newsletters in Django, plus Django Admin configuration for that
  • Four working imports:
    • The most recent Substack items via RSS
    • Every other Substack item via their undocumented API, which GPT-6 Astra knew about (it tried /api/v1/archive directly) and then ran a search to figure out how to paginate it and found this article by Karen Spinner
    • All of my published monthly newsletters from my simonw/monthly-newsletter-archive GitHub repository
    • My most recent private sponsors-only newsletter from a private repository
  • The /newsletters/ and /newsletters/2026/ public archive pages
  • Newsletters showing up on day and month archive pages too, but not on tag pages or my homepage
  • Weekly Substack newsletters link to Substack; archived monthly newsletters have their own pages
  • Integration with my site search engine

It was almost ready to ship. The catch was the imports: Astra offered to export data from my local copy so I could import that into production, but I wanted it to work like my other import scripts. Since some of the data lived in a private GitHub repository, this would involve creating a new API key, and for that I knew I'd have to sit at the keyboard for a while.

Finishing it with a review

Once I had finished cooking and judged it mostly feature-complete, I had Codex create a branch and open a pull request.

I reviewed the code in the GitHub PR interface. It was nearly what I needed, except it had chosen to use Git in a subprocess for one of the import scripts. I needed one of the imports to pull from a private Git repository, so I figured the API would be a better bet. I switched to typing and had Codex swap that out for an API-based import instead.

You can see the changes I made during the review in the extra commits on the PR. I fixed the import mechanism and made a few tweaks to the display of those public pages. It took an additional half hour of typing-based prompting to get to the point where I was happy to deploy it to production by landing the PR.

The end result

You can see the end result at the new newsletters index page, or view the page for a previous monthly newsletter.

Newsletters page. It shows two Substack posts (with thumbnails) and one LLM digest Sponsors-only newsletter with a list of headings. On the right is a CTA to subscribe to my Substack and another one for my $10/month monthly briefing newsletter.

The index page shows my most recent Substack weekly newsletters and GitHub sponsors monthly newsletters mixed together in reverse chronological order. Further down the page are links to my by-year archive pages.

GPT-6 Astra designed the page, and then tweaked that design based on my vocal feedback from glancing at the local preview across the kitchen.

Better for multi-tasking than as a daily driver

OpenAI love using voice-driven demos like this one for things like DevDay - and they do work well in that environment. I don't think this is going to be a daily driver for me though.

I've written before about how much "work" I get done using ChatGPT voice mode on my phone while walking the dog - mostly research and brainstorming, but occasionally actual development work by having ChatGPT write and test out snippets of code.

This feels different. The addition of the visual preview, plus being able to type or paste things in via the keyboard when I need to communicate something that doesn't work vocally, makes this a much more powerful way of interacting with a coding agent.

I still switch back to typing once I get down to the details of things though. Being able to paste in examples and error messages, or directly highlight the code or feature that needs changing, remains more efficient than trying to describe it in words.

I mainly work from home, which is good because there's no way I'd want to talk to my computer like this in a shared workspace!

The killer feature for me is the ability to multi-task. I usually cook with a podcast or TikTok running; now I can actually build stuff instead.

Tags: text-to-speech, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, newsletter, coding-agents, codex, speech-to-text, site-upgrades

Simon Willison's Weblog

ttok 1.0

Release: ttok 1.0

I released ttok 0.4, ran uv tool upgrade ttok, piped a file into the new version... and realized that it was defaulting to the GPT-4 tokenizer when it should very clearly default to GPT-5/GPT-6 instead!

I figured switching the default was a reasonable excuse to finally ship a 1.0.

OpenAI haven't actually confirmed that GPT-6 uses the same tokenizer as the GPT-5 family yet - there's an angry issue about it - but I found this commit by William Liu which reports on an experiment he ran confirming that the tokenizers are likely the same:

All seven GPT models (5.5, 5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna, 6 Astra/Sol/Luna) report 44,794 tokens and match each other on every one of the 31 fixtures. GPT-6 introduces no input-count change on this corpus.

Tags: projects, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, tokenization

Simon Willison's Weblog

ttok 0.4

Release: ttok 0.4

ttok is my CLI tool for counting tokens, using OpenAI's open source tiktoken library.

It hasn't been in updated in a couple of years, but I finally fixed a Click warning, updated CI, and added a --list-models command to list available models.

It works with uvx, so you can count tokens in anything like this:

cat file.txt | uvx ttok

Tags: projects, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, tokenization

Market Design

Congratulations to the new Fellows of the Econometric Society

Al Roth
Updated

 Congratulations to these 30 new Fellows of the Econometric Society, who were announced yesterday.

 The Econometric Society Elects 30 New Fellows  
 
October 8, 2026 (New Haven, CT)—The Econometric Society is pleased to announce the election of 30 new Fellows. 
 
"Election as a Fellow of the Econometric Society is a recognition of important contributions to Economics.  The Fellows  represent the highest authority of the Society. I congratulate them on this great honor,” said Nobu Kiyotaki, President  of the Econometric Society.  
 
Since 1931, only 1,254 total fellows have been elected. The 30 new fellows bring this number to 1,284 elected. To  date, 90 Econometric Society Fellows have won the Nobel Prize in Economics (the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic  Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). Of these 90, 28 have been President of the Econometric Society. 
 
Following are the new 2026 Fellows:  
Nikhil Agarwal, Paul A Samuelson Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
Juliano Assunção, Professor, PUC-Rio 
Panle Barwick, Todd E. and Elizabeth H. Warnock Distinguished Chair Professor, UW-Madison 
Francisco J. Buera, Sam B. Cook Professor of Economics, Washington University in St. Louis 
Ariel Burstein, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles  
Ivan Canay, Breen Family Professor, Northwestern University 
Matias Cattaneo, Professor, Princeton University 
Adeline Delavande, Professor of Economics, Nova School of Business and Economics; University Technology Sydney 
Firmin Doko Tchatoka, Professor, Adelaide University 
Piotr Dworczak, Professor, University of Cologne, Northwestern University, and GRAPE 
Ivan Fernandez-Val, Professor, Boston University 
Eric French, Montague Burton Professor of Industrial Relations and Labour Economics, University of Cambridge 
Alex Gershkov, Professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and University of Southampton 
Nezih Guner, Professor, CEMFI 
Sergei Guriev, Professor, London Business School 
Christian Hansen, Wallace W. Booth Distinguished Service Professor of Econometrics, Statistics, and Applied AI,  University of Chicago Booth School of Business 
Jonathan Heathcote, Monetary Advisor, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis 
Paul Heidhues, Professor, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf 
Charles A. Holt, A. Willis Robertson Professor of Political Economy, University of Virginia 
Jennifer La'O, Professor, Columbia University 
Tong Li, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair and Professor of Economics, Vanderbilt University 
Justin Yifu Lin, Professor, Peking University 
Simon Loertscher, Professor, University of Melbourne 
Antonio Penta, ICREA Research Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra 
Marek Pycia, Professor of Organizational Economics, University of Zurich 
Nancy L. Rose, Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe, Professor, Columbia University 
Martin Uribe, Robert A. Mundell Professor of Economics, Columbia University 
Rakesh Vohra, George A. Weiss and Lydia Bravo Weiss University Professor, University of Pennsylvania 
Daniel Yi Xu, David Rubenstein Distinguished Professor, Duke University 
 
For a full list of all Society Fellows please click here. 

Noahpinion

Maybe the Rapture is already here

Noah Smith
Updated

Back when I was a teenager, a lot of people were very into the Left Behind series. Evangelical Christianity was still very strong in those days, especially in Texas, and Left Behind blew up by putting Christian eschatology into page-turning airport-bookstore-novel form. People really believed that the stories in those novels weren’t just stories — they were glimpses of a very real future event. The Rapture — Jesus Christ’s gathering of the faithful to Heaven before the end of the world — is something that believers expect is going to happen one of these days.

Sometimes, these days, I feel as if it’s already happened. I look around at American culture and I wonder: Where did everybody go?

The mass culture of my youth is long gone. 76 million people watched the last episode of Seinfeld in 1998; fewer than 20 million watched the last episode of Game of Thrones two decades later. Right now I can’t even think of what an appropriate comparison would be. What’s the show that everyone watches?

In the 2010s, mass culture was replaced by meme culture. Everyone knew this photo and what it represented:

Social media feeds — Twitter and the Facebook wall — turned American society into a sort of digital hive mind. Feeling yourself being absorbed into that great unified consciousness could be an agonizing experience — mobs constantly punished any deviation from conformity, quirky unique subcultures were devoured and metabolized, everyone was forced into a cell with people they had spent their lives trying to escape. The hunt for virality was everything. Viral memes were the thoughts that drifted through the mind of the social media Borg.

There are almost no memes left. For so many years there was a steady drumbeat of images and phrases that people passed around among each other ad infinitum; now, I can’t even think of the last one that really made the rounds. Twitter — now X — has not died but is diminished in scope and relevance. At times it feels like a ghost town.

Where did everybody go? I would like to think that they’re offline, living as we lived in the Before Times, running through sunlit fields blasting each other with Super Soakers or playing Dungeons and Dragons in their living rooms. Or perhaps they’re in Signal and WhatsApp chats and Discord channels, talking with their friends in the comfort and safety of privacy. I would like to think that they rejected the digital hive mind for the ancient ways of individuality and Dunbar’s Number.

But my bet is that they’re just watching short form video. Over the last few years, the entire internet has steadily carcinized into a single type of app/website/media/entertainment — a vertically scrolling feed full of short video clips. Vine invented it, TikTok popularized it, and now every other site has copied this one dominant, all-conquering format. Already, vertical short-form video feeds are more dominant than every form of media except for social media itself:

Source: Ampere

But even this significantly understates the change. The term “social media” used to mean people writing things to each other or sending images on Facebook or Twitter; now, it’s mostly used to mean people watching videos:

Source: John Burn-Murdoch

Even the long-form video sites, like YouTube, are increasingly just short-form sites showing a bunch of clips. This shift has basically killed the original use of social media, turning it from a town square or conversation room into a form of purely passive entertainment:

Source: John Burn-Murdoch

I am not part of this trend. I had TikTok on my phone for a year or so, but I could never get into it; in 2021 I deleted the app. The videos all felt like some kind of bland snack that you keep eating even though you don’t really like it — everything seemed optimized to make you swipe to the next thing, like the programming in those hundreds of channels that only existed so that satellite TV could brag that it had 700 channels.

Mass culture is often absorbing; meme culture is delightful and horrifying in turn. Short-form video feels to me like anesthesia; the swiping is the point, not the content. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.” I suppose I’m the exception.

So here I am, alone at the end of culture. I feel like one of the people from the Left Behind series, waking up to find most of the people around me taken to digital Heaven.

Have you ever heard of “heavenbanning”? It’s not a real thing…yet. It’s the hypothetical idea that social media platforms could neutralize obstreperous users by replacing their entire feed with AI content that flatters and agrees with them. You’d think you’re interacting with other human beings, and that everybody just happens to love you and think you’re brilliant, while in reality you’re in solitary confinement with an LLM.

It’s possible to think of vertical short-form video feeds as a kind of heavenbanning. Your feed is curated by AI, tailored to your own preferences. The videos you see aren’t made by anyone you know, or (probably) by anyone you’ll ever meet. The people you know in real life don’t see the same videos you do, unless you share them. Eventually the world blurs together and you lose track of time:

Researchers at several universities in China, in a study involving more than 1,500 high-school students, found that their future time perspective was damaged by a steady diet of such short-form videos…Now, [short-form videos are] also making us less able to plan for the future, or even care about it.

Right now, short-form videos are mostly made by would-be human influencers or clipped from human-made long-form videos that few people actually watch. But in the very near future, much of what you see in your TikTok or Reels feed could be AI-generated. And as the cost of compute drops, AI will be able to generate personalized videos for everyone — content tailored not necessarily to delight you, but to keep you engaged, to keep you swiping, to keep you making in-app purchases.

When I was a kid, I used to wonder what all the dead people were doing in Heaven for all of those countless eons. Now I know what they’re doing. They’re swiping.

I think about the Great Filter sometimes. We’ve searched the skies for signs of alien intelligence for many decades, and found nothing — natural or artificial. The Great Filter is one possible explanation for the silence of the cosmos — it’s the idea that there’s some dread Thing in the Universe that destroys sentient species before they can spread out to the stars.

There are plenty of hypotheses as to what the Great Filter might be. Perhaps every sentient species destroys itself with nukes or bioweapons. Perhaps AI always tends to wipe out its organic creators before retreating into inaccessible virtual worlds. Perhaps there’s a race of killer robots silently cruising between the stars, slaughtering every organic species that looks like it might one day rise to become a threat.

Or perhaps it’s the smartphone. In previous decades, fertility decline was due to couples choosing to have fewer children; now, it’s increasingly about people never forming couples at all. The isolating effects of social media are one obvious culprit; it’s very hard to conceive a child while you’re on your phone.1 Myers and Hooper (2026) found that “access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24”. Breen et al. (2026) found that “the expansion of 3G coverage [in Nigeria] during the study period led to a decline in fertility, corresponding to a 7% reduction in the annual probability of a woman having a birth.”

Given the timing and the microeconomic evidence, smartphones are the likeliest explanation for why instead of leveling out near 2, the total fertility rate in rich countries — and, increasingly, in middle-income countries — has busted right through that floor and headed down toward zero. Smartphones at least help to explain why Latin America now has an even lower birth rate than the EU.

Even without vertical short-form video, social media might still be enough to shrink the human race. Online interactions substitute for offline ones, but only one of the two can make a baby. But it’s hard to deny that vertical short-form video is even more isolating than other online activities — in the case of heavenbanning, it’s almost solipsistic. At least on X you can meet your mutuals. In the brave new world of AI-generated personalized short-form content, your “mutuals” will be made of matrices and computer chips.

Personally, I don’t like vertical short-form video because I think it’s pretty boring. But the fact that it could represent the euthanasia of our species seems like an additional downside. Perhaps it’s in the fundamental nature of intelligence to hack its own reward function — to find a way to give up striving and building and loving, and to simply hit the dopamine button until it starves itself ecstatically to death.

The next time you look at the night sky, you should wonder if instead of star empires and unearthly paradises, it’s simply a vast graveyard of short-form video fans. Such an outcome would be much gentler, but hardly less cataclysmic, than the end of Revelation.

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But not impossible, of course.

Aeon | a world of ideas

Barbara Ward’s vision

Or Rosenboim
Updated

Black and white photo of a woman in sunglasses speaking at a podium with microphones.

She was among the first to argue that prosperity, equality and the protection of nature are inseparable planetary goals

- by Or Rosenboim

Read on Aeon

The Aviationist
The Map Room

Tracé de 1927 du Conseil privé (non définitif)

Jonathan Crowe
Updated
We had a provincial election here in Quebec earlier this week, coverage of which served as a reminder that the Quebec government officially does not recognize the province’s border with Labrador—a border determined by a… More
The Map Room

Alabama Now Requires ‘Gulf of America’

Jonathan Crowe
Updated
“Gulf of America” is now state policy in Alabama. Thanks to a law that took effect on October 1, state entities and employees in Alabama are now required to refer to the Gulf of Mexico… More
Marginal Revolution

A Sentiment Analysis of Cowen, Hanson, Caplan, and Krugman

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Supplied by Bryan Caplan, performed by ChatGPT, excerpt:

So Cowen isn’t well described as either “positive” or “negative.” A much better description is:

High appreciation + high concern + very low emotional agitation.

He seems to think there is an astonishing amount of wonderful stuff in the world and an astonishing number of things worth worrying about.

That combination is unusual.

Insightful throughout.  And have a nice day!

The post A Sentiment Analysis of Cowen, Hanson, Caplan, and Krugman appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

Related Stories

 
Marginal Revolution

On *Stubborn Attachments* and religion (from my email)

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Hey Tyler

I consider Stubborn Attachments your most dogmatic and religious book. Pondering on it, here are my Abrahamic readings of it:

Jewish: Ten Commandments, obviously. While the bigger canon of Jewish laws tend to be overly conservative because people will fail following them anyway, the Ten Commandments are the laws the Jews should be stubbornly attached to. It’s easy to to rewrite the two guidelines of Stubborn Attachments as “Thou shalt … “. Another fun Jewish phrasing of the book would be “That which is good for the economy, is good for you. The rest is commentary”

Catholic: I think you yourself mentioned the Mormonic reading of the book. I’d add that the book is subtly a commentary on many philsophical debates, and revoking most of them. Just like the New Testament

Islamic: The absolute and stubbornness, but that is also there in the Jewish Ten Commandments.I bring two more subtle spiritual readings. There is an Islamic concept which says: in paradise, you will see the effect of every good deed you did, be it a direct or a very non-linear effect. It’s like the spiritual-and-butterfly-effect-ish definition of compounding growths magic. The second concept is “Barzakh”, in some theological readings, it’s a realm where both the dead, highly accomplished “living” souls and the unborn souls reside at the same time. I would liken this to your zero-discount rate concept for future generations.

What do you think?

Best
Hasan

The post On *Stubborn Attachments* and religion (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

Related Stories

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

The first Truth OC campaign ad

Jeff Pearlman
Updated

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

Below this text is an ad I created.

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

Fight, people!

Fight!

Jeff

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Do Me This Favor

Josh Marshall
Updated

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

National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Central Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Central North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Central North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


825
ACPN50 PHFO 110551
TWOCP

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI
Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
800 PM HST Sat Oct 10 2026

For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:

Active Systems:
The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Post-Tropical
Cyclone Rachel, located over Baja California and on Hurricane
Simon, located just southwest of southwestern Mexico.

Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.

$$
Forecaster Katz/Blake
NNNN


National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Atlantic 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Atlantic 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


000
ABNT20 KNHC 110525
TWOAT

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
200 AM EDT Sun Oct 11 2026

For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:

Active Systems:
The Weather Prediction Center is issuing advisories on
Post-Tropical Cyclone Isaias, located inland over Tennessee.

Eastern Tropical Atlantic:
An elongated area of low pressure centered about 100 miles
southwest of the Cabo Verde Islands is producing a large but
disorganized area of showers and thunderstorms extending from
near those islands southward for several hundred miles. Some
development of this system is possible during the next couple of
days while the low north-northwestward before upper-level winds
become too strong for development by midweek. Very heavy rainfall
is also possible during the next few days over portions of the Cabo
Verde Islands regardless of whether the system ever becomes a
tropical cyclone.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...10 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...low...20 percent.

$$
Forecaster Blake


National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Eastern Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Eastern North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Eastern North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


824
ABPZ20 KNHC 110551
TWOEP

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
1100 PM PDT Sat Oct 10 2026

For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:

Active Systems:
The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Post-Tropical
Cyclone Rachel, located over Baja California and on Hurricane
Simon, located just southwest of southwestern Mexico.

South of Southern Mexico:
Disorganized showers and thunderstorms over the far eastern East
Pacific are associated with a tropical wave. Environmental
conditions are expected to be conducive for gradual development, and
a tropical depression is likely to form well south of southern
Mexico by the middle or latter half of next week as the system moves
generally west-northwestward at around 10 mph.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...20 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...high...80 percent.

$$
Forecaster Katz/Blake


National Weather Service

Flooding Risks from Tropical Moisture Across the Southeast and Southwest