Vertical rhythm aligns lines to a consistent spacing cadence down the page. It
creates a predictable flow for the eye to follow. Thanks to the rlh CSS unit,
vertical rhythm is now easier to implement for text.1 But illustrations
and tables can disrupt the layout. The amateur typographer in me wants to follow
Bringhurst’s wisdom:
Headings, subheads, block quotations, footnotes, illustrations, captions and
other intrusions into the text create syncopations and variations against the
base rhythm of regularly leaded lines. These variations can and should add
life to the page, but the main text should also return after each variation
precisely on beat and in phase.
Three factors govern vertical rhythm: font size, line height and
margin or padding. Let’s set our baseline with an 18-pixel font and a 1.5
line height:
CSS Values and Units Module Level 4 defines the rlh unit, equal to the
computed line height of the root element. All browsers support it since
2023.2 Use it to insert vertical spaces or to fix the line height
when altering font size:3
We can check the result by overlaying a grid4 on the content:
Using CSS rlh unit to set vertical space works well for text. You can display the grid using Ctrl+Shift+G.
If a child element uses a font with taller intrinsic metrics, it may stretch
the line’s box beyond the configured line height.5 A workaround
is to reduce the line height to 1. The glyphs overflow but don’t push the line
taller.
code,kbd{line-height:1;}
Responsive images
Responsive images are difficult to align on the grid because we don’t know their
height. CSS Rhythmic Sizing Module Level 1 introduces the block-step
property to adjust the height of an element to a multiple of a step unit. But
most browsers don’t support it yet.
With JavaScript, we can add padding around the image so it does not disturb
the vertical rhythm:
Table cells could set 1rlh as their height but they would feel constricted.
Using 2rlh wastes too much space. Instead, we use incremental leading: we
align one in every five lines.
To align the elements after the table, we need to add some padding. We can
either reuse the JavaScript code from images or use a few lines of CSS that
count the regular rows and compute the missing vertical padding:
A header cell has twice the padding of a regular cell. With two regular rows,
the total padding is 2×2×0.2+2×0.4=1.6. We need to add 0.4rlh to reach
2rlh of extra vertical padding across the table.
One line out of five is aligned to the grid. Additional padding is added after the table to not break the vertical rhythm. 405 is divisible by 27, our line height in this example.
None of this is necessary. But once you start looking, you can’t unsee it. Until
browsers implement CSS Rhythmic Sizing, a
bit of CSS wizardry and a touch of JavaScript is enough to pull it off. The main
text now returns after each intrusion “precisely on beat and in phase.” 🎼
For broader compatibility, you can replace 2rlh with
calc(var(--line-height) * 2rem) and set the --line-height custom
property in the :root pseudo-class. I wrote a simple PostCSS
plugin for this purpose. ❦
It would have been nicer to compute the line height with
calc(round(up, calc(2.4rem / 1rlh), 0) * 1rlh). Unfortunately, typed
arithmetic is not supported by Firefox yet. Moreover, browsers support
round() only since 2024. Instead, I coded a PostCSS
plugin for this as well. ❦
The following CSS code defines a grid tracking the line height:
The country is beginning to wake up to the sheer level of strategic failure of Trump’s impulsive and unilateral war on Iran. Let me start with an extended quote from a weekend article in the New York Times …
The United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on the argument that if Iran one day got a nuclear weapon, it would have the ultimate deterrent against future attacks.
It turns out that Iran already has a deterrent: its own geography.
Iran’s decision to flex its control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supply flows, has brought global economic pain in the form of higher prices for gasoline, fertilizer and other staples. It has upended war planning in the United States and Israel, where officials have had to devise military options to wrest the strait from Iranian control.
The U.S.-Israeli war has significantly damaged Iran’s leadership structure, larger naval vessels and missile production facilities, but it has done little to restrict Iran’s ability to control the strait.
Iran could thus emerge from the conflict with a blueprint for its hard-line theocratic government to keep its adversaries at bay, regardless of any restrictions on its nuclear program.
This is what I’ve been saying for weeks. Control of the strait is a vastly powerful deterrent. It’s also much easier to use than any nuclear weapon, which is one of those threats that is powerful but also very hard to follow through on. I’m not claiming any great insight on this. You could see many other articles about this in the foreign policy press. But it’s only now that it’s really beginning to register in the broader U.S. news and politics discussion.
As someone pointed out to me a few weeks ago, Iran’s control of or at least leverage over the Strait of Hormuz has always been tacit in world affairs. The U.S. military has war-gamed a strait closure for decades; it’s a staple of predicted crises in the region. And it’s always been Iran as the country that was going to do it. That’s just down to simple geography and the fact that they’re the main adversary power to the regional hegemon, the United States. (It’s not something the Saudis or Kuwaitis are going to do. They’re allied to the regional Great Power.) But they’ve now shown they can close the strait without firing many shots. And the U.S. doesn’t seem to be able to do much about it.
For Iran it’s a deceptively elegant solution. Iran closes the strait with threats and perhaps some limited harassment of tankers. The U.S. could respond militarily. But the whole point is that the global economy is highly dependent on that region and that particular waterway not being a war zone. At least in the near-term U.S. military retaliation is more the problem than the solution. The only real solution would be for the U.S. to occupy a significant buffer zone in Iranian territory along the Persian Gulf. That’s probably militarily possible in the most basic sense. But how long do you occupy that strip of land? It’s not a workable solution on any long term basis.
We see something similar in the evolving press treatment of the war this morning. Donald Trump unilaterally extended the ceasefire to give the Iranians more time to respond (submit?) to his conditions. To the Iranians, though, this was Trump showing his cards. He’s in a weak position and he knows it. This has happened again and again over the last two or three weeks. But this morning the Times again says just that. “To Iran, Trump Blinked First by Extending the Cease-Fire,” the article reads. Again, the mainstream press is now saying more openly what’s been clear almost since the beginning of the conflict. Trump started this war on an impulse. In strategic terms he lost almost immediately, despite the vast damage he’s done to Iran. But he’s been unable to accept that fact. He has not made a painful but still manageable retreat or escalate. He’s stuck. He doesn’t know what to do. And he’s increasingly unable to hide that simple reality from anyone watching events unfold.
A little less than a year ago, Trump began his push for state legislatures in, first, Texas, then other red states, to redraw their congressional district lines, a gambit that, he had apparently been told, would help him hold onto the House in the midterms even as his poll numbers began the long march downward that continues to this day.
Democrats counter-attacked — and, as Khaya Himmelman reports this morning, they are succeeding. (Trump is now telling supporters he believes gerrymandering may be “not good.”) Virginia voters have followed California’s lead, authorizing new, bluer maps for their state. As things stand now, that puts Democrats slightly ahead in this fight.
The overall picture is quite a bit more complicated, however. Here’s some of what we’re keeping tabs on.
Depending on how you count — and on the extent to which Trump’s 2024 coalition votes Republican in the 2026 midterms — it appears that Democrats may have squeezed one or two more seats out of these fights than Republicans.
In Virginia, however, the story isn’t over. Republicans filed numerous challenges to the referendum. The state Supreme Court decided to allow yesterday’s election to go forward, and to see if the constitutional amendment was approved before ruling on those challenges. Now it will.
Florida will now attempt a gerrymander, trying to squeeze a few Republican seats out of its current map (while risking diluting those seats to the point that they become pick-up opportunities for Democrats).
Legal fights in Missouri and Utah could change things as well. In Utah, the White House is hoping to weaponize a judicial ethics scandal, creating a vehicle, Republicans hope, to undo a court ruling that had the effect of shifting one seat from Republicans to Democrats.
Republican state legislatures have redrawn their maps (or, in a few notable cases, refused to) amid bullying from President Trump and his top advisors. Democratic states, on the other hand, have put the question before voters, made their case, and let the democratic process choose the path forward. In both states, polling showed that voters initially were skeptical (normal, healthy people don’t typically like gerrymandering) but came around to the new map as a reasonable check on Trump’s red-state-legislature-fueled power grab. It’s a set of facts that considerably complicates the story that “both sides” have rushed straight into the mud. (Hat tip to Mother Jones’ Ari Berman, who made a version of this point last night.)
We’re moving into the second half of our Annual TPM Membership Drive. So we’re at the crunch time when we really need to be adding numbers. Let me be as direct as I can. If you’re not a member, your signing up today will make a big difference in the vitality and health of TPM. I would be so grateful if you could take a moment literally right now and click this link and sign up. We’ve made it super easy. I delay things I plan to do as much as anyone. But if you could take a moment literally right now and click that link we would all appreciate it so much.
Image: The handcart, equipped with a sail. Photo by Kris De Decker.
The human-powered handcart is the oldest of vehicles, and it will likely be the last one around in the future. Of all vehicles, it’s the cheapest and least complex to build and use. It offers a large advantage over carrying a load on your back or dragging it over the ground - the even older concept of the sled. On the other hand, the handcart is cheaper and easier to use than the animal-powered cart. Oxen and donkeys eat more than humans, and they have their own will, which can work against the driver.
Like any other wheeled vehicle, the handcart requires roads to drive on. This infrastructure has not always been available anywhere or at any time in history. For example, in medieval Europe, porters and pack animals were more common than handcarts because of poor roads. 1 In the West, the handcart only reached its heyday during the first decades of the Industrial Revolution, when it connected fast-growing cities to train stations and harbors. In China, on the other hand, the handcart was the backbone of the transport network for millennia. 2
Of all vehicles, the handcart is the cheapest and least complex to build and use.
There are still many human-powered carts in modern society: strollers, grocery carts, roller suitcases, and various utility and folding carts. However, these modern carts are to their predecessors what modern birds are to dinosaurs. They are small, often with very small wheels, and we use them for very short distances, usually inside buildings. In contrast, old-fashioned handcarts were often large and had big wheels, and they were pushed or pulled on roads and over longer distances. Many crafts and professions had their own type of handcart.
Image: Low-tech Magazine's handcart. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Why I need a handcart
People still use large handcarts in so-called “developing countries”. However, they can be just as useful again in the large cities of the industrialized world, as I can testify after using one for a couple of months. Last autumn, I received an internship application from Kozimo, who studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven. In his application, Kozimo sent a video of a large handcart he made, which he was driving on the streets of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
I have always dreamt of a handcart. I have never owned a car, and the only times I miss one are when I have to move stuff, something which has become increasingly common lately. Consequently, I proposed to Kozimo to build a handcart for me.
Now, I can no longer imagine living without it. I have used the vehicle to move houses and offices, pick up materials and objects I bought online, new or second-hand, and transport workshop and event materials (bike generators, solar panels, solar ovens, books, sound systems). I have done the same for friends. During these trips, I often took home materials, furniture, or objects that I found for free on the streets of Barcelona.
Image: Kozimo and Kris De Decker with Low-tech Magazine's handcart, halfway through a 30 km trip along the coast of Spain. Photo by Linda Osusky.
Unlike a van or a car, my handcart doesn’t need gasoline, electricity, or batteries, making it entirely independent from energy infrastructures. Neither do I need to pay taxes and insurance. The handcart is a very democratic vehicle. It allows anyone to carry a load wherever they want, while older, less affordable cars and vans are no longer allowed to enter city centers due to the installation of Low Emission Zones.
A handcart doesn’t need gasoline, electricity, or batteries, making it entirely independent from energy infrastructures.
It would make a lot of sense to offer vehicles like this at community centers, where they are available for all neighbors to use when needed. Few people would need a handcart each day, and communal use would solve the parking problem. Although our handcart can also be parked vertically, it won’t fit in most apartments.
Description of the handcart
This article will not explain in detail how to build a handcart. We want to do that another time with a simpler handcart model, because the vehicle we present in this article is not one that most people can make themselves. You need good woodworking and metalworking skills, and in fact, two people made the handcart.
Kozimo designed and built the whole structure from wood, while Guilhem Senges - visual artist and one of my neighbors - designed and made several essential reinforcements from metal; the wheels, the brakes, and the handlebars are all connected to the wood structure with custom-made iron parts.
Image: The underside of the handcart. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Images: The front and back of the handcart. Photos by Kris De Decker.
Image: The lights are mounted in coconuts. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Load weight and volume
Low-tech Magazine’s handcart is 250 cm long and 100 cm wide, while the platform itself measures 210 by 85 cm. Assuming a load height of 50 cm, the cargo volume is roughly 1.55 m3 (37 cubic feet or 1050 liters). That’s two to four times the typical trunk space in a European car. We have transported cargo that is wider or longer than the cart: a large heated table measuring 140x140cm, and several loads of wooden beams, each three meters long.
The load weight is limited by the wheels, which come from a wheelchair. They can support up to 150 kg. 3 The cart itself weighs 32 kg, so the practical maximum cargo weight is about 120 kg. The loading platform consists of slats with gaps between them, making it easy to secure various types of cargo.
Images: The handcart with various cargoes. Upper left: a 6m2 wooden floor and a chest. Upper right: 3-meter-long wood beams. Below: A heated table ready for transport.
It drives itself!
Over the past few months, we’ve learned that people have many misconceptions about handcarts. For example, you may think that pushing a handcart takes a lot of effort, perhaps based on your experience pushing supermarket carts through parking lots or pulling heavy suitcases through city centers (which is how I moved stuff before I had a handcart).
However, using the handcart can be so effortless - even when it’s heavily loaded - that it feels like you are not pushing at all. Once in motion, you can often guide it with one hand, and it sometimes feels like the cart is pulling you forward. It’s no exaggeration to say that pushing the handcart with a 100 kg load is more comfortable than walking while carrying a 10 kg heavy backpack.
Using the handcart can be so effortless - even when it’s heavily loaded - that it feels like you are not pushing at all.
There are several reasons for this light operation, rooted in physics. Each vehicle has to overcome three forces: rolling resistance, air resistance, and gravity. Air resistance is negligible at walking speed, meaning that a handcart user on flat terrain mainly needs to overcome rolling resistance. That’s the friction between wheels and road surface, a factor that’s largely independent of speed.
In contrast, air resistance increases with the square of speed. A cyclist, going at 15-20 km/h, already spends more effort overcoming air resistance than overcoming rolling resistance, which is the same in both cases because both vehicles have similar wheels. In short, the handcart’s low speed minimizes air resistance, while its narrow wheels minimize rolling resistance.
Image: Driving the handcart. Photo by Linda Osusky.
Second, accelerating a vehicle requires more energy than maintaining a constant speed. You only need to sustain momentum, not build it. Our handcart is pushed by a person walking, so the effort to accelerate lasts no longer than one or two seconds. In contrast, a cyclist takes much longer to reach cruise speed, and because of the higher air resistance, it takes more effort to sustain that speed. If the handcart is heavily loaded, it also gains significant kinetic energy, even at low speed. That explains why it sometimes feels like the cart is pulling you forward - because it actually is.
Finally, our wheels are much larger than those used on modern pushcarts. That makes for comfortable driving on asphalt and sidewalks, which are not as smooth as airport or supermarket floors. Large wheels increase air resistance, but because of our low speed, that doesn’t matter.
Handcarts and gravity
However, an effortless ride requires two conditions: flat terrain and a well-balanced load. Both involve the third force any vehicle must overcome: gravity.
Balancing the handcart: distributing the load
A two-wheeled cart becomes heavy and difficult to use when too much weight is placed on the front or back. Consequently, you need to load the vehicle so that the weight is equal on both sides of the wheels. That’s easy to check: the cart should remain in a horizontal position for several seconds without you touching it. If there’s just one piece of cargo, place it above the center of the wheels. If there are more things to carry, the total weight should be divided equally over the two sides. Finetuning the balance often involves moving a backpack from the front to the back of the cart, or vice versa.
You need to load the vehicle so that the weight is equal on both sides of the wheels.
A two-wheeled cart also needs additional support to keep it horizontal when parked, for instance, when loading or unloading cargo. Otherwise, the cart may suddenly flip to the other side. Our handcart carries four support beams, two on each side. When the cart is moving, they are in a horizontal position. When the cart is parked, we remove one or more beams and place them in a vertical position. Each beam can be set to a different length, allowing us to stabilize the cart on uneven terrain. We tighten the beams with screws.
Image: The handcart is parked with four supporting legs. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Image: Detail of the supporting beam holder. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Many people have asked us why we didn’t build a four-wheeled cart that wouldn’t need to be balanced. However, four wheels would double the rolling resistance and thus the effort required to push the cart. Furthermore, a four-wheeled cart is less maneuverable and more difficult to drive on uneven terrain. You also need to get two extra wheels, and you need to build a steering mechanism. Throughout history, the two-wheeled handcart (or one-wheeled handcart in the case of China) was much more common than the four-wheeled cart. 1
Going uphill: you need help
An effortless ride also requires more or less flat terrain, which is what you get here in many parts of Barcelona. If you go up a steep slope, you suddenly feel the weight of the cart and its cargo. Climbing with a heavily loaded cart can be as strenuous as running up stairs or cycling at top speed. People tell us we should put an electric motor on the cart, and that’s perfectly possible.
However, we found a simpler solution: if necessary, we ask for help from another person. Our handlebars are wide enough for two or even three people to push together, which makes going uphill a lot easier. Adding an electric motor and a battery would significantly increase the vehicle’s weight, and it only makes sense if you regularly have to climb hills.
Going downhill: brakes
Going downhill, you have to counter gravity forces to prevent the handcart from hurling down a slope, which would be very dangerous. Rather than pushing the cart, you’ll have to pull it back instead. Here, cyclists have all the advantage, as they can use gravity to its full benefit during a descent.
We made going downhill a lot easier by adding bicycle brakes. In combination with the large wheels, the brakes also allow the handcart to be taken down sidewalk curbs or even stairs without damaging it. They double as a hand brake as well, by tightening two lashing straps around them. That allows leaving the cart unattended on a slope or in high winds.
Image: The brakes. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Handcarts go on the sidewalk
Many people assume that handcarts go on the road, with the cars, or on the cycling path. That’s not the case: you use it on the sidewalk. Legally, handcart users are in a similar position to other pedestrians pushing a smaller handcart, such as a stroller. The only difference is that, when they are forced onto the road because there’s no sidewalk or it’s blocked, handcart users should walk on the right side of the road, while other pedestrians should walk on the left. For now, the police have stopped us only once, and they were just curious.
Legally, handcart users are in a similar position to other pedestrians pushing a smaller handcart, such as a stroller.
We could find no traffic laws that limit the size of a handcart, at least not in the handful of countries we researched, including Spain. However, in practice, there are clear limits. If your vehicle is wider than the space between traffic bollards that keep cars out of pedestrian streets, all pedestrian zones will become inaccessible to you. You should also take into account other obstacles on the sidewalk, such as building scaffolding. Consequently, it’s rarely practical to build a handcart more than one meter wide.
Barcelona has very wide sidewalks in most of the city. We rarely have to share the road with cars or cyclists. Of course, that’s not the case in every city, and then the use of a handcart becomes less attractive. Using a handcart on the road or cyclepath is rather dangerous because other vehicles are much faster.
Image: Pushing the handcart through a narrow walkway. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Respecting other pedestrians
Driving a large handcart on the sidewalk demands your full attention. You don’t want to hit any infrastructure, and you surely don’t want to hit someone’s legs. You need to drive it with respect for other pedestrians and their pets (some dogs start barking at the vehicle). In general, the handcart is very safe to use because it travels at a very low speed. That makes accidents less likely in the first place and less impactful if they do happen. You also have a very good overview of your vehicle, much better than for a car or a bicycle. As long as you keep your eyes on the handcart, you are unlikely to hit anything or anyone.
However, our handcart is so silent that people don’t hear it coming. We added a bicycle bell to warn people, but we hope to find a better tune in the future: every vehicle needs its own type of sound. We also need a bell for oncoming pedestrians who are watching their phones while walking and expect others to make space. With the handcart, we cannot always make that space. Our handcart has front and rear lights as well, wired to a USB power bank mounted underneath the platform. Lights are very helpful on sidewalks, both day and night, as they make the vehicle more visible. Furthermore, lights are essential if you need to move onto the road after dark.
Images: Kris De Decker drives the handcart through Barcelona. Photos by Guillaume Lion.
Even in Barcelona, sidewalks can get crowded, and a busy sidewalk will slow down the vehicle considerably. With little chance to overtake someone, we tend to get stuck behind the slowest walkers.
A handcart is not a difficult vehicle to drive, but nowadays people in industrialized societies have no experience with it. Apart from driving it attentively, you also need to be careful when rounding blind corners (take the turn as wide as possible) and when you leave a garage or any other type of exit (pull rather than push the cart). By the time you see oncoming traffic, you already have 2 meters of your handcart on the road or around the corner.
Why not a bike trailer?
Almost everyone who sees the handcart for the first time asks the same question: how do you attach it to a bicycle? You don’t. You push it while walking. When we say that, there follows a silence. Pushing a handcart seems like one step too far back, even for people committed to living more sustainably. Why would you push a handcart if you could just as well use a much faster bike trailer, or a cargo bike?
In fact, there are several practical reasons to opt for a handcart rather than a bike trailer, and we have already mentioned many of them. First, a handcart lets you go anywhere a pedestrian can, while cyclists often need to get off their bikes and push them - just like a handcart. A handcart is also more agile. For example, although the cart is 2.5 meters long, it takes just two seconds and little space to turn it around and walk in the opposite direction from where you came from.
Why would you push a handcart if you could just as well use a much faster bike trailer, or a cargo bike?
A handcart can be built larger than a bike trailer as well. Although it’s perfectly possible to build a bike trailer the size of our handcart, its higher speed would pose much greater risk of accidents and damage, both to the cart and to other road users. As a bike trailer, it would also need to be made sturdier, and it would need a more elaborate mechanism to operate the brakes.
All this does not mean that bike trailers are a bad idea. We have used the handcart mainly for trips between 5 and 10 km, which comes down to one to two hours of walking. For longer distances, the bike trailer has the obvious advantage of speed. If you need to cover 40 km, you would need to travel eight hours with a handcart, compared to just two hours with a bike trailer.
Image: Guilhem Senges, who built the vehicle's metal parts, pushes the handcart to a welding job a few streets up in the neighborhood.
The merits of slow travel
However, when people ask us why we don’t use it as a bike trailer, we can also answer differently: why the rush? Deciding to travel with the slowest vehicle possible is subversive because it questions values we take for granted in the modern world, such as speed and utility.
To many people, walking a handcart seems like a waste of time, but our experience is exactly the opposite. Every trip is an adventure, and we always look forward to using it again. It’s a pleasure to drive the vehicle, more like steering a boat than driving a land vehicle. It’s easy to chat with other pedestrians, who tend to be very curious about our vehicle. Consequently, the trip takes even longer.
To many people, walking a handcart seems like a waste of time, but our experience is exactly the opposite.
Driving a handcart feels entirely different from using any other mode of transport. When people are walking, they usually cannot carry much with them, either in terms of weight or volume. In contrast, the handcart allows you to walk with a lot of stuff close at hand: drinks, food, a sound system, books, extra clothes. Furthermore, you have a large platform, which allows you to rest and invite others to do the same. It becomes a vehicle for wandering and roaming, and for connecting to other people.
Image: It's a pleasure to drive the vehicle, more like steering a boat than driving a land vehicle. Model: Rocío Sánchez. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Image: The handcart with rain protection. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Handcart Accessories
Once the handcart proved its utility as a cargo vehicle, Kozimo began designing and building additional structures to expand its uses. These objects make use of the slatted platform or the support beam design. Unfortunately, Kozimo’s internship ended before we could test all these extensions, but the little experience we gained by now shows that the handcart can be much more than just a cargo vehicle.
Passenger seat
The first, and perhaps most powerful addition, is a foldable seat. While our handcart can be - and usually is - operated by only one person, it’s ideally handled by two people, especially for longer voyages. Thanks to the seat, one person can push the cart while the other one rests in the vehicle.
As long as the road is flat, the extra weight of the passenger does not significantly increase the effort to push the cart. Consequently, two people can travel faster or farther in a single day. When climbing hills or bridges, the passenger gets off the seat. If necessary, he or she also helps to push the cart.
One person can push the cart while the other one rests in the vehicle, increasing the distance that two people can travel in a day.
An extra pair of eyes on the road is also handy. The seat can be put in two positions, so that both the passenger and the driver are either looking in the same direction or facing each other, which makes it easier to talk and allows the passenger to serve as the rear-view mirror.
We used the seat on a 30 km day trip along the coast of Catalunya, Spain, moving stuff from my old place to my new place. For one person, this would have been an exhausting trip. However, there were several people on the way there, and two people on the way back. The fact that we could rest from time to time - without stopping - made a great difference, especially on the way back. An extra person also proved useful when unexpected obstacles arose. For example, there was a bridge under repair, which forced us to carry the cart down the rocks, over the beach, and up the rocks again.
Image: A foldable seat on the slatted platform. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Image: Kozimo drives the handcart along the coast. Linda Osusky is filming while resting in the seat. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Images: Carrying the handcart over the rocks. Photos by Linda Osusky.
Digital nomad office
As a second addition, we combined the seat with a work table that doubles as a solar power plant, resulting in a digital nomad office. The table fits onto the sides of the handcart and slides back and forth. The solar panel can be in a horizontal position or at various tilted angles. It can charge a laptop or any other device requiring up to 100 watts of power.
If you’re two people traveling, one person can work at the table while the other drives. If you’re alone, you can wheel the vehicle to the nearest park or beach, set up the four support legs, and work all day. In 2016, I took my home office off the grid with solar panels on the window sills. 4 Ten years later, both the office and the solar panels have become mobile.
Images: Digital nomad office. Photos by Kris De Decker.
Image: Digital nomad office. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Renewable power plant
Although we built only one solar panel support structure, the handcart platform is large enough to support a total of four 100-watt solar panels. That would provide us with 400 watts of solar power for a concert or emergency power, for example. The handcart can also transport the two bike generators Low-tech Magazine has in Barcelona. 5Consequently, the cart enables us to quickly provide power within a radius of several kilometers, at any time of the day. The handcart could also be wheeled into a sunny spot during the day, charging a battery bank to power a household during the night and in bad weather.
Mobile home
If you want to get back home the same day, the handcart’s range is roughly 40-80 km (8-16 hours of walking, back and forth). However, at least in my case, nobody obliges me to come back home the same day. I could use the handcart for longer voyages, especially since it offers me a place to sleep.
The four supporting legs that make loading and unloading the cart more practical can also be used to turn the vehicle into a bed. After Kozimo went back to the Netherlands, I bought a foldable mattress that fits neatly on the platform. During a trip, I can store the other cargo under the cart at night. Alternatively, I could push a passenger who’s lying in the bed, turning the vehicle into an adult version of a baby stroller.
Images: A foldable sleeping mattress on the handcart. Photos by Kris De Decker.
Image: A mosquito net covers the handcart with a sleeping mattress. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Kozimo also made four supporting legs that are almost two meters long. I can use them to erect a tent around the bed, and cover the structure with modern tent materials, wool blankets, or a mosquito net. The large poles can also dry laundry. Furthermore, I could use the supporting legs in various combinations to convert the cart into a podium, expo stand, market stand, or a cinema or presentation screen.
The seat, table, solar panel, sleeping mattress, and longer poles can all be carried on the handcart simultaneously, leaving ample space for other luggage. That means that I could potentially work, live, and travel in the vehicle, turning it into a nomadic home. It fits somewhere between the tiny house on wheels, the tipi, and the homeless shack. Rents got very expensive in Barcelona, so I may as well give it a try.
Image: The handcart is packed for a longer trip. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Sailing and roller skating the handcart
Finally, Kozimo made a small sail for the handcart to help pull a heavy load in a good wind; the vehicle is sometimes used along the coast. Of course, we got the inspiration from the use of sails on the historical Chinese wheelbarrow. For a longer trip, the sail fits on the cart, so I could use it whenever the opportunity arises.
Images: The handcart with a 1m2 sail. Model: Iris De Decker. Photos by Kris De Decker.
We could increase the speed of the handcart by using a larger sail, and combining it with roller blades, inline skates, or a skateboard. In that case, the cart would pull the driver in good winds. It’s also possible to push the cart while using roller blades, inline skates, or an electric unicycle, without a sail. For now, we did a first small test on flat terrain using inline skates, with very good results. If you would take enough cargo, the kinetic energy of a skate-powered handcart would regularly pull you forward even without a sail.
The higher speeds of these configurations obviously introduce more risk and, most likely, trouble with the police. Higher speeds require ample space, free of pedestrians. That almost always pushes the handcart on the road, between the cars, as most cycle paths are not wide enough. However, it shows that sustainable vehicles could take many different forms if only we would give them the space to flourish. There are more than enough roads suitable for sailing and roller-skating handcarts; we need to empty them of cars and vans.
Images: Julia Steketee drives the handcart on online skates. Photos by Kris De Decker.
Handcart design and construction: Kozimo, Guilhem Senges.
Photos: Kris De Decker, Linda Osusky, Guillaume Lion.
You could build a handcart with stronger wheels, either heavy-duty wheelchair wheels (available up to 350 kg) or cargo-bike wheels. However, stronger wheels are likely wider, which increases rolling resistance. It would also become more difficult to push these heavier loads up a steep incline. ↩︎
It is legit good feedback. It is substantive, and it is 100% true, but they do not want to hear it.
How do you know this? You’ve provided the feedback several times. Three different variants of the critical feedback, and each time, the response is one of these:
“I know, I know. I’m working on it.” They are not.
An immediate, abrupt topic change. What?
(My favorite) Twisting the feedback and making it about you. Impressive.
This is not a bad employee, this is not a person incapable of changing, and this is most certainly not an adversarial situation.
They don’t want to hear it.
Not a Trick
I have a move. It’s not a guarantee, but if you’ve tried the obvious approaches, if you’ve tried straight talk, and if you’ve made no progress, I offer The Slide.
There are prerequisites for The Slide:
You’ve tried a couple of different approaches to giving this feedback. They’ve heard it, but they have not acted.
You have high confidence that if they actually absorbed the feedback and acted on it, they’d attempt to change. Somewhere in the back of their head, past the denial, you know they’ll get it.
You’ve had to learn the same lesson in your professional career.
I can not tell you when to deploy The Slide, the opportunity will present itself when the person who needs the feedback, once again, complains or otherwise comments on the by-product consequence of their negligence. Yes, it’s infuriating because if they just listened to you, they’d have a stronger set of tools to tackle the problem, but bury that and Slide ’em:
Them: “Yeah, and isn’t just the endless meetings, it’s the fact that I don’t have anyone on the team who can do the meetings. Francis is deep in backend debugging, Jake isn’t ready to run that meeting, and Jason, well, Jason doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”
Sweet, sweet irony. Take a deep breath and Slide:
“Back at Pinterest, we didn’t have a CTO. I was the VP of Engineering, and had this loose collection of very bright senior engineers who wanted to help. Problem was… me. Whenever a CTO-class problem came up, I’d try to be the CTO, which meant I wasn’t being the VP of Engineering. After a bit, I was doing poorly at both jobs.”
Them: “Poorly, how? What’d you do?”
“It’s mostly the sense of ‘Is there enough time in the day?’ If the answer to that question is ever ‘no’, then I’m doing poorly. Doesn’t hurt when others point that out, too. After a few months of barely treading water, I gathered together the senior engineer leaders, and we built a small council. When CTO problems arrived, we gave it one of them. They drove, but they relied on the other members and me to get it done.”
So, what feedback had I been attempting and failing to give this mysterious former manager prior to this bearing of my soul? Correct. Delegation. The single biggest challenge for new managers — giving up the responsibility for the product… for the building. Learning how to give accountability for projects of significance to the team. It’s an essential set of complex skills involving trust, communication, and, most importantly, judgment. Failure to understand delegation is failing to be a leader. Senior or not.
My thesis is why this skill is hard to learn; the reason they don’t want to hear this feedback is that it contradicts the valuable core engineering skills that got them the role in the first place. The Slide is you gently sliding up right next to that discomfort, that contradiction, and not accusing, not lecturing, just telling the story of that time you learned the thing.
Not a Guarantee
Why won’t they listen? What is it about this particular habit or behavior that has this capable, smart, and reasonable human ignore the advice of a seasoned, well-informed, and trusted leader?
The answer is usually fear. The variants of fear that apply here are as numerous as the situations, but fear is fear. They have an inner monologue about this topic, “I will be less if I do this. I will have failed if I don’t achieve. I should have known. They will finally know I am a fraud.”
You will never diagnose the fear, but slide up next to them and tell them about the time you were scared, too.
The military will no longer require U.S. troops to receive the annual flu vaccine, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday, rolling back what he described as an “overly broad” mandate that had been in place for seven decades.
“We’re seizing this moment to discard any absurd, overreaching mandates that only weaken our war-fighting capabilities,” Hegseth said in a video posted to his social media channels. “In this case, this includes the universal flu vaccine and the mandate behind it.”
Hegseth said that under a new policy, soldiers would be able to take the vaccine if they believed it was in their best interest, billing it as an effort to “restore freedom and strength to our joint force.”
“But we will not force you, because your body, your faith and your convictions are not negotiable,” he said…
The U.S. military first mandated the flu vaccine in 1945, at the end of World War II — in part to hedge against the threat of biological warfare and because the great influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920 had crippled American troop readiness during World War I, killing more than 26,000 American soldiers. The mandate was briefly withdrawn in 1949 but reinstated in the 1950s.
It is as if the entire Trump administration is full of Michael Browns (of “Heckuva job Brownie” infamy), though that is arguably unfair to Michael Brown, since he was just unqualified, not delusionally stupid. Snark aside, it is clear that the Republican Party line regarding vaccination is that, while there might be some very sick people who benefit from vaccination, everyone else is more at risk from vaccination than from the disease itself, which is foolish. Influenza is not fun, and it is not just a cold.
Meanwhile, if you think HHS is going to step in here, yesterday HHS Secretary Kennedy talked about “cleaning up the risk pool”, so eugenics is back on the menu, boys!
But there were no differences between the two parties, amirite?
During the Artemis 2 missions, the astronauts in Orion made a call to their counterparts on the International Space Station. Deana Weibel explains how the experience of the ISS means the Artemis astronauts are very different from those of the Apollo era.
For years, most of the information about the Soviet Union's N1 rocket came from satellite images. Dwayne Day discusses how new images of the N1 are emerging to provide new insights about the Moon rocket.
Last month, NASA proposed major changes to its program supporting the development of commercial space stations, arguing markets for them have not emerged. Jeff Foust reports from a conference last week where several space station developers made their case there are markets.
Experts have debated the role that artificial intelligence has played in the ongoing conflict with Iran. Bharath Gopalaswamy argues that the debate ignores the enabling role of space capabilities, which bring with them new challenges and vulnerabilities.
VinNews: The Rockland County Legislature approved amendments to the Home Improvement Law, dissolving the existing Home Improvement Licensing Board and shifting primary licensing authority to the Legislature itself…Under the new rules, the former licensing board will be reduced to an advisory role, losing its power to issue or revoke licenses. Licensing responsibilities will now fall under the Rockland County Legislature…
This is an interesting change and worth studying. In the Licensing Racket, which I reviewed for the WSJ, Rebecca Haw Allensworth emphasizes that occupational licensing boards put the fox in charge of the chickens:
Governments enact occupational-licensing laws but rarely handle regulation directly—there’s no Bureau of Hair Braiding. Instead, interpretation and enforcement are delegated to licensing boards, typically dominated by members of the profession. Occupational licensing is self-regulation. The outcome is predictable: Driven by self-interest, professional identity and culture, these boards consistently favor their own members over consumers.
Ms. Allensworth conducted exhaustive research for “The Licensing Racket,” spending hundreds of hours attending board meetings—often as the only nonboard member present. At the Tennessee board of alarm-system contractors, most of the complaints come from consumers who report the sort of issues that licensing is meant to prevent: poor installation, code violations, high-pressure sales tactics and exploitation of the elderly. But the board dismisses most of these complaints against its own members, and is far more aggressive in disciplining unlicensed handymen who occasionally install alarm systems. As Ms. Allensworth notes, “the board was ten times more likely to take action in a case alleging unlicensed practice than one complaining about service quality or safety.”
Moving regulation out of the hands of the regulated could be an improvement but there are also advantages to self-regulation. See my review for other reform possibilities.
Earth Day is tomorrow, and Liza Donnelly and I are celebrating with a drawing!
And about the film I mention in the introduction: “Women Laughing.” It’s a look at the women who have drawn cartoons for the New Yorker throughout its history, and their cartoons, shown in the film, will get you laughing. But I was fascinated by the examination of art in the (quite short) film. As the cartoonists explained, their art reflected their own internal vision, and yet it speaks to huge audiences. That universality, in turn, creates a community that both reflects and changes society.
When I teach writing, I talk a lot about the relationship between writer and material, and how, if you think your work through well and manage to execute it even 80% as you envision it, a piece speaks to an audience. But I have never thought about those relationships for cartoons, which are more immediately influential than words (think of Herblock’s extraordinary commentary on Watergate in the Washington Post, for example). I have continued to think about the film since seeing it, and will teach it in the future. Anyone interested in these issues might want to take a look.
If I manage this right, information about it should be here: Women Laughing.
Will O’Neill is the head of the Orange County Republican Party, and a guy I’d prefer to like.
I’m not just saying that. Will is a local guy. He’s read some of my books. As Newport’s mayor, he wasn’t entirely vile. So, sometimes, I think, “Maybe, just maybe …”
Then he drops jewels like this …
I ask this, sincerely, of Will O’Neill: Why should anyone (left or right) take you seriously when you never, ever, ever apply your “standards” to your own side? You’re upset about the undermining of the media? Really, bruh? This bothers you? Because it’s weird that we’ve never (not once) heard you mention the White House press briefings now being less about mainstream media and more about the packing in of hard-right hacks like Riley Gaines and Mike Lindell’s “network.” It’s weird that we’ve never (not once) heard you criticize Donald Trump for attacking one woman reporter after another after another. For their low IQ. For their looks. It’s weird that we’ve never (not once) seen you question Pete Hegseth’s bizarre savaging of journalists. It’s weird that we’ve never (not once) seen you defend minority reporters being dismissed as DEI hires.
You’re upset about journalism under attack? Let’s discuss NPR. Let’s discuss Armed Forces Radio. Let’s discuss a president tagging the press as the enemy of the people.
I truly don’t know what happened to you. But I also know, as your party drowns beneath the vomit of a president you refuse to condemn, your words grow less and less important and more and more pathetic.
A trusted colleague reached out to me, RE: Grimes. And wrote this: “There is only a very small percentage of people in the world and, in a smaller subset, the Capitol community that I truly dislike. I even get along quite well with most of the Republicans around the Capitol. But Katy Grimes… I dislike her intensely. Her investigative journalism consists of her sitting in the back of the chamber during a Senate or assembly session and then going and writing a column for the California Globe, where she trashes everything that went on that day. I have never in my many years of being around this Capitol even seen her talk to any lawmaker, except for the most hard-core Republicans. She is a fucking joke and not a single member of the press corps takes her seriously.”
There is the unmistakable feeling that the wheels are coming off the MAGA bus.
Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak of CNN reported last night that by the end of last week, negotiators for the U.S. and Iran appeared to be on the verge of hammering out an end to hostilities before the two-week ceasefire ends on Wednesday. Then Trump took to the media to crow that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had agreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”
Iranian negotiators said Trump’s claims were false and that if he didn’t remove the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, they would reclose the Strait of Hormuz they had just opened. “The Iranians didn’t appreciate [Trump] negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to, and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home,” a source told Treene and Liptak.
Over the weekend, Iranians closed the strait and the U.S. fired on an Iranian vessel. On Sunday, even as two senior U.S. government officials were on television saying Vice President J.D. Vance would lead a new round of talks in Pakistan, Trump was on the phone telling reporters that he wouldn’t. On Monday, Trump told a reporter that Vance was in the air about to touch down in Pakistan just minutes before Vance’s motorcade arrived at the White House.
After Iranian officials said today they were not sure they would respond to U.S. positions or go to Pakistan for talks, Vance’s trip has been put on hold. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, complained of “contradictory messages, inconsistent behavior and unacceptable actions by the American side,” on Iran’s state media.
For his part, Trump blamed the Democrats for the chaos in U.S. diplomacy. “The Democrats are doing everything possible to hurt the very strong position we are in with respect to Iran,” his social media account posted yesterday. The post insisted “it will be done RIGHT, and we won’t let the Weak and Pathetic Democrats, TRAITORS ALL, who for years have been talking about the Dangers of Iran, and that something has to be done, but now, since I’m the one doing it, belittle the accomplishments of our Military and the Trump Administration. This is being perfectly executed, on the scale of Venezuela, just a bigger, more complex operation.”
As David S. Bernstein of Good Politics/Bad Politics noted, Trump’s account this morning reposted another account claiming that Iran was preparing to execute eight women, showing AI-generated images of them. Trump posted: “To the Iranian leaders who will soon be in negotiations with my representatives: I would greatly appreciate the release of these women. I am sure that they will respect the fact that you did so. Please do them no harm! Would be a great start to our negotiations!!!” As Bernstein put it: Trump urged Iran “to start peace negotiations by releasing non-existent, AI-generated women some rando posted about on X.”
Alan Rappeport of the New York Times reported today that Trump is considering using money from the U.S. Treasury to shore up the finances of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, which have been hurt by the Iran war. After the story appeared, Zach Everson of Public Citizen pointed out that Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who controls the sovereign wealth of the United Arab Emirates, has directed hundreds of millions to Trump personally, buying 49% of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial and investing $2 billion of WLF’s USD1 stablecoin.
Tonight, Trump announced he is extending the ceasefire with Iran until Iran comes up with a proposal to end the fighting permanently. Iran has responded by saying Trump’s extension “means nothing” and suggested it was a “ploy to buy time for a surprise strike.”
According to a new poll out today from Strength in Numbers/ Verasight, conducted between April 10 and April 14, just 35% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s job performance. Sixty-one percent disapprove, a new low. Seventy-two percent of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is handling rising prices. In a generic ballot for Congress, voters prefer Democrats over Republicans by 50% to 43%, a margin of seven points.
Administration officials’ approach to the midterm elections seems to be to continue to sow distrust of elections. Following Patel’s claim, on Sunday, that there would soon be arrests stemming from the 2020 presidential election, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a letter from April 14 demanding that a Wayne County, Michigan, elections official give it records from Wayne County and Detroit from 2024 and alleging that there was fraud in 2020. Although Trump won Michigan, he lost Wayne County by almost 250,000 votes.
Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel and secretary of state Jocelyn Benson wrote in the Detroit Free Press that “this demand isn’t about election integrity—it’s about a weaponized DOJ trying to please a president who doesn’t want to be held accountable at the ballot box by voters tired of the chaos of his administration. It’s also about the upcoming elections in November and in 2028, which he is working to discredit by sowing doubt as to the security and fairness of the process. It’s not going to work with us, and it’s not going to hold up in court,” they wrote. “Michigan’s elections are safe and secure.”
Trump seems, though, to be courting the base that in 2021 attacked the U.S. Capitol to try to keep him in power. After offending his base first by posting an image of himself as Jesus Christ and then by insulting Pope Leo XIV, Trump is participating this week in an event called “America Reads the Bible.” Kaanita Iyer and Aleena Fayaz of CNN report that Trump is expected to read 2 Chronicles 7:11–22 from the Oval Office. The same verse was read by Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin at the January 6, 2021, insurrection, and is associated with white evangelicals’ belief God sent Trump to heal America.
Trump’s vulnerability is showing on Capitol Hill. In Public Notice today, Noah Berlatsky examined House speaker Mike Johnson’s no good, very bad day last Thursday. With a Republican majority in the House of only three seats and a dramatically weakened president, Republican House members handed Johnson two embarrassing losses on Thursday.
First, Republicans joined with Democrats first to pass a discharge petition to force a vote on a measure to protect the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 Haitian immigrants, and then they passed the measure itself.
Trump’s administration has left his claims to want to deport undocumented criminals far in the dust, working hard to get rid of legal immigrants as well. When she was homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem ignored the requirements for evaluating TPS and simply refused to agree to routine extensions of TPS for people from Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Cameroon.
Haitian TPS holders sued, noting Noem’s apparent racial animus as a driving factor in her decision and that Haiti remains dangerous in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that destabilized the country. In February, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes paused the loss of Haitian immigrants’ TPS until the lawsuit works its way through the courts. Last month, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) brought a discharge petition to force a vote on a measure to restore TPS to Haitian immigrants.
Johnson has tried to do Trump’s bidding even though it means ignoring what members of Congress actually want. It is possible for members to force a measure to the floor even after the speaker bottles it up through something called a “discharge petition,” by getting a majority of members of Congress to agree to override the speaker, but such an action is exceedingly rare because it requires members of the majority to side with the minority against their own speaker. Or it was exceedingly rare before this Congress. Herb Scribner of Axios noted last year that there were seven successful discharge petitions in the 30 years between 1985 and 2015; there were the same number from 2023 to 2025.
Four Republicans, all of them from purple districts, joined all the Democrats to sign Pressley’s discharge petition. Then when the measure came up for a vote, six more Republicans voted in favor of it. As Berlatsky notes, the bill probably won’t pass the Senate, but not only did it demonstrate Johnson’s weakness, it also, as Jamie Dupree of Regular Order noted, was a real rebuke to Trump on immigration. And it was bipartisan.
That was not the end of Johnson’s bad day. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 was scheduled to expire on April 20, and Trump and Republican loyalists wanted simply to renew it. But members of both parties have issues with Section 702 of that act, which allows the government to collect information about the communications of foreigners without getting a warrant from a judge. But there are increasing signs the government is also collecting data from Americans without a warrant, and members of both parties concerned about government overreach have refused to extend the law without reforms to 702.
Republican leaders tried to force through a five-year extension just after midnight on Friday, but while four Democrats voted in favor of the measure, twelve Republicans voted against it, sending the measure down to a loss by 20 votes. Then Johnson tried to push through an 18-month extension. Twenty Republicans voted against even considering it. Finally, the House agreed to extend the law for just ten days.
Today, Virginians passed a redistricting referendum that will boost the Democrats’ chances of winning four more seats in the U.S. House. Redistricting in the middle of a decade is rare, but after Trump pressed Texas to rejigger its maps to give Republicans more House seats, California retaliated with its own temporary redistricting to offset the new Texas seats. Other states followed suit. As David A. Lieb of the Associated Press explained today, Republicans currently believe that their redistricting of Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas will net them nine more seats. Democrats think their redistricting of California, along with a court-ordered redistricting of Utah, will get them an additional six seats. They are hoping that redistricting Virginia temporarily will make up the difference.
Zachary Roth of Democracy Docket noted that Trump ally Steve Bannon warned on his podcast Monday that “Democrats are demonic” and said that if allowed to have power, they will impeach Trump. “Not just, are they going to take power and use these four seats to impeach Trump?” he said, “But they’re going to use this as a template for the rest of the country. It’s coming.”
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The president of the United States, on his blog this morning (all capitalization, punctuation, and missing/wrong words verbatim):
I have always been a big fan of Tim Cook, and likewise, Steve
Jobs, but if Steve was not taken from the Planet Earth so young,
and ran the company instead of Tim, the company would have done
well, but nowhere near as well as it has under Tim. For me it
began with a phone call from Tim at the beginning of my First
Term. He had a fairly large problem that only I, as President,
could fix. Most people would have paid millions of dollars to a
consultant, who I probably would not have known, but who would say
that he knew me well. The fees would be paid but the job would not
have gotten done. When I got the call I said, wow, it’s Tim Apple
(Cook!) calling, how big is that? I was very impressed with myself
to have the head of Apple calling to “kiss my ass.” Anyway, he
explained his problem, a tough one it was, I felt he was right and
got it taken care of, quickly and effectively. That was the
beginning of a long and very nice relationship. During my five
years as President, Tim would call me, but never too much, and I
would help him where I could. Years latter, after 3 or 4 BIG
HELPS, I started to say to people, anyone who would listen, that
this guy is an amazing manager and leader. He makes these calls to
me, I help him out (but not always, because he will, on occasion,
be too aggressive in his ask!), and he gets the job done, QUICKLY,
without a dime being given to those very expensive (millions of
dollars!) consultants around town who sometimes get it done, and
sometimes don’t. Anyway, Tim Cook had an AMAZING career, almost
incomparable, and will go on and continue to do great work for
Apple, and whatever else he chooses to work on. Quite simply, Tim
Cook is an incredible guy!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP
You can see in Trump’s take on Tim Cook what he really likes about
tariffs, which is nothing to do with economics and everything
about how it makes business leaders dependent on his goodwill.
Also appreciate that Trump threw in a hot take about Apple being
better off without Steve Jobs.
The man loves to post!
Yglesias is exactly right re: Trump’s obsession with tariffs. There is zero underlying economic philosophy behind them. He likes tariffs because he sees them as a way to exert political power. I’d add only that Yglesias is being a tad deferential/euphemistic when he says “makes business leaders dependent on his goodwill”. Trump himself used the right phrase to describe why he likes tariffs — they get business leaders to “kiss his ass”. Trump’s own words.
Yglesias’s second point is directly related to the first. There’s no evidence that Trump and Jobs ever met, personally, but Trump admired Jobs and has an intuitive understanding that Jobs would not have kissed his ass, and to Trump, that’s the most important thing about Cook. Rightly or wrongly, Cook took/takes that one for the team. Jobs wouldn’t have (and, if he had lived, would have probably sent COO Tim Cook to do it), and Trump knows it.
Lastly, hat tip to Trump for the self-deprecating reference to his having mistakenly addressed Cook as “Tim Apple” at a public meeting back in 2019. He’s still funny when he’s in the right mood.
From Finbar Curtin and Matthew G. Burgess, here is the paper. Here is the thread, worth a read. Important stuff, I hope to hear more about this. The whole climate to gdp transmission thing does not seem to be working very well?
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman came on Core Memory together for a ten-year look back at OpenAI. It’s also the first time they’ve done a media podcast together.
The Internet Archive copy from yesterday shows a checkbox there. Claude Code used to be a feature of the $20/month Pro plan, but according to the new pricing page it is now exclusive to the $100/month or $200/month Max plans.
Update: don't miss the update to this post, they've already changed course a few hours after this change went live.
So what the heck is going on? Unsurprisingly, Reddit and Hacker News and Twitter all caught fire.
I didn't believe the screenshots myself when I first saw them - aside from the pricing grid I could find no announcement from Anthropic anywhere. Then Amol Avasare, Anthropic's Head of Growth, tweeted:
For clarity, we're running a small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups. Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren't affected.
And that appears to be the closest we have had to official messaging from Anthropic.
I don't buy the "~2% of new prosumer signups" thing, since everyone I've talked to is seeing the new pricing grid and the Internet Archive has already snapped a copy. Maybe he means that they'll only be running this version of the pricing grid for a limited time which somehow adds up to "2%" of signups?
I'm also amused to see Claude Cowork remain available on the $20/month plan, because Claude Cowork is effectively a rebranded version of Claude Code wearing a less threatening hat!
There are a whole bunch of things that are bad about this.
If we assume this is indeed a test, and that test comes up negative and they decide not to go ahead with it, the damage has still been extensive:
A whole lot of people got scared or angry or both that a service they relied on was about to be rug-pulled. There really is a significant difference between $20/month and $100/month for most people, especially outside of higher salary countries.
The uncertainty is really bad! A tweet from an employee is not the way to make an announcement like this. I wasted a solid hour of my afternoon trying to figure out what had happened here. My trust in Anthropic's transparency around pricing - a crucial factor in how I understand their products - has been shaken.
Strategically, should I be taking a bet on Claude Code if I know that they might 5x the minimum price of the product?
More of a personal issue, but one I care deeply about myself: I invest a great deal of effort (that's 105 posts and counting) in teaching people how to use Claude Code. I don't want to invest that effort in a product that most people cannot afford to use.
Last month I ran a tutorial for journalists on "Coding agents for data analysis" at the annual NICAR data journalism conference. I'm not going to be teaching that audience a course that depends on a $100/month subscription!
This also doesn't make sense to me as a strategy for Anthropic. Claude Code defined the category of coding agents. It's responsible for billions of dollars in annual revenue for Anthropic already. It has a stellar reputation, but I'm not convinced that reputation is strong enough for it to lose the $20/month trial and jump people directly to a $100/month subscription.
OpenAI have been investing heavily in catching up to Claude Code with their Codex products. Anthropic just handed them this marketing opportunity on a plate - here's Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux:
I don't know what they are doing over there, but Codex will continue to be available both in the FREE and PLUS ($20) plans. We have the compute and efficient models to support it. For important changes, we will engage with the community well ahead of making them.
Transparency and trust are two principles we will not break, even if it means momentarily earning less. A reminder that you vote with your subscription for the values you want to see in this world.
I should note that I pay $200/month for Claude Max and I consider it well worth the money. I've had periods of free access in the past courtesy of Anthropic but I'm currently paying full price, and happy to do so.
But I care about the accessibility of the tools that I work with and teach. If Codex has a free tier while Claude Code starts at $100/month I should obviously switch to Codex, because that way I can use the same tool as the people I want to teach how to use coding agents.
Here's what I think happened. I think Anthropic are trying to optimize revenue growth - obviously - and someone pitched making Claude Code only available for Max and higher. That's clearly a bad idea, but "testing" culture says that it's worth putting even bad ideas out to test just in case they surprise you.
So they started a test, without taking into account the wailing and gnashing of teeth that would result when their test was noticed - or accounting for the longer-term brand damage that would be caused.
Or maybe they did account for that, and decided it was worth the risk.
I don't think that calculation was worthwhile. They're going to have to make a very firm commitment along the lines of "we heard your feedback and we commit to keeping Claude Code available on our $20/month plan going forward" to regain my trust.
As it stands, Codex is looking like a much safer bet for me to invest my time in learning and building educational materials around.
Update: they've reversed it already
In the time I was typing this blog entry Anthropic appear to have reversed course - the claude.com/pricing page now has a checkbox back in the Pro column for Claude Code. I can't find any official communication about it though.
Let's see if they can come up with an explanation/apology that's convincing enough to offset the trust bonfire from this afternoon!
OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.0 today, their latest image generation model. On the livestream Sam Altman said that the leap from gpt-image-1 to gpt-image-2 was equivalent to jumping from GPT-3 to GPT-5. Here's how I put it to the test.
My prompt:
Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio
gpt-image-1
First as a baseline here's what I got from the older gpt-image-1 using ChatGPT directly:
I wasn't able to spot the raccoon - I quickly realized that testing image generation models on Where's Waldo style images (Where's Wally in the UK) can be pretty frustrating!
I tried getting Claude Opus 4.7 with its new higher resolution inputs to solve it but it was convinced there was a raccoon it couldn't find thanks to the instruction card at the top left of the image:
Yes — there's at least one raccoon in the picture, but it's very well hidden. In my careful sweep through zoomed-in sections, honestly, I couldn't definitively spot a raccoon holding a ham radio. [...]
That one was pretty obvious, the raccoon is in the "Amateur Radio Club" booth in the center of the image!
Claude said:
Honestly, this one wasn't really hiding — he's the star of the booth. Feels like the illustrator took pity on us after that last impossible scene. The little "W6HAM" callsign pun on the booth sign is a nice touch too.
I also tried Nano Banana Pro in AI Studio and got this, by far the worst result from any model. Not sure what went wrong here!
gpt-image-2
With the baseline established, let's try out the new model.
I used an updated version of my openai_image.py script, which is a thin wrapper around the OpenAI Python client library. Their client library hasn't yet been updated to include gpt-image-2 but thankfully it doesn't validate the model ID so you can use it anyway.
Here's how I ran that:
OPENAI_API_KEY="$(llm keys get openai)" \
uv run https://tools.simonwillison.net/python/openai_image.py \
-m gpt-image-2 \
"Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio"
Here's what I got back. I don't think there's a raccoon in there - I couldn't spot one, and neither could Claude.
The OpenAI image generation cookbook has been updated with notes on gpt-image-2, including the outputQuality setting and available sizes.
I tried setting outputQuality to high and the dimensions to 3840x2160 - I believe that's the maximum - and got this - a 17MB PNG which I converted to a 5MB WEBP:
OPENAI_API_KEY="$(llm keys get openai)" \
uv run 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/tools/refs/heads/main/python/openai_image.py' \
-m gpt-image-2 "Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio" \
--quality high --size 3840x2160
That's pretty great! There's a raccoon with a ham radio in there (bottom left, quite easy to spot).
The image used 13,342 output tokens, which are charged at $30/million so a total cost of around 40 cents.
Takeaways
I think this new ChatGPT image generation model takes the crown from Gemini, at least for the moment.
Where's Waldo style images are an infuriating and somewhat foolish way to test these models, but they do help illustrate how good they are getting at complex illustrations combining both text and details.
Update: asking models to solve this is risky
rizaco on Hacker News asked ChatGPT to draw a red circle around the raccoon in one of the images in which I had failed to find one. Here's an animated mix of their result and the original image:
Looks like we definitely can't trust these models to usefully solve their own puzzles!
AI agents are already too human. Not in the romantic sense, not because they love or fear or dream, but in the more banal and frustrating one. The current implementations keep showing their human origin again and again: lack of stringency, lack of patience, lack of focus. Faced with an awkward task, they drift towards the familiar. Faced with hard constraints, they start negotiating with reality.
Consumer sentiment, which fell off a cliff in 2022, has declined further under Trump II. Indeed, according to the venerable Michigan Survey, it is at the lowest level ever recorded. Other measures, like the index of consumer confidence produced by the Conference Board, are somewhat less dismal but also show that Americans feelworse now than they did during the Biden years. And as the chart above shows, Americans — a crucial segment of whom voted for Trump because they believed his fabulist promises to bring prices down “on Day One” — are now saying that the Biden economy was better than the Trump II economy.
The question of why Americans are so negative about the economy is important, and I will have much more to say about that question in future posts. First, however, it will be necessary to dispel some widespread misperceptions — misperceptions that were especially acute during the Biden years. So today I’ll talk about what actually happened to ordinary Americans under Biden.
Let me address three issues in particular: Purchasing power, inequality, and the labor market.
Purchasing power: Biden had the misfortune of being president when there was a large jump in prices, a jump that was out of his control and happened around the world. This came as a shock to Americans after decades of low, stable inflation. From my post last week:
This price jump clearly depressed consumer sentiment. However, it’s often asserted that the jump in prices from 2021 through 2022 left most Americans substantially poorer. And that just isn’t true.
The next chart compares the rise in consumer prices to what has happened to the wages of ordinary workers since late 2019. Why start in 2019? Because average wage data in 2020 and much of 2021 were distorted by the pandemic, during which low-wage workers were disproportionately laid off. Using the eve of the pandemic as a baseline, we see that large increases in consumer prices were more than matched by large increases in wages:
Now, many people have the sense that prices are up more than the official numbers say. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces these numbers, is careful and scrupulous. And independent measures of prices, for example for groceries and rents, have generally been consistent with BLS estimates.
What is true is that the Consumer Price Index doesn’t take account of rising interest rates. In particular, monthly mortgage payments for new home buyers have risen much more than average wages, and the chart above doesn’t reflect that. But while this is a real issue, it isn’t consistent with complaints about huge, widespread declines in overall purchasing power.
OK, I can safely predict many hostile comments, not just from Trump supporters sure that the Biden economy was terrible but from people insisting that to point to rising real wages is to deny the struggles of working families. So let me say that throughout the past 5 years many millions of Americans have had a hard time making ends meet. But this is always true, in good times and bad. It was actually less true than usual during the Biden years, a period in which wages at the bottom rose more rapidly than wages at the top.
Which brings me to the question of inequality.
Inequality: The economist Peter Atwater coined the term “K-shaped economy” in 2020, to describe an economy in which those at the top get ahead while those at the bottom fall behind. The phrase has stuck, as has the narrative.
But what actually happened during the Biden years, at least in terms of wages, was the opposite. In 2023 and in subsequent work, David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew documented that there had in fact been an “unexpected compression” in which the wage gap between the highly paid and the less well paid suddenly narrowed.
Dube has a terrific new book out, The Wage Standard: What’s wrong in the labor market and how to fix it, which is a manifesto on how to improve the state of workers. I will lift a couple of charts relevant to the tale of inequality during the Biden years to illustrate my point.
The chart below plots annual real wage growth across the wage distribution for two periods in time. On the horizontal axis is the wage distribution. For example, a person at the 10th percentile is considered low income: they earn a wage that is at or below 90% of other Americans. Someone at the 90th percentile is high income: only 10% of Americans earn a wage higher than theirs.
The solid line shows annual real wage growth across the wage distribution for the years 1979 to 2019. The dashed line shows it for the years 2019 to 2024, the Biden years.
This chart shows that during the Biden years, real wages for the bottom 80 percent of workers grew substantially faster than they had over the previous 40 years. Moreover, growth was especially high at the very bottom of the wage distribution. This was the “unexpected compression”: because low-earning workers experienced faster wage growth than those with higher pay, the wage gap between low income workers and high income workers was squeezed during the Biden years.
Second, let’s look at a direct measure of wage inequality, the ratio of wages at the 90th percentile to wages at the 10thpercentile:
This ratio began rising under Ronald Reagan and was still near its peak on the eve of the pandemic at 4.8. But from 2020 to 2024 it declined substantially. America at the end of the Biden years was still a hugely unequal society, but less so than it had been for a generation.
Granted, stock prices rose substantially under Biden, and stock ownership is highly concentrated at the top. So the Biden economy was K-shaped in that sense. But if you think about it, it’s hard to see how rising prices for stocks, which are both bought and sold mainly by the richest 10 percent of the population, hurt those below.
So wage inequality fell dramatically during the Biden years. Is income inequality now rising again under Trump? There are faint hints in the data to that effect, but no more than that so far. One thing we do know, however, is that the force Dube identifies as the strongest driver of wage compression — a “tight” labor market — has largely disappeared.
The labor market: Dube’s thesis is that a tight labor market – one in which workers find it easy to get jobs and employers find it hard to get workers -- is essential to wage growth, especially among the low paid.
And for much of the Biden era the U.S. job market was very tight. For evidence, look at the Conference Board’s “labor market differential” — the difference between the percentage of people saying that jobs are plentiful and those saying that jobs are hard to get. That number is usually positive — we are an optimistic nation — but it was exceptionally positive during the Biden years:
(Via Haver Analytics)
So, why is it important to set the record straight about the Biden economy? We can’t rerun the 2024 election (although if we could, Kamala Harris would win.) But misperceptions about that economy may prevent us from appreciating policies — especially the strong response to the pandemic — that were actually very good, and which we should be prepared to emulate in future crises.
And understanding economic reality when consumer sentiment plunged is crucial to making sense of the vibecession debate, about which I’ll write more soon.
MUSICAL CODA
Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation. [...]
Our experience is a hopeful one for teams who shake off the vertigo and get to work. You may need to reprioritize everything else to bring relentless and single-minded focus to the task, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are extremely proud of how our team rose to meet this challenge, and others will too. Our work isn’t finished, but we’ve turned the corner and can glimpse a future much better than just keeping up. Defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively.
On the same day as Claude Code's temporary will-they-won't-they $100/month kerfuffle (for the moment, they won't), here's the latest on GitHub Copilot pricing.
Unlike Anthropic, GitHub put up an official announcement about their changes, which include tightening usage limits, pausing signups for individual plans (!), restricting Claude Opus 4.7 to the more expensive $39/month "Pro+" plan, and dropping the previous Opus models entirely.
The key paragraph:
Agentic workflows have fundamentally changed Copilot’s compute demands. Long-running, parallelized sessions now regularly consume far more resources than the original plan structure was built to support. As Copilot’s agentic capabilities have expanded rapidly, agents are doing more work, and more customers are hitting usage limits designed to maintain service reliability.
It's easy to forget that just six months ago heavy LLM users were burning an order of magnitude less tokens. Coding agents consume a lot of compute.
Copilot was also unique (I believe) among agents in charging per-request, not per-token. (Correction: Windsurf also operated a credit system like this which they abandoned last month.) This means that single agentic requests which burn more tokens cut directly into their margins. The most recent pricing scheme addresses that with token-based usage limits on a per-session and weekly basis.
My one problem with this announcement is that it doesn't clearly clarify which product called "GitHub Copilot" is affected by these changes. Last month in How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'? I mapped every one Tey Bannerman identified 75 products that share the Copilot brand, 15 of which have "GitHub Copilot" in the title.
Judging by the linked GitHub Copilot plans page this covers Copilot CLI, Copilot cloud agent and code review (features on GitHub.com itself), and the Copilot IDE features available in VS Code, Zed, JetBrains and more.
Despite legal pledges to reduce greenhouse gases to address climate change, Portland’s transportation greenhouse gas emissions are going up, not down.
State, regional and city governments have adopted climate goals that purport to commit to steadily reducing greenhouse gases, but we’re not merely failing to make progress, we’re going in the wrong direction.
In the face of these persistent failures, Oregon is moving forward with plans to billions and billions dollars into three Portland area freeway widening projects. As a result, April 22 isn’t so much Earth Day as a macabre Groundhog Day, where every year we’re reneging in a bigger and more expensive way on our climate pledges, even as the crisis grows worse.
For us at City Observatory, Earth Day has officially become the new Groundhog Day. Every year, we wake up to the same repeating script: the climate crisis accelerates, transportation-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions climb, and our public agencies double down on subsidizing automobile travel, in flat violation of state and local pledges to reduce driving to fight climate change.
Like Bill Murray’s character in the movie, we are trapped in a loop. Only this year, the script has taken a darker, more expensive turn.
An Abject Failure to Reduce Emissions from Driving
All of the objective data on greenhouse gas emissions shows we’re failing to meet our stated and legally adopted climate goals, chiefly because transportation emissions are increasing, and we’re driving more. ClimateTrace.org, which tracks transportation greenhouse gas emissions throughout the United States has data showing the Portland area emissions have increased substantially over the past five years, even as state law and local plans call for emissions to continuously decrease. Metro’s adopted regional Climate Smart Strategy calls for us to reduce greenhouse gases by almost 5 percent per year; instead, they are increasing, at more than three-fourths of one percent per year.
Compared to the promises made by the City, the region and the state, we’re not merely failing to make progress, we’re going rapidly in the wrong direction.
You’d think with the data showing that we’re falling far behind our planned and committed reductions in greenhouse gases and driving, that state and local officials would be re-doubling their efforts to lower greenhouse gases. Today, as in prior years, you would be wrong. Instead, the Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to commit the region to spending tens of billions of dollars, largely to subsidize even more driving, and higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
As we describe below, Portland established its environmental reputation–and fostered dramatic economic improvements–starting in the 1970s by tearing out some freeways and choosing not to build others. The environmental legacy of freeway removal is not merely forgotten, its being actively demolished by a transportation department that is hell-bent on building wider highways and increasing traffic and greenhouse gas emissions. Between the $15.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project, the $2.1 billion I-5 Rose Quarter Project, and a plan to rebuild and widen the I-205 Abernethy Bridge at $815 million, ODOT is embarked on a multi-billion dollar highway building spree. And that’s just the beginning, because these projects have almost invariably gone over budget, and more expansions (a wider I-205 on either side of the Abernethy Bridge, and plans to widen the I-5 Boone Bridge) will generate even more debt and traffic.
The math doesn’t add up. Oregon’s adopted climate plans explicitly call for a 10% reduction in aggregate vehicle miles traveled (VMT). You cannot achieve a 10% reduction while building projects predicated on a 25% increase in driving. Planning for all of these project’s is predicated on models that call for driving to go up, when state policy insists that driving will go down.
Four years ago, a New York Times story asked the question, “Can Portland be a climate leader without reducing driving?” The Oregon Department of Transportation is still answering that question with an emphatic “No.” In the face of increasing driving and greenhouse gas emissions, its planning a multi-billion dollar series of highway expansion projects that will only further increase greenhouse gas emissions. That’s how they really celebrate Earth Day..
The New York Times, April 22, 2022
The Oregon Department of Transportation’s plans to squander billions of dollars widening area highways plainly undermines State, regional, and city commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Driving is the single largest source of climate pollution in Portland, and it has grown 20 percent, by more than a million tons per year, in the past five years.
Betraying Portland’s Legacy of Environmental Leadership
Five decades after the city earned national recognition for tearing out a downtown freeway, it gets ready to build more. Back in the day, Portland built its environmental cred by tearing out one downtown freeway, and cancelling another–and then taking the money it saved to build the first leg of its light rail system. In place of pavement and pollution, it put up parks. Portland made choice to remove the Harbor Drive freeway that blighted the city’s waterfront, and replace it with a beautiful and widely used park.
For decades, city and state political leaders have celebrated this legacy, and proudly touted our environmental leadership based on these bold and far-sighted steps. It is bitterly ironic, and tragic, that half a century after proving that removing freeways promotes livability, economic vitality and thriving cities, Oregon is now embarking on an unprecedented huge expansion of highway capacity, and exactly the time the climate crisis has come plainly into view.
Portland was smart enough to stop building freeways half a century ago, when environmentalism was in its infancy, and the prospects of climate change were not nearly so evident. Why aren’t we smart enough to do the same today?
Happy Earth Day, or actually Groundhog Day, everyone. We’ve squandered another year, and a planning to squander billions in the face of a growing crisis. Let’s all be ready for yet another long hot, smoky summer as we endure the increasingly obvious and unavoidable effects of climate change. See you next year.
Beyond the border of Washington, D.C., numerous suburbs spread across Virginia and Maryland. Many are accessible from the Capital Beltway (I-495), the highway that encircles Washington. An astronaut on the International Space Station captured this photo of the beltway’s northeast side where it passes through the historic city of Greenbelt, Maryland.
The photo was taken on July 30, 2023, a time of year when the region’s vegetation is lush and green. One of the more prominent green spaces in this image is Greenbelt Park. The park’s nearly 5 square kilometers (2 square miles) contain forested hiking trails, several picnic areas, and a campground. The land was once intended as a future extension of the city of Greenbelt, but it was acquired by the National Park Service in 1950.
Just north of the park, Greenbelt’s historic district is laid out in a crescent shape. The district is one of three planned communities that arose in the 1930s as part of the New Deal program, intended to provide work for the unemployed and to create affordable cooperative housing with accessible green space. Homes connect to walking paths, which in turn connect to one of the country’s oldest planned shopping centers.
A collection of buildings east of the beltway is NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, established in Greenbelt on May 1, 1959, as NASA’s first spaceflight complex. Several patches of forested land separate some of the buildings. The large green spaces north of Goddard are a mix of forested land and agricultural fields in the town of Beltsville, which include University of Maryland and USDA agricultural research sites. The main campus of the University of Maryland is visible just west of Greenbelt in College Park.
Other nearby tree-lined areas are visible as well. For instance, Hyattsville, just south of College Park, has been recognized as a “tree city” for more than three decades. In addition, trees line a large segment of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway (MD-295), which runs north-south between Baltimore and Washington and bisects Greenbelt Park.
Astronaut photograph ISS069-E-39302 was acquired on July 30, 2023, with a Nikon D5 digital camera using a focal length of 1150 millimeters. It was provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 69 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
We do not know whether technological unemployment swept across England in the wake of the British Industrial Revolution. In this paper, I propose an approach to quantify jobs lost to, and created by, creative destruction in the 19th century. Using over 170 million individual records from the full-count British census (1851–1911), I generate sub-industry “task” level occupational data. I apply this to the English bootmaking industry as it mechanized. The new data reveal sharp structural changes: 152,000 artisanal jobs disappeared as skills became obsolete, while 144,000 new jobs emerged. However, incumbent bootmakers were rarely displaced. Instead, the decline was driven by young men no longer entering the artisanal trade. These findings challenge assumptions about displacement, showing how slow adoption and persistent demand can shield existing workers, while opportunities vanish for new entrants.
First published January 4, 2021, just before this newsletter started. Comes more starkly into focus given my recent Parkinson’s diagnosis. In that piece I introduced the time value of time, which I need to expand on further.
A billion dollars in 30 years. Would you take it? I wouldn’t. Here’s why that’s not dumb for me.
This is another of my “smash two ideas together” essays. In this case, the ideas are:
The time value of money &
Mortality
Heavy stuff, but there you have it. It’s a new year, time for big thoughts.
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I turn 60 this year [ed: now 65]. I’ve recently noticed my career thinking diverging from that of my colleagues. They are more willing than I am to sacrifice now for gains later. Reflecting on the differences I’m led back to a theme of economics I learned early and have been teaching geeks ever since: the time value of money.
The absurdity of software engineering dogma at the beginning of my career dragged me to the time value of money. The trend back then was to do more and more work at first (spending money all the while) for (it was promised) greater and greater benefit later and later.
This didn’t make sense to me. Much of that up-front work turned out to be useless speculation. More fundamentally, this style contradicted a central tenet of economics—the time value of money.
A dollar today is better than a dollar tomorrow. It’s worth more. If I have a dollar today, I can invest it and make more by the time tomorrow comes around. I should prefer less than a dollar today to exactly a dollar tomorrow, less by a discount rate (which, spoiler alert, is hard to figure out and shouldn’t be modeled as a constant, but please keep reading).
If you accept this truth, then you do exactly the opposite of “spend more now to (maybe) make more later”. Those dollars you spend now are more expensive than the dollars you earn later. You can create economic value simply by figuring out how to earn sooner or spend later, even before making anything!
Aligning with economics requires that you start earning sooner and defer spending as long as possible. This seems to contradict engineering purity—if I do a great job today then I’ll never have to invest in this code again. Sorry, that’s not how money works. Look at XP and you’ll find a hundred ways to earn sooner and spend later.
(At this point I encourage you to do background work to gain intuition about the time value of money. Build a spreadsheet. Play with parameters. Let the difference between a dollar today and a dollar tomorrow soak into your bones. That’s what I did.)
Here are 2 more ways to think about the time value of money. First, the less time involved, the less it matters. This will be important as we talk about the effects of mortality.
The second, the discount rate profoundly affects the difference in value. Compare 5% with 10% with the current yield on 30-year Treasuries of 1.6% [ed: 4.9%].
Discount Rate Isn’t Constant
Back to that billion dollars in 30 years. Why is that worthless to me? Is a billion dollars in 1000 years worth anything to you? No. You won’t be alive to benefit from it. 100 years? Same.
If you’re 20-something, a billion dollars in 30 years is awesome. You can do whatever for 30 years, secure in the knowledge that your financial options will explode at the end of that period. And you’re likely to be alive to experience it. For me, though, a billion dollars after either I’m too old to enjoy it [ed: hello, Parkinson’s] or after I’m dead is worth nothing. I’d literally rather have one dollar in my hand today.
One of the challenges working with the time value of money is determining the discount rate. My discount rate here in the last stage of my career is not constant. That’s what I was missing. My colleagues have a smooth discount rate over the 10–20 year time scales we are used to. I stop financially caring about the future before they do. Here are the life probabilities for a 30-year-old male.
As long as my young colleagues get paid off some time in the next 30 years they have a high probability (relative to me) to have a long time (relative to me) to enjoy their money.
My “discount rate” isn’t a single rate at all. Past a certain horizon, probably 30 years, it’s infinite. Before that it’s steep. I’m much more interested in money while I can enjoy spending it.
Time Value Arbitrage
If you actually offered me a billion dollar 30-year principle-only bond I wouldn’t just use it to light a bonfire. I’d go find a bank (or similar counter-party with a smooth discount rate) and offer it to them. They’d give me the $600M today minus whatever for their transaction costs and risk of non-payment. I’d have instant options for retirement. They’d have more money in the future. Everybody happy.
Which brings me back to my disconnect with my (younger) colleagues. Tech compensation is biased towards the long term:
4–5 year vesting schedules,
Further delays before liquidity [ed: and getting worse—topic for another day],
The risk of equity value dropping to zero and thus the need for a portfolio of equity, further extending the timeframe for The Big Score.
4 years versus 8 years versus 12 years to liquidity is no big deal when you’re 30. For me, though, 4 years is a significant fraction of the time I have left to enjoy money.
I don’t have an answer to this mismatch. Much of the work I do creates value over decades. In the time I have left I have to both:
Earn money so I have financial options &
Enjoy the time.
Is there a way to sell long-term benefits for short-term revenue? Technology compensation is stacked against me. At the very least I’m glad I have a frame for understanding my frustration.
Epilog: Finance Matters
Finance profoundly affects our work and our lives as geeks. It needs to be normal to talk about it. (There are also some cool concepts to explore in there — ask me about options pricing algorithms some time). Talking about it is part of helping geeks feel safe in the world.
Finance profoundly affects the options we will have for the rest of our lives. Gaining financial literacy and then acting sensibly based on that knowledge is low-cost and low-risk. I hope that talking about how financial tradeoffs change as context changes will encourage you to learn, apply what you learn, and benefit thereby.
[ed: Updated Mortality Curve]
Because Parkinson’s is now part of my life & because Parkinson’s doesn’t so much affect lifespan as it affects quality of life, this data doesn’t help much but I put it here for completeness.
Up betimes and to my office, where first I ruled with red ink my English “Mare Clausum,” which, with the new orthodox title, makes it now very handsome. So to business, and then home to dinner, and after dinner to sit at the office in the afternoon, and thence to my study late, and so home to supper to play a game at cards with my wife, and so to bed. Ashwell plays well at cards, and will teach us to play; I wish it do not lose too much of my time, and put my wife too much upon it.
As recent American military operations show, space underpins American forces’ ability to operate globally with unmatched precision. Its strategic importance is reflected in the President’s Cyber Strategy for America and the Joint Staff’s integration of space into non-kinetic effects alongside cyber, electronic warfare and information operations. Through the United States Space Force and initiatives like […]
NordSpace has secured early defense funding to develop a very low Earth orbit satellite, further broadening the Canadian startup’s push to build sovereign space capabilities beyond launch.
New spacesuits for Artemis lunar missions and the International Space Station may not be ready until after the end of the decade, a report by NASA’s inspector general warns.
Five years ago today, I launched The Honest Broker with lofty dreams but low expectations.
Back then, few people had heard of Substack—the name sounded like something in the engine room of the starship Enterprise. We’re going at Warp Nine on the Substack, captain, I don’t know if she can take any more. So I kept having to explain to people what a Substack actually was, and why I was shifting my focus to this new unproven platform.
To be honest, I also had to keep explaining it to myself. It sometimes felt like I was chasing a dream, not a reality—pursuing an elusive vision of a writing vocation beyond agents, editors, pitches, word counts, and constraining assignments.
I was a successful author of books back then, and (if I’m totally honest) probably too old to reinvent myself. There was a genuine risk I’d tarnish my reputation if I shifted to this new platform, and stumbled. And there are plenty of ways to stumble when you enter the do-it-yourself world of self publishing.
But I wanted that freedom to define my own vocation. And Substack was my best (maybe my only) chance to get to Warp Nine and beyond on my own terms.
Failure is not an option, I told myself. That meant I had to put all my energy into this unproven venture—just to avoid the downside. So I stopped taking all freelancing assignments. I stopped pitching books and articles to editors. As they say in Texas hold ‘em, I was all in, pushing every last chip into the center of the table.
At the end of the first day, I had three subscribers. Okay, at least that was a start.
Before I knew it, I was off on a wild roller coaster ride. In the aftermath, everything changed.
I started taking chances with my writing that I’d never even considered before. I wrote with a degree of self-disclosure and honesty that left me feeling somewhat exposed. But when you start writing directly for readers, without intermediaries, that begins to happen naturally. Above all, I decide to treat the reader as a trusted friend—with the hope that you might extend the same courtesy to me.
And guess what? I have almost 300,000 friends now. You can call them subscribers, if you want—but it feels more like a community here than a periodical. And that might just be the best part of it.
If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).
Ah, but the world also changed during these last five years, and this forced me into new arenas with high stakes.
The creative endeavors that are so important to me—music, books, visual arts, etc.—came under attack in bold new ways. Back when I launched The Honest Broker in 2021, I had no idea of the threat posed by centralized tech platforms and the AI slop they would unleash on our culture.
I soon realized that, if I had any integrity as a critic and advocate for the creative class, I would have to grapple with these threats. I would also need to find ways of supporting the struggling indie movements and emerging counterculture. After all, they are our only hopes if we want to survive outside the widening spheres of the tech command-and-control economy.
I refused to succumb to doom-and-gloom. I have faith in the transcendent power of art, and hoped to use my voice to celebrate the great creative work that still happens today—although mostly on the margins of mainstream culture.
All this gave more urgency to my efforts here on Substack. As it turned out, this is a good place to showcase indie creativity. In some ways, Substack is now the epicenter of the alternative culture.
Yes, it’s been a busy five years. And this birthday gives me a good excuse to look back, and share some highlights.
So below you will find links to the ten most popular articles from the last five years. These will give you a useful survey of what we do here, and why we do it.
I present these in rank order, starting with the most widely read piece in the history of The Honest Broker.
The Top 10 Articles from The Honest Broker (2021-2026)
Back in 2024, I warned of the rise of “dopamine culture”—a web-driven replacement of arts and entertainment with shorts burst of stimuli. I included this chart, which went viral, and sums up the changes we’re now facing.
The creative economy is getting degraded by the imposition of business and productivity metrics on artistic works—above all, an obsession with speed. In this article, I look at the popularity of ultra-fast techniques of culture consumption. But do you really want to spend your days listening to podcasts at triple speed?
I’d lost hope for chain bookstores—and then James Daunt took over as CEO of Barnes & Noble. He loves books, and made brave moves to put readers first. He stopped taking financial incentives from publishers. He gave freedom to people working in the stores to promote books they believed in, and not those with the biggest kickbacks. He refused to dumb-down offerings.
Customers took notice. After years of struggling for survival, Barnes & Noble is growing again. Executives in music, movies and other culture businesses ought to learn from this case study.
I start this article with testimony from a teacher:
You guys don’t know what’s going on in education right now. That’s fine—how could you know unless you were working in it? But I think that you need to know….
First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.
Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off.
When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in….
They’re not there.
And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.
Let me make clear: I don’t blame the students (or the teachers). Here, again, the root cause is dysfunctional technology implemented in a mad rush without regard to consequences.
Society cannot survive without a trustworthy system for preserving and protecting our accumulated learning and wisdom from the past. But in just the last few months, we see ominous signs of a collapse in the knowledge system.
Every once in a while, I write an advice column. They are surprisingly popular—which is a shock to my family members. I give them free advice all the time, and they fail somehow to recognize what a boon this is.
Diogenes seeking an honest man (18h century painting by Tischbein)
But readers here are more receptive, or perhaps just more polite. In any event, this article on how to judge character is one of the most popular all-time articles on The Honest Broker.
Not long ago, consumers were invited to purchase hot new tech products, and were excited about the opportunity. Not anymore. Now AI is forced on us everywhere.
Instead of customer service, I get a bot, not a person. When I stream music, bot slop is served up by the platform. When I want to write an email, a bot intrudes. Microsoft not only bundles unwanted AI with its software, but then forces a price increase on me for the privilege of using something I don’t even want.
This is stirring up an intense backlash from the general public. But will AI companies read the room? Or will the force-feeding of AI continue?
The big Internet platforms are now all oxymorons. ChatGPT makes you less likely to chat with family and friends. Social media stops you from having a social life. Relationship apps undermine your relationships. And now we have the latest paradox—the search engine that doesn’t want you to search.
For two years, I published a series of articles about disturbing practices at Spotify. But it was hard to find out what was really going on—the platform operates with so little transparency. But, finally, I was able to get behind-the-scenes details from Liz Pelly’s investigative work. The truth was even scarier than what I feared.
At the time of David Foster Wallace’s suicide in 2008, I barely understood the implications of his warnings about screen culture. I was optimistic about the impact of the Internet and digital interfaces, and so were many others.
But with the benefit of hindsight, I see how much he anticipated our current crisis—which I summarize here in eight points.
Before signing off, let me thank of each of you for your support during the first five years of The Honest Broker. Hey, if we keep working together, we just might get to Warp Ten.
I sat down with Elizabeth Spiers, founding editor of Gawker, former editor of The New York Observer and now a columnist for the Times, to discuss this year’s annual TPM Membership Drive and today’s media landscape. We discussed journalist independence, membership business models and why in the Trump Era only truly independent media can tell the truth without fear or favor.
I hope you give it a look.
Ready to join the TPM community as a member and support our team’s work? Just click right here.
I’ve described to you many times how TPM was saved by an early shift to building a membership system. We began it at the end of 2012 and started building it in earnest in about 2014. That gave us a five or six year head start on almost everyone else. We were thus much better positioned when the collapse of the digital ad economy hit in the couple years just before the pandemic. But today I’d like to share with you another part of that transition because it intersects with a fascinating story of Trump era corruption published today in the New York Times. It’s the story of a couple Syrian-born billionaires, already in business with the Trump family, lining up Trump’s personal support to secure another vast payday. In “a sign of how powerful Mr. Trump has become,” Times reporter Eric Lipton says after laying out the basic facts of the story, “To get almost anything done in the nation’s capital requires not alienating a vexed and vengeful president, and, ideally, pleasing him.”
It’s that personalist rule I want to focus on.
And to do that let’s go back to TPM ad business.
We were very successful for about a decade selling ads in the very specific and peculiar DC public affairs ad space, a very sui generis and odd advertising space which is in effect a subset of corporate America’s lobbying budgets. Every big corporation in America, as well as large organizations, has business before the people who run the country’s government. This can involve long-term policy aims. This can be regulatory issues. This can often be trying to keep the government out of regulating things. Everyone has interests before the federal government. The public affairs ad space is focused on talking to the people who run the federal government about a particular corporation or organization’s interests, needs and what the company does. They’re not selling their product. It’s not consumer advertising. It’s partly reputational advertising. But it’s not even entirely that. It’s corporation X talking to the people who run the federal government. Who is that? It’s everyone in the executive and legislative branches. It’s their staffs. It’s the vast array of interest groups and organizations and policy factories that exist in DC. It’s the lobbyists. It’s not just the folks they talk about in Schoolhouse Rock. It’s the whole para-government. It’s an extremely lucrative ad space. It’s the reason insider sheets and publications like Politico and Punchbowl all seem to defy the gravity that has affected the rest of the journalism ecosystem. The money has also increasingly moved from display advertising to the corporate-sponsored events these publications can host.
The additional factor was that to remain kosher in that world advertisers needed to be very careful about appearing to be on one political side or another. That governed what publications they advertised in. And that was a major problem for us. (It’s also a key anchor of “both-sides” journalism. But that’s a topic for another day.) We faced a major obstacle because we were perceived as being on the side of the Democrats. That’s not really true. Or it’s not nearly as simple as that. But in the world they operated in, it was true enough. It was true in their terms. So what to do about that?
What I came up with turned out to be an effective approach that also had the benefit of being true. The argument went like this. You may not like our readers — who tend to be highly educated, some flavor of liberal or left-wing, politically active and on the affluent side. You may not like us. But you (the advertiser) or you (the public affairs firm) actually need to be talking to these people because sometimes they will be in power. What’s more, those people tend to be involved in or adjacent to the origination of novel public policy questions. So again, you should save a few bucks from your ad buys with WaPo and Politico and Roll Call and do a placement with us too.
Ad sales in that space always involved a lot of hard work for us. But that was our core ad argument. And it helped us sell (relative to our scale) a lot of ads and build out a lot of this organization.
Now, as I mentioned earlier and in many other posts over the years, by the late teens the whole digital advertising world was coming under a lot of strain. We were already moving a lot of our focus and resources toward building our membership base and away from advertising. But advertising was still a big deal.
So now let me take you to the first months of 2017. I was down in D.C. for a few business-side meetings. This was when, you’ll remember, Trump had just been elected and believed he had a mandate to abolish Obamacare. He also controlled both houses of Congress to make that happen. I was meeting with staffers from one of the big health care trade associations. These folks didn’t necessarily support or oppose Obamacare. But its repeal and just what might replace it was a very big deal for them and their members. As I discussed TPM’s unique audience I got a question I’d never heard before. “Do you know if Donald Trump reads your site? Or … what about Jared Kushner?”
Needless to say, in a narrow sense, I didn’t have a terribly good answer to this question. But on a larger canvas this was something totally new, however it might impact us specifically. No one ever asked about what George W. Bush or Barack Obama read. Those weren’t personalist regimes or governments. Like virtually every other post-war American presidency — and many earlier administrations — there was a whole community of policy and political appointees who determined and executed administration policy. And there’s not just the executive branch to consider. What happens on Capitol Hill is just as important. Indeed, if you’re opposing what the administration wants it’s even more important.
This was different. Everything had tightened down to access to one man: Donald Trump. Then secondarily perhaps a handful of his top advisors or family members. Some ad budgets just froze because no one knew how to operate in a situation in which only Trump’s momentary whims really mattered. This conversation again confirmed to me our need to reduce our dependence on the D.C. ad market as much as possible. Toward the end of 2017, I pulled most of the resources we directed toward ad sales and redirected them toward growing our membership business. But it was also a revealing, bracing illustration of how the whole architecture of the D.C. para-government was reorienting itself, rewiring itself around the personalist aspirations and rule of Donald Trump. Out with the broader community of governance and policy-making, in with the whims and momentary impulses of one erratic and distractible guy. That has ramified through the lobbying world, the political communications world, the D.C. advertising world and more.
During Trump’s first term, his personalist rule was as much aspiration as reality. His cabinet was populated mostly with retired generals and corporate CEOs, most of whom didn’t like or respect him. Trump also hadn’t reduced his MAGA slogans to a set of policies, something he never did but a series of “America First” policy shops did largely do. All that changed in term two. Meanwhile, gutting much of the federal bureaucracy tightened the relationship between the president’s will and the actions of the government. As we see from that Times article, in addition to creating a kind of electoral strongman rule it also created an engine perfectly suited to corruption. Obviously there’s a ton of money sloshing around Washington and there always has been. But the old model was persuasion. Or there was at least a significant role for it. But why bother persuading Donald Trump? Or, really, what would that even mean? Why not just cut him a check? Or cut him in on a real estate deal. It’s more direct. It’s more reliable. It may even be cheaper. And we see it happening everywhere across the federal government today.
The result is that even though today’s young adults, and graduates in particular, are over-represented in the top quartile of the earnings distribution, they are also far more likely to be at the bottom than the top for earnings relative to reasonable expectations. In both the UK and US, even though only 10 percent of graduates are in the lowest earnings quartile, one in three is in the bottom bracket for earnings relative to expectations.
After the successful conclusion of the Artemis II mission earlier this month, focus turned to what comes next in NASA's roadmap to return humans to the Moon.
The biggest question concerned the readiness of lunar landers, the complex and essential machines needed to take astronauts down to the lunar surface and back up to orbit. And as Ars reported at the time, both SpaceX and Blue Origin have a significant amount of developmental and testing work left to do before even a prototype lander is ready.
But a secondary question has been the development of spacesuits, which are necessary for astronauts to exit their landers and explore the lunar surface. Less is publicly known about their development.
I hack on hardware a whole bunch, at Inanimate and at home.
AI is in the cloud. Interaction is in my room and in my hands. The job always begins by wiring together those two ends.
So the second thing I do, every single time, is bring up real-time messaging using JSON over websockets so I can connect my new device to a server, and have it emit events and listen for commands.
(The first thing I do is bring up the hardware and get basic blinkenlights.)
I want my on-device websockets client to have a super easy interface: give me an onMessage handler to deal with incoming messages.
I need built-in wi-fi config (so I can carry my prototype around to different places). And I don’t want to have to choose which libraries I’m going to use each time, I want good defaults.
That’s what Courier does, in just a handful of lines.
Honestly this isn’t rocket science. It’s no biggie. But it’s decisions I make and boilerplate I have to write for every new project, and I don’t want to vibe code and test this bit every time… I just want it to work. So I find Courier useful personally. And in the spirit of sharing, I hope it’s useful for you too.
Now your server can send real-time messages in JSON to your device, and your device can handle them. (It pulls out the type automatically for easy routing.)
That’s it!
You don’t need to hardcode wi-fi details in your code. Courier bundles WiFiManager for portable connectivity: if a network can’t be found, this library pops up its own access point and open a captive portal.
Also you get for free: sane auto-healing of both the socket and wi-fi, NTP time sync so the internal clock doesn’t drift and break your secure connection (which happens after about 72 hours), and an easy upgrade path to MQTT.
Try Courier with an M5Stick
ESP32 is a family of microcontrollers that has a special place in the hardware ecosystem: thanks to its low cost, built-in wi-fi and Bluetooth, and ease of development,
it is the platform of choice for new hardware startups
and it is great in mass-market production.
It even has an Arduino compatibility framework, so you can start with that and then iterate as you go. It’s pretty unique to go from bench to production like that.
So we love ESP32 at Inanimate.
A big player in the ESP32 ecosystem is M5: they’re China-based and have about 400 SKUs that wrap ESP32 microcontrollers in all kinds of enclosures with all kinds of peripherals and sensors. I had a blast getting a personal tour of M5 when I visited Shenzhen last year – they use their own sensors in an industrial IoT network to run and monitor their assembly line.
Now you may have seen an M5Stick or two on the socials. They’re super popular at least in my circle, people love hacking on them.
Pick up an M5Stick-C Plus2 on Amazon for less than 30 bucks! It’s an ESP32 with a screen, buttons, buzzer, gyro, battery and mic in a tiny bright yellow package.
This is what I made with real-time messaging plus my backend websocket server:
My lil traffic guy tells me the top pages on my blog in real-time ^_^ v
I have live cursors on every page of my blog (write-up and open source code) so that same system sends JSON messages via websockets to the M5Stick on my desk.
If a post gets big then I have my stick on my desk so I see immediately, then I pop over to the page and say hi to everyone with the cursor chat.
More visitors = more flowers!
Plus: shake-for-QR code, so I can quickly follow the link back to the top post.
It’s amazing when hardware starts to feel alive.
Do show me if you make anything too.
Try Courier now
To use Courier right now, first bring up your M5Stick or other ESP32 hardware so you know it works ok, and then go to the Courier repo on GitHub where you can find installation instructions, API docs and examples.
Greg Ip of the WSJ is one of my favorite economics writers, and you should always read what he writes. But in a recent post about manufacturing, I think he gets the main narrative wrong. Greg writes that America is in the middle of a “manufacturing revival”, which his headline writer calls a “stealth manufacturing boom”:
You won’t hear this from either critics or fans of President Trump’s tariffs, but there’s a manufacturing revival going on…Critics have focused on the fact that factory jobs have steadily slid since Trump took office last year…Unlike jobs, though, actual factory output has risen briskly, and may even be picking up speed. This stealth recovery, though, isn’t because of tariffs. Instead, credit goes to the most basic economic force of all: demand. The U.S. is good at making things that happen to be in big demand right now.
As a macro story, “AI boom cancels out tariffs” isn’t a bad description of the U.S. economy right now — including the manufacturing sector. But it’s just not right to say that the former is winning out when it comes to manufacturing.
Let’s look at the data. Here’s Greg’s evidence for the boom:
First, a few data points. Since January 2025, manufacturing jobs have indeed fallen by about 100,000 workers, or roughly 0.6%. In the same period, though, manufacturing production rose 2.3%, and manufacturing shipments, unadjusted for inflation, climbed 4.2%.
Regarding manufacturing shipments…why wouldn’t you adjust for inflation? Inflation is important! Shipping more dollars of stuff doesn’t indicate a boom if a dollar is worth much less. As it happens, there’s no price series that exactly corresponds to the data series for manufacturing shipments, but we can probably approximate it by using the producer price index for manufacturing. Here’s what we get when we do that:
Do you see a “stealth manufacturing boom” since January 2025? I sure don’t. What I do see is the continuation of a decades-long stagnation in American manufacturing.
Let’s look at some other measures. Here’s industrial production in the manufacturing sector:
I guess if you squint very hard, you can see a slight rise since the end of 2024. But really this is just the same story as before: American manufacturing has been stagnating since 2008.
Let’s look at gross manufacturing output, adjusted for output prices:
Same exact story, only this is quarterly data and the last quarter of 2025 looks bad.
“The National Guard were deployed on Aug. 18, and you can see a pullback in pending sales and showings for properties in the District of Columbia. I got the sense that people were already feeling uncertain, and now they’re a whole group of people saying, either (A) I hear there’s a lot of crime because we’re putting National Guard on the street, so I don’t want to move to D.C. Or (B) this is ridiculous. The federal government is in D.C., and I don’t want to be part of that kind of thing,” she said. “And it’s still taking some time for prospective buyers to want to take a look back at the District, particularly in the condo market.”
Send the Guard troops home now. And, of course, D.C. statehood now.
Do you see the same truth? That's how C.S. Lewis defined the essence of friendship. And that's what we gathered 130 people in New York to honor for Omacon two weeks ago. Seeing the same truth: A love of computers. Bespoke computers. Malleable computers. Our computers.
It's the kind of magic you can only really summon in person. We do our best online, but you instantly realize what an impoverished medium it is for creating real connections once you're all together in the same room.
So that's what we did. We connected. We shared our work, our passion, and our opinions about all these new Linux vibes. It happened in an absolutely gorgeous venue, generously offered for the occasion by Tobi and his event team at Shopify. The space had an almost comedy-club intimacy, with chairs just a few inches from the podium. Thanks to the single-track format, we made the most of that warm atmosphere. I gave the keynote.
I also got to meet Prime, TJ, Bjarne, Spencer, and Vaxry for the first time in person. Which is always a bit odd when you've been working together for a while over the internet. It feels so familiar, but like an unfinished agreement. And then, boom, it's signed with a handshake and a smile.
Same with getting to meet and talk to a ton of other Omarchy users from all walks of life. Many were programmers, but plenty were not. Some came from other Linux distributions, but most from either Windows or Mac. Everyone shared a passion for computers, though. Not just as instruments of action, but as delightful environments for play, learning, and connection.
It all added up to a massive recharge. I built Omarchy for myself, but sharing it makes it mean so much more. Seeing others enthusiastically embrace it as a starting point for their own Linux adventure is a real boost to the motivation needed to keep making it better. Because there's always more to do: more systems to cover with perfect compatibility, more corners to polish.
So that's what we're going to do, together. Make this distro reach more kindred spirits. Entice those who would love a bespoke, kintsugi system, but don't know where to start. It's never going to be for everyone, but that's also why it works as a beacon for those who choose to share the quest.
The Pentagon has canceled a ground control system for the US military's GPS satellite navigation network after the program's enduring problems "proved insurmountable," the US Space Force announced in a press release Monday.
The Global Positioning System Next-Generation Operational Control System, known by the acronym OCX, was officially canceled by Michael Duffey, the Pentagon's defense acquisition executive, on Friday, April 17, the Space Force said.
The decision to terminate the OCX program ends a 16-year, multibillion-dollar effort to design, test, and deliver a command and control system for the military's constellation of GPS navigation satellites. The program consisted of software to handle new signals from the latest generation of GPS satellites, GPS III, which started launching in 2018, along with two master control stations and modifications to ground monitoring stations around the world.
Announcing the third annual Progress Conference! The pace of technological change feels faster this year, and the progress movement is growing too. Gathering people together helps build community and establish a movement’s identity. We want this annual event to continue to connect and inspire people, catalyze new projects, and share ideas.
Thanks to everyone who made Progress Conference 2025 great: over 350 people attended, the event sold out in June, and there were hundreds of interested people on the waitlist. Several attendees again said it was the best conference they had ever attended. We shared our reflections here, including a list of write-ups from writers like Santi Ruiz, Ruy Teixeira, Ryan Puzycki, and more. We are excited to build on that momentum for 2026:
Hosted by: the Roots of Progress Institute, together with Abundance Institute, Foresight Institute, Foundation for American Innovation, Human Progress, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Institute for Progress, and Works in Progress.
When: October 8–11, 2026.
Where: Berkeley, CA, again at the Lighthaven campus that got great reviews the last two years.
Speakers: Keynote speakers include Dmitri Dolgov (Co-CEO, Waymo), Tyler Cowen (Mercatus Center), Stephen Winchell (Director, DARPA), John Martinis (Qolab; Nobel Laureate in Physics), and Michael Kremer (University of Chicago; Nobel Laureate in Economics). 20+ additional speakers will share ideas across three tracks: Human Talent & Potential, AI & Robotics, and Security & Resilience. Full speaker list so far here.
Attendees: We expect ~400 leaders across tech, policy, and culture; builders, founders, policymakers, storytellers, writers, and students. This is an invitation-only event, but anyone can apply for an invitation. Complete the open application by May 31st.
Program: Similar to 2025, the main two-day conference will happen all day on Friday and Saturday. Participants will attend talks on topics ranging from AI and robotics to housing construction to psychology and philosophy of builders, organize and run unconference sessions, mingle in the garden, and more. Thursday and Sunday are add-on days, with optional gatherings for interest groups and other activities like factory tours to Bay Area startups.
Children under 12 years old are welcome—must be accompanied by a parent at all times (except during childcare). We also plan to have on-site childcare available on Friday and Saturday with progress-themed programming.
Sponsors: Special thanks to our early sponsors Coefficient Giving, Astera Institute, Jane Street, Ken Broad, Works in Progress, Halcyon Futures, Inclusive Abundance, LENS, MNX, Archbridge Institute, Good Science Project, the Institute for Humane Studies, Circulate Planning & Policy, and the Foundation for Economic Education. Sponsorships make events like this one possible. We have more sponsorships available; view sponsorship opportunities here.
Our mission is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and to build a culture of progress. Now is a critical time for our culture: Technological change is happening. We can try to fight it, we can let it happen, or we can channel the path of technology consciously and deliberately towards human flourishing. It is ours to choose, as individuals and organizations.
Everyone knows the Luddites smashed looms. What is less appreciated is that the loom was the first serious programmable device — the direct ancestor of the computer. Thus, the Luddites weren’t just the first to resist automation. They were in some ways the first to attack AI.
The Jacquard loom, introduced in France circa 1805, used a chain of punched cards to control which threads were raised for each pass of the shuttle. The ability to change the pattern of the loom’s weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to computer programming. Babbage borrowed the idea directly for the Analytical Engine in the 1830s.
The Luddites lost–they were violently suppressed by the UK military–but more generally they lost because programmable looms brought patterned clothes to the masses.
Prior to its invention, the creation of complex patterns required skilled and labour-intensive manual labour, often involving large teams of weavers. With the Jacquard loom, a single operator could control the machine and produce intricate designs with relative ease.
This innovation greatly increased the speed and efficiency of textile production. It also opened up new possibilities for creativity and design, as the loom enabled the production of intricate patterns that were previously unattainable. The Jacquard loom contributed to the democratization of textile manufacturing, making intricate fabrics accessible to a wider audience
By the time Jacquard died in 1834, thousands of his looms were operating in Manchester, an epi-center of the Luddites riots. Moreover, just over 100 years later, Manchester birthed the Manchester Baby and the Manchester Mark 1, the first electronic stored-program computer. And who was hired to program the latter? None other than Alan Turing.
Ada Lovelace had foretold it all beautifully: “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
Addendum: I thank Claude for assistance on this post.
It’s been a few months since the last post so here are some blogs and newsletters I’ve started following since. Here are the previous posts and here’s my blogroll. I should maybe stop splitting that (and this) into blogs / newsletters because that distinction seems less useful than topics.
Building Slack – I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned this previously because I’ve been reading it a while. A history of Slack, the app(s) and the company.
Dan Catt’s Miniblog – As well as all the other things he does (newsletter, videos, plotting, printing, actual paid work) Dan’s got a newish blog. I like the simplicity of it: one photo and a few paragraphs.
Denis Defreyne – I can’t remember how I came across his weeknotes, but I’m enjoying them. More good weeknotes please!
Ephemeral 80s – Writing about objects from the 1980s could be very “Whatever happened to proper bin men?” but this blog’s few posts so far aren’t the usual things.
Jon Heslop – More good weeknotes! Even if they’re not actually every week.
Peter Rukavina – A good personal blog (since 1999) by a writer and letterpress printer in Canada.
Piccalilli – Really good, detailed posts about front-end development.
The Shape of Everything – “Mostly about Mac stuff,” by Gus Mueller who created Acorn, the image editing app I use, among other things.
Unsung – I recently whizzed through every post – over 250 since December – on this blog from Marcin Wichary about UI design, software quality, etc.
Super Chart Island – I’m adding this a few hours after publishing this post because having only just found it I know I’ll be following it. Articles about every best selling computer game in Britain from 1983 onwards.
Newsletters
Dan Catt’s Newsletter – I realised a few months ago that I hadn’t subscribed to Dan’s newsletter about his print studio etc, an error I swiftly rectified.
Django News – A weekly email with lots of links and info about the web development framework. Nicely done.
The Hiro Report – A weekly email containing a handful of interesting new apps, gadgets and other products. Always at least one thing I click on and ponder.
Transmissions from Nowhere – My old friend Ted is researching “the occult underbelly of surrealism and socialist movements, while exploring the eclectic art scene of Aotearoa NZ”.
Late Saturday evening, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was so unstable and angry after learning on April 3 that Iranians had shot down an American jet that his aides kept him out of the room as they received updates, simply telling him what was going on at important moments.
The journalists describe an erratic president who entered the war after Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced him the Iranian people would support such strikes and after his successful extraction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores convinced him the military could pull off another quick victory. He seemed to believe that if his gamble worked, he would be saving the world.
But while the strikes did indeed kill Iran’s top leaders and badly damage its military, the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz. Trump did not foresee this outcome, although he was warned of it. He told his team that the Iranian government would give up before it closed the strait and, if it did manage to close the strait, the U.S. military would handle it. The journalists report Trump has “marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed.”
Once the strait was closed, the president flipped back and forth between demanding other countries help reopen it and insisting the U.S. didn’t need any help, between wanting to fight and calling for negotiations. On April 5, Easter morning, after the recovery of the second airman, he turned to trying to scare Iranian leaders into reopening the strait and ending the conflict, warning: “Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”
He added an Islamic prayer to be as insulting as possible, he later told senior administration officials. That, like his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” was “improvisational,” officials told Dawsey and Linskey.
Seemingly unable to figure out how to find a way out of the war, Trump has told aides he wants to focus on other topics, and shifted his attention to fundraising events for the midterms or details for his ballroom. Clara Ence Morse and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post offered proof of Trump’s growing enthusiasm for his ballroom, noting that he has called public attention to it on about a third of the days this year, mentioning it less than tariffs or Iran but more than healthcare insurance or affordability. And his focus on it has increased as the year has progressed.
On Friday, April 17, after Israel and the government of Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire, Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz to commercial—but not military—vessels. Trump declared the strait was “completely open and ready for business” and that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including “never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” But Iran’s chief negotiator posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour and that all seven of them were false. Iranians said that if the U.S. continued its blockade of Iranian ports, as Trump said it would, they would close the strait again.
On Saturday, they did, firing on a tanker and two other vessels, all of which left the encounters safely. Yesterday Trump announced on social media that the USS Spruance intercepted an Iranian-flagged cargo ship, the Touska, as it tried to pass the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. According to Trump, the U.S. Navy “stopped them right in the tracks by blowing a hole in the engineroom” and then took control of the vessel. Trump posted: “We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “We are spending billions to keep our entire navy in the Strait to fecklessly fail to open a waterway that wasn’t closed until Trump’s pointless war of choice closed it. He’s just burning your tax money.”
The two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, begun on April 7, expires on Wednesday, April 22. On Friday, Trump said: “Maybe I won’t extend it, but the blockade is going to remain. But maybe I won’t extend it, so you have a blockade, and unfortunately, we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”
Today Nick Marsh of the BBC explained the fact pattern behind the general suspicion that someone is engaging in insider trading over Trump’s war announcements. After matching the president’s market-moving statements to the trade volume on a number of financial markets, Marsh found “a consistent pattern of spikes just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public.” Marsh notes a similar spike over Trump’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs of last April.
A new NBC News Decision Desk Poll out yesterday showed that 63% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, while only 37% approve. Fifty percent say they disapprove strongly, a sign that they will be highly motivated to vote in the midterms. Sixty-seven percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran, including 54% who strongly disapprove.
This morning, Trump’s social media account responded to the bad news of the weekend, including the Wall Street Journal story, by dismissing it. “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran,” the account posted. “[T]he results of Oct[ober] 7th, added to my lifelong opinion that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON, did. I watch and read the FAKE NEWS Pundits and Polls in total disbelief. 90% of what they say are lies and made up stories, and the polls are rigged, much as the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged. Just like the results in Venezuela, which the media doesn’t like talking about, the results in Iran will be amazing—And if Iran’s new leaders (Regime Change!) are smart, Iran can have a great and prosperous future! President DJT”
Over the weekend, David S. Cloud, Alexander Saeedy, and Nick Timiraos of the Wall Street Journal reported that officials from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasury and Federal Reserve officials if the U.S. will provide a financial backstop for the UAE if the Iran war continues to damage its economy.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) reminded an audience that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is “on the Saudi payroll for $2 billion,” a reference to the $2 billion a Saudi sovereign wealth fund controlled by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has invested in Kushner’s private equity firm.
“And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East. Apparently, while at the very same time, asking princes and sheikhs across the Arab world to give him billions more. If you’re watching this online, don’t take my word for it. Look it up for yourself.
“Can you imagine…a normal sitting U.S. ambassador just hitting up Saudi Grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars? But he’s a Trump. A royal. A princeling. The rules are for us, not for them.
“And it’s not just Jared getting in on the action. A company owned in part by Eric and Don Jr. has been pitching Gulf kingdoms on its drone interceptors during this war. The Financial Times reported: ‘Pete Hegseth’s broker looked to buy defense fund before Iran attack.’
“I tell you what, never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption. The Mar-a-Lago Mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.”
This afternoon, Trump’s account posted: “I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well.”
But things were not going very well. On Friday, Sarah Fitzpatrick published an article in The Atlantic that portrayed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel as a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endanger our national security.
After Patel’s behavior in the locker room of the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team, during which he was filmed shouting and chugging a beer, Ryan J. Reilly, Gordon Lubold, and Katherine Doyle of NBC News reported that Trump was unhappy with Patel over the incident. Shortly afterward, Patel directed the FBI to fire at least half a dozen FBI employees who had been connected to the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, the Trump Organization’s property in Florida, where Trump was storing classified documents he retained after his first term.
Over the weekend, Patel seemed to try again to curry favor with the president. He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that the Department of Justice is about to make arrests related to the 2020 presidential election that Trump insists—falsely—was rigged. “We have the information that backs President Trump’s claim,” Patel said.
This morning, Patel sued The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for $250 million for publishing “a sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece,” full of “obviously fabricated allegations.” The suit says “Director Patel does not drink to excess…, and this has not, and has never been, a source of concern across the government.”
The Atlantic says: “We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel, and we will vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit.” Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch notes that the discovery phase of this defamation lawsuit, during which parties testify under oath, “could be quite something.”
And yet at the end of the day, it was Trump’s secretary of labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who abruptly resigned after accusations that she has abused her position, drinks on the job, and has had an affair with a subordinate. An investigation into her conduct was nearing its completion. She is the third person to leave Trump’s cabinet: all are women.
When asked about Patel’s fitness for office, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “Kash Patel is deeply unqualified, deeply unserious, and his behavior is deeply un-American. And he should no longer be the FBI director. That shouldn’t surprise anyone that I hold that view because he never should have been confirmed to begin with. And we have to stop putting all the blame on the people who nominated this incompetent, toxic, malignant individual. What about the people who confirmed him? And it’s extraordinary to me that Senate Republicans confirmed people like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and Kash Patel. All of them. Deeply unserious and deeply unqualified. And now the country is paying the price because of the individuals that Donald Trump chose to nominate as part of the Trump cartel that’s now doing great damage to the nation, and the fact that Senate Republicans, like helpless sheep, went along with it all.”
Tim Cook, in a letter addressed, simply, “To the Apple community”:
For the past 15 years I’ve started just about every morning the
same way. I open my email and I read notes I received the day
before from Apple’s users all over the world.
You share little pieces of your lives with me and tell me things
you want me to know about how Apple has touched you. About the
moment your mom was saved by her Apple Watch. About the perfect
selfie you captured at the summit of a mountain that seemed
impossible to climb. You thank me for the ways Mac has changed
what you can do at work and sometimes give me a hard time because
something you care about isn’t working like it should.
In every one of those emails I feel the beating heart of our
shared humanity. I feel a sense of deepening obligation to work
harder and push further. But most of all, I feel a gratitude that
I cannot put into words, that I somehow got to be the person on
the other end of those emails, the leader of a company that
ignites imaginations and enriches lives in such profound ways it
defies description. What an honor and a privilege it has been.
In its annual Environmental Progress Report released today,
Apple marked progress toward Apple 2030, the company’s
ambitious goal to be carbon neutral across its entire footprint
by the end of this decade. Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions in
2025 remain down over 60 percent compared to 2015 levels,
holding constant from 2024 even in a year of significant
business growth. The report highlights additional progress in
renewable energy, materials innovation and recycling, water
stewardship, and zero waste.
On the packaging front:
Apple completed the transition to 100 percent fiber-based
packaging last year, fulfilling its pledge to remove plastic from
packaging by 2025. Over the past 10 years, Apple engineers and
designers have developed alternatives to common packaging
components, replacing plastic screen protectors and trays with
versions made with recycled or responsibly sourced paper. They
also innovated to make packaging more recyclable, designing the
largest boxes, like for the new Studio Display XDR, to collapse
into smaller pieces that fit into a home recycling bin. Apple
avoided more than 15,000 metric tons of plastic in the past five
years alone — the equivalent of about 500 million plastic water
bottles.
Apple made this shift while not compromising a whit on the design quality of its packaging. If anything, I’d say Apple products have better packaging than ever. How they look, how they feel, the experience of opening them. Some of the company’s most talented and most effective designers work on the packaging team.
Earlier in the announcement:
As Apple celebrates Earth Day with its teams, partners, and
customers around the world — including with a special offer for
users who bring in their Apple devices for recycling at
participating Apple Store locations — here’s a look at the
progress the company is making across its environmental
initiatives.
That special offer, the 2026 Earth Day Promotion, is a PDF. That PDF file is not the work of Apple’s best designers. Jiminy.
It’s a profoundly different feeling today than the last time Apple’s CEO announced his transition to chairman of the board, and his chosen successor was promoted to replace him as CEO.
In August 2011, Steve Jobs was sick. For years he’d managed to stay a step, sometimes two, ahead of the pancreatic cancer he’d been battling since 2003, but no more. Jobs wrote, in his letter to the company’s board and the Apple community: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”
Unfortunately, indeed. Cook inherited a company with extraordinary potential growth in front of it, but in deep existential grief. He led the company — and its community — through that grief and achieved that potential.
The transition Apple and Tim Cook announced today is entirely different. No one’s hand was forced. There is nothing unpleasant. Apple’s business is firing on nearly all cylinders. This year’s iPhone 17 lineup is arguably the best ever. The Mac is more popular than ever — exemplified just last month by the introduction of the $600 MacBook Neo, a machine so fun, with a price so low, that the only problem is that it’s selling so well that Apple is reportedly running out of A18 Pro chips to put in it. The iPad lineup is strong, AirPods remain dominant, and I see Apple Watches on wrists everywhere I go.
Tim Cook is 65 years old, has been CEO for 15 years, and is going out on top. Looking only at the numbers, Cook is the GOAT. But Cook, by all accounts, would be the first to tell us he doesn’t want to be judged by the numbers alone. Or as he famously put it himself at a shareholders meeting, early in his reign, “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”
Jobs made the right pick for his successor. And while only time will tell, it sure feels today like Cook has too. Cook has never been a product person and to his credit, he never once pretended to be. (That was John Sculley’s downfall, in a nut.) With the table set by the budding iPhone and nascent iPad products Jobs left behind, Apple didn’t need a product person at the helm in the 2010s. They needed someone to let the existing products blossom and expand. Today, it feels to me like Apple needs a product guy at the helm again. Someone with the itch to spearhead the creation of new things. Of course Cook’s successor came from within the company’s ranks. And John Ternus, more than anyone else at the company, seems like that person.
Here’s Cook, quoted in Apple’s announcement today: “John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor. He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future. I could not be more confident in his abilities and his character, and I look forward to working closely with him on this transition and in my new role as executive chairman.”
Regarding that new role, Apple’s announcement states:
As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects
of the company, including engaging with policymakers around
the world.
Back in December, linking to the Financial Times’s blockbuster scoop accurately foretelling this announcement, I predicted:
I would also bet that Cook moves into the role of executive
chairman, and will still play a significant, if not leading, role
for the company when it comes to domestic and internationalpolitics. Especially with regard to
Trump.
Sounds right. The only problem I can see with this arrangement is the potential for Cook to stand over Ternus’s shoulder — keeping Ternus in his shadow. That doesn’t sound like Tim Cook to me. A Bob Iger situation, I do not foresee.
After I gathered my thoughts back in August 2011, under the title “Resigned”, I wrote:
Apple’s products are replete with Apple-like features and details,
embedded in Apple-like apps, running on Apple-like devices, which
come packaged in Apple-like boxes, are promoted in Apple-like ads,
and sold in Apple-like stores. The company is a fractal design.
Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility. Directness.
Truth. Zoom out enough and you can see that the same things that
define Apple’s products apply to Apple as a whole. The company
itself is Apple-like. The same thought, care, and painstaking
attention to detail that Steve Jobs brought to questions like
“How should a computer work?”, “How should a phone work?”,
“How should we buy music and apps in the digital age?” he also
brought to the most important question: “How should a company
that creates such things function?”
Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is
Apple itself.
I remember writing that piece with such a heavy heart. It hurt. But there was hope. Those words stand up, and I can quote them today in the context of Cook handing the mantle to Ternus with nothing but the hope, and none of the hurt.
CEOs typically leave companies in one of three ways: with a hook, on a gurney, or on their own terms. Cook, seemingly, is doing it entirely on his own terms. One can reasonably argue with certain of his strategic decisions over the years. I certainly have. But I don’t think you can argue that Cook ever did anything for any reason other than what he believed was in the company’s best interest. Not his personal interest. Not employees. Not users. Not shareholders. Not developers (ha!). The company’s interest always came first. There’s a nobility to his singleminded focus on Apple itself, as an abiding institution, and his faith that what’s best for Apple will ultimately prove best for everyone involved with it: employees, shareholders, users, and, yes, even developers. If he’s made mistakes, they’re errors in taste, not mistaken priorities. He is the ultimate company man at the ultimate company.
Cook has transformed Apple in his own image. The company is much more predictable now than it ever was, or could have been, under Jobs. It now runs on an annual schedule that can be printed on a calendar. There is far less drama, and no scandal. And there is seemingly no drama, at all, in this particular transition, despite the incredibly high stakes and the (justifiably) large egos in Apple’s leadership team. Cook inherited the greatest company in the world. He’s handing it over to Ternus in even better shape than what Jobs handed to him. Even the timing of the announcement and the transition, on Apple’s annual calendar, seems perfect. Cook oversees one last WWDC in June, then Ternus takes the helm on the cusp of Apple’s announcement of new iPhones in September. It’s hard to imagine a more orderly, confidence-inspiring, exciting-but-not-at-all-surprising, this-feels-right way to do this.
All of that, I am sure, is just the way Cook wants it.
And, if you agree that Apple itself was Jobs’s greatest product, Cook really is a product person after all.
Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week and shipping them out next week. Go ahead and place your order now, while I gather my thoughts about today’s Apple leadership news.
The initial heart transplant was not greeted with universal applause. Shortly after Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the procedure for the first time in 1967, people bombarded his hospital in South Africa with letters that characterized the doctor as a butcher and a ghoul. A fellow cardiologist likened the operation to a form of cannibalism. Many people criticized Barnard for picking one life over another and playing God.
It did not take long for most of this criticism to dissipate. Within a couple of years, the public became accustomed to the idea of heart transplants and then they welcomed them. Last year, about 10,000 people worldwide had heart transplants, while nearly 165,000 people received a kidney, liver, lung or pancreas.
There would be far more organ transplants if there were more viable organs available. Which brings us to the next medical and ethical quandary that society may soon face.
A three-year-old startup named Kind Biotechnology has begun work on what it calls an integrated organ network, or ION. This acronym undersells what Kind is making, which is a collection of organs that can be grown inside of an animal’s womb and then harvested for transplantation. Cue the gasps from some and the cheers from others.
By creating a series of genetic edits, Kind can alter the development of an embryo so that it forms organs without also forming limbs, a central nervous system and brain. The result is a group of organs growing in the womb. It sounds like science fiction, but Kind has already done this hundreds of times in mice and now rats, according to Justin Rebo, the company’s founder and CEO.
In the months ahead, Kind plans to expand its technology to larger mammals like pigs and possibly sheep with the hopes of producing organs good enough to endure the transplantation process. One day, Rebo expects that humans might be able to use these animal-grown organs to deal with medical emergencies and to help people live longer.
“We’re working on a platform to build abundant organ medicine, which we believe is a path not only to treating organ failure, but eventually to being more broadly medically useful and even impacting human lifespan,” Rebo says. “The point of medicine is to make people live longer and healthier lives. That’s what it’s always been. And that’s what we’re working on.”
TENS OF thousands of people languish waiting for viable organs each year. Scientists have been attempting to solve this problem for decades by trying to create individual organs in their labs. In some cases, they take the cells of an organ and then coax them into developing more fully to make, say, a lab-grown kidney or liver. Companies like United Therapeutics and eGenesis have also been editing the genes of pig organs to make them more suitable for human use.
While there has been some success with these approaches, Rebo considers them too basic and limited to produce the full complement of organs that humans need. He contends that you can’t create the best organs in isolation and that they need to develop alongside each other. “The heart relies on the kidney to modulate the system environment in the right way to allow it to live and grow,” he says. “And both rely on the lungs and the liver and so forth, and both need access to nutrients, which is provided by the intestines.”
Justin Rebo at the KindBio lab
Rebo is a doctor and scientist with a long history in the bio-tech and longevity fields. And he’s not alone on this quest to create organs inside of what could be called headless bodies. R3 Bio, co-founded by John Schloendorn and Alice Gilman, is pursuing similar technology, although without much detail as of yet. Gilman has talked about trying to create animal models that could be used for medical testing so that researchers would no longer need to experiment on living, conscious mammals like primates. RenewalBio in Israel is also believed to be working in this area, trying to build organs from a patient’s own cells. (Schloendorn and Rebo were previously collaborators.)
Before even getting to the ethical considerations of Kind’s technology, there are myriad practical, scientific matters to confront.
Rebo’s vision is that you might grow a collection of organs inside of a pig’s or other animal’s womb and then have those organs placed into humans. To do this well, there would need to be genetic edits made to the organs so that the human bodies would accept them. In addition, you would need to mature the organs outside of the womb so that they could grow and be suitable for humans of different ages.
All of these are incredibly difficult technological challenges, and it’s unclear that we can actually pull them off in anything resembling a cost-effective, repeatable fashion in the nearish future. Rebo, though, talks matter of factly about taking today’s lab research and making it more concrete. He thinks all the major problems are solvable via advances with genetic editing technology and hardware systems that can support the development of organs outside of the body by helping regulate hormonal, immune and other functions.
“So initially the transplants would be into neonatal pigs or neonatal whatever larger animal that we use,” he says. “But even beyond that, I think many people don’t know is that there are case reports where kidneys, for example, were transplanted from a seven-month infant into an adult and they were life sustaining. I want to emphasize that we don’t have a plan to do a human system. But we have seen that you don’t have to keep these things going for an extended period of time for their organs to be useful.”
The notion of a body being able to develop in a healthy fashion without a central nervous system and brain to aid in the process seems hard to fathom. This, however, does happen on occasion in nature. There are babies born without brain stems and without their neocortex, which is responsible for cognition, and that survive for years – the most famous example being Baby K.
The ethical questions are equally challenging. There’s something very off-putting about the idea of headless meat sacks being grown for harvest.
That said, organ transplantation is unpleasant as is. There’s a black market for organs that is the stuff of nightmares. And, in general, sick old people are sitting around waiting for young people to have a car crashes or some other horrific accidents so that they might get an organ and live a few more years, which is a grim calculus. Beyond all of that, what we already do in terms of harvesting sentient animals for food is abhorrent, and most of us seem to deal with this just fine. It does not feel like a huge leap, at least to me, to think about taking an organ from a brainless sack to save a child or a loved one.
“I understand that this looks weird,” Rebo says. “But ultimately, it’s a system that prioritizes ethics and prioritizes something that can actually work. We can grow these things with our present technology.”
While Kind must currently grow the organs in the womb of an animal, there are futures where similar functions could take place inside of artificial wombs. We wrote earlier this year about Becoming Bio, which has developed an artificial placenta. Over the last couple of years, scientists have also made huge strides in the perfusion systems that keep organs functioning outside of the body. Bexorg does this with brains. And Science Corp. recently unveiled a whole perfusion product line.
Rebo, 47, grew up in Pennsylvania – one of those kids who built Tesla coils and lasers for fun. After obtaining his medical degree in 2010, Rebo went right into bio-tech working with embryonic stem cells and then on parabiosis, where an old animal and a young animal have their bodies fused together to share a circulatory system.
“Ever since I was very young, I thought that the wisest and best people in the world must be working on the obviously most important problem, which is to make people live longer and healthier lives,” he says.
He started KindBio about three years ago after growing dissatisfied with the rate of progress in the longevity field. Today, the company, located in New Hampshire, has a handful of employees. Rebo declines to say how much money the company has raised or from whom.
Kind has spent much of its time researching and identifying the genes that disrupt the formation of the central nervous system and brainstem and other genes that lower the metabolic demands of the organ systems to make them easier to sustain. “They’re not small, tiny cutouts,” he says. “We’re talking about taking out multiple exons.”
Rebo says that Kind has proven out its technology in mice and will move to larger animals this year – first in pigs and then possibly sheep. The company has yet to try a transplant with the organs it has grown and does not expect to do so until the work on the larger animals begins. “The timeline in the larger systems is longer than in mice because mice grow very fast and the generation time is short,” Rebo says. “I would like to have large animal IONs in less than three years and would consider the goal of that stage of research to be a transplant and demonstrating that the organs are life-sustaining.”
The technology, if it works, will start out expensive. Rebo, though, can see a future where the price comes down enough to perhaps open the organ work up to other uses beyond transplants. It could, for one, help with animal testing of drugs. “From there, you can imagine getting to a level of scale and cost effectiveness where you could even look at ethical animal products more broadly. You could imagine a leather application or even a meat application.”
Paul Waldman died on March 22, 2026. As far as I know we weren’t related, but he hovered around my Google alerts for years, a well-known painter and sculptor, though not famous enough to otherwise reach one like me who doesn’t know much about the art world. Because I never bothered to read more about him, I was unaware that the artist and the bodybuilder were the same person.
The bodybuilder Paul Waldman — now this version of my namesake I was more familiar with. Not that I knew anything about him either; he was represented by a single photo on the cover of the August 1954 issue of Strength & Health magazine, popping up in the “Images” tab of those same searches. The 17-year-old Waldman poses on rocks before a waterfall, hairless below the neck, muscles inflated in a way that shouts “This teenager spent the last two years doing a million pushups,” which he apparently did. He adopts a serious expression, no doubt trying to look older than his baby face shows him to be. But those abs! They bulge to the point where they just might burst.
He entered bodybuilding contests, and in 1953 was awarded the title of Most Ideal High School Physique. The next year, he was crowned Mr. New York City. Strength and Health magazine featured him in a cover story that took the measure of his unusual strength.
“A press on bench with 355 pounds is a worthy mark for anyone, but for a 17-year-old youth it is phenomenal,” the article said. “In the basic exercises, Paul Waldman is one of the best performers in his age group.”
The magazine also noted another gift.
“Paul Waldman, known to Strength and Health readers for his fine physique, may someday be well known to art lovers for his talent as a painter,” it said. “He is applying himself diligently to his studies and shows promise of reaching prominence in the field of fine arts.”
I never had much talent for visual art, but this Paul Waldman I recognized as a version of myself the first time I saw that photo. The short Jewish kid who one day decided to remake his body into something more formidable through relentless calisthenics in his bedroom? That was me a few decades after the prior Paul Waldman, doing pullups on a bar I squeezed into the doorframe of my closet. I think I know the feeling of teenage compulsion that drove him.
In 1954, the word “bodybuilder” did not denote what it would come to mean a couple of decades later, those roided-out monsters of inhuman proportions who can’t buy regular clothes or fit in an airplane seat. Just who declared Paul Waldman the possessor of the “Most Ideal High School Physique” in 1953 is unclear; this honor is mentioned without elaboration in the obituary and another Times article from 1993 about his artwork. But at the time, bodybuilding was a curiosity, not far from the realm of circus sideshows with mustachioed “strongmen” in striped singlets.
And in the photo, he’s just not that big, certainly not by today’s standards. Sure, those abs are something else, but if you saw him fully clothed he’d look like a regular person. Even so, in the 1950s regular people didn’t “go to the gym” as part of their weekly routines. Fitness as a mass obsession with an entire economy built around it was still years away (Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s book Fit Nation: The Gains & Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession recounts this history), and the distance between a civilian and a semi-pro muscleman was not too large.
And despite the grunts of a few young men tossing medicine balls around at the YMHA, bodybuilding was definitely not a Jewish thing. That didn’t stop young Jews from yearning after physical prowess of a kind that had traditionally not been valued in their community, though. And they had their heroes; the year after Paul Waldman’s cover appearance, Sandy Koufax would make his major league debut and go on to become the greatest Jewish athlete in history, and perhaps the greatest pitcher who ever lived (look him up, kids).
Koufax too was not that distant in appearance from the ordinary boys in Brooklyn among whom he grew up; he was a man of average height and weight, and had you seen him at the butcher’s without knowing who he was you wouldn’t have pegged him for an athlete. Even his left arm, an instrument of such power it might as well have been delivered to Moses on Mt. Sinai as a gift to the Jews, was a fragile thing, requiring lengthy ice baths after every game (state-of-the-art physical therapy at the time) and forcing Koufax’s retirement at the tender age of 30.
No one would write inspiring books about Paul Waldman’s bodily achievements; the glory of his abs notwithstanding, it was his art that made a lasting impression on the world. Which is a lesson for young men — or any men — wondering what they’re supposed to do and supposed to be.
That lesson could not be more urgent. We are ruled by someone who embodies every sordid and poisonous aspect of manhood, packed into one repulsive soul. Your government plans to erect an MMA arena on the White House lawn so the nation can celebrate 250 years of democracy by watching young men beat each other bloody. Meanwhile, a thousand “influencers” scream that masculinity can be found in blasting your lats and maxxing your jawline and pouring contempt on women and measuring yourself relentlessly by whether you can make other men feel bad about themselves.
So the lesson of the late Paul Waldman in his duality is this: Sure, go ahead and work out. Exercise is healthy for both body and mind. But that will not make you a man. Much more importantly: Create something. It could be art, but it doesn’t have to be. Put something worthwhile into the world that wouldn’t have been there without you. Forget about being macho and be a mensch. One day your muscles will wither and die, but if you do it right, the things you made and the effect you had on other people will not.
Paul Waldman, Flowers and Helpers, 2010
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This paper compares agentic AI systems and human economists performing the same causal inference tasks. AI systems and humans generally obtain similar median causal effect estimates. While there is substantial dispersion of estimates across model instances, the human distributions of estimates have wider tails. Using AI models as reviewers to compare and rank “submissions,” the following ranking emerges regardless of reviewer model: (1) Codex GPT-5.4, (2) Codex GPT-5.3-Codex, (3) Claude Code Opus 4.6, and (4) Human Researchers. These findings suggest that agentic AI systems will allow us to scale empirical research in economics.
I enjoy the name of the author, namely Serafin Grundl. Here is the paper, via Ethan Mollick. You could interpret these results as showing the AIs have fewer hallucinations. And just to reiterate a key point from the paper:
The second part of this paper is an AI review tournament in which “submissions” (codes and write-ups) from humans and the AI models are compared and ranked against each other. The reviewers are the following AI models: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4. For each review the reviewer is asked to write a report comparing four submissions (human, Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3-Codex, GPT-5.4). Each reviewer model writes comparison reports for the same 300 comparison groups. The average rankings are strikingly similar across reviewer models: (1) Codex GPT-5.4, (2) Codex GPT-5.3-Codex, (3) Claude Code Opus 4.6, and 2(4) Human Researchers.
This post has benefited from generous contributions from Austin Vernon, Malcolm Davis, Sam D’Amico, and others who do not necessarily endorse the conclusions of this piece. I will follow Australian spelling conventions in this piece.
I’ve written a few pieces over the years about Australian energy and economicpolicy, and now I’m dipping my toes into defence. The usual disclaimers apply; this post represents my opinions only. I’m a dual US/Australia citizen, resident in Los Angeles, where I founded and run Terraform Industries, a solar synthetic fuel tech startup. I write this as someone who is familiar with the 2023 Defence Strategic Review, the 2024 and 2026 National Defence Strategies, and the 2024 and 2026 Integrated Investment Programs (IIP). While each successive document diagnoses the strategic environment with increasing accuracy it allocates capital against a threat model that no longer exists.
Australia spends nearly AUD $60B/year (US $40B/year) on defence, about 2% of GDP. The 2026 National Defence Strategy commits to raising this to 3% by 2033 and allocates $425B over the coming decade, but increased expenditure won’t buy increased security if it’s spent on weapons that are no longer determinative.
To avoid burying the lead, it is my contention that Australia should be able to achieve far more bang for its buck running competitive, lean, mean domestic weapons development programs focused on the newly demonstrated and increasingly determinative drones-of-various-kinds platforms. This is in stark contrast to the existing practice of spending >90% of acquisitions funding on foreign weapons platforms and much of the remainder on outrageously expensive failed development programs, such as the Hunter class anti-submarine frigate. This ship, which will spend eight years under construction until first launch in 2032, was based on a British design and will end up costing over $7b, per hull!
Let’s contrast this to the US, hardly a paragon of lean defense spending. $7b would buy you a Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carrier – including the planes. It would buy you the complete ground up development costs of nuclear attack submarines, with enough left over to pilot ballistic missile submarines and develop the original trident missile. It would buy you the complete ground up development of Falcon 9 and Starlink. That’s just for a single Hunter-class hull – Australia is currently planning to build six!
Why maintain a defence force at all?
The primary purpose is to maintain Australia’s capacity for peaceful self determination indefinitely into the future. That is, absolute national sovereignty requires Australia to maintain the ability to secure its territory, deter hostile aggression, and control its destiny.
Without putting too fine a point on it, the purpose of the Australian Defence Force is to ensure that the calamity that befell Ukraine can never occur to Australia. While focused on Australia, this analysis could also be translated with minimal changes to other middle powers.
Australia is rich (US$69,360 GDP per capita), populous (28m + 1m diaspora), educated, peaceful, democratic, liberal, and financially stable. It has enormous territory and unmatched natural resources. It has much that foreign powers covet through either open or covert warfare.
Australia’s current GDP exceeds that of every WW2 belligerent in 1940, even the US. It exceeds the combined economic power of all the Axis powers. And yet somehow, in 1940, in a world before computers, reliable diesel engines, modern healthcare, all the WW2 powers were able to churn out planes, tanks, ships, submarines, and munitions. The US produced nearly 300,000 planes. Even countries with terrible climates that are still poverty stricken in 2026, like Russia, were able to produce 160,000 aircraft back in the early 1940s.
In contrast, wealthy, modern Australia was able to assemble 73 F-18 fighters from mostly imported components between 1984 and 1990, and nothing for the last 36 years.
This is a festering problem that is now inviting catastrophe.
What the strategy documents say
The Albanese government’s position on Australian defence rests on three documents released in three consecutive biennial cycles.
The 2023 Defence Strategic Review (Smith / Houston) concluded that the ADF is “not fully fit for purpose” and that the historical ten-year warning window before major conflict no longer applies. It accepted 105 of 108 classified recommendations and identified six priorities: AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines, long-range strike and domestic munitions manufacture, northern base hardening, workforce retention, rapid translation of disruptive technology into ADF capability, and deepening Indo-Pacific partnerships.
The 2024 National Defence Strategy introduced two doctrinal inventions that now anchor Australian defence planning: National Defence (a whole-of-nation concept spanning maritime, land, air, space, cyber) and the Strategy of Denial (the cornerstone of Defence planning, intended to deter adversaries from projecting power through Australia’s northern approaches). Deterrence was elevated to Australia’s primary strategic defence objective, above the previously co-equal “shape” and “respond.” The accompanying IIP committed $330B through 2033/34.
The 2026 National Defence Strategy, released last week on 16 April 2026, builds on rather than departs from the 2024 framework. It raises the fiscal envelope to $425B over the decade, adds $14B over the forward estimates, and benchmarks defence spending at 3% of GDP by 2033. It lists seven IIP priorities: enhanced undersea warfare via nuclear-powered submarines, accelerated lethal maritime capabilities, expanded long-range strike, integrated air and missile defence (IAMD), expanded autonomous and uncrewed systems, counter-UAS for critical infrastructure, and resilient multi-orbit satellite communications. It claims lessons from Ukraine and the Middle East have been absorbed, and it emphasizes self-reliance, industrial resilience, and civil preparedness.
This is, on the face of it, a reasonable set of documents. The strategic diagnosis is correct. The Strategy of Denial is the right doctrine for a middle power: deterrence-by-punishment and deterrence-by-retaliation are beyond Australia’s resources, as Retired Major General Mick Ryan has noted. The rhetorical emphasis on sovereign industrial base, Ukraine lessons, and autonomous systems reads well.
The problem is the capability acquisition list that actually gets funded.
Why the strategy will fail in execution
The unifying defect of the current program is a mismatch between the rhetorical doctrine (denial, mass, self-reliance, Ukraine lessons) and the capital allocation (foreign-sourced exquisite platforms, long lead times, workforce-intensive crewed systems, single-digit hull counts).
Four critiques from inside the Australian strategic-policy establishment make this point from different angles, and I quote them here to establish that this diagnosis is not idiosyncratic:
The Lowy Institute (2026) describes NDS 26 as “modest spending, welcome reforms” — a continuation of NDS 24 rather than a departure. It notes that Australian defence policy is developed within a narrow Canberra circle largely insulated from external scrutiny, and that Minister Marles’s dismissal of think-tank and retired-officer input at the National Press Club reflects a structural problem, not a tactical misstep.
Meanwhile, the same author (retired Major General, CSIS fellow Mick Ryan) remarks on his Substack that AUKUS Pillar 1 plus conventional ADF modernization cannot both be funded at current spending — one will squeeze the other. He also documents that military star-rank officers grew 33% over the past decade while enlisted ranks shrank 1%, which is difficult to reconcile with the claim of a more effective, faster-moving force.
Sam Roggeveen argues that increased spending may be necessary but buys us little if it only increases co-dependency on US operational capability, undermining the premise of improving self reliance!
Asia Pacific Defence Reporter summarized the ADF press release, but comments immediately identified the weaknesses with respect to environmental shifts since 2024 that the new document does not absorb: weakening US alliance commitments, reduced US Asia deployments, two theaters of successful low-cost mass drone warfare, and chronically underfunded British defence investment. Despite all of this, AUKUS Pillar 1 remains the centerpiece of Australian acquisition.
The argument I make below starts from these observations and pushes further.
The electric stack has inverted the offense/defence cost curve
The core technical fact that Australian defence planning has not absorbed is what Packy McCormick and Sam D’Amico call the Electric Slide: the five foundational technologies of the electric stack — motors, batteries, power electronics, sensors, and edge compute — have each decosted by roughly 100× over the past 30 years. The guidance electronics that in 1990 required a government munitions program now ship as the cheapest component in a disposable toy.
The practical result, demonstrated across Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Red Sea, the cartel conflicts in northern Mexico, and now the Persian Gulf, is a cost-exchange regime in which a $500–$5,000 drone can plausibly destroy a $1M–$100M asset. Ukraine produced more than 2 million drones in 2024, and doubled that in 2025. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which in 2021 was significantly larger than the Royal Australian Navy, has been reduced by approximately 45% by an adversary with no navy at all. The dominant ships were destroyed by autonomous surface vessels and anti-ship missiles at a cost-exchange ratio on the order of 1:1000. Houthi operations have forced US carrier strike groups into standoff. Cartel drones routinely contest Mexican state control in Michoacán and Sinaloa.
This is not a speculative threat. It is the observed empirical base rate of every live conflict since 2020. The chart below shows just how cheaply an adversary can now asymmetrically convert exquisite war fighting systems into scrap metal.
Australia’s existing force, and the force envisioned by IIP 26, is built to engage a different set of adversaries under a different set of cost-exchange assumptions. If a legacy system is operated as part of an integrated force with robust Integrated Air and Missile Defence, directed-energy weapons, resilient Command and Control, counter-UAS coverage, and updated tactics, it may retain some utility, albeit at enormous expense. The question is whether Australia has any of those enablers at scale, and whether NDS 26 funds them at the rate the threat demands. The honest answer to both is no.
Domain-by-domain
(With apologies for acronym soup, I have done by best to link/summarize/rationalize!)
59 (most transferred to Ukraine and subsequently destroyed)
~$15M
HIGH. Cold War tank optimized for maneuver warfare. Top-attack loitering munitions (Lancet-class), FPV drones with shaped charges, ATGM-armed UAS all lethal. Trophy APS not yet fitted. Weight precludes most regional deployment.
MOD-HIGH. New Hanwha platform. Better protected than M113AS4 but at 42t still vulnerable to top-attack precision munitions. Active protection to be fitted.
LOW (defensive). But: NASAMS is a short-range system based on AMRAAM. Does not close the IAMD gap. NDS 26 revived the MRGBAD program to layer above NASAMS — an implicit admission that the 20+ year Ground Based Air Defense (GBAD) gap has not been closed.
LOW-MOD. 5th-gen. Primary vulnerability is basing — small number of northern airfields are targetable and have no IAMD. ALIS/ODIN creates US dependency. AIM-260 JATM (air to air missile) acquisition now confirmed per IIP 26. LRASM (anti ship missile) to be integrated.
MOD. 4.5-gen, not survivable vs modern IADS. Useful for standoff strike with JASSM-ER and LRASM (now operational). HACM (Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile) development under US partnership. Block III upgrade in progress.
MOD. Vulnerable to long-range AAMs (PL-15 class). Only 6 airframes. The future of this platform lies in MUM/T battle management for autonomous systems, not as a standalone AEW.
MOD. Points in the right direction, but at current unit cost not attritable by drone-war standards. Unit cost must fall 10–30× and production rate rise by orders of magnitude before Ghost Bat matters at the force level. As a learning lab and a template for evolved CCAs, more valuable.
Cost blowouts and delays, 32 VLS cells per hull. Entire program yields 192 VLS cells — one US Arleigh Burke Flight III carries 96. ASW-focused. A $45B+ program delivering two destroyers’ worth of missile cells.
Offensive and defensive cyber. Doubles ASD capability. Arguably the best value-for-money investment in the ADF: asymmetric, scalable, sovereign.
In short, almost none of Australia’s current or near future weapon systems are useful against any adversary capable of obtaining the specific kinds of missile or drone warfare systems that are routinely fielded by such poorly funded outfits as second tier Mexican cartels, investigative journalists, Hamas, and Houthi rebels, as we have seen time and time again in Ukraine, Iran, and other places.
This may seem unbelievable. So unbelievable that, for example, you can measure Russia’s state of denial in their loss of more than 2600 tanks to drone attacks in the last four years. Australia doesn’t have 2600 spare tanks to learn this lesson. We live in the future, and highly capable attack drones are significantly less difficult to build than, say, a motorcycle.
The structural problem, restated
Australia’s capability posture is built around high-unit-cost, low-count, foreign-sourced exquisite platforms — a force structure appropriate to a world where precision strike was a US/USSR duopoly and tactical mass was a minor consideration. That world is gone. In the world NDS 26 claims to operate in — the post-Ukraine, post-Red Sea, post-Nagorno-Karabakh world — tactical mass is everything, and the cost-exchange regime rewards the side that can produce cheap guided munitions in volume.
Australia produces essentially none of these domestically. Approximately 90% of Australian defence acquisition spending flows offshore, primarily to the US. The 2024 NDS identified this as a problem and committed to sovereign industrial resilience; the 2026 NDS reiterates the commitment and adds some additional funding. Neither document commits to domestic manufacturing at the scale or tempo the threat model requires.
Despite spending $60b/year, foreseeable advances in drone weapons have rendered not only Australia’s legacy defence systems but almost all of its current generation of acquisitions obsolete.
On land we have vehicles, tanks, artillery, attack helicopters, all of which are extremely expensive cannon fodder for drones or guided rockets. As we have seen in Ukraine, when a $1000 drone can take out a $1m tank or $100m aircraft, the asset light combatant has a sharp advantage.
On sea, we are planning to spend AUD$70b (1.5x the entire Manhattan Project!) on six Hunter Class Frigates that are far too few to defend our maritime borders and just as vulnerable to explosive jet skis as Russia’s black sea fleet, halved in four years by a conventionally far weaker adversary who doesn’t even have a navy, and who extracted casualties with a 1:1000 cost exchange ratio. Australia is rich but not that rich.
The only systems which are not floating boxes of explosives and sailors visible from space are the submarines, consisting of the rapidly aging Collins fleet and the AUKUS submarines that are as expensive and foreign as they are far off.
In air, Australia has about 100 foreign-built fighters. Which airforce are they built to engage? Australia doesn’t have a regional peer adversary who is going to slug it out fighter to fighter. 100 F-18s and F-35s could hardly stand up to Chinese air power and represent high value targets (particularly when on the ground) to irregular insurgent/proxy/asymmetrical combatants, against which they have struggled to engage in similar conflicts elsewhere. Israel has plenty of jets but they were not particularly useful in stopping rocket attacks from Gaza.
In all cases, this is hardware built for fighting yesterday’s wars. The electric stack has de-costed by a factor of 100-1000, putting sharply asymmetrical threats directly into the fight. In WW2, the Allies were ultimately able to achieve crushing air superiority and then destruction of enemy energy and transport infrastructure via the saturation Combined Bombing Offensive. Eighty years later, wars are once again decided by materiel production capacity, only adversaries can easily field 100 times as many aircraft and operate them with software rather than trained pilots.
Despite spending nearly AUD$60b/year, Australia is functionally undefended and undefendable. The unstated premise of this conversation is whether Australia’s military is powerful enough to deter, that is, to compel the resolution of disputes through diplomatic channels, with strong military powers like China. But this isn’t how most wars are fought anymore.
Instead, adversarial powers prefer to act with a winking deniability between networks of proxies, committing a litany of sub-threshold hybrid outrages that are calibrated to fall short of an open declaration of war while doing everything possible to degrade their opponents.
Grey-zone threats the strategy underweights
The documents acknowledge “hybrid threats” but the IIP does not allocate against them at scale. The actual vectors being used against Australia and similar middle powers today include:
A further strategic problem: any adversary can use Australia’s much smaller, closer neighbours, or enormous swaths of uninhabited sovereign territory, or even existing infrastructure, as covert staging grounds. In a world where adversaries now routinely preposition containers of offensive drones within a mile of their target, how are Papua New Guinea, the Solomons, parts of Indonesia, and the broader Pacific arc, let alone the 99% of Australia with no significant human presence, meant to counter this threat? A few shipping containers of Shaheds or lightly modified commercial drones, released by a non-state proxy, would be sufficient to regionally neutralize Australian military power, with no warning, no formal declaration of war. This is not speculative. Hezbollah has conducted Shahed operations against Israel from Iraq and Yemen. Houthi operations have targeted commercial shipping and US naval assets at 1000+ km standoff. Wagner / Africa Corps conducts similar operations across the Sahel. The base rate of proxy-staged drone warfare is not hypothetical, rather, it is the modal form of contemporary conflict.
In 1943, Australian commandos were able to infiltrate Japan-occupied Singapore in a disguised fishing boat, sinking or damaging six ships. This sort of raid could only be done once, at enormous risk and limited impact. Today, a similar raid could be executed by a competent high school robotics team with autonomous boats, or deployed at literally 1000x the scale and 1000x less cost by a well-resourced military.
What the 2026 IIP does not buy, and must
In the following, I advocate strongly for domestic production capacity. This does not mean autarky. It means possessing enough of the stack that either the remaining supply chains are highly fungible, or Australia has enough aggregate industrial power to earn a seat at the table when supply is constrained.
(I drafted this post before the latest conflict in Iran. Then, I worried that Australia lacking bargaining power in a resource constrained environment would be hard to motivate. Now, with Australian agriculture on the verge of diesel starvation, it is only too obvious.)
None of what follows is technically difficult relative to Australian economic and technological capacity. The Soviet Union delivered most of it in the 1950s, at a fraction of Australia’s current real GDP per capita. Each program below could be operated for under AUD $1B/year — well within the existing defence envelope.
Indeed, programs fail more often from over funding causing indigestion than underfunding. Committing to tight budgets and schedules is the key to success.
Must-have domestic capability
Orbital launch capability. SpaceX developed Falcon 1 in five years for under $100M. Rocket Lab repeated the feat with Electron a decade later. Gilmour Space Technology in Queensland is developing the Eris vehicle — the first Australian-developed orbital-class rocket — and represents the nascent beginning of sovereign launch. It is privately funded, chronically under-supported by the government, and has not yet reached orbit. Compare Rocket Lab’s trajectory, which benefited from early NZ government partnership and US customer access. Without sovereign launch, Australia lives under a sky controlled by others.
Domestic comsat, spysat, radar sat, and GNSS capability. SpaceX ships some of the most advanced satellites ever built, for less than $1M per unit. The US, China, India, Russia, Europe, and Japan each operate sovereign GNSS constellations. Planet Labs, a private company, operates hundreds of imaging satellites and offers sub-metre resolution. Umbra operates a SAR constellation resolving better than 1 m in any weather. The ADF buys or requests access to intelligence that any civilian with a credit card can purchase — and has no sovereign path to independent ISR because DEF 799 has effectively disappeared from the public IIP over the last two years. JP 9102 has been redefined to multi-orbit per NDS 26, but the number of satellites and timeline remain unspecified. Through DARC, Australia is a partner in deep-space SSA — genuinely useful, but co-dependent with the US and UK, not sovereign.
One million drones per month manufacturing capacity, with local supply chains and/or stockpiles sufficient for more than a year of sustained conflict. Ukraine produced over 2 million drones in 2024 and 4 million in 2025 — a wartime economy, certainly, but Ukraine’s pre-war GDP was a quarter of Australia’s. Australia has a strong drone innovation community (the current world drone speed record is held by an Australian hobbyist) but no production base worth the name.
Drones require motors, structures, batteries, power electronics, and controllers. Most of these parts can be mass-produced with startup capital in the ~$1B range per category. Standing up semiconductor fab capacity for controllers, MEMS sensors, and CMOS cameras at drone-adequate nodes would cost approximately $5B. The first step is supplier relationships and stockpiling; the second is a land-and-expand domestic fab strategy with enough strategic ambiguity about actual capacity that defence saturation or blockade are unacceptably risky for an adversary. Either Australia has the ability to produce its own industrial controllers, or it ends up — as Russia has — cannibalising white goods for guided-munition chips. Fabricating 1980s-era 8086-class processors is not technically difficult; those nodes are adequate for the vast majority of drone applications. But… Australia bulldozed its only functional fab in 2021 to extend the Sydney Metro.
Austin Vernon has described the necessary fleet architecture in his drone airforce essay. The point is that the key components are the same across drone types, which means that a single industrial base serves the entire mission set.
Missile defence. Israel, the US, and other allies have operationalised layered missile defence systems. What were infeasible science projects in the 1960s and unreliable demonstrators in the 1990s are now mature enough to shift deterrence calculus — not to guarantee leak-proof defence, which is physically difficult against a capable adversary, but to raise the cost of strike sufficiently to change the adversary’s planning. A system that intercepts more than 50–70% of incoming threats is a strategic asset; it does not need to be perfect to deter. Australia’s NDS 26 MRGBAD acquisition is the first real step in two decades, but it is a purchased point-defence capability, not a sovereign system. Building a domestic layered IAMD would cost a fraction of AUKUS and deliver deterrent value on a much shorter timescale.
There are multiple rocket hobbyists on YouTube currently building rockets that, with some extra-legal tweaks, would be capable of missile defence. AI coding agents are more than capable of writing the entire software stack in an afternoon. Australia does not need to spend billions of dollars and wait decades to purchase this capability from foreign nations.
Energy independence.
Australia has oil and tight shale but has allowed domestic refining capacity to collapse. Two refineries are not enough. This is re-discovered every few years, including the current gulf crisis.
Australia invented the modern solar module and then actively exported the technology to China. It is now time to play an active role in the production of the materials and technology that power the electric stack. Building GW-scale solar and inviting the world to smelt their aluminium and other metals in Australia is a path to both wealth and strategic weight.
Submarines.
Surface naval assets are increasingly vulnerable against any adversary. Conventional wisdom maintains that surface ships can still function inside an integrated force given sufficient organic integrated air/missile defence (IAMD), electronic warfare (EW), counter unmanned aerial system (C-UAS), and coalition coverage but it is not the empirical pattern of recent conflicts. The Black Sea Fleet, operating inside its own anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) bubble with the full range of Russian EW and air cover, was reduced 45% by an adversary without a navy. The Moskva and Sevastopol strikes were the headline cases; the attritional campaign against patrol craft, intelligence ships, and the Kerch Bridge was continuous. Surface ships can be made more survivable. They cannot currently be made cheap enough for an attrition regime.
Submarines retain genuine utility. They are used for anti-shipping, anti-submarine, special-forces insertion, strategic chokepoint interdiction, electronic intelligence, and missile launch. Crewed submarines perform all these missions, but autonomous submarines can perform many of them, and the technology is trending there — Australia’s Ghost Shark program is a leading example.
Submarines require air-independent propulsion. The Collins class has demonstrated that Australia can operate large long-range diesel-electric submarines for decades, though transit speed and time on station are so limited that coverage of Australia’s top four strategic chokepoints would require a fleet of over one hundred submarines of this type.
The US Navy developed the first nuclear submarine powerplant in 1173 days for approximately $2.5B in current dollars, including two hulls and the adjacent unsuccessful sodium-cooled reactor work, as well as all the start-up costs associated with building the first ever nuclear power reactors, such as developing a supply chain for hafnium and vanadium from scratch. Seven decades of design heritage and modern computational tools later, Australia is being told that buying foreign-designed and mostly foreign-built nuclear submarine powerplants will cost $30–40B over 15+ years. Why do the error bars on this purchase exceed by a large factor the real world cost and time for long dead pioneers to do it for the first time ever? Brazil is developing sovereign nuclear submarine technology. A domestic Australian submarine powerplant effort, capped at $1B and four years, is technically feasible. Whether it is politically feasible is a separate question.
Must-have domestic participation
AI sovereignty. The near future will run on CCP AI or US AI. Choose wisely.
Australia must retain the ability to make material contributions to US frontier AI, and therefore to derive special benefits from it.
Australia does not need to run a nationalized frontier model or replicate TSMC. It does need to contribute enough of the stack to stay in the conversation.
Australian expats are well-represented at every frontier AI company. A “Federation Fellowship” structured to repatriate senior talent on favourable terms could help, but would need significant follow through.
Australia is geographically ideal for large solar-powered AI datacenters, but would need legal reform to bring Australian fair-use and training-data rules into alignment with US practice.
Nuclear weapons. This is the most politically fraught recommendation in this document, and I want to state it precisely.
The technical argument: producing a nuclear weapon is not especially hard given baseline industrial capacity. The 1964 Nth Country Experiment showed that three physics PhDs with no classified access produced a workable weapon design in 2.5 years.
The strategic argument: the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine relinquished its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security “guarantees”, has become the canonical example of why middle powers without independent deterrents are structurally vulnerable. Having a nuclear deterrent guarantees a baseline of absolute national sovereignty that no alliance commitment can replicate.
The political and industrial argument: Australia has a tiny civil nuclear industry, no enrichment or separation capability, no testing infrastructure, and — at present — no political coalition willing to sustain the investment. That said, North Korea is hardly an economic powerhouse and was able to build plutonium weapons despite determined interference by its adversaries. The NPT and various regional agreements would need to be renegotiated, exited, or ignored.
The point of listing nuclear weapons here is to identify an asymmetry: the technical and industrial obstacles are self-imposed and reversible on a sub-decade timescale given political will. The political constraint is the binding one. If Australian political will to sustain sovereign security catches up to the realities of the post-unipolar era, the nuclear question will be on the table, and the preparation — civil nuclear industry, enrichment-adjacent capability, professional workforce — should begin now regardless.
Having a nuclear deterrent guarantees absolute national sovereignty. After WW1 and WW2, England and France did not hesitate for an instant to ensure they could never again suffer outrages from the industrial might of Germany and later, the Soviets. It is better to have it and not need it than to think “she’ll be right mate” and bequeath eternal slavery and damnation to your descendents.
Conclusion
None of the capabilities above are hard to build relative to Australian economic and technological capacity. The Soviet Union did them in the 1950s. Each program could be operated for under AUD $1B/year — a rounding error inside the existing defence budget, and less than a tenth of what AUKUS Pillar 1 is projected to consume annually by the late 2030s.
Unlike the current acquisition pattern, which sends most capital offshore in exchange for indefinite dependence on foreign industrial complexes for maintenance and support, a domestic weapons-platform development policy accumulates research and production expertise within Australia, where its value appreciates over time, including in the civilian economy. Expat Australians work at every frontier technology company on earth. Australian hobbyists hold world records in the relevant disciplines. The constraint has never been talent, capital, or technology.
The 2023 Defence Strategic Review diagnosed the threat environment accurately. The 2024 and 2026 National Defence Strategies identified the right doctrine — National Defence, Strategy of Denial, self-reliance, industrial resilience. The 2026 Integrated Investment Program commits $425B against these priorities and in doing so reaffirms a platform-centric acquisition model that the post-Ukraine evidence base does not support.
Australia is not undefendable in principle, but it is undefendable against the threat model the documents themselves describe, using the capabilities the documents themselves fund.
The Strategy of Denial is the right strategy. The question is whether the capability program actually delivers denial against a cost-exchange ratio of 1:1000 in favour of the adversary.
The answer to that question, visible in the IIP line items, is obviously not. That has to change.
Australia’s future national sovereignty could topple at any moment, not through conventional conquest but through the slow attrition of deterrent credibility that invites exactly the kind of sub-threshold coercion the Strategy of Denial is evidently unable to prevent.
If Australia fails to aggressively correct course toward domestic defence tech production immediately — not the next biennial National Defence Strategy cycle, right now — the last vestiges of its existence as an independent political entity will soon vanish entirely.
The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. It appears increasingly obvious that the 20 percent of world oil supply that normally flows through it to world markets won’t be restored to normal anytime in the near future — quite possibly for many months. What will this disruption do to the world economy?
The International Monetary Fund raised the economic anxiety level last week with a projection of a global slowdown “in the shadow of war.” Yet while the IMF brings great expertise to this subject, I think that it is seriously underestimating how badly the global economy could be hit. In my view, a full-on global recession is more likely than not if the Strait remains closed for, say, another three months, which seems all too possible.
Why do I think most forecasts are insufficiently alarmist? Because I believe that most economists are thinking about the Hormuz crisis the wrong way.
The usual approach, which appears to be how the IMF is making its projection, is to start with a guesstimate of the price of oil over the next year, then try to model the effects of that oil price trajectory on the world economy.
An immediate problem with this approach is that, as I argued a few weeks ago, there’s a huge range of uncertainty about the future price of oil if the war goes on, reflecting underlying uncertainty about both the severity of the disruption and the responsiveness of demand to prices. The following table shows various scenarios for the price of oil depending upon the level of disruption of supplies (low, medium or high disruption) and the responsiveness of demand to price (high, medium or low responsiveness). As you can see below, there is a wide range of price scenarios, from $99/bbl to $372/bbl:
More generally, I would argue that the usual approach to modeling the effects of the Hormuz crisis goes about it the wrong way around. We should start with the physical supply constraints, not a guess about oil prices. One way or another, the world will have to burn significantly less oil in the near future than it would have if this war had been avoided. In the jargon of energy analysts, there will have to be large “demand destruction.” But how can oil demand be destroyed? Three ways:
· People can switch away from oil to other energy sources. But there’s very little ability to do that in the short run
· People can switch away from economic activities that use a lot of oil — e.g., they can take buses rather than driving. But for many, perhaps most, people, this option is very limited. For example, there are no buses in American suburbs and there is no substitute for oil to power emerging-market trucks.
· People can just do less overall — consume less, produce less. That is, we can reduce oil consumption by having a global slump. And demand destruction through a global slump can happen quickly.
What about the price of oil? In the face of a major loss in supply it must rise enough to cause an equal destruction of demand. Because there’s very limited ability to reduce the demand for oil through options 1 and 2 above, it appears inevitable that some (if not most) of the demand destruction required will happen through a global recession.
Indeed, as I’ll show in a minute, in past world oil crises a significant share of the demand destruction needed to match reduced supply was indeed “achieved” by having a global recession.
So if your guess about the world price of oil in the face of a large disruption of oil supply doesn’t look high enough to cause a global slump, you’re projecting too low a price.
What does history tell us?
The closest parallel I know to the Hormuz crisis is the oil shock that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War. (The 1979 Iran crisis was more complex, involving a lot of speculative price changes.) World oil supply fell only moderately after 1973, but it had been on a rapidly rising trend until then, so there was a large shortfall relative to that trend. In the chart below I show the natural log of world oil consumption with 1965 as the base year:
The percentage difference between two numbers is approximately the difference in their natural logs times 100. So this chart shows that the world was burning approximately 17.5 percent less oil in 1975 than it would have under the pre-1973 trend — a supply shock not too different from what we will see now if the Strait remains closed.
What happened to global economic growth? It also fell substantially relative to the pre-1973 trend — a shortfall of roughly 7.5 percent:
A comparable slowdown now would mean zero or negative world growth over the next two years, compared with the current IMF forecast of 3 percent. This would be a true global disaster.
OK, before everyone jumps off ledges, there are large potential mitigating factors this time around. First and foremost is the likelihood that a deal to reopen the Strait will in fact be struck. Basically, the U.S. can get the Strait reopened by loudly proclaiming victory while quietly accepting de facto defeat. All this will take is for Trump to accept reality, admittedly a hard climb.
Even if the Strait remains closed, the world economy is far less dependent on oil than it was in 1973. Here’s an index of world “oil intensity” — barrels of oil consumed per dollar of real GDP — with 1973=100:
This will reduce the impact of higher oil prices on world production — although the remaining oil demand may be less “compressible” than demand in 1973. So reducing consumption in the short run may be harder today than it was in the 1970s.
Finally, beyond the short run there are far more alternatives to oil now than there were in 1973. Given time — even a year or two — the world could make major shifts to other energy sources.
Despite these caveats, however, I would argue that most analysts are still far too sanguine about the effects of a prolonged Hormuz crisis. I don’t know how high the price of oil will go if the Strait remains closed, but it will, more or less by definition, have to go high enough to be seriously destructive.
Long spits of muddy sediment are visible behind islands created by mud volcanoes in an image captured on August 30, 2025, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8.
With its abundance of naturally occurring gas seeps and fires, Azerbaijan has long been called “the land of fire.” Yet burning mountains are just one of the geologic wonders found in the small Eurasian country on the Caspian Sea.
Azerbaijan is also home to at least 220 mud volcanoes, according to data from the Azerbaijani government, though some researchers put the total number closer to 350. That is thought to be one of the highest concentrations of mud volcanoes on Earth.
Mud volcanoes—as well as gas seeps—are found within sedimentary basins where geologic conditions have allowed hydrocarbons to accumulate. Such basins typically have fluids and gases, such as oil and methane, trapped beneath sedimentary rocks and under high pressure. Instead of erupting molten lava, mud volcanoes typically eject cold slurries of mud, water, methane, and other gases. Oil and gas form from the remains of marine organisms, such as phytoplankton and algae, which settle on the ocean floor and are later transformed by pressure and heat.
Many of Azerbaijan’s mud volcanoes are clustered near the cities of Baku and Qobustan on the Absheron Peninsula, an area where structural folds and faults in the landscape have created cracks that allow methane-rich mud to move up toward the surface. On land, mud volcanoes typically form conical structures anywhere from 20 to 400 meters (70 to 1,300 feet) tall and 100 to 4,500 meters in diameter.
There are also at least 140 underwater mud volcanoes in the South Caspian Sea along Azerbaijan’s coast, including eight islands in the Baku archipelago. The satellite image above shows one of them, the tadpole-shaped Xərə Zirə Adası (also known in Russian as Ostrov Bulla), which had violent eruptions in 1961 and 1995 and still has two “weakly active” mud volcano vents, said Adelaide University geologist Mark Tingay. The neighboring island to the northwest, Duvannı (Ostrov Duvannyy), is visible in the wide view below. It erupted in 2006 and still has active vents on its northern side.
“The islands’ ‘tails’ are most likely caused by currents eroding their weak mud deposits,” Tingay said. “They look like spits of eroded and redeposited sediment that formed on the lee of the island, where current and wave action have the least effect.”
Four tadpole-shaped mud volcano islands are visible along the Caspian Sea in this image captured on August 30, 2025, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
There are two more tadpole-shaped islands to the south, with sediment “tails” also oriented to the southwest. One of these—Səngi Muğan Adası (Ostrov Svinoy)—is known for producing particularly violent eruptions, most recently in 2002 and 2008, Tingay said. One of its most notorious events occurred in 1932 when, without warning, it released a 150-meter-tall fireball in an eruption that caused 13 injuries and almost destroyed the island’s lighthouse, he added.
Though mud volcanoes are interesting to geologists and often indicators of underground fossil fuels, they can be unpredictable and pose risks. “They have the potential for ‘paroxysmal eruptions’—short but extremely violent eruptions,” Tingay said. “They sometimes fuel huge fireballs and have created whole new islands in the space of a few minutes.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of
Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president
of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive
officer effective on September 1, 2026. The transition, which was
approved unanimously by the Board of Directors, follows a
thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.
Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he
works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive
chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company,
including engaging with policymakers around the world.
Ternus will become the 8th CEO in Apple’s 50-year history:
Mike Scott, 1977–1981
Mike Markkula, 1981–1983
John Sculley, 1983–1993
Michael Spindler, 1993–1996
Gil Amelio, 1996–1997
Steve Jobs, 1997–2011
Tim Cook, 2011–2026
At just over 50 years old — the same age Cook was when he took the job — Ternus is young enough for decade-plus run, joining only Sculley, Jobs, and Cook.
Kidney Transplants Save Lives, Cut Taxpayer Costs Lund University Sweden's kidney exchange programme has been operational since 2018 and will soon be expanded to include the entire EU. The programme has meant that patients' previous waiting times of up to two years have been reduced to just six months.
"Tommy Andersson, Professor of Economics at Lund University School of Economics and Management, never imagined his research would one day lead to this-but his joy, pride, and commitment are unmistakable.
"Thirteen years ago, we began the planning phase in Sweden, and in 2019 we expanded to Denmark, and later to Finland, Iceland, and Norway. The programme is called STEP (Scandiatransplant Exchange Programme). Now, in 2026, there is a consensus on how kidney exchanges should be conducted across the entire EU, and almost all the pieces of the puzzle are in place for us to launch the pilot project during 2026," says Tommy Andersson.
Tommy Andersson was involved from the start, developing the algorithms that make the kidney exchange programme in Sweden possible. In cases where a family member can donate a kidney, the transplant can occur directly. However, if the donor's kidney does not match the patient, the exchange programme becomes vital. The programme enables matching across Scandinavia and soon across the entire EU."
A Falcon 9 streaks through a sky filled by the Milky Way in this long duration streak shot. It carried a Global Positioning System satellite for the U.S. Space Force. Photo: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now.
The U.S. Space Force launched its final Global Positioning System (GPS) III satellite into medium Earth orbit in the predawn hours of Tuesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station occurred at 2:53:25 a.m. EDT (0653:25 UTC).
The mission was delayed a day due to poor weather in the recovery zone for the first stage.
The satellite for the GPS III-8 mission is officially designated Space Vehicle 10 (SV10) satellite but is also named ‘Hedy Lamar’ after the Austrian-American actress and inventor whose frequency-hopping research led to the development of technologies, like GPS satellites, WiFi, and Bluetooth.
“Today marks an important milestone for our unit and for the entire GPS enterprise. As we prepare to launch the final satellite in the GPS III block, we’re closing out a chapter that has defined the last several years of work for this team,” said USSF Col. Stephen Hobbs, the Mission Delta 31 (MD 31) commander within Combat Forces Command.
“Closing out the GPS III block is not the end of the story, but rather it’s a foundation for what comes next. We’re excited to turn the page and continue advancing our mission with the GPS IIIF generation, bringing even greater capability to the joint force and to the global users who rely on this system every single day.”
A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts off with the GPS III-8 SV10 satellite. Photo: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster B1095, which flew for the seventh time after launching six batches of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.
The GPS III SV10 satellite was encapsulated in two halves of the payload fairing, one of which flew for a second time and the other for a third time. One of the pair was used on the GPS III-9 mission back in January.
“So that was a huge benefit for us and for the Space Force team to take advantage of that from a mission assurance perspective,” said Anne Mason, SpaceX’s director of its National Security Space Launch (NSSL) division.
A little more than 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1095 landed on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions.’ Both halves of the payload fairing were also to be recovered after splashing down a little further downrange than the booster.
The drone ship will be devoted to supporting the Starship program, SpaceX said.
The mission also represented the fourth time that SpaceX will carry to orbit a GPS satellite that was originally assigned to United Launch Alliance as part of the NSSL Phase 2 contract with the U.S. Space Force.
Previous GPS satellites were moved from ULA’s Vulcan rocket to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 because of development delays with that rocket. Vulcan didn’t receive certification to fly NSSL payloads until the spring of 2025.
During its most recent launch, USSF-87, the rocket suffered a problem with one of its Northrop Grumman-built solid rocket boosters. The payload was able to be delivered to the intended orbit, but the launch vehicle is grounded in its most powerful configurations until an investigation is completed.
“One of the things we really pride ourselves on here on the NSSL program, is our flexibility and responsiveness, and a lot of that goes to our our contracts, the way they’re set up, that allow for swaps like this,” said USSF Col. Ryan Hiserote.
“For any of these swaps, we have to have both launch providers agree to it. So both SpaceX and ULA have agreed to all of these swaps. So just that process and teamwork has gotten a little bit faster and tighter each time.”
In exchange for putting the GPS III SV10 satellite on a Falcon 9 rocket, ULA in turn will fly the USSF-70 mission on a Vulcan rocket in 2028. That mission with an undisclosed payload was originally set to fly on a Falcon Heavy rocket.
The GPS III Space Vehicle 10 satellite, named ‘Hedy Lamar’, is photographed during the process of it being encapsulated within SpaceX Falcon 9 payload fairings. Image: SpaceX
The GPS III-8 SV10 satellite will join a fleet of 38 spacecraft in medium Earth orbit, of which 32 are active. The others are held in reserve in case of a problem with the operational spacecraft.
Following the GPS III-8’s deployment, about an hour and a half after liftoff, the satellite will raise its orbit over a period of 10 days to achieve its operational position, said Fang Qian, Lockheed Martin’s vice president of its Global Positioning System program. That will be followed by two to three days of on-orbit testing before satellite operations are handed over to the Space Force.
“And on this particular launch, because we have the optical cross-link demo, we will likely be doing a little more testing to ring out what capability that has to feed in future blocks of the IIIF satellites,” Hobbs said.
The optical cross-link demonstration is a laser communications system that is being tested on this mission before it’s integrated on the next-generation GPS IIIF satellites. The SV10 satellite also carries with it a new digital atomic clock for better precision as another technology demonstration.
“The final GPS III deployment is an important milestone as we continue strengthening the GPS constellation,” Qian said in a post-launch statement. “By launching SV10 into orbit, we’re not only adding to the resiliency of today’s GPS capabilities – we’re opening the door to the next generation of GPS IIIF satellites that will provide greater resiliency and serve as the backbone of the GPS constellation for years to come.”
Latvia is the latest country to sign the Artemis Accords as part of a new push to use the Accords to foster cooperation on NASA’s lunar exploration ambitions.
The moon itself does not wax and wane as frequently as American public opinion on its space program. The Artemis 2 astronauts barely gulped their first taste of fresh Pacific air before a chorus of voices began criticizing the Artemis program as a waste of money for which the American people received little in return. […]
China is rapidly building a broad, diverse satellite manufacturing base capable of producing thousands of spacecraft annually, but faces bottlenecks in launch and uncertain demand.
Up betimes as I use to do, and in my chamber begun to look over my father’s accounts, which he brought out of the country with him by my desire, whereby I may see what he has received and spent, and I find that he is not anything extravagant, and yet it do so far outdo his estate that he must either think of lessening his charge, or I must be forced to spare money out of my purse to help him through, which I would willing do as far as 20l. goes.
So to my office the remaining part of the morning till towards noon, and then to Mr. Grant’s. There saw his prints, which he shewed me, and indeed are the best collection of any things almost that ever I saw, there being the prints of most of the greatest houses, churches, and antiquitys in Italy and France and brave cutts. I had not time to look them over as I ought, and which I will take time hereafter to do, and therefore left them and home to dinner.
With Sir G. Carteret and Sir John Minnes by coach to my Lord Treasurer’s, thinking to have spoken about getting money for paying the Yards; but we found him with some ladies at cards: and so, it being a bad time to speak, we parted, and Sir J. Minnes and I home, and after walking with my wife in the garden late, to supper and to bed, being somewhat troubled at Ashwell’s desiring and insisting over eagerly upon her going to a ball to meet some of her old companions at a dancing school here in town next Friday, but I am resolved she shall not go. So to bed.
This day the little Duke of Monmouth was marryed at White Hall, in the King’s chamber; and tonight is a great supper and dancing at his lodgings, near Charing-Cross. I observed his coat at the tail of his coach he gives the arms of England, Scotland, and France, quartered upon some other fields, but what it is that speaks his being a bastard I know not.
It’s no great insight to say Trump’s impulsive Iran War has been a big political loser for him. Even some of his and the war’s supporters would concede that point. “Katrinas” are also wildly overdetermined and over-diagnosed in political talk. How many “Obama’s Katrinas” were there? How many did Joe Biden allegedly have? But it did occur to me this morning that it is something like that for Trump but for a specifically Trumpian reason. Donald Trump’s great super power is changing the subject. He never sticks to one racket or con until its rung out of all its juice. He’s always on to some new thing because — long before we lived in the broken world of social media — Trump has always lived in the attention economy. Attention is the great commodity. It’s even more powerful for Trump as a defensive weapon. When something isn’t going great he’s always creating some new drama, some new thing to change the subject to. But what we’re seeing now is that Trump simply cannot change the subject. The whole Iran War story is devastatingly bad for him. And he simply has no way to stop it from being the big, dominating story. He can’t make any shiny object take its place. He’s stuck, not just militarily but politically as well.
Things a president does at home he can generally undo or just stop doing. Not always but usually, at least to a degree. Not long after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, the White House began moonwalking away from its intentionally high-profile and confrontational occupations of Midwestern Blue state cities. Mass deportations didn’t stop. A lot of the same ICE predations continued. But the temperature was reduced significantly and the high-profile, news-generating confrontations slowed. It was hurting Trump politically so he pulled back, at least from the actions generating news.
Abroad, things work differently. Even for a U.S. president, there are others parties involved. They can act unpredictably or beyond a president’s control. Tariffs were in a sense an example of this. Longterm, Trump has unleashed trade and economic forces the U.S. cannot easily control or recover from. But in the near term Trump could and in many case did simply pull the tariffs, often through carve-outs or other means that didn’t drive a lot of attention. Critically, every country targeted by tariffs was happy to give him an out. They weren’t going to make it hard. They just wanted the tariffs rescinded or reduced. Often they were willing to toast Trump’s capitulation as some kind of signal Trump victory.
Iran is a very different matter. The war is extremely high profile. It is unambiguously his war. It has affected everyone in the country through dramatically higher gas prices. It is also a catch-all explanation and point of blame for inflation and high prices generally even though the inflationary effects of the war are probably still mostly in the future. Iran meanwhile is in no mood to give him an out. Obviously the Iranian government wants to hurt the U.S. and Trump specifically as much as possible. They also realize that even if their situation is desperate, Trump’s is more so.
They say a shark has to keep moving forward or it will die (turns out this is only true for some sharks). For Donald Trump it’s changing the subject. I’m not saying he’s approaching political death. But he is stuck and unable to change the subject in what I think is a genuinely new way for him. And for his political prospects, it’s a very big deal.
Zimbabwe, often considered an economic basket-case because of its history of farm seizures and hyperinflation, is enjoying an idiosyncratic boom. High prices for the metal and other commodities have led to a surge of cash through its highly informal economy. They have made it easier for authorities to stop printing money and meddling in currency markets; inflation is at its lowest in about 30 years. The IMF has repeatedly revised upwards estimates for economic growth, most recently to at least 7.5% for 2025, almost double the African average…
Gold is not the only source of growth. The current tobacco crop will be the largest on record. Lithium, chrome and platinum miners, many of them Chinese, have raised production. Zimbabwe’s diaspora, mainly in South Africa, sent back $2.5bn last year. So overall demand is higher than ever, says a banker.
4. More on the wet market hypothesis. We should all be uncertain, but it is mood affiliation (with conspiracy theorizing, for one thing) to be convinced of Lab Leak. It is contributing to negative emotional contagion.
5. Review of the new Knausgaard series. By Max Norman: “(I’d rather read Knausgaard on defecation than predestination, let alone whether machines can think or trees can feel.)”‘
7. AI and the pancreatic vaccine. More testing is needed, but there is a reasonable chance that we have a good treatment for pancreatic cancer, and AI was instrumental in that. It is mRNA as well, so a double burn on the haters.
Spectators along the beach in Cape Canaveral, Florida, enjoy a spectacular Sunday morning launch, taking in the view of a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket blasting off carrying a next-generation cellular broadband satellite. The company said later the AST SpaceMobile Bluebird 7 satellite ended up in the wrong orbit. Photo: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.
Blue Origin launched the company’s third New Glenn rocket Sunday, re-flying and successfully recovering a previously used first stage. But the rocket’s payload, a direct-to-cellphone communications satellite, ended up in the wrong orbit, the company said.
“We have confirmed payload separation,” Blue Origin, owned by Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos, posted on X. “AST SpaceMobile has confirmed the satellite has powered on. The payload was placed into an off-nominal orbit. We are currently assessing and will update when we have more detailed information.”
The Bluebird 7 satellite, built by AST SpaceMobile in Midland, Texas, is equipped with a 2,400-square-foot phased array antenna, the largest civilian antenna of its type ever put in low-Earth orbit.
The satellite is the second in a new generation of AST SpaceMobile data relay stations designed to seamlessly provide space-based 4G and 5G cellular broadband service directly to users anywhere in the world.
Blue Origin provided no additional information about the nature of Bluebird 7’s unplanned orbit and it was not immediately known what options, if any, might exist to eventually achieve the planned orbit.
But the launch clearly marked a setback to AST SpaceMobile’s timeline for deploying up to 60 such “block two” Bluebirds in an initial constellation, launching them with SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets, Indian LVM3 boosters and Blue Origin’s New Glenn.
The New Glenn launched Sunday was Blue’s third and the first using a previously flown first stage.
New Glenn rises from Launch Complex 36 on Sunday, April 19, 2026, near the historic Cape Canaveral lighthouse. Photo: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now.
Liftoff from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station came at 7:25 a.m. EDT, 40 minutes after an unexplained hold in the countdown. When the count finally hit zero, the towering rocket’s seven methane-burning ME-4 engines ignited with a ground shaking roar and the booster began climbing away atop 3.8 million pounds of thrust.
The first stage appeared to work flawlessly, shutting down and falling away as planned about three minutes and nine seconds after liftoff. The rocket’s second stage, powered by two BE-3 engines, then ignited to continue the climb to an initial orbit.
The first stage, meanwhile, headed for a Blue Origin’s landing barge stationed several hundred miles down range in the Atlantic Ocean, flying itself to an on-target touchdown about nine minutes and 20 seconds after launch.
The same stage accomplished the same feat last November during the second flight of a New Glenn — NG-2 — albeit using a different set of engines.
“With our first refurbished booster we elected to replace all seven engines and test out a few upgrades including a thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in an earlier social media post. “We plan to use the engines we flew for NG-2 on future flights.”
About two-and-a-half minutes after the first stage landing Sunday, the second stage engines shut down as planned. A second upper stage engine firing was expected an hour and 10 minutes after launch, but that time came and went without any updates from Blue Origin.
About an hour later, however, the company reported the satellite had not been released into its intended orbit. The post did not say whether the second upper stage engine firing actually took place or if it did, whether it ran for the full duration.
Blue Origin plans to compete head-to-head with SpaceX to deliver commercial, military and science satellites to Earth orbit and deep space while deploying a fleet of Amazon-owned space-based LEO internet satellites intended to compete with SpaceX’s already-established Starlink system.
Blur Origin also is developing moon landers to deliver NASA cargo and astronauts to the lunar surface.
The New Glenn rocket is critical to all of those ventures. The company tentatively plans to launch a prototype Blue Moon lander on an unpiloted test flight this fall, followed by one and possibly two launches of Amazon LEO internet satellites before the end of the year.
But those plans will depend on the results of an investigation into what went wrong Sunday.
Justice Breyer responded later that day to the chief’s memo but did not address all its points. Such stays were unusual, he wrote, stating his objections mildly.
He skipped over the question of whether the plan was lawful, asking only: Why the rush? The circuit court had already set a date to hear the case in June. The first deadline for power plants to reduce their emissions was six years away; full compliance was not required until 2030. That was plenty of time for the case to play out through the legal system.
The chief wrote right back the next day sounding irritated and blunt.
Speed was vital, he said, because environmental regulation was going to be very expensive for states and the power industry. The sums involved could approach $480 billion, he asserted, and industry groups would have to start preparations immediately.
What I cannot get past is the concern over the amount of $480 billion as an excuse to employ the major questions doctrine. If we take Roberts’ statement at face value and in good faith, it seems clear that an amount of $4.80 would not be an issue. So somewhere between $4.80 and $480 billion, the cost is too much. Is it $48 billion? $4.8 billion? $967 million?
How does one draw the line? How does a president know where that line is? And how should Congress write legislation as to not run afoul of a conservative Supreme Court?
It is just bullshit all the way down. Pack the Court, and when needs be, strip it of jurisdiction.
I’ve long been an industrial policy enthusiast. My favorite popular nonfiction book is Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works, a synthesis of decades of research about the economic miracles in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. I wrote a whole series of posts examining the successes and failures of various developing countries through the lens of Studwell’s ideas:
Around the same time I discovered the industrial policy literature, the consensus was shifting within the big economic development agencies (the World Bank and the IMF). Whereas in previous decades, these organizations generally recommended against government meddling in the economy’s industrial structure, they’ve recently started to consider the kind of interventionist policies that Studwell recommends. In 2019, the IMF’s Reda Cherif and Fuad Hasanov wrote a paper called “The Return of the Policy That Shall Not Be Named: Principles of Industrial Policy”. They conclude that a Studwellian approach, if executed competently, can help a developing country grow faster than it would from just letting the market take its course:
We argue that the success of the Asian Miracles is based on three key principles that constitute “True Industrial Policy,” which we describe as Technology and Innovation Policy (TIP)…(i) state intervention to fix market failures that preclude the emergence of domestic producers in sophisticated industries early on, beyond the initial comparative advantage; (ii) export orientation, in contrast to the typical failed “industrial policy” of the 1960s–1970s, which was mostly import substitution industrialization (ISI); and (iii) the pursuit of fierce competition both abroad and domestically with strict accountability[.]
I was happy to see this shift — not because I’m certain that this sort of industrial policy is the secret to growth, but because I think it deserves to be in the discussion. So I’m also happy to see the World Bank now following suit, with a new report (or “book”) by Ana Margarida Fernandes and Tristan Reed entitled “Industrial Policy for Development: Approaches In the 21st Century”. The authors argue that although classic policy recommendations — macroeconomic stability, education, health, infrastructure, etc. — are still good, industrial policy can often help when layered on top of those basics.
I think it’s great to see the stigma about industrial policy going away. Not because this will lead to a wave of countries trying out such policies — that’s already happening — but because it’ll lead to more researchers taking the idea seriously. Dismissing the whole idea of industrial policy out of hand — as the World Bank and others did in the 1990s — is simply a policy of self-imposed ignorance. Countries need smart researchers to help them figure out which kind of industrial policies work and which don’t.
But as general interest in the topic has grown, my thoughts on industrial policy have also become more nuanced. As I’ve read more and written more about the idea, and as I’ve watched current events unfold, my thinking has evolved beyond “This is an important idea that deserves to be taken seriously”. So I thought I’d write a post briefly summarizing that evolution.
“Industrial policy” has become too broad of a category
One thing I always try to specify when I talk about “industrial policy” is that this term can mean a ton of different things. Most people think of it as government promotion of specific industries — autos, or electronics, or maybe just manufacturing in general. Others see export promotion — which is more about where products are sold than about which products they are — as the key industrial policy. Some people see FDI promotion as industrial policy; others don’t.
Even if we just focus on what you might call “classical” industrial policy — government promotion of specific industries — there’s a huge range of types of policies you might use. Protectionism — tariffs, import quotas, etc. — is often regarded as a tool for promoting manufacturing. That’s very different from export promotion. Direct government subsidies for favored industries are a common strategy — and one that’s on the rise throughout the world — but subsidies weren’t really used by many classic “industrial policy” success stories like Japan and Taiwan.
It’s kind of crazy that this huge diversity of policies and goals coexists under one single buzzword. It makes conversations about the topic difficult if not outright impossible. When people yell at me that “industrial policy is bad” or “industrial policy always fails”, I have no idea whether they’re talking about protectionism, or industrial subsidies, or government intervention in general.
If you read the IMF and World Bank papers on industrial policy, you can see that these distinctions really matter. The IMF paper explicitly contrasts export promotion with import substitution (protectionism), claiming that the former is very promising while the latter is usually bad. The World Bank report supports industrial parks and market-access assistance, while casting doubt on the effectiveness of subsidies and tariffs. In other words, even the people advocating industrial policy think that certain kinds are good and other kinds are bad.
In 2012 or even 2018 it made sense to talk about “industrial policy” as a single thing, because it basically just meant that researchers and policymakers should take a look at a bunch of different ideas that had been beyond the pale of orthodoxy in previous decades. But now that researchers and policymakers have actively started to look into those ideas — and to implement them on a large scale — it no longer makes sense to talk about “industrial policy”. We need to be more specific.
For developing countries, “just do FDI” looks like a viable strategy
In my series of posts on developing-country industrialization, I found a subset of countries that had clearly succeeded with a very simple, seemingly replicable formula: promoting FDI in manufacturing. I singled out Poland and Malaysia as countries that got rich in recent years simply by encouraging multinational companies to put their factories and research centers there:
Poland, especially, has succeeded amazingly using the FDI strategy. A lot of industrial policy enthusiasts — Ha-Joon Chang, for example — used to argue that developing countries should build their own domestic “national champions” instead of relying on foreign capital and know-how. That’s what Japan and Korea did, it’s true. But you’d probably be hard-pressed to name a Polish brand. And yet Poland’s economic performance since the end of communism has been absolutely stellar — it’s about to surpass Japan’s living standards, and is now even starting to catch up to Korea:
Interestingly, FDI was also central to the development strategies of Singapore and Ireland — two of the richest countries on the planet. You’d also be hard-pressed to name a Singaporean or Irish brand. And China’s approach before the early 2010s — during its fastest era of growth — centered much more on FDI than on subsidies or on the promotion of national champions in general.
When you look at poor countries that got rich since World War 2 by building national champions, the list is pretty short — there aren’t a lot of South Koreas out there. But the list of countries that got rich, or nearly rich, by promoting FDI is getting longer by the decade. So while I wouldn’t discount the Korea strategy, I’m leaning toward the idea that the Poland approach is a lot easier to get right.
Why would it be easier to get rich through FDI than by building your own brands? I can think of a couple of reasons. For one thing, FDI is less risky — instead of having the government pick winners, you let multinationals try building a bunch of things in your country. It’s a way to let the market discover comparative advantage, while the government simply assumes that some sort of competitive advantage exists within the broad category of export manufacturing.
FDI promotion also requires good institutions. If you’re trying to get German companies to build their factories in your country, you probably need to have the kind of property rights that German companies are used to dealing with. Poland became the workshop of Europe by forcing itself to shed its communist-era institutions and become more like the EU.
Note that the new World Bank report focuses on industrial parks as its favorite industrial policy. Industrial parks are a key part of the Poland/Malaysia/Singapore/Ireland strategy — a tool of FDI promotion. I predict that for developing countries, this approach will become more recognized as the closest thing we have to a universal push-button solution for getting out of poverty.
For developed countries, industrial policy is technology policy
Right now, much of the economic discussion in the U.S. is about AI — how to promote it, how to enable it, and how to regulate it.
This is classic industrial policy. It’s picking a winner! If you rewrite regulation to allow more construction of data centers, or if you try to recruit top AI researchers, or if you use export controls to prevent a competing company from seizing the initiative in AI, or if you do any special thing to promote the industry, you are picking AI as a winner. (The fact that almost every country is picking AI as a winner doesn’t change that fact — there was a time when every country thought it was essential to have its own auto industry.) And I don’t see a lot of free-market economists disagreeing with this pick.
Nor is this the first hot new technology that the American government has specifically encouraged within my lifetime. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 selectively deregulated the internet sector, because everyone agreed that the internet would be economically important. The National Science Foundation subsidized the internet’s initial buildout, as did the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991. State governments provided telecom companies with tons of subsidies to build out wireless networks, and so on.
We picked the internet as a winner, and it was a winner. Notably, very few of the free-market enthusiasts who criticized industrial policy in developing countries raised the alarm about the U.S. picking winners in the internet age. The industrial policies we used to pick that winner fell under the rubric of things that economists had already admitted that rich countries ought to be doing — infrastructure, deregulation, and R&D promotion.
But for rich countries, technology policy is industrial policy. The emergence of a major new technology puts a developed country in the position of a developing country in a narrow, limited sense. A poor nation lacks a car industry, an electronics industry, a machinery industry, a shipbuilding industry, and so on. America in 1985 lacked an internet industry, and America in 2022 lacked an AI industry, because those technologies had just been invented.
So I think rich countries actually have a lot to learn from developing countries when it comes to technological revolutions. Building something that no one has ever built before is a task that shares a lot in common with that of building something that your country has never built before. It’s not the exact same problem, but it’s related. So the people trying to figure out how to make America competitive in AI should study the South Korean Heavy and Chemical Industry initiative, or Taiwan’s promotion of TSMC, or METI’s promotion of Japan’s auto industry.
China’s approach has big flaws
In the last few years, China embarked on an unprecedented policy experiment. The Chinese government has subsidized high-tech manufacturing industries to a far greater degree than any other country in history. This has led to a boom in high-tech manufacturing, increases in China’s global market share in those industries, a huge surge in Chinese exports (known as the Second China Shock), and to the emergence of some Chinese national champions like BYD.
But we’re definitely starting to see the downsides of this experiment. First and foremost, paying dozens of companies to all make the same products ends up creating brutal price wars that compete profit margins toward zero:
Margin compression deprives companies of R&D budgets, which must then be substituted by government research. It also leads to deflation, which exacerbates bad debts, burdening households, corporations, and the financial system.
China’s leaders realize these issues. Cutting industrial subsidies will be politically difficult, especially because the country is still suffering low demand from the bursting of its real estate bubble. But they’re starting to do it — for example, the government is phasing out subsidies for trading in old cars, leading to a predictable plunge in new car sales.
According to the standard “export discipline” playbook — which Studwell articulated, and which the 2019 IMF paper on industrial policy endorsed — this is exactly what you’re supposed to do. A wave of subsidies for export manufacturing results in a Cambrian explosion of manufacturers; the brutal global market selects the best of these; the government withdraws subsidies and lets all the inferior manufacturers die, while the national champions live and flourish and experience healthier margins.
This may work for China, if subsidies can successfully be withdrawn. But it’ll leave behind a major problem: bank debt. By some estimates, the bulk of China’s unprecedented industrial subsidies are actually in the form of artificially cheap bank loans:
This means that if and when China forces most of its subsidy recipients into bankruptcy — just as Joe Studwell and the IMF say you’re supposed to do! — it’ll result in a huge wave of bad debts. Those bad debts will sit on the books of Chinese banks, right alongside the existing mountain of bad debts from the real estate bust.
If you believe that the Chinese state is unified, and that Chinese banks and the government are the exact same thing, and that the government simply directs borrowing without regard to profit and loss, then maybe you think bank balance sheets just don’t matter in the People’s Republic. But if you think bank managers in China have any discretionary power over lending — how much, or to which companies — then you have to think that having the bank’s books crammed with bad debts will have some kind of effect.
In particular, Chinese banks will be heavily incentivized to “evergreen” loans to zombie companies that they’ve already lent to. Those subsidized lifelines will delay the day of reckoning, allowing banks to pretend their balance sheets are healthier than they are, while diverting financing from younger, healthier companies. This is probably what happened in Japan after its bubble burst in the early 1990s.
The standard model of industrial policy — temporary export subsidies — imagines these as being provided at taxpayer expense. But if financial intermediaries are important — and most rapidly industrializing countries rely heavily on banks rather than on markets for financing — then it’s not so simple. A wave of corporate failures may be healthy for margins, but could cause years of low growth as banks are paralyzed with fear and tethered to zombie companies. And it’s not clear that state ownership and control of the banking system is an effective remedy, because even in a communist system, middle managers are still probably afraid for their personal careers (or their lives) if their institutions perform poorly.
This means we shouldn’t hail the Chinese industrial policy experiment as a success until we wait a few years. More generally, I think discussions of industrial policy tend to downplay the role of financial systems, and banking systems in particular. I plan to write a lot more about that soon.
The New York Times has a long article where the author lays out an impressive array of circumstantial evidence that the inventor of Bitcoin is the cypherpunk Adam Back.
I don’t know. The article is convincing, but it’s written to be convincing.
I can’t remember if I ever met Adam. I was a member of the Cypherpunks mailing list for a while, but I was never really an active participant. I spent more time on the Usenet newsgroup sci.crypt. I knew a bunch of the Cypherpunks, though, from various conferences around the world at the time. I really have no opinion about who Satoshi Nakamoto really is.
1. Produce and Teach Useful Knowledge
Universities exist to generate and teach useful knowledge. This knowledge is grounded in skeptical inquiry, empirical evidence, and logical deduction. “Useful” includes not only practical applications but also fundamental discoveries that expand our understanding of the world, even if their benefits are long-term.
2. Be Useful to All of Society
Universities are subsidized only if society at large finds them valuable. Research may take time to bear fruit, but its insights should ultimately serve the public good, communicated openly and accessibly, and presented with epistemic humility. Teaching should be done with care and draw on up-to-date research.
3. Attract Talent from All of Society
Useful knowledge can be created by people from any social or economic background. Do not waste talent. Do not select talent based on who knows “how to play the game”. Avoid insular language or norms that deter people from entering research.
4. Neutral, Objective Research Produces Useful Knowledge
Research must be neutral and objective. It is true that everyone has their individual background and preferences; nonetheless, unbiased research is still possible. Tradition, folk knowledge, and storytelling all play an important roles in society, but they are not the purpose of universities. There is no “Western science” or culturally-determined “ways of knowing”. Rather, research is open to all and can be performed identically regardless of background.
5. Hire, Promote, and Cite Based on Knowledge Contribution
Hiring, promotion, and citation must be based on an individual’s contribution to knowledge. Nepotism, group preferences, and adherence to specific “schools of thought” corrupt this process. When advancement is not based on merit, the public rightly questions our integrity and the objectivity of our findings.
6. Keep Personal Views Out of Research and Teaching
A scholar’s personal politics should be invisible in their research and teaching. If a finding is predictable based on the author’s identity or known views, the process has failed. Objectivity is the hallmark of credible science. Academics may hold private beliefs like anyone else, but their academic work must stand apart from them.
7. Research Fraud is Unacceptable
Fraud destroys trust. Misrepresentation of results, selective reporting, or methods designed to publish rather than to discover are also harmful. Proven fraud must bring immediate dismissal, as it violates the core purpose of academia.
8. Scientific Institutions Should Be Apolitical
Universities, journals, and scientific societies must remain non-partisan. Their public statements must be rare, restricted to issues of direct expert consensus, and made only when silence would be a greater threat to their integrity than speaking. Activism sacrifices credibility for influence – or worse yet, sacrifices credibility and influence alike.
On the evening of April 18, 1775, the people who lived in the British colony of Massachusetts had gone to bed with the sun, as usual. By the evening of April 19, everything had changed. In the past twenty-four hours, soldiers from their own government had opened fire on them, killing their own people. And Massachusetts men had fired back.
It was hard to understand how things had gotten so bad. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, Bostonians had looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.
But that euphoria faded fast. Almost as soon as the war was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.
In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.
But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent, a right the king had guaranteed to Englishmen in the Magna Carta of 1215. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury—also a historical right—and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.
Far more than money was at stake. The fight over the Stamp Act tapped into a struggle over a profound question of human governance: Could the king be checked by the people?
This was a question the colonists were perhaps uniquely qualified to answer. While the North American colonies were governed officially by the British crown, the distance between England and the colonies meant that colonial assemblies often had to make rules on the ground. Those assemblies controlled the power of the purse, which gave them the upper hand over royal officials, who had to await orders from England that often took months to arrive. This chaotic system enabled the colonists to carve out a new approach to politics even while they were living in the British empire.
Colonists naturally began to grasp that the exercise of power was not the province of a divinely ordained leader, but something temporary that depended on local residents’ willingness to support the men who were exercising that power.
The Stamp Act threatened to overturn that longstanding system, replacing it with tyranny.
When news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, a group of dockhands, sailors, and workers took to the streets, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They warned colonists that their rights as Englishmen were under attack. Lawyer John Adams recognized that the Sons of Liberty were changing the political equation. He wrote that gatherings of the Sons of Liberty “tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty. They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”
John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, who was deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty, recognized that building a coalition in defense of liberty within the British system required conversation and cooperation. As clerk of the Massachusetts legislature, he was responsible for corresponding with other colonial legislatures. Across the colonies, the Sons of Liberty began writing to like-minded friends, informing them about local events, asking after their circumstances, organizing.
They spurred people to action. By 1766 the Stamp Act was costing more to enforce than it was producing in revenue, and Parliament agreed to end it. But it explicitly claimed “full power and authority to make laws and statutes...to bind the colonies and people of America...in all cases whatsoever.” It imposed new revenue measures.
News of new taxes reached Boston in late 1767. The Massachusetts legislature promptly circulated a letter to the other colonies opposing taxation without representation and standing firm on the colonists’ right to equality in the British empire. The Sons of Liberty and their associates called for boycotts on taxed goods and broke into the warehouses of those they suspected weren’t complying, while women demonstrated their sympathy for the rights of colonists by producing their own cloth and drinking coffee rather than relying on tea.
British officials worried that colonists in Boston were on the edge of revolt, and they sent troops to restore order. But the troops’ presence did not calm the town. Instead, fights erupted between locals and the British regulars.
Finally, in March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry men and boys harassing them. They wounded six and killed five, including Crispus Attucks, a Black man who became the first to die in the attack. Son of Liberty Paul Revere turned the altercation into the “Boston Massacre.” His instantly famous engraving showed soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, “Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey; Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.”
Parliament promptly removed the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor and got rid of all but one of the new taxes. They left the one on tea, keeping the issue of taxation without representation on the table. Then, in May 1773, Parliament gave the East India Tea Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. By lowering the cost of tea in the colonies, it meant to persuade people to buy the taxed tea, thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose a tax on the colonies.
In Boston, local leaders posted a citizen guard on Griffin’s Wharf at the harbor to make sure tea could not be unloaded. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded three merchant ships. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped the valuable leaves overboard.
Parliament closed the port of Boston, stripped the colony of its charter, flooded soldiers back into the town, and demanded payment for the tea. Colonists promptly organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and took control of the colony. The provincial congress met in Concord, where it stockpiled supplies and weapons, and called for towns to create “minute men” who could fight at a moment’s notice.
British officials were determined to end what they saw as a rebellion. In April they ordered military governor General Thomas Gage to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had left Boston to take shelter with one of Hancock’s relatives in the nearby town of Lexington. From there they could seize the military supplies at Concord. British officials hoped that seizing both the men and the munitions would end the crisis.
But about thirty of the Sons of Liberty had been watching the soldiers and gathering intelligence. When the soldiers set out on the night of April 18, two Sons of Liberty flashed two lanterns in the steeple of the Old North Church—the highest point in Boston—to signal to watchers that the soldiers were traveling across Boston Harbor to Charlestown. Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.
Paul Revere and William Dawes headed for Lexington. There, they warned Adams and Hancock and then set out for Concord. They picked up young doctor Samuel Prescott, who had been in Lexington courting, on their way. British soldiers stopped Revere and Dawes, but Prescott got away and made it to Concord. As they heard the news, families set off a system of “alarm and muster” developed months before for just such an occasion, ringing bells and banging drums to alert the next house that there was an emergency.
Just before dawn on that chilly, dark April morning, militiamen had heard the news and were converging on Lexington Green. When the soldiers marched onto the Lexington town green in the darkness just before dawn, they found several dozen minute men waiting for them. An officer ordered the men to leave, and they began to mill around, some of them leaving, others staying. And then, just as the sun was coming up, a gun went off. The soldiers opened fire. When the locals realized the soldiers were firing not just powder, but also lead musket balls, most ran. Eight locals were killed, and another dozen wounded.
The outnumbered militiamen fell back to tend their wounded, and about 300 Regulars marched on Concord to destroy the guns and powder there. But news of the arriving soldiers and the shooting on Lexington town green had spread through the colonists’ communication network, and militiamen from as far away as Worcester were either in Concord or on their way. By midmorning the Regulars were outnumbered and in battle with about 400 militiamen. They pulled back to the main body of British troops still in Lexington.
The Regulars headed back to Boston, but by then militiamen had converged on their route. The Regulars had been awake for almost two days with only a short rest, and they were tired. Militiamen fired at them not in organized lines, as soldiers were accustomed to, but in the style they had learned from Indigenous Americans, shooting from behind trees, houses, and the glacial boulders littered along the road. This way of war used the North American landscape to their advantage. They picked off British officers, dressed in distinct uniforms, first. By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.
Even before the British soldiers made it back down the Battle Road from Concord on April 19, militiamen—both white and Black, free and enslaved—from the Massachusetts countryside, furious that soldiers of their own government had shot at them and killed their neighbors, rushed to surround Boston, laying siege to the soldiers and British officials there.
By the next morning, more than 15,000 militiamen surrounded the town of Boston. The Revolutionary War had begun.
Just over a year later, the fight that had started over the question of whether the king could be checked by the people would give the colonists an entirely new, radical answer to that question. On July 4, 1776, they declared the people had the right to be treated equally before the law, and they had the right to govern themselves.
It takes most college students at least four years to earn a bachelor’s degree. Christie Williams finished in three months.
The North Carolina human resources executive spent two months racking up credits through web tutorials after work in 2024, then raced through 11 online classes at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in four weeks. Later that year, she went back to earn her master’s — in just five weeks. The two degrees cost a total of just over $4,000.
Since then, she has coached a thousand other students on how to speed through the state college, shaving off years and thousands of dollars from the usual cost of a degree.
It's been a decade since we lost Prince, and I wanted to take a moment to offer a look back at some of the pieces I've written over the years, and share some of the work I've done, and hopefully it will give you a chance to explore some aspect of his artistry or legacy that you haven't yet had a chance to discover!
Perhaps a good place to start: It's time to discover Prince — a set of starting points to look at Prince's musical catalog, with selected albums (with more than 40 albums to pick from, it can be overwhelming to know where to start!) and some playlists that I created specifically to help new fans find out exactly why we love his music so much.
Another comprehensive overview: Every video Prince ever made. I walked through all of the music videos Prince made over the four decades of his career, offering some info and context that might help you find which ones are most compelling (or weird!) and worth your time.
I've also gotten to guest on a number of podcasts and in other media over the years to discuss various aspects of Prince's career. Perhaps none was more exciting for me than talking about Prince's history of technological innovation for the official Prince podcast. Then, no less than the New York Times described me as a "Prince scholar" when it covered the discovery of the earliest known footage of Prince as a child. There are a bunch of other podcast appearances (see below) but these felt like the pinnacle of legitimacy for my career as a Prince fan.
Here on my site, there are some pieces I wrote to try to explain a few of Prince's masterworks. I wanted to give a sort of x-ray view into the larger cultural and even political context behind his choices when Prince created his best-known artistic expressions:
I Know Times Are Changing: This is the minute-by-minute story of how the song Purple Rain was created — covering everything from the background story of how conservative rock fans had hounded Prince's band off the stage at the turn of the 80s, to a glimpse into Prince's editing process where he turned a debut of his band into his signature song.
How Prince Won the Super Bowl: Many people know that Prince played the greatest Super Bowl halftime show of all time, but very few know that it wasn't just a scintillating musical performance. I get into why Prince didn't play his biggest hits like "When Doves Cry" and "Kiss", and how the show was a deeply personal statement on race, equity, and legacy.
Prince Interactive: Shortly after Prince's passing, I collaborated with several of the people who maintained Prince's (many!) websites over the years to help create the Prince Online Museum, an archive of many of Prince's digital works over the years. The earliest of these digital experiences is the Interactive CD-ROM which Prince released in 1994. I created a walkthrough video of the game which is shared as a resource on the site for those who've never gotten a chance to see the game in the years since its release.
Prince's Own Liner Notes On His Greatest Hits: I have worked hard to preserve Prince's extensive digital archives over the years, and this is one of the bits I'm most proud of. For the release of his first greatest hits set in 1993, Prince compiled a list of draft notes for his former manager Alan Leeds to use as the basis of the box set's liner notes. This draft was later posted on Prince's first website, and then quickly deleted — but not before I was able to archive a copy! So I was able to share the only surviving copy of Prince's first-person commentary on the biggest hits of his career, which is well worth a read.
Message From The Artist: This is another bit of digital archiving from Prince's original website of a letter that was briefly posted 30 years ago before being lost to history. In it, Prince explained the spiritual and artistic reasons behind his shocking decision to change his name to an unpronounceable symbol, and laid out the battle for ownership and control of his music which would come to define the second half of his career. The letter was quickly amended to be far less personal, and then deleted completely from Prince's website, but I was able to hold onto a copy that we can now read for ourselves.
Then, there are some fun artifacts and experiences about Prince that I found to be worth sharing, and other folks have found them to be pretty fun, too. One of my most favorite stories is The Purple Raincheck, about the time that Prince invited me to his house, but I couldn't go. And yet somehow, in true Prince fashion, I ended up with an even better story in the end anyway. If you've ever wanted to know what it's like to roll up to Prince's Oscars party, this is the one for you.
At the other end of the nerdy spectrum, there's this piece about my favorite floppy disc of all time, a rarity I was able to track down which contained the obscure font that Prince's team sent out to publications when he had changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, so that they could properly render his trademark icon. Later, with the help of the brilliant minds at Adafruit, I was able to recover the data from the disc after almost three decades, through some vintage technology and a little bit of good luck.
For Minnesota Public Radio's The Current, we also dug into Prince's history as a computer nerd. On Switched on Pop, we dug into Why U Love 2 Listen 2 Prince, with an incredible audio breakdown showing how Prince influenced everybody — including a direct connection to the biggest album of all time.
Dig, if u will
We've been lucky to have a global community of Prince scholars that's formed over the years, which regularly hosts academic symposia, publishes papers and books, delivers remarkable talks on every aspect of Prince's work and the impact of his legacy, and in general uses his art as the starting point for some pretty extraordinary cultural exploration. One manifestation of that tendency to take his work seriously is the spreadsheet of Prince recordings, which is a fan-created work designed to provide a canonical reference for the thousands of compositions that Prince created over his career, unifying the conversations and discussions that people have. This is genuine nerd stuff!
And finally, one of the things I'm most proud of is this talk I delivered just a few weeks after Prince passed, in Minneapolis on what would have been his 58th birthday. It covers a really broad swath of Prince's influences and both his technical innovations and fierce battle for artistic independence. But it also dives into a lot of my background and my family's personal history, and connects it to a lot of themes of immigration and the systems that govern how this country moves. A decade on, I think some of these themes resonate more than ever, and if you're willing to set aside some time for it, I'd really love for more people to watch it, as I think it speaks to so many of the things I care most deeply about.
In all, after the initial grief and shock of his loss, I've been pleased to see Prince's legacy and impact grow. It's been wonderful to see so many people be surprised and delighted at all the different ways his work and innovative ideas remain relevant and resonant years and even decades after he created them. And I never get tired of people around the world sending me links or images of Prince or Prince-related items, saying "this reminded me of you!". Whether it's from old friends or people I've never met, it's something very special to be connected to others through the art and creativity of a fiercely independent spirit.
Above all else, Prince wanted to encourage people to create and be creative, to have mastery over their work and their lives, to be their true selves, and to be loving and compassionate towards others. Like everyone, he was flawed and complicated and weird and contradictory. But unlike anyone, he was able to create new worlds that millions of people got to live in inside their imaginations, and to fight impossible battles against all the odds and still somehow prevail.
That's still an inspiring example everyone can follow, no matter who your are, or how you create in the world. And best of all, Prince has created a perfect soundtrack to help you do it.
So schools will respond to cost pressures by letting quality deteriorate. More instruction will be of the inferior online variety. There are very good online experiences, but schools are too bureaucratic and not run well enough to deliver them. Fewer professors will be full-salaried, tenure-track professors. Administrators and staff will grow at much slower rates than over the last 20 years, a positive development.
That overall picture may sound grim, but adjustments will kick in to limit the costs. A global market will ensure that adjunct faculty are smarter and better than before. Students will get better at using AI to teach themselves, filling in the gaps left by university budget shortages.
At the same time, colleges and universities will get better at marketing and fundraising. Schools with famous football and basketball teams will be just fine. Schools will intensively market a few academic superstars and let the quality of their median tenured faculty decline. Every possible profit center in a university will be mined for extra revenue, whether extra housekeeping service for dormitory living or renting out the swimming pool and university library to nearby retirees.
And this:
Perhaps you commonly hear it said that “college is what you make of it.” That may sound like a cliché, but it is a truth that helps us understand this new world to come. A lot of students just flat out want to go to college. If they have to put more into the social side of learning to make it worthwhile, they will do so.
In sum, there will be a lot of painful adjustment, but the major institutions will not come close to disappearing.
Milder temperatures in April than March, with much more precipitation; snowpack, however, remains extremely low What a strange Water Year it has been in 2025-2026! We started the WY with record rainfall during Oct-Dec across much of the central and south coast, including the wettest Oct-Dec period ever observed in Santa Barbara, Ventura, Kern, and […]
I upgraded my Claude Token Counter tool to add the ability to run the same count against different models in order to compare them.
As far as I can tell Claude Opus 4.7 is the first model to change the tokenizer, so it's only worth running comparisons between 4.7 and 4.6. The Claude token counting API accepts any Claude model ID though so I've included options for all four of the notable current models (Opus 4.7 and 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, and Haiku 4.5).
Opus 4.7 uses an updated tokenizer that improves how the model processes text. The tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens—roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type.
I pasted the Opus 4.7 system prompt into the token counting tool and found that the Opus 4.7 tokenizer used 1.46x the number of tokens as Opus 4.6.
Opus 4.7 uses the same pricing is Opus 4.6 - $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens - but this token inflation means we can expect it to be around 40% more expensive.
The token counter tool also accepts images. Opus 4.7 has improved image support, described like this:
Opus 4.7 has better vision for high-resolution images: it can accept images up to 2,576 pixels on the long edge (~3.75 megapixels), more than three times as many as prior Claude models.
I tried counting tokens for a 3456x2234 pixel 3.7MB PNG and got an even bigger increase in token counts - 3.01x times the number of tokens for 4.7 compared to 4.6:
Update: That 3x increase for images is entirely due to Opus 4.7 being able to handle higher resolutions. I tried that again with a 682x318 pixel image and it took 314 tokens with Opus 4.7 and 310 with Opus 4.6, so effectively the same cost.
Update 2: I tried a 15MB, 30 page text-heavy PDF and Opus 4.7 reported 60,934 tokens while 4.6 reported 56,482 - that's a 1.08x multiplier, significantly lower than the multiplier I got for raw text.
Along the western coast of Southern Thailand, a series of bright tan beaches lines the Andaman Sea. These sandy expanses fill the gaps between the myriad other features touching the sea, from limestone karst towers to mangroves to built-up areas.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured these images on March 23, 2026, showing part of the coastal area along Thailand’s Krabi Province. These beaches lie about 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of Phuket across Ao Phangnga, a bay of the Andaman Sea. The beaches are a tourism hotspot and draw visitors from around the world.
Railay Beach and Phra Nang Beach, accessible by boat, are especially a draw for rock climbers who come here to scale the seaside walls of limestone. The towering formations are an iconic part of the region’s tropical karst landscape, resulting from the just-right ingredients of rock type and climate conditions.
Limestone in this region formed from the accumulation of calcium carbonate, the skeletal remains of marine organisms that settled here when the area was covered by a shallow sea hundreds of millions of years ago. Over time, continental collisions lifted the rock upward and shaped it into complex patterns. Rainwater, made slightly acidic due to the tropical environment, assisted in the chemical weathering that eroded the limestone, sculpting the rock into unique shapes.
Limestone towers stand above the sea off the coast of Southern Thailand.
Photo by Shawn via Unsplash.
March 23, 2026
The karst landscape extends into the sea in the form of islands. For instance, Ko Po Da Nai and Ko Hong, visible in the wide satellite image above, feature steep limestone cliffs and caves, making them a popular destination for paddlers. Larger boats also cut through the water, their wakes appearing as white streaks.
On the mainland, the landscape beyond the sandy beaches includes varied terrain. Green forests cover the slopes of Khao Hang Nak, where hikers can take in views of the Andaman Sea and surrounding karst formations. At lower elevations, green mangroves line several rivers, including Khlong Chi Lat.
Human activity is most visible in the flatter plains, where urban development and agriculture have transformed the landscape. Krabi, the province’s capital, and nearby towns appear gray. To the northwest, patches of brown and green in geometric patterns indicate agricultural land, where oil palm and rubber trees are commonly grown alongside other crops such as pineapple.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo by Shawn used under the Unsplash license.Story by Kathryn Hansen.
It might look like we started a space war, but we didn't. This isn't a scene from Star Wars either. What we're looking at is the Tarantula Nebula. And those beams come from the lasers installed on the telescopes that comprise ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer.
The VLTI combines the light from several telescopes to create a “virtual” telescope with a mirror as large as the separation between them, allowing astronomers to discern very small details. For the telescopes to combine their light properly, we need to correct the distortions introduced by atmospheric turbulence.
In November 2025, as part of an extensive upgrade called GRAVITY+, new lasers were installed on the 8-m telescopes that comprise the VLTI. Each laser in this image comes from a different telescope, all pointing at the same target. The lasers excite sodium atoms high up in Earth’s atmosphere, creating artificial stars that can be seen here at the end of the laser beams. These stars are then used to measure atmospheric turbulence in real time.
The Tarantula Nebula was one of the first targets of this new system. This Picture of the Week is not itself a VLTI image of the target, but a photograph taken outside of the telescopes by astronomer Anthony Berdeu, who took part in the GRAVITY+ testing activities. This image beautifully bridges near and far-away objects: the lasers launched by the four telescopes, the artificial stars they create 90 km above the ground, and the Tarantula Nebula, nestled in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way some 160 000 light-years away.
I put together some notes on patterns for fetching data from a Datasette instance directly into Google Sheets - using the importdata() function, a "named function" that wraps it or a Google Apps Script if you need to send an API token in an HTTP header (not supported by importdata().)
I've been experimenting with ways to fetch data from Datasette and display it in Google Sheets.
I've found three patterns that work so far. importdata() and "named functions" can only fetch from public Datasette instances. Apps Script can fetch from API key protected instances as well.
Using IMPORTDATA()
The easiest way to get this up and running doesn't involve any custom sheets functions at all. The IMPORTDATA() default function can fetch any CSV data from a URL and load it into the sheet - and Datasette exports CSV by default.
Ideally I'd like to use =sql("SELECT ...") in my spreadsheet cells instead. Google Sheets lets you define new "named functions" on a per-sheet basis, which can use existing Sheets functions and formulas - including importdata().
Go to Data -> Named functions and select "Add new function". Call it SQL and add a single argument placeholder called query, then set the following formula definition:
Now you can use =SQL("select * from roadside_attractions") in a cell to execute that SQL query and load in the CSV data:
Using Apps Script
There's one big downside of importdata() or a named function built on top of it: only unauthenticated URLs to CSV exports are supported. If your Datasette instance is protected by authentication and requires API keys to be sent as HTTP headers you will not be able to use them.
(importdata() can work fine here if the API key is a query string argument though. Here's how to enable that using the datasette-auth-tokens plugin.)
Apps Script lets you define custom server-side JavaScript functions which can then be called from a Google Sheets cell. These can be a lot more flexible, including sending API tokens in HTTP headers.
To create an Apps Script for a spreadsheet, use "Extensions -> Apps Script". This will start you on a code editor with a Code.gs file that you can edit. Here's a function definition for a =datasette_sql(query) custom function:
functiondatasette_sql(query){varbaseUrl='https://latest.datasette.io/fixtures'vartoken='';// Strip a trailing slash so we control the joinbaseUrl=baseUrl.replace(/\/+$/,"");varurl=baseUrl+"/-/query.json?sql="+encodeURIComponent(query);varoptions={muteHttpExceptions: true};if(token){options.headers={Authorization: "Bearer "+token};}varresponse=UrlFetchApp.fetch(url,options);varjson=JSON.parse(response.getContentText());if(!json.ok){thrownewError(json.error||"Query failed");}varrows=json.rows;if(!rows||rows.length===0)return[["No results"]];varcols=Object.keys(rows[0]);varresult=[cols];for(vari=0;i<rows.length;i++){varrow=[];for(varj=0;j<cols.length;j++){varval=rows[i][cols[j]];row.push(val===null ? "" : val);}result.push(row);}returnresult;}
You can set the base URL and an optional API token in variables at the top of the script.
You can ignore that "Deploy" button entirely, it's not necessary for custom functions for sheets. I had to hit the Command+S key combination to save my changes - confusingly I could not find a "save" button in the editor UI.
Apps Script has a script and document properties mechanism which theoretically could be used to keep secret values separate from that code, but I wasn't able to get that to work without confusing permission dialogs popping up.
As far as I can tell users who have "view" permission but not "edit" permission on the spreadsheet are unable to view the source code, so it should be safe to keep read-only API tokens in the source code even for shared spreadsheets.
I've prepared this demo sheet showing all three of the above solutions - importdata(), a named sql() function and a datasette_sql() function defined using Apps Script.
Of course, it’s no surprise that the efforts to rewrite a past that casts ill thoughts on Donald Trump’s legacy are still the subject of intense attempts to rewrite history.
After all, Trump simply wants to wish away Jan. 6, 2021, as an insurrectionist stain, and continue to argue that he never lost the 2020 election. He even wants to rewrite the more recent past, like why we ended up in a war with Iran from which we see no easy exit that preserves international safety, unburdened commerce and diplomatic face for Trump.
The news this week, again, was that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence efforts that Trump so easily set aside in war fervor, is among the chief historical rewriters, along with the Justice Department.
In short, the call, which amounted to blackmailing Zelenskyy for adverse information about Joe Biden, his 2020 political opponent, should never have seen the light of day, Gabbard’s investigation found. Gabbard, in effect, came to the opposite conclusion of the rest of the legal and political world – that misconduct by Trump’s investigators outweighed any wrongdoing on Trump’s part.
Basically, Gabbard contends that former Inspector General Michael Atkinson should not have flagged a whistleblower report about the Zelenskyy call to Congress, that it was too flimsy a piece of evidence. Atkinson has said repeatedly he did what statutes required, to let people know that someone had witnessed a likely crime by the president.
This is the same Tulsi Gabbard that turned up in Atlanta last month to witness the FBI seizure of ballots and records from voting headquarters in Fulton County, where Trump still believes – despite multiple recounts by machine and hand – that he was cheated of a win in Georgia, and thus for the presidential Electoral College.
What Gabbard never addressed, nor has Trump, is why the director of national intelligence, who has been left out of the war decision-making in the Middle East, is justifiably spending her time with a political eraser as her principal tool. Indeed, if the intelligence community’s job is to keep us safer, why is she spending her time re-polishing the Trump apple?
Indeed, the one actual intelligence job involving Gabbard –renewal of a warrantless FISA authority — hit the congressional skids late Friday night, with enough Republican defections from a Trump demand for unanimity to allow only a 10-day renewal. Gabbard had warned Trump he needed more protections for U.S. citizens in the authorizing bill, but was ignored.
Erasing Convictions
Meanwhile, the Justice Department this week asked a federal appeals judge to erase convictions for pardoned members of the far-right groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who were previously found guilty of seditious conspiracy for their parts in the violence at the U.S. capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
It was the Capitol riot that spurred the second, still unsuccessful impeachment.
The request came from Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney in Washington and applicant for Attorney General. Again, despite commutations and pardons covering 1,600 or so insurrectionists, Pirro asked that history be rewritten to say the convictions never took place. Several Proud Boys and Oath Keepers’ leaders were granted clemency as part of that action.
Apparently, Donald Trump thinks we’re stupid and never watched television that day. Still, it remains unclear how erasing the convictions is supposed to make us feel better about Trump, who clearly was the organizer for the full election denial campaign for the months that had led up to the Capitol riots.
What makes it more rankling are the persistent plans being discussed by this very same Trump to limit, interfere or disrupt election voting and counting this year in an increasingly desperate attempt to control the outcome of balloting that looks at this point to be heavily favored against his policies.
Of course, the trials that followed Jan. 6 had been meant to seek accountability for violent crimes against those responsible for what prosecutors described as an attack on the heart of democracy. Charges against Trump himself were dropped after he won reelection.
The Trump administration has sought to portray the rioters as patriots and peaceful protesters, being used as pawns by his political rivals, and repeating baseless claims of widespread election fraud. “In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters,” reads the White House’s web page on Jan. 6.
At least 10 pardoned for Jan. 6 have been re-charged since with crimes that range from crimes plotting murder of FBI agents, to child sexual assault, possession of child sexual abuse material and reckless homicide while driving drunk.
Two postscripts: The California Supreme Court permanently has disbarred John Eastman, a key architect in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The high court declined to intervene after lower courts found that Eastman had repeatedly misled courts and advanced baseless claims in service of Trump’s last-ditch effort to cling to power after losing the presidency in 2020.
Meanwhile, Medetis Long, a career prosecutor in Justice and the lead in the investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan has walked away from the case, CNN reported, apparently because she has serious reservations that there is no case to be made, despite orders from Trump.
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