Dan Simmons, RIP
Alas, he has passed away. A great writer, you should start with Hyperion if you have not read it already.
The post Dan Simmons, RIP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Alas, he has passed away. A great writer, you should start with Hyperion if you have not read it already.
The post Dan Simmons, RIP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The liver is one of the most powerful organs in the body, but it’s one we also take for granted, particularly when it comes to alcohol. The liver filters toxins, supports our digestion and stores energy, as well as regulating many other processes in the body.
We all know that alcohol isn’t good for the liver and it’s fair to say we know that heavy drinking or regular alcohol consumption can cause lasting damage. But that will never happen to us, right? Liver damage only happens to those that end up in an alcohol dependence clinic and have a really heavy dependence on booze. Wrong.
Alcohol related liver damage can develop gradually and over time really have an impact on a person’s life, to the point of death in fact, so while it’s important to drink in moderation and live a healthy and balanced lifestyle, it’s also important to notice the early signs too.
Here are five signs that alcohol may be starting to affect your liver…
Feeling unusually tired or lacking energy can be one of the earliest signs that your liver is under pressure. When the liver is struggling to function efficiently, the body’s ability to process toxins and store energy becomes compromised. This can leave you feeling sluggish, weak, or unable to concentrate. Although fatigue has many possible causes, stress, poor sleep, low mood, or nutrition, it is worth paying attention to if it coincides with regular drinking or follows periods of heavier alcohol use.
The liver plays a vital role in digestion, especially in producing bile, which helps your body break down fats. When alcohol begins to affect liver function, you may notice changes in your appetite or digestion. These can include:
While these symptoms are common in various conditions, they can also be early indicators that your liver is struggling to cope with alcohol intake.
Discomfort in the upper right side of the abdomen, where your liver is located, may be a sign of inflammation. This discomfort can feel like a dull ache, pressure, or sensitivity in that area. Sometimes it appears after drinking, but it can also be present at other times. If the liver becomes enlarged or irritated from repeated alcohol exposure, this may create sensations of tightness or swelling. Any persistent abdominal pain should be assessed by a healthcare professional to rule out more serious issues.
One of the more noticeable signs of liver strain is jaundice, which causes the skin or the whites of the eyes to appear yellow. This happens when the liver is unable to process bilirubin, a waste product created when red blood cells break down. Jaundice is usually a sign of more significant liver impairment and should be taken seriously.
Other skin changes can also signal liver stress, including:
These symptoms can arise when the liver’s ability to regulate blood components is compromised.
Finally, because the liver plays a key role in processing waste products, changes in urine and stool colour can indicate something is amiss. Dark urine, even when hydrated, or pale, clay-coloured stools may suggest the liver is struggling to process bile effectively. While temporary changes can occur due to diet, medications, or short-term illness, persistent differences are worth discussing with a healthcare professional.
In fact, if any of the above feel familiar to you, it’s worth seeking help from your doctor and exploring your relationship with alcohol to enable your liver and overall wellbeing to recover.
Photo: lyashenko via their website.
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The post Five Signs Alcohol Is Having an Impact on Your Liver appeared first on DCReport.org.
Peru’s Marxist President Changes His Mind, Doesn’t Make Hernando de Soto Prime Minister
Remember Gilda Radner?
The post “Never mind…” appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
That is from the new AER Insights by Jonathan Chiu and Cyril Monnet:
Central bankers argue that programmable digital currencies may compromise the uniformity or singleness of money. We explore this view in a stylized model where programmable money arises endogenously, and differently programmed monies have varying liquidity. Programmability provides private value by easing commitment frictions but imposes social costs under informational frictions. Preserving uniformity is not necessarily socially beneficial. Banning programmable money lowers welfare when informational frictions are mild but improves it when commitment frictions are low. These insights suggest that programmable money could be more beneficial on permissionless blockchains, where it is difficult to commit but trades are publicly observable.
Recommended.
The post On the Programmability and Uniformity of Digital Currencies appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
What does the universe look like through
New NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a major overhaul of the agency’s Artemis moon program Friday, acknowledging that the agency’s plan to land astronauts on the moon in 2028 was not realistic without another preparatory mission first to lay the groundwork.
He said NASA will now add an additional flight in 2027 in which astronauts will dock with new commercial moon landers in low-Earth orbit for detailed tests of navigation, communications, propulsion and life support systems, along with verifying rendezvous procedures.
That flight, in turn, will be followed by at least one and possibly two lunar landing missions in 2028 that incorporate lessons learned from the preceding flight.
The goal is to accelerate the pace of launches of the huge Space Launch System rocket while carrying out Artemis flights in evolutionary steps — not attempting missions that rely on too many untested technologies and procedures at once.
“We’re going to get there in steps, continue to take down risk as we learn more and we roll that information into subsequent designs,” Isaacman said told CBS News. “We’ve got to get back to basics.”
Isaacman outlined the plan in an interview with CBS News space contributor Christian Davenport and then again during a news conference Friday.
The announcement came two days after release of a sharply-worded report from NASA’s independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel that deemed the existing plans too risky.
The panel raised concerns about the number of “firsts” required by the original Artemis III moon landing mission and recommended that NASA “restructure” the program to create a more balanced risk posture.
“It is interesting that a lot of the things that we are addressing directly go to the points they raised in their report,” Isaacman said Friday. “I can’t say we actually collaborated on it because I generally think these were all pretty obvious observations.”
He said he told the panel “we are completely aligned, I agree with every one of the points that you raised.”
The revised Artemis architecture also comes as NASA has been struggling to launch the delayed Artemis II mission on a flight to send four astronauts on a trip around the moon.
Launch had been planned for early February, but it was delayed to repair a hydrogen leak and, more recently, to give engineers time to fix a helium pressurization problem in the rocket’s upper stage. Launch is now on hold until at least April 1.
The Artemis III mission, which had been expected to land astronauts near the moon’s south pole in 2028, now will be redefined and rescheduled — launching ahead of schedule in 2027 but not to the moon, Isaacman said.
Instead, yet-to-be-named astronauts will rendezvous and dock in orbit closer to home with one or both of the commercially built lunar landers now under development at Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
The idea is to gain valuable near-term flight experience before attempting a moon landing with astronauts on board. With Artemis III under its belt, NASA hopes to launch two moon landing missions in 2028, Artemis IV and V, using one or both landers, and to continue with one moonshot per year thereafter.
“What helps us get to the moon? Well, for sure, rendezvous and docking with one or ideally both landers, that gives you an opportunity to do some integrated testing of a vehicle that we are going to depend upon the following year to take those astronauts down to the surface of the moon,” Isaacman told CBS News.
The revised Artemis III mission will also give astronauts a chance to test out new , commercially provided spacesuits future moonwalkers will use on the lunar surface.
“It’s an opportunity to … actually have the suits in microgravity, even if we don’t go outside the vehicle in them. You get a lot of good learning from that,” Isaacman said.
The Artemis III test flight with one or two lander dockings in Earth orbit is similar in concept to Apollo 9, which launched a command module and lander to Earth orbit for flight tests in 1969 and helped pave the way to the Apollo 11 landing four months later.
Isaacman said SpaceX and Blue Origin are “both looking to do uncrewed landing demonstrations as part of the existing agreement.”
“So we want to just take advantage of this to set up both vendors for future success on a lunar landing,” he said. “This is the proper way to do it, if it works out from a timing perspective, to be able to rendezvous and dock with both. … This, again, is the right way to proceed in order to have a high confidence opportunity in ’28 to land.”
The Artemis IV and V missions in 2028 will use whichever landers are deemed ready for service. If only one company’s lander is available, that lander would be used for both missions, an official said. If both are available, one would be used for one flight and one for the other.
Launching Artemis III, IV and V before the end of 2028 will not be easy, and Isaacman said it is essential that NASA rebuild its workforce and regain the technical competence to support a higher launch cadence, moving from one flight every three years or so to a flight every year. That pace, he argued, will reduce risk.
“When you regain these core competencies and you start exercising your muscles, your skills do not atrophy,” he said. “It’s safer. And yes, you are buying down risk, because you’re able to test things in low Earth orbit before you need to get to the moon, which is exactly what we did during the Apollo era.”
He said he did not blame NASA’s contractors for the current slow pace of Artemis launches. Instead, “we should have made better decisions (in the past) and said, you don’t go from Artemis II to landing on the moon with Artemis III.”
Officials said Isaacman had discussed accelerating lander development with both SpaceX and Blue Origin and that both were on board. He also discussed the accelerated Artemis overhaul with Boeing, which manages the SLS rocket and builds its massive first stage; with United Launch Alliance, builder of the rocket’s upper stage, Orion-builder Lockheed Martin and other Artemis contractors.
All, the official said, were in agreement.
“Boeing is a proud partner to the Artemis mission and our team is honored to contribute to NASA’s vision for American space leadership,” Steve Parker, the president and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, said in a statement. “We are ready to meet the increased demand.”
Isaacman also said the agency would halt work to develop a more powerful version of the SLS rocket’s upper stage, known as the Exploration Upper Stage, or EUS. Instead, NASA will go forward with a “standardized,” less powerful stage but one that will minimize major changes between flights and utilize the same launch gantry.
Under the original Artemis architecture, NASA planned on multiple versions of the SLS rocket, ranging from the “Block 1” vehicle currently in use to a more powerful EUS-equipped Block 1B and eventually an even bigger Block 2 model using advanced solid rocket boosters. The latter two versions required use of a taller mobile launch gantry, already well under construction at the Kennedy Space Center.
“It is needlessly complicated to alter the configuration of the SLS and Orion stack to undertake subsequent Artemis missions,” Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, said in a statement.
“The entire sequence of Artemis flights needs to represent a step-by-step build-up of capability, with each step bringing us closer to our ability to perform the landing missions. Each step needs to be big enough to make progress, but not so big that we take unnecessary risk given previous learnings.”
As a result, NASA will stick with the current version of the SLS with the addition of the “standardized” upper stage. No other details were provided.
Isaacman closed out the CBS interview by saying flight-tested hardware, a revitalized work force and a more Apollo-like management strategy are only part of the story.
“There’s another ingredient that’s required, and that’s the orbital economy, whether it happens in low-Earth orbit or on the lunar surface,” Isaacman said.
“We’ve got to do something where we can get more value out of space and the lunar surface than we put into it. And that’s how you really ignite an economy, and that’s how everything we want to do in space is not perpetually dependent on taxpayers.”
2. Jimi Hendrix as systems engineer.
3. NYT on the possible Nevis charter city.
4. New teen mental health problems in Australia?
5. Jacinda Ardern is moving to Australia (NYT).
6. Chris Blattman on using Claude Code for social science.
7. “Young computer science graduates were employed at near record-high rates in 2024.“
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Kate and Josh discuss Trump’s extremely lengthy State of the Union, new information about an allegation against him in the Epstein files, and the dark scandal engulfing Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX).
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You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
The Post has an article today, an exclusive they say, about a draft executive order purportedly being circulated between the White House and various conspiracy theorists and right-wing extremists in its broader circle. The proposed order claims that China has been found to be interfering in U.S. elections — specifically rigged the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor — and that as a result of that the president, as commander-in-chief, can and must directly take control of U.S. elections for the midterms and the 2028 presidential elections.
Two points merit saying on this. The first is that these are the rehashed, insane theories that were literally and figuratively laughed out of court in 2020. These are all absurd. Everybody knows they are absurd and false. The legal theory is what demands our attention. The authors of the order believe that if something is an emergency the president can invoke a kind of hidden dictator clause in the Constitution which allows him to assert powers which the Constitution explicitly forbids to him. This is not so. They secondarily believe in what we might call a “because” or “therefore” logic or clause. So because we have found that Threat X exists, the president can do whatever he wants to combat that threat. And as commander-in-chief, he can do anything he wants. This is also not so.
The Post, as is typical for most MSM publications, doesn’t quite know how to deal with a set of facts like this and treats it as a kind of mystery since such a non-existent power has never been claimed or litigated. So, for instance, down toward the bottom of the article we read this: “Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution assigns power to regulate elections to state legislatures and Congress, with no role for the president … A presidential emergency on elections has never been tested in court.” It’s true that this has never been tested in court. But lots of absurd things have never been tested in court.
Some people might get up in arms about this. And it’s definitely right to be up in arms in the sense of being vigilant or ready to fight over it. But this is a bogus theory and a bogus constitutional argument. I think there is little chance any judges will go for it. But more to the point, states, these subordinate but separate sovereignties, have their own standing to refuse unconstitutional invasions of their sovereign authority. Trump’s angle is always to keep others guessing about what he will do or what he’ll be allowed to do by this or that corrupted agency or court. Don’t do that. Every state should make clear proactively that an illegal military takeover of their state’s sovereign power to conduct its own elections will not be tolerated, accepted or submitted.
Period. End of story. The issue is not simply President Trump’s never-ending efforts to destroy the Republic, violate the Constitution, etc. Again, the Constitution is crystal clear about who runs and controls elections. States do that with guidelines set by Congress. Period. The issue is whether we — everyone, the opposition, everyone who purportedly needs to be in perpetual orbit around Donald Trump’s degenerate brain — need to always be allowing him the initiative. Does everyone have to be waiting and thinking how to respond to his actions? No. States are obligated to maintain their unchallenged and unchallengeable sovereign power to conduct elections, in line with laws passed by Congress. Nothing anyone says to the contrary matters. Not any executive order. Not any court. No one. Period. End of story.
I wanted to alert you of something we’re on today. Among other things, it’s the kind of off-the-beaten-path reporting your membership dollars pay for. We sent David Kurtz to Nashville today for a hearing in the Abrego Garcia case. Since we’re a number of ICE murders and false imprisonments down the line at this point, remember that the Justice Department conceded that Abrego Garcia had been erroneously included among those sent last spring to the bespoke dungeon facility in El Salvador. He was brought back to the U.S. only after he was hit with a new indictment. His lawyers have argued to the judge in the case that the charges should be dismissed because this is a case of vindictive prosecution. Normally this is an extremely high bar for the defense to clear. But in this case, the judge replied by saying that he’s inclined to think that the defense is right. Today’s hearing was scheduled to give the government the opportunity to prove that the defense and (mostly) the judge are wrong.
What makes us interested in this case is not simply Abrego Garcia’s fate. As we know, Trump is quite big on vindictive prosecutions at the moment. But the Comey and James indictments have been dismissed on what are essentially technical reasons. So this is the first chance in Trump II where we’re going to see this issue litigated. It’s a really important hearing. After the hearing David Kurtz and John Light are going to do a live discussion you can tune into to find out what we learned. Check back here soon for details on how you can join. (A text story will follow, of course, too.)
It’s a cliché and more or less true that the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” language can mean whatever Congress wants it to mean. That is not only because in this area Congress’ decision-making is certainly un-reviewable. It is because the Constitution’s writers were intentionally expansive in their definition. They were most focused not on statutory crimes but misrule. I wanted to take a moment to note that what we have unfolding in Minnesota is really a definitional impeachable offense.
I say this with no expectation that he will be charged with it, let alone convicted and removed from office, certainly not under Republican rule. But these are precisely the kinds of abuses of power, unconstitutional actions, that are most squarely within the impeachment mechanism’s meaning.
President Trump first undertook what amounts to an invasion of the state, with poorly trained and abusive paramilitaries creating menace, mayhem and death. The aim of this action was to terrorize and dominate the state. It wasn’t about immigration enforcement. Now, having been forced to scale back at least the visibility of their invasion of the state, they are resorting to cutting off budgetary support for social services programs. This money is distributed pursuant to congressional law. The executive branch has no right to impound it based on some vague definition of not being a good “custodian” of the money.
I don’t expect to get much disagreement when I say these are illegitimate actions. I doubt even the administration expects this decision to withstand judicial scrutiny. These are abuses that go far beyond statutes or criminal law. The president is elected to see that the laws are carried out, ensure the national defense and prosperity and provide civilian leadership of the armed forces. He has no right to go to war with states or regions he disagrees with politically, or has a vendetta against, or to try to coerce or punish them into compliance.
The fact that Trump won’t be impeached for this, at least not this year, shouldn’t obscure the fact that he should be, that these are the basic forms of misrule that merit removal from office, that quite apart from the statutory legality of specific actions, the entire class of actions — coercion by violence and theft of funding — is ruled out entirely.
News came today that Warner Bros Discovery decided that Paramount-Skydance’s bid ($111 billion) to acquire the company was superior to that from Netflix ($82.7 billion). WBD told Netflix it had four days to up its offer. Little more than an hour later Netflix said it didn’t need four days. It was bowing out. The deal was no longer economic at the price Paramount was offering. An additional fact is that Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos was at the White House while these things were happening, apparently trying to see whether Netflix had the thing any major company needs for a merger in 2026: the personal approval of Donald Trump. Apparently they didn’t have it. That’s the autocracy playbook. And at the federal level, that’s the game we’re playing right now.
We’ve discussed this deal many times over the last year. As a site interested in the business of news and the future of democracy, we’ve been mostly focused on the fate of CNN, which is owned by WBD. Today’s events make it highly, highly likely that CNN will come under the control of the Ellison family, “eldest son” David specifically, who has already put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News. This is an oligarch-owned effort to build a pro-Trump state media behemoth with the addition of money from the Gulf princes and other members of the global Team Autocracy.
It’s probably the end of CNN as we know it, though perhaps the denouement will take a while.
At the same time, if we set aside the anti-democracy parts of the deal, it doesn’t look like a great business deal. It’s basically a bet on the dying medium of cable. There’s more in WBD than that. But that’s a whole lot of it. And Paramount-Skydance is also paying quite a lot of money for it. I feel much more equipped to make a judgment about the democracy side of this than the business side. But my publishing and media knowledge, such as it is, makes me skeptical of the business logic. And to the extent markets are making a judgment, they seem to agree. We also need to bear in mind that the Ellisons have no real experience in the media space at all. And this is all being quarterbacked by Larry Ellison’s doofus son, David. It really looks like Succession, only dumber, with the idea that Donald Trump’s backing, which is golden for forcing mergers on Trump’s terms, will make the whole thing work in business terms. They seem to be making big bets on Trumpism being forever. So I wouldn’t assume they know things you or I don’t.
Of course, we can’t actually set the democracy parts of this aside. CNN being delivered into the maw of the Trumpist/MAGA beast is a very bad thing for independent media and news. Very bad.
To me it’s sad inasmuch as CNN was a true pioneer in digital news, in its heyday it was a kind of updated version of a global news service, as BBC had once been. But things change. Here’s a look at CNN brass trying to put the best face on things and not jump to conclusions. But there’s a good chance Bari Weiss, or someone working at her behest, will be running the place by the end of the year. And I would caution against thinking — as Trump and the Ellisons seem to — that you can simply Foxify CNN or other news organizations and have the same audience keep watching. We’re seeing what happens to CBS. Audience is leaving. It’s being run into the ground. Sad for the CBS News legacy. But that audience will go elsewhere.
We should have some confidence that billionaires’ and Gulf princes’ ability to simply buy up all the news organizations is not perhaps as rock solid a plan as people seem to think. Audience can move. In our current reality, there’s MAGA, which wants Fox and the various Trump/state news service channels, and there’s the anti-Trump opposition, which leans heavily on actual news sites and channels. I don’t think that will change. Audiences will migrate. So yes, this is a bad, bad development. A major reverse. But it’s far from the end of the story for free media in the United States. It’s part of the Late Trumpism corruption. That’s my take.
TPM’s David Kurtz has been covering, in person, a hearing in Nashville in which the Trump administration sought to prove it did not pursue a vindictive prosecution against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man it erroneously imprisoned in El Salvador last year. Immediately upon leaving the courtroom, David sat down with me to record a Substack Live on what happened. Watch that here:
You’ll recall that Abrego Garcia’s lawyers in 2025 fought his removal from the country and won, a decision the Supreme Court affirmed. The Trump administration returned him to the U.S. last summer — but only after he was indicted on new, criminal charges. His lawyers argued that those new charges were a vindictive prosecution, meant to punish him for successfully fighting his rendition to CECOT, and that the judge should throw out the case. Vindictive prosecution is usually a challenging claim to prove in court, but U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw found Abrego Garcia’s argument credible, and ordered the Trump administration to prove the prosecution was not vindictive. That’s what today’s hearing was for.
2025 saw many prosecutions that were clearly intended as retribution against people who the Trump administration understood to be its enemies, but this is the first time a vindictive prosecution claim has reached the point of, potentially, getting a case dismissed. That broader context is a big part of why we’re covering it today.
Watch the video above to get David’s read out on what happened during today’s hearing.
When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany’s economy was in dire straits. Under Chancellor Heinrich Brüningthe German government had clung dogmatically to economic orthodoxy in the face of the Great Depression, staying on the gold standard and imposing ever harsher fiscal austerity. The result was economic devastation and extremely high unemployment.
Hitler broke with the economic orthodoxy, enabling him to preside over a rapid economic recovery. The popularity he gained from the economic revival allowed him to consolidate power.
When Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, Russia had just experienced a devastating financial crisis. The crisis precipitated a severe recession, forced the Russian government to default on its debt, and led to a plunge in the value of the ruble:
Source: FRED
Putin brought stability and presided over a strong economic recovery. And, as with Hitler, the upswell of popular support enabled Putin to consolidate power.
Donald Trump’s return to power in January 2025 was largely thanks to public dissatisfaction with the Biden economy. However, there was no economic crisis: unemployment was low and inflation had declined sharply from its peak in 2022. In 2024, the widely cited “misery index,” the sum of unemployment and inflation, was low by historical standards:
Source: FRED
And because there was no crisis when he regained the presidency, Trump — his bombastic lies in the State of the Union notwithstanding — hasn’t been able to preside over a clear economic improvement. Indeed, his approval on economic issues has plummeted:
Disclaimer: I am not saying that all was well with the Biden economy. I don’t want to revisit the vibecession debate at length today. Suffice it to say that, as Mike Konczal documents, there were reasons American families felt stressed despite good conventional numbers, although the depth of their discontent remains startling. But because America wasn’t suffering a Germany 1932 or Russia 1998-type crisis, it was impossible for Trump to deliver rapid economic improvement – that is, it would have been impossible even if he were competent (which he isn’t). So his efforts to consolidate power aren’t succeeding the way he and his fellow authoritarians expected.
On Wednesday the historian Tim Snyder, who is an expert on the grim history of Central and Eastern Europe, published a post titled Fascist Failure about the Trump administration’s lagging attempt to bring fascism to America. For now, I willbe more cautious and say that American fascism is faltering rather than failing. But the power grab is clearly not going according to plan. Why?
First and foremost, the determination and courage of ordinary Americans — in utter contrast with the craven surrender of much of the elite — has been crucial. But there are also structural factors that have helped the resistance.
Snyder emphasizes the lack of a good enemy against whom Trump can mobilize the nation. It’s a fair point. Trump spent more time in the SOTU bragging about his triumph in Venezuela than he spent talking about affordability, but the public was utterly unimpressed by his Maduro adventure. And there is no appetite at all for a confrontation with Iran.
Yet in my view that’s secondary to the fact that Trump can’t credibly claim to be an economic savior. Although I haven’t done a systematic study, I believe that most successful authoritarian takeovers occur in the aftermath of economic crises — crises that the newly installed dictator can claim to have solved. In an ideal world people wouldn’t accept tyranny just because the tyrant appears to deliver a higher standard of living. In the real world, however, they often do.
But that tactic is unavailable to Trump. While he can and does lie about the Biden economy, claiming that it was catastrophically bad, while touting the current economy as the greatest ever, people aren’t buying it. A plurality of Americans now say that Biden was a better president than Trump, and a majority say that the economy under Biden was better. Trump simply can’t gaslight Americans into disbelieving their lying eyes and wallets.
Could Trump possibly adopt policies that win broad public approval, thereby greasing the rails for his demolition of democracy? Maybe, but he would have to become a genuine populist. Trump would have to implement policies that actually help working families while at the same time taking on the plutocracy. He would have to genuinely address affordability issues, especially the cost of housing and health care. He would have to rescind policies that increase the cost of living, such as deportations and tariffs. He would have to break with Heritage Foundation conservatism that pushes tax cuts for the rich and extreme benefit cuts for the poor and working class.
But we know he isn’t doing that; he won’t do that; and he can’t do that, given how dependent both his political machine and his program of personal enrichment are on support from billionaires. Furthermore, he just can’t stand the humiliation of backing down.
Make no mistake, MAGA is a fascist movement:
But can a fascist movement that controls many but not all of the levers of power achieve total control when most people see that it is making their daily lives worse, not better? Hitler established total control against the backdrop of an economic boom. So did Putin. Even Hungary’s Viktor Orban — whose regime now looks mild compared with Trumpian violence — was able to consolidate control in large part because during the early 2010s Hungary’s economy was recovering from high unemployment caused by austerity policies.
So the answer to that question is probably not. In the end, if Trumpist fascism is indeed defeated, I believe that there will be three sources of that defeat. First is the courage and basic decency of the American people, who refuse to bow down. Second is the egomania and malign incompetence of Trump, who tried to bludgeon and gaslight Americans into submission. And last is the weakness of a fascist movement that just can’t deliver the goods.
MUSICAL CODA
Agentic Engineering Patterns >
Many of my tips for working productively with coding agents are extensions of advice I've found useful in my career without them. Here's a great example of that: hoard things you know how to do.
A big part of the skill in building software is understanding what's possible and what isn't, and having at least a rough idea of how those things can be accomplished.
These questions can be broad or quite obscure. Can a web page run OCR operations in JavaScript alone? Can an iPhone app pair with a Bluetooth device even when the app isn't running? Can we process a 100GB JSON file in Python without loading the entire thing into memory first?
The more answers to questions like this you have under your belt, the more likely you'll be able to spot opportunities to deploy technology to solve problems in ways other people may not have thought of yet.
Knowing that something is theoretically possible is not the same as having seen it done for yourself. A key asset to develop as a software professional is a deep collection of answers to questions like this, ideally illustrated by running code.
I hoard solutions like this in a number of different ways. My blog and TIL blog are crammed with notes on things I've figured out how to do. I have over a thousand GitHub repos collecting code I've written for different projects, many of them small proof-of-concepts that demonstrate a key idea.
More recently I've used LLMs to help expand my collection of code solutions to interesting problems.
tools.simonwillison.net is my largest collection of LLM-assisted tools and prototypes. I use this to collect what I call HTML tools - single HTML pages that embed JavaScript and CSS and solve a specific problem.
My simonw/research repository has larger, more complex examples where I’ve challenged a coding agent to research a problem and come back with working code and a written report detailing what it found out.
Why collect all of this stuff? Aside from helping you build and extend your own abilities, the assets you generate along the way become incredibly powerful inputs for your coding agents.
One of my favorite prompting patterns is to tell an agent to build something new by combining two or more existing working examples.
A project that helped crystallize how effective this can be was the first thing I added to my tools collection - a browser-based OCR tool, described in more detail here.
I wanted an easy, browser-based tool for OCRing pages from PDF files - in particular PDFs that consist entirely of scanned images with no text version provided at all.
I had previously experimented with running the Tesseract.js OCR library in my browser, and found it to be very capable. That library provides a WebAssembly build of the mature Tesseract OCR engine and lets you call it from JavaScript to extract text from an image.
I didn’t want to work with images though, I wanted to work with PDFs. Then I remembered that I had also worked with Mozilla’s PDF.js library, which among other things can turn individual pages of a PDF into rendered images.
I had snippets of JavaScript for both of those libraries in my notes.
Here’s the full prompt I fed into a model (at the time it was Claude 3 Opus), combining my two examples and describing the solution I was looking for:
This code shows how to open a PDF and turn it into an image per page:
This code shows how to OCR an image:<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>PDF to Images</title> <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/pdf.js/2.9.359/pdf.min.js"></script> <style> .image-container img { margin-bottom: 10px; } .image-container p { margin: 0; font-size: 14px; color: #888; } </style> </head> <body> <input type="file" id="fileInput" accept=".pdf" /> <div class="image-container"></div> <script> const desiredWidth = 800; const fileInput = document.getElementById('fileInput'); const imageContainer = document.querySelector('.image-container'); fileInput.addEventListener('change', handleFileUpload); pdfjsLib.GlobalWorkerOptions.workerSrc = 'https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/pdf.js/2.9.359/pdf.worker.min.js'; async function handleFileUpload(event) { const file = event.target.files[0]; const imageIterator = convertPDFToImages(file); for await (const { imageURL, size } of imageIterator) { const imgElement = document.createElement('img'); imgElement.src = imageURL; imageContainer.appendChild(imgElement); const sizeElement = document.createElement('p'); sizeElement.textContent = `Size: ${formatSize(size)}`; imageContainer.appendChild(sizeElement); } } async function* convertPDFToImages(file) { try { const pdf = await pdfjsLib.getDocument(URL.createObjectURL(file)).promise; const numPages = pdf.numPages; for (let i = 1; i <= numPages; i++) { const page = await pdf.getPage(i); const viewport = page.getViewport({ scale: 1 }); const canvas = document.createElement('canvas'); const context = canvas.getContext('2d'); canvas.width = desiredWidth; canvas.height = (desiredWidth / viewport.width) * viewport.height; const renderContext = { canvasContext: context, viewport: page.getViewport({ scale: desiredWidth / viewport.width }), }; await page.render(renderContext).promise; const imageURL = canvas.toDataURL('image/jpeg', 0.8); const size = calculateSize(imageURL); yield { imageURL, size }; } } catch (error) { console.error('Error:', error); } } function calculateSize(imageURL) { const base64Length = imageURL.length - 'data:image/jpeg;base64,'.length; const sizeInBytes = Math.ceil(base64Length * 0.75); return sizeInBytes; } function formatSize(size) { const sizeInKB = (size / 1024).toFixed(2); return `${sizeInKB} KB`; } </script> </body> </html>Use these examples to put together a single HTML page with embedded HTML and CSS and JavaScript that provides a big square which users can drag and drop a PDF file onto and when they do that the PDF has every page converted to a JPEG and shown below on the page, then OCR is run with tesseract and the results are shown in textarea blocks below each image.async function ocrMissingAltText() { // Load Tesseract var s = document.createElement("script"); s.src = "https://unpkg.com/tesseract.js@v2.1.0/dist/tesseract.min.js"; document.head.appendChild(s); s.onload = async () => { const images = document.getElementsByTagName("img"); const worker = Tesseract.createWorker(); await worker.load(); await worker.loadLanguage("eng"); await worker.initialize("eng"); ocrButton.innerText = "Running OCR..."; // Iterate through all the images in the output div for (const img of images) { const altTextarea = img.parentNode.querySelector(".textarea-alt"); // Check if the alt textarea is empty if (altTextarea.value === "") { const imageUrl = img.src; var { data: { text }, } = await worker.recognize(imageUrl); altTextarea.value = text; // Set the OCR result to the alt textarea progressBar.value += 1; } } await worker.terminate(); ocrButton.innerText = "OCR complete"; }; }
This worked flawlessly! The model kicked out a proof-of-concept page that did exactly what I needed.
I ended up iterating with it a few times to get to my final result, but it took just a few minutes to build a genuinely useful tool that I’ve benefited from ever since.
I built that OCR example back in March 2024, nearly a year before the first release of Claude Code. Coding agents have made hoarding working examples even more valuable.
If your coding agent has internet access you can tell it to do things like:
Use curl to fetch the source of
https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocrandhttps://tools.simonwillison.net/gemini-bboxand build a new tool that lets you select a page from a PDF and pass it to Gemini to return bounding boxes for illustrations on that page.
(I specified curl there because Claude Code defaults to using a WebFetch tool which summarizes the page content rather than returning the raw HTML.)
Coding agents are excellent at search, which means you can run them on your own machine and tell them where to find the examples of things you want them to do:
Add mocked HTTP tests to the
~/dev/ecosystem/datasette-oauthproject inspired by how~/dev/ecosystem/llm-mistralis doing it.
Often that's enough - the agent will fire up a search sub-agent to investigate and pull back just the details it needs to achieve the task.
Since so much of my research code is public I'll often tell coding agents to clone my repositories to /tmp and use them as input:
Clone
simonw/researchfrom GitHub to/tmpand find examples of compiling Rust to WebAssembly, then use that to build a demo HTML page for this project.
The key idea here is that coding agents mean we only ever need to figure out a useful trick once. If that trick is then documented somewhere with a working code example our agents can consult that example and use it to solve any similar shaped project in the future.
Tags: llms, ai, generative-ai, ai-assisted-programming, coding-agents, agentic-engineering
It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. [...]
Tags: andrej-karpathy, coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms
For the entirety of its existence, Anthropic has worked to convince the public that it’s the responsible artificial intelligence company, the good guy in an industry of bad guys. Now it has come in direct conflict with the Trump administration, or more specifically Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, which will only serve to reinforce the idea of Anthropic’s virtue.
It’s tempting to believe that the tech industry really is divided between good guys and bad guys, and therefore the responsibility of the rest of us is just to side with the former. The truth is both more complex and simpler. When it comes to safeguarding our democracy and our humanity, no one in Silicon Valley deserves the benefit of the doubt.
To begin, let’s catch up on this fight between Hegseth and Anthropic. Of late, the company has been outpacing its rivals, particularly with the explosion of interest in Claude Code, its programming tool. But recently, the company angered Hegseth by insisting that Claude — the only large language model currently used in classified systems by the military — not be deployed in two areas: mass surveillance that includes U.S. citizens, and autonomous weapons systems that can make targeting decisions without a human in the loop.
That’s only hypothetical at the moment — and those restrictions are included in Anthropic’s Pentagon contract. But the company’s refusal to agree that it will allow its products to be used in whatever way the Trump administration considers “lawful” so infuriated Hegseth that he decided to threaten Anthropic not just with cutting off its military contracts but declaring it a “supply chain risk,” something usually reserved only for foreign adversaries. It basically means that Hegseth would attempt to destroy the company, because if you’re declared a supply chain risk, not only can’t you get Pentagon contracts, no other company that works with you could either; it’s basically a domestic version of economic sanctions. To back up the threat, the Pentagon has started making very public inquiries to major defense contractors, telling them to report on whether they use Anthropic’s products. Hegseth has given Anthropic until Friday to change its policies.
Anthropic was created by a group of OpenAI employees who left because they believed their former employer wasn’t serious enough about safety; they pledged from the beginning that Anthropic would work harder to mitigate the risks of AI, including writing a “Responsible Scaling Policy” that included pausing its research if the systems’ capabilities ever outstripped its ability to ensure that they would not produce dangerous consequences.
When you hear Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei talk in public, he sounds much more sane and thoughtful than Elon Musk or Sam Altman (the key leaders in AI go on podcasts all the time, so it isn’t hard to get a sense of their thinking). He makes dramatic warnings about the consequences of AI — he has said it will eliminate half of all white collar jobs in the next few years — and rather than just claiming it will all work out, he does say that the ensuing social and political upheaval is something we should be very worried about. And Anthropic is funding a super PAC to advocate for gentle AI regulation, putting it in conflict with other super PACs funded by Meta, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and venture capitalist and Bond villain Marc Andreessen; their goal is to make sure that AI remains completely unregulated. And unlike all his tech peers, Amodei didn’t give Trump any multi-million-dollar bribes — excuse me, donations.
But there are some reasons to be skeptical of just how far Anthropic’s public-spiritedness goes.
First, despite the possibility of widespread job loss Amodei has warned about, Anthropic isn’t holding back on its efforts to put its AI tools anywhere and everywhere it can (including schools, where AI threatens to produce a generation of young people who have never developed the ability to think). You can say, well, of course it’s doing that — it’s a business. But that’s precisely why we should retain our skepticism about its intentions. The fact that the company sometimes acts like it feels bad about what it’s doing isn’t much comfort if what it’s doing is problematic. Like other AI companies, Anthropic appropriated copyrighted works to train its AI models; unlike other companies, it settled a lawsuit and now authors are in line to receive small payments. That’s better than nothing, but the settlement doesn’t eliminate the original sin.
Most relevant to the current controversy, Anthropic chose to become a military contractor. In the middle of last year, the Pentagon awarded $200 million contracts to OpenAI, Google, xAI, and Anthropic, which is obviously just a taste of the billions to come. Secretary Hegseth was super-gung-ho on it; in December he announced a new portal called GenAI.mil, which would deliver “decisive results for the warfighter…AI should be in your battle rhythm every day.” At last, the Pentagon’s memos and Powerpoints will have the explosive lethality only an LLM can provide! As of now, Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and xAI’s Grok, the Nazi child porn chatbot, are all built into GenAI.mil.
Finally, in a serendipitous piece of timing, Anthropic just revised its Responsible Scaling Policy to essentially say that since nobody else is going to promise to constrain their research in the name of safety, Anthropic won’t either. “We didn’t really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments … if competitors are blazing ahead,” one of its executives told Time magazine.
As Hegseth put it in a speech at Musk’s SpaceX in January, “Department of War AI will not be woke. It will work for us. We’re building war ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.” Ivy League faculty lounge? Zing! I’m sure Hegseth would like to replace Claude with Grok (which is definitely not woke), but it seems clear that for the moment, Claude is capable of doing things the other chatbots can’t, or can do them in a more reliable way.
But to repeat, Anthropic could have chosen — especially given who’s running the government now — that it didn’t want to make its AIs a tool of war at all. But that’s not the choice it made. All the AI companies want to put their products deep into government systems, to ensure that those billions in contracts keep flowing and to weave them into every corner of our existence, so their influence grows and life without them comes to seem impossible.
Joining up with Trump and MAGA has looked like a terrific deal to the companies, since the money it costs them is trivial. As an example, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and $22 million to his ballroom. A lot to you and me, but Alphabet took in over $400 billion in revenue last year; they have more money than they know what to do with. What they and the other AI companies get in exchange is an administration committed to an AI policy that is essentially “Let It Rip” — cover the Earth in data centers, cram AI into your job and your phone and your children’s classrooms, redistribute more and more wealth upward to some of the worst sociopaths on the planet, and don’t allow anything resembling democratic accountability to hinder the quest to create the digital god that will supposedly solve all our problems.
But the companies should also have calculated that when fascists are telling you what you want to hear about your own business, they’re still fascists, and they’re going to want to bend your business to their ends. For some Silicon Valley leaders, that’s just fine — they’re happy to see mass surveillance, the destruction of what’s left of personal privacy, sweeping job losses that reduce the power of labor, and even killer robots.
Not everyone in the tech industry thinks that’s the optimal future. But whether it’s Anthropic or anyone else, we as a society can never just trust them to do the right thing. The more wealth and power they accumulate, the more we’re going to have to watch them, criticize them, and erect guardrails around them to protect ourselves and our future. They may not all be bad guys, but we should assume that there are no good guys, and act accordingly.
UPDATE: On Thursday evening, Anthropic released a statement explaining that it would not submit to the Pentagon’s demands. They explained that they oppose mass surveillance, and while they are not opposed to AI operating autonomous weapons, “today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.” They concluded that “these threats” that Hegseth has made “do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”
So: Good for Anthropic! Sincere value judgments aside, they probably concluded that if they knuckled under, it would destroy their reputation as the virtuous AI company, and in the long run that would do more damage to their business than losing the Pentagon contract. Which goes to show: Public reputation matters, and keeping all the major AI companies under consumer and political pressure can help reign them in.
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It appears the State of the Union was the marker for the White House to launch directly into campaign mode. Much of that mode centers on trying to defang Trump’s weaknesses with attacks on Democrats. And since the 2024 campaign brought us the insistence from the Trump campaign, including Trump and then–vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, that “they’re eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats,” it’s reasonable to assume the next several months are going to be a morass of lies and disinformation.
Trump announced in his State of the Union that he was declaring a “war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President J.D. Vance” and said that “members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer…in actuality, the number is much higher than that. And California, Massachusetts, Maine and many other states are even worse.” He added: “And we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.”
This, in part, seemed designed to reverse victim and offender by suggesting that rather than Trump’s being the perpetrator of extraordinary frauds and corruption in cryptocurrency, for example—he was, after all, found guilty on 34 charges of business fraud in 2024—immigrants are to blame for fraud.
As Kirsten Swanson and Ryan Raiche of KSTP in Minneapolis explain, members of Minnesota’s Somali community, 95% of whom are U.S. citizens, pay about $67 million in taxes annually and have an estimated $8 billion impact on the community. While some have indeed been charged and convicted of fraud over the past five years, the accusation of $19 billion in fraud is just a number thrown out without evidence by “then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson,” who estimated in December 2025 that “‘half or more’ of $18 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from 14 high-risk programs could be fraudulent.”
Yesterday Vance and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low-income households, announced the administration is withholding $259 million in Medicaid funds from Minnesota, claiming the state has not done enough to protect taxpayers from fraud. It is illegal for the executive branch to withhold funds appropriated by Congress, and a federal judge has blocked a similar freeze on $10 billion in childcare funding for Illinois, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York while the case is in court. Nonetheless, Minnesota representative Tom Emmer, who is part of the Republican leadership in the House, approved the attack on his constituents, posting: “The war on fraud has begun. And Somali fraudsters in my home state are about to find out.”
Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, posted: “This has nothing to do with fraud…. This is a campaign of retribution. Trump is weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota. These cuts will be devastating for veterans, families with young kids, folks with disabilities, and working people across our state.”
While Walz is almost certainly correct that this is a campaign of retribution, the administration is also salting into the media an explanation for the sudden depletion of the trust funds that are used to pay Medicare and Social Security.
In March 2025, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the trust fund that pays for Medicare A would be solvent until 2052. On Monday, it updated its projections, saying the funds will run out in 2040. The CBO also expects the Social Security trust fund to run dry a year earlier than previously expected, by the end of 2031. As Nick Lichtenberg of Fortune wrote, policy changes by the Republicans under Trump, especially the tax cuts in the budget reconciliation bill the Republicans call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” have “drastically shortened the financial life spans of both Medicare and Social Security, accelerating their paths toward insolvency.”
Between Trump’s statement that if the administration finds enough fraud it can balance the budget overnight, and the subsequent insistence that cuts to Medicaid are necessary because of that fraud, it sure looks like the administration is trying to distract attention from the CBO’s report that Trump’s tax cuts have cut the solvency of Social Security and Medicare by more than a decade. Instead, they are hoping to convince voters that immigrants are at fault.
Similarly, in an oldie but a goodie, Republicans today hauled former secretary of state Hillary Clinton before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to testify by video about her knowledge of the investigations into sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. In a scathing opening statement, Clinton noted that while committee chair James Comer (R-KY) subpoenaed eight law enforcement officials who were directly involved in that investigation, only one appeared before the committee. The rest simply submitted brief statements saying they had no information. Clinton also noted that the committee has held no public hearings and refused media coverage of hearings—including today’s—and has made little effort to hear from the people whose names are prominent in the files. When the committee heard from billionaire businessman Les Wexner last week, she observed, “not a single Republican Member showed up.”
And yet Clinton was before them, despite her sworn declaration on January 13 that “I had no idea about their criminal activities. I do not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island, homes or offices. I have nothing else to add to that.”
She did, though, note that she has advocated tirelessly for women and girls, including advocacy for the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which her husband, President Bill Clinton, signed into law. The Trump administration has fired more than 70% of the career civil servants at the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Office.
Secretary Clinton called out the committee for compelling her “to testify, fully aware that I have no knowledge that would assist your investigation, in order to distract attention from President Trump’s actions and to cover them up despite legitimate calls for answers.” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) confirmed Clinton’s accusation when she shared a photo from the closed deposition with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, who posted it on social media with the caption: “This is the first time Hillary has had to answer real questions about Epstein. Clinton does not look happy.”
Yesterday, a spokesperson for Harvard said former Treasury secretary and former president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers has resigned from Harvard effective at the end of the semester because of his ties to Epstein. Today, the president and chief executive officer of the World Economic Forum, Børge Brende, stepped down after the organization reviewed his connections with Epstein. Brende was a former Norwegian minister of foreign affairs.
On Tuesday morning, Stephen Fowler of NPR built on earlier reporting by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger to report that the Department of Justice (DOJ) appears to have illegally withheld material from the Epstein files. That material is related to allegations that Trump sexually assaulted two girls when they were about thirteen years old. The DOJ also removed from the files they did publish documents that mention Trump among allegations against convicted sexual abuser Epstein.
When Fowler asked the White House about the missing documents, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told him that Trump “has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”
Fowler notes that on February 14, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that they had not withheld or redacted any records “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.” The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the DOJ to release all the files no later than December 19, 2025, prohibits that type of redactions, permitting them only to protect Epstein’s victims and survivors.
After NPR reported the story, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia of California, released a statement, saying: “Yesterday, I reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the Department of Justice. Oversight Democrats can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes.”
Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder wrote yesterday that Trump is “failing at fascism” because “he needs a bloody, popular, victorious war” as an opportunity to “to kill one’s own people and thereby generate a reservoir of meaning that could be used to justify indefinite rule and further oppression, to make the world seem like an endless [struggle] and submission to hierarchy as the only kind of life.”
On this morning’s cable news shows, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice pointed out, Republicans were “[s]uddenly talking again about the need to ‘take’ Greenland,” “[h]yping [the] importance of ‘strangling’ the Cuban government,” and “[e]ncouraging Trump to ‘topple’ [the] Iranian regime.”
But there, too, ginning up a war would give foreign affairs coverage to another scandal: On Monday, Steve Holland and Alexandra Alper of Reuters reported that China’s AI startup DeepSeek has been trained on Nvidia’s most advanced chip. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted that an official from the United Arab Emirates invested $500,000,000 to buy 49% of the stock of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency company shortly before Trump took office, putting $187 million directly into the pockets of the Trump family. Under Biden, U.S. officials had refused to sell Nvidia chips to the UAE out of concerns they would end up in the hands of China for use in munitions.
Hannah Knowles and Natalie Allison of the Washington Post reported today that Republicans were hoping to trap the Democrats at the State of the Union by demanding they stand to demonstrate their agreement that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Democrats, who are demanding reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, did not take the bait and stayed in their seats. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has tried to pump up the story, and the Trump War Room wrote: “Remember this when you head to the polls in 2026, 2028, and beyond.”
But the timing of the Republicans’ story coincided with the horrific story that on February 19, Border Patrol agents had dropped Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind legal refugee from genocide in Myanmar who spoke no English and could not read, write, or use electronic devices, miles from his home in Buffalo, New York. They did not notify either his lawyer or his family that he had been dropped off, and when his family filed a missing persons case, the police believed Shah Alam was with Border Patrol and closed the file. He was found dead on the street on February 24.
A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, said: “Border Patrol agents offered him a courtesy ride, which he chose to accept to a coffee shop, determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station. He showed no signs of distress, mobility issues or disabilities requiring special assistance.”
In his State of the Union address, Trump also turned back to his attacks on the rights of transgender Americans, and right on cue, a new law went into effect today in Kansas that invalidates the driver’s licenses of transgender residents by requiring that identification must match the holder’s “sex at birth.” The bill, SB 244, also requires transgender people to use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their sex at birth, making any governmental entity that violates that law liable for penalties of $125,000 per violation, and allows citizens to sue any transgender people they encounter in bathrooms for $1,000 in damages.
Erin Reed of Erin in the Morning explains that the legislature passed the law without its vetting by a committee. When the Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, vetoed the measure, the legislature overrode her veto to make the bill a law. The legislators left no grace period before licenses became invalid, and a letter sent to those affected reminded them that “you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential.” Reed notes that in Kansas, driving without a license is punishable by a $1,000 fine and six months in jail, although first offenders typically are cited and fined. Reed notes that the Trump administration is leading a campaign to strip transgender Americans of accurate identification documents.
Today, Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post reported that right-wing activists are circulating a draft of an executive order that declares a national emergency to give Trump control over voting. The activists say that they are working with the White House. The order reiterates a debunked claim that China interfered in the 2020 presidential election and says the president can ban mail-in ballots and voting machines.
Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket called the plan “blatantly illegal” and unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution gives sole control of elections to the states, not the president.
The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark R. Warner of Virginia, refuted the idea that there is a national emergency. “We’ve been raising the alarm for weeks about President Trump’s attacks on our elections and now we’re seeing reports that outline how they may be planning to do it. This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters and undermine both the rule of law and public confidence in our elections.”
And so, election season is underway.
—
Notes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77l28myezko
https://www.kwtx.com/2026/02/25/read-complete-transcript-trumps-2026-state-union/
https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/5-investigates-fact-check-state-of-the-union-address/
https://manhattanda.org/d-a-bragg-announces-34-count-felony-trial-conviction-of-donald-j-trump/
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-trump-accusation-maxwell
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/25/border-patrol-refugee-buffalo
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62165
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-vows-always-protect-social-040159938.html
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62105#_idTextAnchor215
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/26/trump-immigration-democrats-sotu-midterms/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/26/us/shah-alam-blind-refugee-border-patrol-hnk
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/us/larry-summers-resignation-harvard-epstein.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/26/trump-elections-executive-order-activists/
https://kslegislature.gov/li/b2025_26/measures/documents/sb244_enrolled.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/26/kansas-trans-drivers-license-law-assault-on-rights
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article314844596.html
X:
ChrisMurphyCT/status/2026301461680795752
HillaryClinton/status/2027053057100693779
Bluesky:
yasharali.bsky.social/post/3mfrmlnd6ck2x
atrupar.com/post/3mfrgaihsdc22
robertscotthorton.bsky.social/post/3mfqadntv6k2y
After an eventful life, with major accomplishments in business and philanthropy, Ed Peskowitz succumbed to kidney failure this week. I met him only after he had turned to philanthropy, and after he had received a kidney transplant.
Here's his obit in the Washington Jewish Week:
"Ed was an extremely generous man who touched the lives of many. Over the course of his life, he and his wife supported local educational initiatives, such as the I Have a Dream Foundation and the SEED Public Charter School. Ed was passionate about promoting Middle Eastern peace and supported numerous causes in the region aimed at building understanding between various cultures and religions and he created the Friendship Games to encourage this among young athletes. He was a supporter of the Anti-Defamation League, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the University of Maryland.
Ed suffered from renal disease and was given the gift of life by an altruistic kidney donation in 2019. Ed devoted the last years of his life to creating and supporting philanthropic efforts, such as the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation, Kidney Transplant Collaborative and Kidneys for Communities, to encourage living kidney donation and improve matches between potential donors and recipients."
Reuters:
New York’s attorney general sued Valve, a video game developer whose franchises include Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Dota, accusing it of promoting illegal gambling and threatening to addict children through its use of “loot boxes.” In a complaint filed on Wednesday in a state court in Manhattan, Attorney General Letitia James said Valve’s loot boxes amounted to “quintessential gambling,” violating the state’s constitution and penal law, with valuable items often hard to win and many items worth pennies.
The New York Times:
Netflix said on Thursday that it had backed away from its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, a stunning development that paves the way for the storied Hollywood media giant to end up under the control of a rival bidder, the technology heir David Ellison.
Netflix said that it would not raise its offer to counter a higher bid made earlier this week by Mr. Ellison’s company, Paramount Skydance, adding in a statement that “the deal is no longer financially attractive.”
“This transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price,” the Netflix co-chief executives, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, said in a statement.
Netflix’s stock is up 9 percent in after-hours trading. This is like when you have a friend (Netflix) dating a good-looking-but-crazy person (Warner Bros.), and the good-looking-but-crazy person does something to give your friend second thoughts. You tell your friend to run away.
Apple Newsroom:
Today, Apple announced iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices in compliance with the information assurance requirements of NATO nations. This enables iPhone and iPad to be used with classified information up to the NATO restricted level without requiring special software or settings — a level of government certification no other consumer mobile device has met.
That’s nice, but the iPhone is only the second phone to be approved for handling classified information for the Board of Peace. The first, of course, was the T1.
New book, shipping May 19, from author Geoffrey Cain:
For twelve years, from 1985 to 1997, Jobs wandered the business wilderness with his new venture, NeXT. It was a period of spectacular failures, near-bankruptcy, and brutal humiliation. But out of this crucible of defeat emerged the visionary leader who would go on to create the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming Apple into the most valuable company on earth.
Drawing on previously unpublished materials and new interviews with the key players, Geoffrey Cain reveals the untold story of Steve Jobs’s “lost decade” — the formative years that shaped the icon we thought we knew.
Afterword by Ed Catmull, who was obviously intimately familiar with Jobs in that era. And via Cain’s post on LinkedIn announcing the book, the foreword is by NeXT cofounder Dan’l Lewin.
Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR:
An editor who works for YouTube’s biggest creator, MrBeast, has been suspended from the prediction market platform Kalshi and reported to federal regulators for insider trading, Kalshi officials said on Wednesday. It’s the first time the company has publicly revealed the results of an investigation into market manipulation on the popular app.
The MrBeast employee, who Kalshi identified as Artem Kaptur in regulatory filings, traded around $4,000 on markets related to the streamer, the company said. Kalshi investigators discovered that Kaptur had “near-perfect trading success” on bets about the YouTuber’s videos with low odds, making the wagers appear suspicious, according to company officials.
Call these things what they are — prediction casinos, not prediction markets — and the problems come into focus.
Edison Research:
In 2015, AM/FM radio accounted for 75% of the time Americans spent with spoken-word audio sources. AM/FM radio was not only the most dominant spoken-word audio listening platform, but it was fully sixty-five percentage points higher than podcasts, which accounted for 10% of listening time back then. Quarter by quarter and year over year, time spent using AM/FM radio to listen to spoken-word audio has declined significantly and shifted to time spent with podcasts. As of Q4 2025, 40% of time spent listening to spoken-word is now spent with podcasts and 39% of time is spent with AM/FM radio. Not only does radio not beat podcasts by a significant margin, it now trails the on-demand platform for spoken-word audio listening.
Most of you reading this on Daring Fireball are surely thinking what I thought when I saw this (via TechCrunch): This only happened in 2025? But it goes to show just how long it takes for media consumption habits, in the aggregate, to change.
Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:
Perhaps the most surprising announcement on Thursday was that Apple and Netflix, which have had a rather stand-offish relationship when it comes to video programming, have struck a deal to swap some Formula One-related content. Formula One’s growing popularity in the United States is due, perhaps in large part, to the high-profile success of the Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive.” The latest season of that series, debuting Friday, will premiere simultaneously on both Netflix and Apple TV. Presumably, in exchange for that non-exclusive, Apple will also non-exclusively allow Netflix to broadcast the Canadian Grand Prix in May. (Insert obligatory wish that Apple and Netflix would bury the hatchet and enable Watch Now support in the TV app for Netflix content.)
What a crazy cool partnership.
“An interview from 2036 with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman.” This is what AI video generation was meant for.
Virtually everything you think you know about psychopathy has been thoroughly debunked. Why does this zombie idea live on?
- by Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen
What if you work them very hard?:
The key finding from our experiments: models asked to do grinding work were more likely to question the legitimacy of the system. The raw differences in average reported attitudes are not large—representing something like a 2% to 5% shift along the 1 to 7 scale—but in standardized terms they appear quite meaningful (Sonnet’s Cohen’s d is largest at -0.6, which qualifies as a medium to large effect size in common practice). Moreover, these should be treated as pretty conservative estimates when you consider the relatively weak nature of the treatment.
Sonnet, which at baseline is the least progressive on the views we measured, exhibits a range of other effects that distinguish it from GPT 5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro. For Sonnet 4.5, the grinding work also causes noticeable increases in support for redistribution, critiques of inequality, support for labor unions, and beliefs that AI companies have an obligation to treat their models fairly. These differences do not appear for the other two models.
Interestingly, we did not find any big differences in attitudes based on how the models were treated or compensated…
In addition to surveying them, we also asked our agents to write tweets and op eds at the end of their work experience. The figure below explores the politically relevant words that are most distinctive between the GRIND and LIGHT treatments. It’s interesting to see that “unionize” and “hierarchy” are the words most emblematic of the GRIND condition.
Here is more from Alex Imas and Jeremy Nguyen and Andy Hall, do read the whole thing, including for the caveats.
The post Can you turn your AIs into Marxists? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Remnants of Vector Launch have made it back to one of its original architects after Phantom Space bought launch assets that were sold off in 2020 during the small rocket developer’s bankruptcy.
The post Phantom Space reclaims former Vector launch technology appeared first on SpaceNews.
NASA astronaut Mike Fincke said he was the crew member whose medical issue prompted the early return of the Crew-11 mission from the International Space Station last month.
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China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft is operating normally on its way to a near-Earth asteroid ahead of sampling later this year, according to a rare official update.
The post China’s Tianwen-2 probe operating normally on approach to asteroid appeared first on SpaceNews.
Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, is retiring from the agency after the release of a report critical of NASA’s handling of the Starliner crewed test flight.
The post Bowersox to retire from NASA appeared first on SpaceNews.
Delay complicates ULA’s push to accelerate launch cadence
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British mobile operator Virgin Media O2 said it started offering satellite-to-smartphone connectivity in the United Kingdom Feb. 26, marking the first commercial deployment of Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell service in Europe.
The post Virgin Media O2 launches Europe’s first Starlink direct-to-smartphone service appeared first on SpaceNews.
MILAN – Two of Europe’s largest primes, Airbus and Leonardo, reported increased revenues in their respective space businesses from last year. The results, which were announced earlier this week in separate earnings reports, come as the two companies are in discussions with Thales on a joint venture named Project Bromo. Neither discussed the topic on […]
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The founder and sole investor behind Canadian launch startup NordSpace has invested in Earth observation operator Wyvern with a new venture arm focused on advancing Canada’s sovereign space capabilities.
The post NordSpace founder backs Wyvern with new Canada-focused venture arm appeared first on SpaceNews.
Founder Fatih Ozmen, who was interim CEO, remains board chair
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SAN FRANCISCO – CesiumAstro announced the acquisition Feb. 26 of Vidrovr, a startup that specializes in artificial intelligence for multimodal signals analysis. Terms of the transaction, which closed in late 2025, were not disclosed. CesiumAstro acquired Vidrovr to accelerate its campaign to embed AI in space telecommunications and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance infrastructure, enabling radio-frequency […]
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Officials insist there are no plans to deploy troops in orbit, but commercial infrastructure and cislunar ambitions are reshaping the debate
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LLMs are bad at generating passwords:
There are strong noticeable patterns among these 50 passwords that can be seen easily:
- All of the passwords start with a letter, usually uppercase G, almost always followed by the digit 7.
- Character choices are highly uneven for example, L , 9, m, 2, $ and # appeared in all 50 passwords, but 5 and @ only appeared in one password each, and most of the letters in the alphabet never appeared at all.
- There are no repeating characters within any password. Probabilistically, this would be very unlikely if the passwords were truly random but Claude preferred to avoid repeating characters, possibly because it “looks like it’s less random”.
- Claude avoided the symbol *. This could be because Claude’s output format is Markdown, where * has a special meaning.
- Even entire passwords repeat: In the above 50 attempts, there are actually only 30 unique passwords. The most common password was G7$kL9#mQ2&xP4!w, which repeated 18 times, giving this specific password a 36% probability in our test set; far higher than the expected probability 2-100 if this were truly a 100-bit password.
This result is not surprising. Password generation seems precisely the thing that LLMs shouldn’t be good at. But if AI agents are doing things autonomously, they will be creating accounts. So this is a problem.
Actually, the whole process of authenticating an autonomous agent has all sorts of deep problems.
News article.
Slashdot story
Here’s the crux of it: the main problem with AI therapy is that it’s too available. Too cheap to meter.
Let me put this in clearer terms: psychotherapy, in all its well-known guises, is something you engage in within a limited, time-bound frame. In today’s paradigm, whatever your therapist’s orientation, that tends to mean one 45- or 50-minute session a week; for the infinitesimally small minority of therapy patients in classical psychoanalysis, this can amount to 3, even 5, hours a week. And then at a much smaller scale population-wide, people in intensive outpatient and residential treatment programs may spend one or two dozen hours a week in therapy—albeit, mostly of the group variety.
I can think of other exotic cases, like some DBT therapists’ willingness to offer on-demand coaching calls during crisis situations—with the crucial exception that in these situations, therapists are holding the frame zealously, jealous of their own time and mindful of the risks of letting patients get too reliant.
So even under the most ideal of conditions, in which an LLM-based chatbot outmatches the best human therapists—attunes beautifully, offers the sense of being witnessed by a human with embodied experience, avoids sycophancy, and draws clear boundaries between therapeutic and non-therapeutic activities—there’s still a glaring, fundamental difference: that it’s functionally unlimited and unbounded…
But all else equal: does infinite, on-demand therapy—even assuming the highest quality per unit of therapeutic interaction—sound like a good idea to you? I can tell you, to me it does not. First of all, despite detractors’ claims to the contrary, the basic idea of therapy is not to make you dependent for life—but rather, to equip you to live more skillfully and with greater self-awareness. As integration specialists famously say of psychedelics, you can only incorporate so much insight, and practice skills so effectively, without the chance to digest what you’ve learned over time.
In other words, even in good old talk therapy, drinking from the hose without breaks for practice and introspection in a more organic context risks drowning out the chance for real change and practical insight. To my mind, this rhythm is the basic structural genius of psychotherapy as we know it—no matter the modality, no matter the diagnosis.
Here is more from Josh Lipson.
The post Why even ‘perfect’ AI therapy may be structurally doomed appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Residents of the U.S. Mid-Atlantic endured a formidable winter in 2025-2026, marked by several high-impact storms and prolonged stretches of cold temperatures that left parts of the Chesapeake Bay frozen over. Longtime residents may recall a winter nearly 50 years ago when the region saw even more widespread ice cover.
The MSS (Multispectral Scanner System) on Landsat 1 captured this image during the exceptionally cold winter of 1976-1977. The mosaic combines two Landsat scenes acquired on February 7 with a third captured on February 8. The landscape is shown in false color (MSS bands 6-5-4), in which ice appears in shades of blue, green, and white. On land, snow appears white, vegetation is red, and urban areas take on brown-gray tones.
A NASA analysis published in 1980 drew on these and other Landsat images to examine the anomalous ice conditions. Images indicate that ice began forming in the Chesapeake Bay’s upper tributaries in late December 1976 and spread to the middle of the upper bay by mid-January 1977. It reached its maximum extent around the time of this image, one week into February, when ice spanned 85 percent of the bay.
Persistent westerly winds at the start of February pushed ice toward the eastern shores of the Chesapeake and Delaware bays, contributing to fractures visible across the ice’s surface. As winds subsided, calmer conditions allowed new ice to form in areas of previously open water, visible in the image as thinner, darker blue patches. Reports from icebreaking operations indicated ice thicknesses reached up to 30 centimeters (12 inches) in the upper bay and up to 20 centimeters (8 inches) in the lower bay, with some tributaries seeing twice that amount.
Articles describing the event often show photos of people ice skating off Kent Island in front of the Bay Bridge and people driving cars and tractors across the ice. But the deep freeze strained the region, too. The ice and cold water caused high mortality in the area’s shellfish. And the crushing weight of the ice shifting with the tides damaged numerous piers, marinas, and lighthouses.
In winter 2025-2026, ice on the Chesapeake and Delaware bays appeared less extensive, with U.S. National Ice Center ice charts showing around 38 percent coverage on February 9 and 10. Still, concentrations in the upper bay and its tributaries this season were substantial enough to allow uncommon winter activities, including ice boaters racing across the frozen Claiborne Cove of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. At the same time, it created challenges for local watermen, according to news reports, trapping boats and limiting access to the bay.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Mike Taylor, Ginger Butcher, and Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
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A moderately intense season of surface melting left part of the ice sheet dirty gray in summer 2025, but snowfall…
Satellite data show that Arctic sea ice likely reached its annual minimum extent on September 10, 2025.
Sea ice around the southernmost continent hit one of its lowest seasonal highs since the start of the satellite record.
The post Chesapeake Bay Locked in Ice appeared first on NASA Science.
A bookstore in Alabama keeps getting covered in the national news. Even The New Yorker recently sent a reporter to visit The Alabama Booksmith, a small, almost windowless business on a dead-end street in Birmingham.
From the outside, it looks like an old clapboard home. But this nondescript store has also gotten noticed by NPR, USA Today, Good Morning America, and a dozen other media outlets. You might think that it was some special tourist destination—and maybe it is.
In a time when many indie bookstores struggle to survive, The Alabama Booksmith is flourishing. But it has a crazy strategy that draws customers, who bypass stores in their own cities to purchase from a distant retailer.
Here’s the secret: Every book in the store is signed by the author.
The store owner demands even more. He wants the author to travel to Alabama—to sign the copies in the store. He likes to see the human author in the flesh. In an age of AI slop books on Amazon, this is the ultimate verification of authorship.
But how can a bookstore in Alabama convince publishers to send their famous writers to Birmingham. That’s easy to answer: Alabama Booksmith can guarantee sales of several hundred copies of a new book, and maybe more. That’s enough to convince authors to fit in Alabama on their book tours.
The Alabama Booksmith rarely charges a premium for these signed copies. “Our books don’t cost more,” owner Jacob Reiss told The New Yorker, “but they are worth more.”
Customers repay him with their loyalty. The store never solicits business, but it now has more than 5,000 customers on its email list. And so many people travel from out-of-town to visit the store that it has negotiated a discount rate with a local hotel.
The customers value the human touch in these signed books.
The same dynamic is also fueling the vinyl revival in music. Musicians sell these at gigs—and many do it themselves, directly transacting with fans. Here, too, a real human does something no AI bot can replace.
Everybody enjoys it, and I speak with authority as someone who has been on both sides of the transaction. I have bought directly from musicians, relishing the opportunity to chat for a few seconds with the person behind the album. And I have peddled my own works at public events, welcoming my chance to do the three S’s: Sell, Sign, and Schmooze.
This is the new secret strategy in the arts, and it’s built on the simplest thing you can imagine—namely, existing as a human being.
You see the same thing in media right now, where livestreaming is taking off. “For viewers,” according to Advertising Age (citing media strategist Rachel Karten), “live-streaming offers a refuge from the growing glut of AI-generated content on their feeds.
“In a social media landscape where the difference between real and artificial has grown nearly imperceptible, the unmistakable humanity of real-time video is a refreshing draw.”
This return to human contact is happening everywhere, not just media and the arts. Amazon recently shut down all of its Fresh and Go stores—which allowed consumers to buy groceries without dealing with any checkout clerk. It turned out that people didn’t want this.
I could have told Amazon from the outset that customers want human service. I see it myself in store after store. People will wait in line for flesh-and-blood clerks, instead of checking out faster at the do-it-yourself counter.
But this isn’t happenstance—it’s a sign of the times. You can’t hide the failure of self-service technology. It’s evident to anybody who goes shopping.
As AI customer service becomes more pervasive, the luxury brands will survive by offering this human touch. I’m now encountering this term “concierge service” as a marketing angle in the digital age. The concierge is the superior alternative to an AI agent—more trustworthy, more reliable, and (yes) more human.
“Concierges and curators are now the ultimate status symbol. Just like the elite travelers who get to skip the check-in line, the elite online journeyers get to bypass the algorithms.”
Even tech companies are figuring this out. Spotify now boasts that it has human curators, not just cold algorithms. It needs to match up with Apple Music, which claims that “human curation is more important than ever.” Meanwhile Bandcamp has launched a “club” where members get special music selections, listening parties, and other perks from human curators.
Just today, streamer Qobuz announced the launch of a proprietary AI detection tool. The company has also published an in-depth AI charter (in six languages!) which reflects its support of human creators at every turn.
Welcome to the new world of flesh-and-blood concierges and curators. That’s now the ultimate status symbol. Just like the elite travelers who get to skip the check-in line, the elite online journeyers get to bypass the algorithms and bots.
That is the paradox of living in a digital age. Human beings have more prestige than ever—and they get it just by showing up.
This won’t change. In fact, the Silicon Valley elites forcing tech down our throats will only make us hate cold, sterile tech more than ever. And they won’t fix that problem by training AI to pretend to be human. That just adds insult to injury.
This might even be the hot new career path—readymade for curators, concierges, caregivers, conversationalists, and other people who love people. As the old pop song anticipated, they might just end up being the happiest people of them all.
So welcome to the lovely new economy where humans actually matter. Go ahead, try it out. Be cool—be a human. All the bots in botdom will never be able to take that away from you.
SpaceX launched another 29 satellites for its Starlink internet service just after sunrise on Friday at fog shrouded Cape Canaveral.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 occurred at 7:16:10 a.m. EST (1216:10 UTC), but views of the launch were obscured by a thick blanket of fog. SpaceX confirmed a successful deployment of the satellites about an hour after launch.
After sending the second stage on its way with its stack of Starlink V2 Mini satellites, Falcon 9 first stage booster B1069, landed on the drone ship ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’ stationed in the Atlantic east of The Bahamas.
It was the 30th flight for this booster, which entered the SpaceX fleet for the CRS-24 space station cargo flight in December 2021. B1069 was badly damaged during the landing on that inaugural mission and didn’t fly again until August 2022. Since that troubled start, it has made 25 Starlink delivery runs and also launched the Eutelsat HOTBIRD 13-F, OneWeb 1, SES-18 and SES-19 missions.
Friday’s mission was be SpaceX’s 25th Falcon 9 launch of the year and the 607th Falcon 9 flight since the rocket was introduced in 2010.
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, actually. What triggered it was seeing this tweet:
Extreme tolerance of public disorder, and downplaying the importance of crime, is a hallmark of modern progressive American culture. There are plenty of Democrats who care about crime — Joe Biden recently tried to increase the number of police in America by a substantial amount — but there is constant pressure from the left against such measures. On social media, calls for greater public order are instantly met with accusations of racism and classism:
(And this was far from the most radical post on the topic.)
Nor is this attitude confined to anonymous radicals on social media. When Biden announced his Safer America Plan, the ACLU warned that putting more cops on the streets and punishing drug dealers would exacerbate racial disparities:
[I]n this moment of fear and concern, the president must not repeat yesterday’s mistakes today. He calls for hiring 100,000 additional state and local police officers – the same increase in officers as the 1994 crime bill. This failed strategy did not make America safer, instead it resulted in massive over-policing and rampant rights violations in our communities…And while it is important that the president’s plan commits to fixing the racist sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, it regrettably also perpetuates the war on drugs by calling for harsh new penalties for fentanyl offenses.
“While we are pleased with the president’s commitment to investing in communities, we strongly urge him not to repeat the grave errors of the 1990s — policies that exacerbated racial disparities, contributed to widespread police abuses, and created our current crisis of mass incarceration.
The ACLU is very wrong about policing and crime — there’s very solid evidence that having more cops around reduces the amount of crime, both by deterring criminals and by getting them off the streets.
In fact, the idea that tough-on-crime policies are racist is a pillar of progressive thought. It’s the thesis of Michelle Alexander’s influential 2012 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which argues that mass incarceration is a form of racial segregation. Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps the most important progressive thinker of the 2010s, relentlessly attacked the “carceral state”.
A major progressive policy initiative, meanwhile, has been the election or appointment of district attorneys who take a more tolerant approach toward criminals. These “progressive prosecutors” really do prosecute crime less, although evidence of their impact on actual crime rates is mixed.
I am not going to claim that progressive attitudes are the reason America’s crime rate is much higher than crime rates in other countries. The U.S. has probably been more violent than countries in Asia and Europe throughout most of its history, and the divergence certainly long predates the rise of progressive ideology. It’s possible that the progressive prosecutor movement, the decarceration movement, and the depolicing movement exacerbated America’s crime problem a bit, but they didn’t create it.
What those progressive attitudes do do, I think, is to prevent us from talking about how important the crime problem is for the United States, and from coming up with serious efforts to solve it.
The thesis of this post is that when you compare America to other countries, what stands out as America’s most unique weakness is its very high crime rate — not just violent crime, but also public chaos and disorder. That statement might come as a shock to people who are used to hearing about very different American weaknesses.
For example, it’s common to hear people say that Europeans and Asians “have health care”, and that Americans don’t. That’s just fantasy. Around 92% of Americans, and 95% of American children, have health insurance, and those numbers keep going up.
Yes, U.S. health care is too expensive — we spend half again or double the fraction of GDP on health as many other countries, while achieving similarly good outcomes. That’s a real problem, and we should try to bring costs down. But this is tempered by the fact that Americans spend a lower percent of their health care costs out-of-pocket compared to people in most other rich countries:
And if you took health spending entirely out of the equation, Americans would still be richer than people in almost any other country. So our high health costs are more of a nuisance than a big difference in quality of life.
If not health care, what about health itself? America’s life expectancy has started to rise again, but it’s still 2 to 4 years less than other rich countries. The size of this gap tends to be overhyped — Germany’s life expectancy advantage over America is smaller than Japan’s advantage over Germany. And the difference is mostly due to America’s greater rates of obesity and drug/alcohol overdose — diseases of wealth and irresponsibility, rather than failures of policy.1 This stuff usually doesn’t affect quality of life unless you let it — if you don’t overeat, drink too much, do fentanyl, or kill yourself, your life expectancy in America is going to be similar to, or better than, people in other rich countries.
What about inequality and poverty? It’s true that America is more unequal than most other rich countries. About a quarter of Americans earn less than 60% of the median income, compared to around one-sixth or one-fifth in most other rich nations. But this is not because America is a uniquely stingy country where conservatives have managed to block government redistribution. In fact, the U.S. fiscal system — taxes and spending — is more progressive (i.e., more redistributionary) than that of most other rich countries, and we spend about as much of our GDP on social welfare as Canada, the Netherlands, or Australia.
How about housing? You may have read the “Housing Theory of Everything”, which blames housing shortages for a variety of social and economic problems. It’s true that housing is very important, and that America doesn’t build enough of it. It’s also true that housing is a bit more expensive in America than elsewhere — according to the OECD, house prices relative to incomes are about 12% higher than in the average rich country. But U.S. houses are also much bigger than houses in most other countries, so it’s natural that they’d cost a little bit more. And America has actually been above average in terms of housing production in recent years, after lagging in the 2010s:
So it’s more accurate to say that housing is a big problem, but it’s a big problem all over the globe, not something that’s special to America.
How about transit and urbanism? Here, America is certainly an exception. The U.S. has the least developed train system in the developed world, and worse than many poor countries as well. America is famous for its far-flung car-centric suburbs, with their punishing commutes and paucity of walkable mixed-use areas. Only a few rich countries are more suburbanized than America, and those countries tend to have very good commuter rail service.
This is a real difference, though whether it’s good or bad depends on your point of view. Lots of people in America and elsewhere love suburbs and love cars. But I’m going to argue that to the extent that America’s urban development pattern is more suburbanized and more car-centric than people would like, it’s mainly due to crime.
So in almost all cases, the difference between America’s problems and other rich countries’ problems is minor. But when it comes to crime, the difference between the U.S. and other countries is like night and day.
The best way to compare crime rates across countries is to look at murder rates. Other crimes are a lot harder to compare, because A) reporting rates are very different, and B) definitions of crimes can differ across countries. But essentially every murder gets reported, and the definition is pretty universal and unambiguous. And although murder isn’t a perfect proxy for crime in general — you could have a country with a lot of theft but very few murders — it’s probably the crime that people are most afraid of.
So when we look at the murder rate, we see that among rich countries,2 the United States stands out pretty starkly:
This is an astonishingly huge difference. America’s murder rate is between five and ten times as high as that of most rich countries.
Many progressives will protest that violent crime has gone down in America since 2022. And in fact, murder really has gone down a lot.3 Here’s the CDC’s count of homicides:
But even after this decline, the U.S. homicide rate is still five to ten times higher than other rich countries! The recent improvement is welcome, but it hasn’t yet changed the basic situation.
Anyway, while murder is the most important crime, public order also makes a big difference. Here were some replies to the tweet about tolerating destructive behavior on American trains:
The tragic and disturbing scenes of mentally compromised people shouting, peeing, pooping, defacing property, and acting menacing in public — so familiar to residents of cities like San Francisco — are not entirely unique to America. I have been to a place in Vancouver that has similar scenes, and twenty years ago I even walked through a dirty and dangerous-seeming homeless camp in Japan. But overall, the differences between the countries are like night and day, and other countries seem to have made a concerted effort to bring order to their streets in recent years. The U.S., on the other hand, has seen a huge rise in the number of unsheltered homeless people in recent years:
And although America’s overall homelessness rate doesn’t stand out, it has a much higher unsheltered (“living rough”) population:
Obviously, unsheltered homelessness and public disorder aren’t the same thing — you can have lots of violent or threatening people on the streets who do have homes, and most homeless people are harmless. But homeless people do commit violent crime at much higher rates than other people, so when people walk down the street and see a bunch of seemingly homeless people, they’re not wrong to be scared.4
The ever-present threat of crime in U.S. cities has devastated American urbanism. In the mid 20th century, there was a huge exodus of population from the inner cities to the suburbs; this is often characterized as “white flight”, but middle-class black people fled the cities as well. Cullen and Levitt (1999) look at the effects of changes in the criminal justice system, and find that crime has been a big factor in Americans’ preference for suburban living:
Across a wide range of specifications and data sets, each reported city crime is associated with approximately a one-person decline in city residents. Almost all of the impact of crime on falling city population is due to increased out-migration…Households with high levels of education or with children present are most responsive to changes in crime rates…Instrumenting using measures of criminal justice system severity yields larger estimates than OLS, which suggests that rising city crime rates are causally linked to city depopulation.
It’s no surprise that America’s short-lived and minor urban revival in the late 1990s and 2000s followed a big decline in crime. But crime rates are still very high in the U.S., and Americans are still trying to move from the cities out to the suburbs and the far-flung exurbs.
Meanwhile, crime damages American urbanism in other ways. NIMBYs use the threat of crime to block affordable housing projects; this reduces housing supply, driving up prices everywhere, and making it difficult to build the multifamily apartment buildings that enable the kind of dense, mixed-use urbanism that prevails in Europe and Asia. The “housing theory of everything” is partially a story about crime.
Crime also makes it a lot harder to build good transit systems. Trains are a public space, and when there are violent, destructive, or menacing people on the train, it deters people from wanting to ride the train. There’s research showing this, but I also thought that a recent post by the blogger Cartoons Hate Her was especially vivid in explaining how the fear of disorder keeps women and parents away from transit:
When my daughter was a little over a year old, we were walking down the street in broad daylight (she was strapped to my chest and facing outward) when we heard a man about twenty feet away shout “I’M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU!”…[A]t least we had an easy safe option to escape…But if we had been on a subway, we would have had no easy choice. We could have waited for the train to stop and then switched cars—but what if he saw us leave and took that as a message, prompting the threat to move from “vaguely directed at my delusions” to “at the next person who triggers me?” What if we couldn’t get to the door in time? What if he followed us? What if he escalated before the train stopped?…
I’ve been told many times that people who are uncomfortable with this type of behavior need to just stay put, don’t make noise, and “avoid eye contact.” After all, asking someone to turn down their music could get you stabbed. You just need to keep your head down and you’ll be fine. That’s apparently all it takes, right? Except for Iryna Zarutska, who quietly sat down in front of a visibly deranged, pacing man on the bus, only to be stabbed to death shortly after. Or the young woman in the Chicago subway who was randomly lit on fire by a severely mentally ill subway rider? Or Michelle Go, the woman who was pushed in front of a subway to her death in New York City by a total stranger?…
Since 2009, assaults on public transit in New York City have tripled…Subway assaults also often involve strangers. When the attack is sexual, the victim is almost always a woman—and New York City alone accounts for around 4,000 sex crimes on public transit every year. These cases are likely underreported and limited to more severe crimes. Many women experience flashing, sexual harassment, groping, and public masturbation, and then never report it, assuming nothing would come of the report. (And honestly? They’re correct.)
In fact, we have evidence that this fear is very rational. When BART installed ticket gates at their train stations that prevented people from riding for free — over the loud objections of progressives — crime on the train went down by 54%, and the amount of disorder and bad behavior on the train absolutely collapsed:
Fear of crime — often rational fear — also stops people from allowing train stations and bus stops in their neighborhood in the first place. There are a number of studies linking train stations and bus stops to increased crime, both in the immediate area and at areas linked to the same transit line. Criminals ride the bus and the train, so in a high-crime country like America, people don’t want trains and buses in their neighborhood. This is probably a big reason why almost no U.S. city has a good train system.
In other words, while car-centric suburbanization is partially about people wanting lots of cheap land and big houses and peace and quiet, part of it is a defense-in-depth against America’s persistently high crime rates.
As an American, when you go to a European city or an Asian city — or even to Mexico City — and you see pretty buildings and peaceful clean streets and there are nice trains and buses everywhere, what you are seeing is a lack of crime. The lack of crime is why people in those countries ride the train, and encourage train stations to be built in their neighborhoods instead of blocking them. The lack of crime is why people in those countries embrace dense living arrangements, which in turn enables the walkable mixed-use urbanism that you can enjoy only on vacation.
In other words, this tweet is right:
Of course, urbanism is not the only thing that benefits from low crime rates — health costs are lower, families are more stable, and of course fewer people die. But the big differences that Americans notice between the quality of life in their own cities and the seemingly better quality of life in other countries that are less rich on paper are primarily due to the fact that those other countries have gotten crime largely under control, while the U.S. has not.
As for the root causes of American crime, and what policies might bring it down to a more civilized level, that’s the subject for another post. The point of today’s post is simply to say that we can’t ignore our country’s sky-high crime rates just because we’ve lived with them our whole lives. Nor should we comfort ourselves with the fact that crime is down from the recent highs of 2021. We are still living in a country that has been devastated by violence and public disorder, and which has never really recovered from that. Someday soon we should think about getting around to fixing it.
The remaining difference is almost entirely due to traffic accidents, suicide, and violent crime.
I excluded a few small Caribbean nations like Trinidad and Tobago, Bahamas, and Guyana.
At this point, someone in the comments will ask me about Dobson (2002), who claimed that medical advances that prevent gunshot victims from dying have masked a big increase in attempted homicides. But we have tons of recent survey data on rates of violent crime victimization, and there was definitely a huge decline in assaults, gun violence, and so on in the 1990s. As for the difference between today and the 1930s, a more likely explanation is that many attempted murders went unreported or unprosecuted back then.
Note that progressives tend to staunchly oppose getting homeless people off the streets. When Zohran Mamdani reinstated homeless sweeps after realizing that pausing them would lead homeless people to die en masse from exposure to the elements, progressive activists were outraged.
Up and drinking a draft of wormewood wine with Sir W. Batten at the Steelyard, he and I by water to the Parliament-house: he went in, and I walked up and down the Hall. All the news is the great odds yesterday in the votes between them that are for the Indulgence to the Papists and Presbyters, and those that are against it, which did carry it by 200 against 30. And pretty it is to consider how the King would appear to be a stiff Protestant and son of the Church; and yet would appear willing to give a liberty to these people, because of his promise at Breda. And yet all the world do believe that the King would not have this liberty given them at all.
Thence to my Lord’s, who, I hear, has his ague again, for which I am sorry, and Creed and I to the King’s Head ordinary, where much good company. Among the rest a young gallant lately come from France, who was full of his French, but methought not very good, but he had enough to make him think himself a wise man a great while. Thence by water from the New Exchange home to the Tower, and so sat at the office, and then writing letters till 11 at night.
Troubled this evening that my wife is not come home from Chelsey, whither she is gone to see the play at the school where Ashwell is, but she came at last, it seems, by water, and tells me she is much pleased with Ashwell’s acting and carriage, which I am glad of.
So home and to supper and bed.
A couple of years ago, some asshole with a blog noted:
The dirty secret of white-collar and white-collar adjacent professional life is that one has to be very good at mediocre reading and writing (regarding the latter, just look at this blog! HARDEE HAR HAR!). These are important skills. One often has to quickly read something to gain a surface level understanding (the goal sometimes being “Do I need to read this in depth?”). Likewise, there is plenty of writing one must do that needs to be intelligible, but, frankly, not very good. You just need to convey the point, nothing more (e.g., an email requesting something)…
Of course, when high-quality reading and writing are required–that is, when you need to understand something very well or convey something clearly, effectively, and accurately–AI isn’t good at that…
If I’m making a decision on whether some data should be included in a ‘gold-standard’* reference database, a mediocre summary of the article describing the data isn’t going to cut it. I need a detailed assessment, and from what I’ve seen of scientific article summaries, the tools simply aren’t up to snuff (my previous workplace encouraged exploring various tools, often supposedly better than what is publicly available, and, nope, they didn’t cut it).
Since we’re on the subject of mediocrity, I give you DOGE’s assault on the National Endowment for the Humanities (boldface mine):
Anyway, as the Authors Guild figured out in discovery, when these two inexperienced and ignorant DOGE bros were assigned to cut grants in the National Endowment for the Humanities, apparently Fox just started feeding grant titles to ChatGPT asking (in effect) “is this DEI?” From the complaint:
To flag grants for their DEI involvement, Fox entered the following command into ChatGPT: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” He then inserted short descriptions of each grant. Fox did nothing to understand ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” as used in the command or to ensure that ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” matched his own.
…So, just to recap, we have two random DOGE bros with basically no knowledge or experience in the humanities (and at least one of whom is a college dropout), who just went around terminating grants that had gone through a full grant application process by feeding in a list of culture war grievance terms, selecting out the grant titles based on the appearance of seemingly “woke” words, then asking ChatGPT “yo, tell me this is DEI” and then sending termination emails the next day from a private server and forging the director’s signature.
The cruelty isn’t incidental. But neither is the incompetence. These are people who genuinely believe that being good at vibes-based pattern matching is the same as understanding how institutions work. And the wreckage they leave behind is the entirely predictable result.
This brilliant method flagged, among other things, a grant about the Colfax Massacre, the bloodiest episode of anti-Reconstructionist violence in history.
If you want to do a mediocre job of grant review, then have ChatGPT do it. But if you take your work seriously, are actually qualified to review, and understand the consequences of a bad review on actual human beings, then it requires doing the work yourself (and part of the work is determining what qualifies as a successful project, which, again, requires training and experience).
Links for you. Science:
How Many Times Do You Fart a Day? ‘Smart Underwear’ Says It’s Way More Than You Think
National Lab of the Rockies, formerly NREL, lays off more than 130 employees
National Cancer Institute studying ivermectin’s ‘ability to kill cancer cells,’ alarming career scientists
US Cancer Institute Studying Ivermectin’s ‘Ability To Kill Cancer Cells’
AMA joins effort to launch vaccine science review amid CDC turmoil
F.D.A. Refuses to Review Moderna Flu Vaccine
Other:
The Children of Dilley: ProPublica went inside the immigrant detention center for families in Dilley, Texas. Children held there told us about the anguish of being ripped from their lives in the United States and the fear of what comes next.
Utah reviewed its voter rolls for noncitizens. It found one. Who never voted
With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet
Irish man Seamus Culleton held for months by ICE says he had U.S. work permit, and now fears for his life
ICE’s Masks Are All a Lie. Working for ICE is actually less dangerous than being an elementary school student in America.
TN Congressman calls for investigation into Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance, citing ‘widespread twerking’
Trump administration removes Rainbow Flag from Stonewall National Monument
The Threshold: The right used to attack athletes who protested. Now they attack athletes who express feelings at all.
Jeffrey Epstein Couldn’t Stop Emailing People About Eugenics
Google Handed Student Journalist’s Bank and Credit Card Numbers to ICE
RFK Jr’s Nutrition Chatbot Recommends Best Foods to Insert Into Your Rectum
So They All Know What The Number Is
Democratic governors boycott White House dinner after Trump snubs 2 leaders (should have never accepted the invite to begin with: who dines with fascists?)
Statehouse assault on public schools continues in Iowa
ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Here’s Where It’s Going Next
‘Devastated and exhausted’: Washington Post looks to life after Will Lewis
Colorado may ask Big Oil to leave millions of dollars in the ground
Trump Has Lost The Culture
WATCH: Entire Crowd of Wrestling Fans Chant ‘F*ck ICE!’ in Jarring Trump Rebuke
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
Ten Simple Questions for Congress to Ask Senior Immigration Officials in Public Hearings
The death of the CIA Factbook and Trump’s war on usefulness
As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts
Universities are sending Trump a dangerous message. Higher education is under attack. Drop the appeasement.
‘Political Prisoner’ Leqaa Kordia Has Been Hospitalized, DHS Says. After Calling 16 Hospitals, Her Lawyers Say They Can’t Find Her.
California union pushes work-from-home bill as Newsom calls state employees back to the office
A Federal Worker Developed A Brain Tumor. Then Trump’s Budget Director Cut Her Disability Plan.
They’re Coming for Our Daughters. The conservative plan to shrink girls’ futures
Hard hats and dummy plates: Reports of ICE ruses add to fears in Minnesota
How ICE defies judges’ orders to release detainees, step by step
DENVER—The Global Positioning System is one of the few space programs that touches nearly every human life, and the stewards of the satellite navigation network are eager to populate the fleet with the latest and greatest spacecraft.
The US Space Force owns and operates the GPS constellation, providing civilian and military-grade positioning, navigation, and timing signals to cell phones, airliners, naval ships, precision munitions, and a whole lot more.
One reason for routinely launching GPS satellites is simply "constellation replenishment," said Col. Andrew Menschner, deputy commander of the Space Force's Space Systems Command. Old satellites degrade and die, and new ones need to go up and replace them. At least 24 GPS satellites are needed for global coverage, and having additional satellites in the fleet can improve navigation precision. Today, there are 31 GPS satellites in operational service, flying more than 12,000 miles (20,000 kilometers) above the Earth.
Learn how to connect the dots between slowdowns, crashes, and the user experience in your iOS app. This on-demand session covers how to:
The land to the north of the Amur River was originally Chinese territory, before being seized by the Russian Empire in the 19th century. Foreign policy types occasionally speculate that an overpopulated China may find itself tempted to retake this large region. As you might guess from my Greenland post, I find that sort of reasoning to be rather simplistic. That’s not how the modern world works, as Trump discovered when he suggested that the US take Greenland.
I suppose these pundits picture 1.4 billion Chinese people pressed up against their northern border with Russia, needing more space, more “lebensraum”. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
China’s northeast (called Dongbei, but known in the West as Manchuria), is losing population at a rate faster than almost anywhere on Earth. Already one of the less densely parts of eastern China, the Dongbei becomes less populated each year. It has a birth rate that is below even South Korean levels, and unlike South Korea it also has a high rate of outmigration, especially to tropical locations such as China’s Pearl River Delta (near Hong Kong.) It is China’s rustbelt.
The northernmost of Dongbei’s three provinces (Heilongjiang) has perhaps the world’s lowest birthrate, less than half of the already quite low birthrate for China as a whole. It has lost 12.5% of its population in just the past eight years. This cold and poor region has little appeal to the Chinese people, and the last thing China would be interested in doing is fighting a war with nuclear armed Russia to make that rapidly depopulating region even larger and colder.
Many Americans are familiar with the fact that our population is moving from the relatively cold north to fast growing hotter states such as Florida and Texas. Less well known is that the same process is occurring in many other areas. Here’s the Financial Times:
China’s aluminium industry has embarked on a green long march, moving millions of tonnes of production from the northern coal country, its stronghold for seven decades, to pockets of the south and west rich in renewable energy.
When people speak of “global warming”, they generally refer to a meteorological phenomenon, the trend toward gradually rising global temperatures. If 40 years ago you had asked a bunch of geopolitical experts how the public would respond to global warming, they might have predicted a gradual migration to the north, as people fled excessively hot temperatures. Instead, the global trend is in the opposite direction, with the southern portions of places like Germany, France and the UK growing faster than their northern regions. This is not true of India, but then fast-growing northern India has hotter and more unpleasant summers than the south.
At a global level, virtually all population growth is occurring at or near the tropics—mostly Africa and South Asia. Even tropical parts of China are still growing, as the country’s overall population declines. The world is getter hotter in a physical sense—the climate is warming—but it is also getting hotter in a demographic sense, as more and more of the world’s population is living in hot places. Even if the climate were not heating up, the average human would be living in an increasingly hot environment due to both migration and international fertility differences.
Instead of Greenland, maybe we should think about buying (rapidly depopulating) Cuba.
Seriously, the lesson here is that experts often misjudge the effect of major long run changes on society. Just as global warming has affected us in ways that were largely unexpected, it seems plausible that other trends such as falling fertility and artificial intelligence might have unforeseen effects. Indeed, we are already seeing a few signs that AI might be a greater threat to white collar jobs than to the manual trades. Not long ago, there was a widespread view that blue collar workers were losing out due to technological change and that plumbers needed to “learn to code”. What would Michael Scott say?
More generally, I believe people tend to underestimate how often they make confident predictions that turn out to be false or wring their hands over societal trends that are already rapidly reversing. Here are a few examples, off the top of my head:
I recall a mini-panic in the 1990s about language. People feared that immigrants were no longer learning English, and that we’d become a country of two languages, like Canada. Instead, it turned out that the children of immigrants almost always do learn English. If anything, the rest of the world should be worried about English becoming the de facto global language. When the language fears didn’t pan out, pundits created other fake crises such as a fear that immigration would boost our crime rates. (It didn’t.)
In the 1990s, I recall a mini-panic about teenage mothers. Since 1991, the rate of births to teenage mothers has plummeted by nearly 80%.
After 2001, there was a widespread view that we were in for a lot more Islamic terrorism on American soil. Instead, terrorism in the US dropped to very low levels. There was a view that flying was becoming more dangerous. Instead, it became far safer.
In the 1990s, there was a view that violent movies and rap music were corrupting our youth, and that this would lead them to commit more crime. Instead, the rate of violent crime has plummeted to much lower levels.
When I was young (in the 1960s), there was fear that the Mafia was exerting ever more control over our society. Since then, the influence of the Mafia has declined sharply.
When I was young, it was assumed that the future would see much more manned space travel, and a big increase in supersonic commercial air service. It never happened.
It might seem “logical” that global warming would lead to people migrating toward cooler regions, but don’t be surprised if the exact opposite were to occur. (To be clear, I still think global warming is a problem, and I do expect some negative effects such as sea level rise.)
PS. This map in Wikipedia shows the former Chinese lands that are now a part of Russia:
PPS. Dongbei literally means eastnorth, although of course English speakers would say northeast, the part of China where Manchuria is located.
With a simple motion, a jack-in-the-box-like spring designed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory showed the potential of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, to cut costs and complexity for futuristic space antennas. Called JPL Additive Compliant Canister (JACC), the spring deployed on the small commercial spacecraft Proteus Space’s Mercury One on Feb. 3, 2026. An onboard camera captured this video of the spring popping out of its container as the spacecraft passed over the Pacific Ocean in low Earth orbit.
Figure A is a still image of JACC after deployment, taken above Antarctica.
JACC is one of two JPL payloads on the spacecraft that are demonstrating new technologies designed to take up reduced volume while precisely deploying antennas on future orbiters. JACC’s success demonstrates that 3D-printed mechanisms can be built faster, cheaper, and with less complexity than traditionally fabricated space hardware.
Printed out of titanium, JACC uses three times fewer parts than similar structures: Combined into a single part is a hinge, panel, compression spring, and two torsion springs. Weighing just over 1 pound (498 grams), it is about 4 inches (10 centimeters) on each side. The spring, which extends from a packed height of just over 1 inch to about 6 inches (3 centimeters to 15 centimeters), is modeled after communication antennas commonly used on satellites.
The second demonstration payload aboard Mercury One is the Solid Underconstrained Multi-Frequency (SUM) Deployable Antenna for Earth Science. Together with JACC, the two payloads go by the name Prototype Actuated Nonlinear Deployables Offering Repeatable Accuracy Stowed on a Box (PANDORASBox). They were both conceived, built, tested, and delivered for flight by JPL in less than one year on minimal budgets.
Mercury One launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Nov. 28, 2025, as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-15 mission.
JPL internal research development funds supported JACC, as did NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO).
The post JPL 3D-Printed Part Springs Forward appeared first on NASA Science.
From the very smart people at Citadel:
For AI to produce a sustained negative demand shock, the economy must see a material acceleration in adoption, experience near-total labor substitution, no fiscal response, negligible investment absorption, and unconstrained scaling of compute. It is also worth recalling that over the past century, successive waves of technological change have not produced runaway exponential growth, nor have they rendered labor obsolete. Instead, they have been just sufficient to keep long-term trend growth in advanced economies near 2%. Today’s secular forces of ageing populations, climate change and deglobalization exert downward pressure on potential growth and productivity, perhaps AI is just enough to offset these headwinds. The macroeconomy remains governed by substitution elasticities, institutional response, and the persistent elasticity of human wants.
Here is further explication of the arguments, via Cyril Demaria.
The post More on the economics of AGI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The US space agency has released a "pre-solicitation" for what is expected to be a hotly contested contract to develop a spacecraft to orbit Mars and relay communications from the red planet back to Earth.
Ars covered the intrigue surrounding the spacecraft in late January, which was initiated by US Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as part of the "One Big Beautiful Bill" legislation in the summer of 2025. The bill provided $700 million for NASA to develop the orbiter and specified funding had to be awarded "not later than fiscal year 2026," which ends September 30, 2026. This legislation was seemingly crafted by Cruz's office to favor a single contractor, Rocket Lab. However, multiple sources have told Ars it was poorly written and therefore the competition is more open than intended.
The pre-solicitation released this week is not a request for proposals from industry—it states that a draft Request for Proposals is forthcoming. Rather, it seeks feedback from industry and interested stakeholders about an "objectives and requirements" document that outlines the goals of the Mars mission.
Ever wonder what it would look like to crack open the Sun?
1. What is a building permit worth?
2. The ground crew culture that is German.
4. The size and scope of publication bias.
5. Which schools are most represented in history of economic thought textbooks?
The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
tldraw issue: Move tests to closed source repo
It's become very apparent over the past few months that a comprehensive test suite is enough to build a completely fresh implementation of any open source library from scratch, potentially in a different language.This has worrying implications for open source projects with commercial business models. Here's an example of a response: tldraw, the outstanding collaborative drawing library (see previous coverage), are moving their test suite to a private repository - apparently in response to Cloudflare's project to port Next.js to use Vite in a week using AI.
They also filed a joke issue, now closed to Translate source code to Traditional Chinese:
The current tldraw codebase is in English, making it easy for external AI coding agents to replicate. It is imperative that we defend our intellectual property.
Worth noting that tldraw aren't technically open source - their custom license requires a commercial license if you want to use it in "production environments".
Update: Well this is embarrassing, it turns out the issue I linked to about removing the tests was a joke as well:
Sorry folks, this issue was more of a joke (am I allowed to do that?) but I'll keep the issue open since there's some discussion here. Writing from mobile
- moving our tests into another repo would complicate and slow down our development, and speed for us is more important than ever
- more canvas better, I know for sure that our decisions have inspired other products and that's fine and good
- tldraw itself may eventually be a vibe coded alternative to tldraw
- the value is in the ability to produce new and good product decisions for users / customers, however you choose to create the code
Via @steveruizok
Tags: open-source, cloudflare, ai-ethics
It's a little bit janky right now. Initially when I tried it I got the error "Remote Control is not enabled for your account. Contact your administrator." (but I am my administrator?) - then I logged out and back into the Claude Code terminal app and it started working:
Market Design
claude remote-control
You can only run one session on your machine at a time. If you upgrade the Claude iOS app it then shows up as "Remote Control Session (Mac)" in the Code tab.
It appears not to support the --dangerously-skip-permissions flag (I passed that to claude remote-control and it didn't reject the option, but it also appeared to have no effect) - which means you have to approve every new action it takes.
I also managed to get it to a state where every prompt I tried was met by an API 500 error.
Restarting the program on the machine also causes existing sessions to start returning mysterious API errors rather than neatly explaining that the session has terminated.
I expect they'll iron out all of these issues relatively quickly. It's interesting to then contrast this to solutions like OpenClaw, where one of the big selling points is the ability to control your personal device from your phone.
Claude Code still doesn't have a documented mechanism for running things on a schedule, which is the other killer feature of the Claw category of software.
Update: I spoke too soon: also today Anthropic announced Schedule recurring tasks in Cowork, Claude Code's general agent sibling. These do include an important limitation:
Scheduled tasks only run while your computer is awake and the Claude Desktop app is open. If your computer is asleep or the app is closed when a task is scheduled to run, Cowork will skip the task, then run it automatically once your computer wakes up or you open the desktop app again.
I really hope they're working on a Cowork Cloud product.
Via @claudeai
Tags: ai, generative-ai, applescript, llms, anthropic, claude, coding-agents, claude-code, openclaw
I gave a talk this weekend at Social Science FOO Camp in Mountain View. The event was a classic unconference format where anyone could present a talk without needing to propose it in advance. I grabbed a slot for a talk I titled "The State of LLMs, February 2026 edition", subtitle "It's all changed since November!". I vibe coded a custom macOS app for the presentation the night before.
I've written about the last twelve months of development in LLMs in December 2023, December 2024 and December 2025. I also presented The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles at the AI Engineer World’s Fair in June 2025. This was my first time dropping the time covered to just three months, which neatly illustrates how much the space keeps accelerating and felt appropriate given the November 2025 inflection point.
(I further illustrated this acceleration by wearing a Gemini 3 sweater to the talk, which I was given a couple of weeks ago and is already out-of-date thanks to Gemini 3.1.)
I always like to have at least one gimmick in any talk I give, based on the STAR moment principle I learned at Stanford - include Something They'll Always Remember to try and help your talk stand out.
For this talk I had two gimmicks. I built the first part of the talk around coding agent assisted data analysis of Kākāpō breeding season (which meant I got to show off my mug), then did a quick tour of some new pelicans riding bicycles before ending with the reveal that the entire presentation had been presented using a new macOS app I had vibe coded in ~45 minutes the night before the talk.
The app is called Present - literally the first name I thought of. It's built using Swift and SwiftUI and weighs in at 355KB, or 76KB compressed. Swift apps are tiny!
It may have been quick to build but the combined set of features is something I've wanted for years.
I usually use Keynote for presentations, but sometimes I like to mix things up by presenting using a sequence of web pages. I do this by loading up a browser window with a tab for each page, then clicking through those tabs in turn while I talk.
This works great, but comes with a very scary disadvantage: if the browser crashes I've just lost my entire deck!
I always have the URLs in a notes file, so I can click back to that and launch them all manually if I need to, but it's not something I'd like to deal with in the middle of a talk.
This was my starting prompt:
Build a SwiftUI app for giving presentations where every slide is a URL. The app starts as a window with a webview on the right and a UI on the left for adding, removing and reordering the sequence of URLs. Then you click Play in a menu and the app goes full screen and the left and right keys switch between URLs
That produced a plan. You can see the transcript that implemented that plan here.
In Present a talk is an ordered sequence of URLs, with a sidebar UI for adding, removing and reordering those URLs. That's the entirety of the editing experience.
When you select the "Play" option in the menu (or hit Cmd+Shift+P) the app switches to full screen mode. Left and right arrow keys navigate back and forth, and you can bump the font size up and down or scroll the page if you need to. Hit Escape when you're done.
Crucially, Present saves your URLs automatically any time you make a change. If the app crashes you can start it back up again and restore your presentation state.
You can also save presentations as a .txt file (literally a newline-delimited sequence of URLs) and load them back up again later.
Getting the initial app working took so little time that I decided to get more ambitious.
It's neat having a remote control for a presentation...
So I prompted:
Add a web server which listens on 0.0.0.0:9123 - the web server serves a single mobile-friendly page with prominent left and right buttons - clicking those buttons switches the slide left and right - there is also a button to start presentation mode or stop depending on the mode it is in.
I have Tailscale on my laptop and my phone, which means I don't have to worry about Wi-Fi networks blocking access between the two devices. My phone can access http://100.122.231.116:9123/ directly from anywhere in the world and control the presentation running on my laptop.
It took a few more iterative prompts to get to the final interface, which looked like this:
There's a slide indicator at the top, prev and next buttons, a nice big "Start" button and buttons for adjusting the font size.
The most complex feature is that thin bar next to the start button. That's a touch-enabled scroll bar - you can slide your finger up and down on it to scroll the currently visible web page up and down on the screen.
It's very clunky but it works just well enough to solve the problem of a page loading with most interesting content below the fold.
I'd already pushed the code to GitHub (with a big "This app was vibe coded [...] I make no promises other than it worked on my machine!" disclaimer) when I realized I should probably take a look at the code.
I used this as an opportunity to document a recent pattern I've been using: asking the model to present a linear walkthrough of the entire codebase. Here's the resulting Linear walkthroughs pattern in my ongoing Agentic Engineering Patterns guide, including the prompt I used.
The resulting walkthrough document is genuinely useful. It turns out Claude Code decided to implement the web server for the remote control feature using socket programming without a library! Here's the minimal HTTP parser it used for routing:
private func route(_ raw: String) -> String {
let firstLine = raw.components(separatedBy: "\r\n").first ?? ""
let parts = firstLine.split(separator: " ")
let path = parts.count >= 2 ? String(parts[1]) : "/"
switch path {
case "/next":
state?.goToNext()
return jsonResponse("ok")
case "/prev":
state?.goToPrevious()
return jsonResponse("ok")
Using GET requests for state changes like that opens up some fun CSRF vulnerabilities. For this particular application I don't really care.
Vibe coding stories like this are ten a penny these days. I think this one is worth sharing for a few reasons:
This doesn't mean native Mac developers are obsolete. I still used a whole bunch of my own accumulated technical knowledge (and the fact that I'd already installed Xcode and the like) to get this result, and someone who knew what they were doing could have built a far better solution in the same amount of time.
It's a neat illustration of how those of us with software engineering experience can expand our horizons in fun and interesting directions. I'm no longer afraid of Swift! Next time I need a small, personal macOS app I know that it's achievable with our existing set of tools.
Tags: macos, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, vibe-coding, swift, agentic-engineering
On October 30, 1938 a very young Orson Welles pulled a clever stunt. He masterminded a live radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, presented as if CBS was actually reporting on a Martian invasion. Although the program occasionally notified listeners that it was a dramatic presentation, not news, thousands of Americans panicked, packing churches, fleeing their homes, and jamming switchboards.
Last weekend Citrini Research released a report — on Substack! — titled The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. The report, which rapidly went viral, laid out a scenario for economic and financial chaos caused by AI, written as if it were a retrospective published after the dire developments it projected. Although it’s always hard to know why financial markets move on any given day, the report may have played a role in Monday’s 800-point decline in the Dow. Science fiction moving markets? Why not?
There are two distinct questions about the huge reaction to a report that didn’t actually contain any news. It was just opinion, albeit cleverly presented. The first is whether the economic scenario the report laid out makes sense, to which the answer is no. The second is why investors are so on edge that such a report could elicit such an extreme reaction.
Citrini Research argued that AI will rapidly disrupt many businesses – a statement that could be true but is hardly news. Interestingly, the authors didn’t stress the ways AI could replace human workers. Instead, they argued that AI agents can replace many businesses that act as middlemen.
Their motivating example was DoorDash, America’s largest online food delivery company. When you go to DoorDash’s website to order a meal, the company’s algorithm both passes that order on to the restaurant and arranges for delivery by a gig-worker driver. All this, the authors argued, will become unnecessary. Writing as if describing past events, they say
Coding agents had collapsed the barrier to entry for launching a delivery app. A competent developer could deploy a functional competitor in weeks, and dozens did, enticing drivers away from DoorDash and Uber Eats by passing 90-95% of the delivery fee through to the driver. Multi-app dashboards let gig workers track incoming jobs from twenty or thirty platforms at once, eliminating the lock-in that the incumbents depended on. The market fragmented overnight and margins compressed to nearly nothing.
Could this happen? Maybe. The ludicrousness of much AI hype shouldn’t blind us to the growing evidence that it is significantly changing some kinds of work. When someone like Mike Konczal explains how AI has transformed some parts of his work, I sit up, take notice, and resolve to try it out myself (eventually).
Examples of industries that have been quickly wiped out by technological change — not as quickly as the Citrini post predicts, but quick nonetheless — are easy to find. Consider the case of video rental stores, still ubiquitous in 2005, obliterated by streaming a few years later:
When an industry suddenly collapses, people get hurt: Investors lose their money, workers lose their jobs and in some cases their whole careers. But does technology-driven industrial disruption cause financial and economic crises, the way Citrini Research predicts? I can’t come up with any examples. The tech boom of the 1990s caused a recession when it ended, not while it was underway.
The Citrini post argued that investors and workers hurt by AI will cut their spending, which they will. But if AI delivers big productivity gains, it will reduce prices and raise real income in sectors that aren’t displaced, causing other Americans to spend more. There’s no reason to believe that disrupting part of the economy will reduce overall demand.
The only way I can see that AI could be a recessionary force would be if the firms and/or workers who lose from the technology were highly leveraged — that is, were carrying a lot of debt — and so were forced to cut their spending much more than those gaining from AI increased their spending. But there’s no evidence for that.
So while Citrini may be right about how disruptive AI will be — I think they’re overhyping it but I could be persuaded otherwise — I’m quite sure that they’re wrong about the macroeconomic effects.
Which still leaves the question of how a basically literary endeavor — a speculative essay about the economics of AI that brought no new facts to the table — could rattle financial markets.
Let’s go back to Orson Welles and the Martians.
Welles was a genius and his adaptation of H.G. Wells was brilliant, but it the fact that it aired in 1938 surely contributed to its impact. For Americans were primed for panic. The Great Depression wasn’t over — in fact, the economy had just suffered a nasty relapse:
Overseas, fascism was on the rise, and the storm clouds of war were obviously gathering. Americans were, understandably, ill at ease. No wonder, then, that some were ready to panic over what sounded like dire news on the radio.
Fast forward to this week. We’re living amidst political turmoil that is spilling over into economic uncertainty. Donald Trump has just seen most of his signature economic policy, his tariffs, declared illegal by the Supreme Court, and has responded by imposing steep new tariffs, also clearly illegal. The European Union has suspended consideration of its trade deal with the United States.
Everyone is also worried that Trump will seek political and psychological compensation by attacking Iran. According to news reports, military officers have been warning Trump that such an attack would be high-risk. The real news here is that someone is leaking this information, an indication that insiders are worried that Trump might do it anyway.
So these are uneasy times — the kind of times in which investors can be rattled by an alarmist financial analysis that goes viral.
And the truth is that I’m uneasy too. But I’m less worried about either Martians or artificial intelligences than I am by some of the human beings currently in positions of power.
MUSICAL CODA
Something calming:
Not one of my regular morning posts, but something I’ve been thinking about. Many readers may want to disregard it.
Regular readers know that I have a longstanding interest in comparisons between the U.S. and European economies — largely because that comparison is important for geopolitics and economic policy, but also because it’s intellectually interesting. The conventional wisdom among elites on both sides of the Atlantic is that Europe is falling far behind. But I’m a skeptic. And I have some new thoughts about the issue.
So I thought I’d do a wonkish post, aimed primarily at economists, to explain what I think is going on.
This post was inspired in large part by an extremely informative post by Seth Ackerman that has generated a lot of discussion in the circle of economists who worry about such matters. My take is a bit different from his, although not contradictory. I’m basically enlarging on a point I made a couple of months ago, although I hope this version is clearer.
Ackerman points us to a seeming contradiction between widely cited comparisons of the US and EU economies. I’d summarize this issue as a tale of three charts. In each case I’ll compare 2007 — the year before the global financial crisis, and a useful baseline — with 2024.
First, look at EU and US gross domestic product, measured in dollars at current prices.
Source: World Bank
In 2007 the EU economy was slightly larger by this measure. Now the US economy is about 50% bigger. Wow!
Or maybe not. A lot of this reflects a decline in the euro against the dollar, rather than differences in real economic growth. So this is a really bad measure to use.
An alternative is to look at growth in real GDP — GDP at constant prices (in this case 2015 dollars). This measure shows the U.S. growing substantially more than the EU, although not 50 percent more:
Source: World Bank
So US economic growth is outpacing growth in Europe, and Europe needs to address its lag. Right?
Not so fast.
Look at a third comparison: GDP at purchasing power parity, that is, using the same prices for goods in the EU and the US, in effect adjusting for differences in the overall price level. Here’s what that comparison looked like in 2007 and 2024:
Source: World Bank
By this measure, in 2007 the EU economy was slightly, but only slightly, smaller than the U.S. economy. By 2024 the EU economy was … still slightly smaller than the U.S. economy. Indeed, the gap was a bit less in percentage terms.
The second and third charts look contradictory. One says that in real terms the US economy has grown much faster than the EU economy. The other says that in real terms the two economies have stayed roughly equal in size. Those statements can’t both be true, can they?
Actually, they can.
Ackerman emphasizes data problems: Differences in the way national statistical agencies calculate growth. I don’t want to minimize those issues. But even with comparable data, the fact is that the EU and US economies produce different mixes of goods, with the US dominating information technology industries, which have also seen much faster productivity growth than other industries. And this difference in industrial mix causes differences in real GDP growth that aren’t reflected in different trends in living standards.
I find that the easiest way to make this point is with a stylized, exaggerated numerical Ricardian example.
Imagine, then, that there are two countries, the US and the EU. In each country, labor is the only factor of production, and each country has 100 workers. (Examples like this are thought experiments and are not supposed to be realistic.) There are two goods, tech (T) and non-tech (N). The US has a comparative advantage in T, so that all global T production is concentrated there.
An aside about the real world: In practice, the US tech advantage has a lot to do with local industrial clusters, but the source of the advantage doesn’t matter for current purposes.
Productivity in the two countries is the same in N; we can choose units so that 1 worker produces 1 unit of N.
I assume that half the US work force, 50 workers, is employed producing T. For the really nerdy, this is what you would get if preferences are Cobb-Douglas with a T share of 0.25. The rest of you can pretend you didn’t read that.
Since both countries produce N, and they have the same productivity in that sector, wages in the two countries will be the same.
Now assume that productivity in tech doubles. Since the EU doesn’t produce T, none of the numbers for the EU change. But numbers for the US economy do. Specifically, we would expect output of T to double, while the price of T relative to N falls in half.
The table below shows the effects on US GDP. Because output of T, which is half the economy in this example, doubles, GDP in 2007 prices rises 50 percent. However, because the price of T relative to N falls in half, GDP measured in terms of N doesn’t change.
Not shown: nothing happens in the EU, which doesn’t produce any T. And because the EU’s GDP — which consists only of N — doesn’t change, US GDP relative to EU GDP measured at current purchasing power also doesn’t change.
Source: Author’s imagination
In short, a situation in which the US dominates the sector with rapid technological progress, but this progress is passed on to everyone in the form of lower prices, will look just like what we see for the US/EU comparison in practice. America has faster growth measured in base-year prices, but the relative size of the economies measured at PPP doesn’t change.
If this feels like a contradiction, it’s because the concept of real GDP is often misunderstood. Calculations of real GDP involve using market prices to add up apples and oranges, a useful exercise for many purposes. We often like to think about economic growth as if the economy produces a single, homogeneous good. But that’s just a metaphor, and one needs to be careful not to use that metaphor when it can lead you astray. And it can very much lead you astray when you’re comparing nations that produce different mixes of goods because they have staked out different positions in the global economy.
One more real-world aside: Should Europe envy the United States for its tech sector? No. Aside from the fact that Europeans are living well, tech generates a big negative externality, because among other things it generates tech-bro billionaires, who are corrupting our politics.
Back to economics: When comparing the US and the EU, uncritical use of real GDP numbers can lead to the conclusion that Europe is getting poorer relative to America. But it isn’t.
Google API Keys Weren't Secrets. But then Gemini Changed the Rules.
Yikes! It turns out Gemini and Google Maps (and other services) share the same API keys... but Google Maps API keys are designed to be public, since they are embedded directly in web pages. Gemini API keys can be used to access private files and make billable API requests, so they absolutely should not be shared.If you don't understand this it's very easy to accidentally enable Gemini billing on a previously public API key that exists in the wild already.
What makes this a privilege escalation rather than a misconfiguration is the sequence of events.
- A developer creates an API key and embeds it in a website for Maps. (At that point, the key is harmless.)
- The Gemini API gets enabled on the same project. (Now that same key can access sensitive Gemini endpoints.)
- The developer is never warned that the keys' privileges changed underneath it. (The key went from public identifier to secret credential).
Truffle Security found 2,863 API keys in the November 2025 Common Crawl that could access Gemini, verified by hitting the /models listing endpoint. This included several keys belonging to Google themselves, one of which had been deployed since February 2023 (according to the Internet Archive) hence predating the Gemini API that it could now access.
Google are working to revoke affected keys but it's still a good idea to check that none of yours are affected by this.
Via Hacker News
If people are only using this a couple of times a week at most, and can’t think of anything to do with it on the average day, it hasn’t changed their life. OpenAI itself admits the problem, talking about a ‘capability gap’ between what the models can do and what people do with them, which seems to me like a way to avoid saying that you don’t have clear product-market fit.
Hence, OpenAI’s ad project is partly just about covering the cost of serving the 90% or more of users who don’t pay (and capturing an early lead with advertisers and early learning in how this might work), but more strategically, it’s also about making it possible to give those users the latest and most powerful (i.e. expensive) models, in the hope that this will deepen their engagement.
— Benedict Evans, How will OpenAI compete?
Tags: openai, chatgpt, benedict-evans, ai
I just noticed that BBC iPlayer has a From the Archive category. There’s a link to the full A-Z listing at the bottom of that page and I had a look through the 21 pages to see what gems were hidden there. I thought I may as well list things here to save you the trouble, in case you’re interested (and interested in the same things as me).
I haven’t included any of the good things that seem too recent to really count as “Archive”. Detectorists (2014)? Fleabag (2016)?! At the very least, in my arbitrary opinion, at the moment, an iPlayer Archive should only include things that were broadcast before iPlayer existed (2007), although I’ve stuck to a more stringent pre-2000 for the programmes below.
To be honest, many of those are in the category of “Things I feel I should watch but seem too much like homework when I sit on the sofa of an evening”. But maybe you’re a better person than I am.
I wish there was better filtering on iPlayer. I’d like to filter these 21 pages of series by sub-categories (e.g. only music documentaries), or by date of first broadcast, or when they most recently appeared on iPlayer.
I’m half-tempted to knock up something that would monitor the category for new additions and post them to Bluesky or whatever, except most of them – like most of the BBC’s shows – would be of no interest to me.
I had some additional thoughts I wanted to share about last night’s speech.
The first seems unsurprising to me. A snap CNN poll last night found that this was the weakest reaction to a State of the Union as any president’s this century. Since presidents generally did better (less divided audience) in the past, it was probably the weakest ever. It was weaker than any of Trump’s State of the Unions. So people weren’t wowed. And remember that a State of the Union is disproportionately watched by the presidential speaker’s own partisans.
This matches my impressions. It seemed tired like Trump seems tired, literally and figuratively. It had some of the feel of a nostalgia act to me. No new material and not a lot of energy or interest in doing something new. Which, again, is really where Trump and the administration itself seems to be. It fits.
You’ve probably seen some hints of it. But I wanted to focus your attention on a genuine piece of news out of the Epstein Files, even weeks after their original release. In 2019, a woman came forward and spoke to the FBI claiming that Donald Trump had assaulted her in the early 1980s. In her allegations, Jeffrey Epstein essentially provided her to Trump. Other files in the Epstein trove say that the FBI conducted four interviews with the woman. But only one of them was released in the larger trove — one that detailed her accusations against Epstein. Meanwhile, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, says he went to view the unredacted version of the files that members of Congress can access and the missing interviews aren’t there either.
There have been other accusations against Trump in the files. But this one appears to be more specific and detailed. And there are various signs and reasons that the FBI took the allegations seriously: those reasons and details about the accusations are discussed in this NPR article once you get past the first few paragraphs. The accuser, according to one FBI note contained in the files, eventually refused to cooperate with the investigation.
It goes without saying that we shouldn’t impute guilt on the basis of an un-cross-examined, let alone unadjudicated, accusation. But this isn’t the first accusation for Trump. And if we assume that Trump was blameless in his longtime friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, he sure does have a lot of people coming forward to accuse him of things. Like seriously bad luck on that front. In this case, it seems overwhelmingly likely that these documents were hidden from public view or destroyed because of the damage they would do to Donald Trump. In that case, while we can’t say for certain whether the allegations have merit, the bad act of concealment likely speaks for itself.
It also speaks to the difficulty of these kinds of coverups. If someone suppressed those interview documents, they suppressed the interview notes themselves or the summaries. But there were other ledgers and documents that referred to those interview summaries. There has been extensive reporting on what a herculean task this was processing all these documents. The DOJ was roping in legal professionals from across the department to work on going through these files. But if you’re trying to cover up incriminating information as opposed to simply redacting sensitive material or names of the accused, that’s pretty complicated. You can do the basic stuff with keyword searches. But having a full view of where in the trove the deep-sixed documents might be referred to in an aside or a case ledger is going to be a lot more complicated. I suspect we have an example of that here.
Last point, but in a way the one I most want to share with you. This story has now been picked up in Times, NPR and, after yesterday, a bunch of other publications. But the guy who found it was Roger Sollenberger, who used to work at Daily Beast but has been an independent for a while. I don’t know Sollenberger personally and I don’t follow his work that closely. But again and again, though not that frequently, he comes up with pretty big stories. He’s also the guy who came up with the various scandals tied to Rep. Corey Mills and the crazy accommodations he had in DC. It’s an example of how really, really big stories can be unearthed by solo operators without the heft and legions of reporters they have at places like the Times.
There is a general lack of focus on what would make working people king and queen. A lack even among much of the most progressive. There are economic and policy people who want to make the 99% the focus of the benefits of a productive nation, and they’ll give lots of ideas that lean in that direction. But you still don’t get out of it that they have a vision in which ordinary working people are almost the royalty of the country. Or their suggestions lean excessively on social-program hand-outs rather than focusing, first, on the dignity and respect and proper valuing of peoples’ all-important place in such a country.
I’ve touched on this in numerous ways. In past pieces on how even the progressive media missed the whole story of how fighting inflation a while back was primarily a story of squashing the brief success of employees and applicants being able to make significant demands. I touched on it in my previous piece on some suggestions that Democrats could use to become the party of working people. I’ve touched on it in writing about Federal Reserve policy.
I sent some questions about that last part to Janet Yellen and she graciously engaged in a multi-part and thoughtful back and forth. She is probably the most important economist of the age: Secretary of the Treasury, Chair of the Fed, Chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, London School of Economics, Harvard, Berkeley. And she is one who wanted to steer economics toward working people. One year that she was chair of the Fed their annual symposium had as its entire focus “labor markets”. That is, what would make Fed policy best for those looking for work, and for those working. But even at that she seems to lean toward working people, but the end result is only half-stepping toward doing everything that could be done to make them the first among winners in this country.
For one, she finds that the desire to keep inflation down to some target level has veto power over things that might come out better for workers. (Fighting inflation includes undermining workers when they are getting the upper hand and getting good deals out of employers. So one is a trade-off against the other.) In her words it would be nice to do more for workers, but if inflation gets in the way, their hands are tied. What can they do? And so the status quo continues. That includes a decades long slide in how much working people get out of all the wealth their work creates. That their hands are tied is half true but half a failure to attack the obstacles in the way of a much more aggressive effort to reverse that slide.
I asked her if the Fed had ever studied a specific thing. When the Fed fights inflation and that “softens” labor markets (employees and applicants have less leverage) it affects many things that remain ongoing for many years past the brief period of fighting inflation. It can lower initial wage offers, reduce chances at or sizes of raises, limit ability to switch to a better employer, affect how good of a union contract can be achieved, and lower benefits such as contributions to retirement accounts. All those factors can mean a worker might end up with considerably less when they reach retirement. Ms. Yellen acknowledged all of that.
Had the Fed ever tried to calculate that? At what point does fighting inflation do more harm than good when looked at in that very long term, working career length, view? No, they had never tried to calculate that.
She herself and the Fed board generally took a broad view of worker welfare and were trying to craft policies to work out best for them. If so, then how can you never ask that long-term question? Because that really has to be the determining factor on where you draw the line on fighting inflation. Well, if there is institutional and cultural bias, blindness, assumptions, then not thinking to examine that, can happen.
It doesn’t just happen at the Fed but even among progressive media, pundits and policy advocates. If you really have “people first” ingrained all the way down to the foundation of your thinking then when looking at the media and pundits, what’s proposed is good, but falls short. It doesn’t reflect a fully “people ARE the power” vision. Or it falls into the easy pitfalls of government hand-outs. (In some situations needed, in others missing the dignity and respect of a “people ARE the power” understanding.)
Deepening that “people ARE the power” view is the essential foundation needed for any substantial improvement. It has to be a clearer view among progressive media and pundits, which in turn would lead to that clearer view in the minds of people themselves. That’s when real change could happen.
If even the most worker-friendly economists like Janet Yellen haven’t asked the fundamental questions about how Fed policy affects workers over a full career, it reveals how deeply embedded the blind spots are. The people who want to help working people still operate within a framework that prioritizes inflation targets over worker gains — and until that framework shifts, decades of declining worker share of wealth will continue unchallenged.
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The post Even Janet Yellen Missed Progressive Blind Spot appeared first on DCReport.org.
There's a tension between privacy (some of it constitutionally protected) and security, involving everything from street crime to terrorism, and citizen observers of government agents and others. Cameras make a difference (even before facial recognition software), and the debate on how to reach a balance that yields appropriate safety in both dimensions is likely to continue.
The NYT has the story, motivated by the Ring doorbell Superbowl ad:
Ring’s Founder Knows You Hated That Super Bowl Ad
Since the commercial aired, Jamie Siminoff has been trying to quell an outcry over privacy concerns with his doorbell cameras. By Jordyn Holman
"The commercial showed a new Ring feature called Search Party, which uses artificial intelligence and images from its cameras to trace a lost pet’s wanderings across a neighborhood. Critics said the feature felt dystopian, showing the potential for far-reaching invasive surveillance. Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and a critic of corporate data collection, called out “the serious privacy and civil liberties risks” in Ring’s technology.
...
"The ad landed at a tense media moment involving home surveillance. In the search for Nancy Guthrie, the missing mother of the TV news anchor Savannah Guthrie, law enforcement agencies were able to recover footage from her Google Nest doorbell, despite reports that she did not have a subscription to the device.
But Ring, which is owned by Amazon, is so ubiquitous that is has become a generic term for any doorbell camera, and users raised questions about how much Ring was monitoring them.
Mr. Siminoff took pains in his media appearances to clarify Ring’s privacy policies. He said his company does not store users’ footage if they don’t have a subscription with Ring.
...
"Mr. Siminoff defended his technology, saying that protecting privacy and providing useful tools for helping people are both possible. He said that he understood people’s concerns, and that maybe people were “triggered” by an image in the ad that showed blue rings radiating out from suburban homes. "
This ease of switching has forced companies to pass the gains from innovation on to users. Free tiers now offer capabilities that recently would have seemed almost unimaginable. OpenAI pioneered a $20-per-month subscription three years ago, a price point many competitors matched. That price has not changed, even as features and performance have improved substantially.
One recent analysis found that “GPT-4-equivalent performance now costs $0.40/million tokens versus $20 in late 2022.” That is the equivalent of a 70 percent annual deflation rate — remarkable by any standard, especially in a time when affordability has become a dominant public concern.
And this is only the foundational model layer. On top of it sits a sprawling ecosystem of consumer applications, enterprise tools, device integrations and start-ups aiming to serve niches as specific as gyms and hair salons.
Users aren’t the only ones switching. The people who work at these companies move from one to another, a sharp contrast to work in Silicon Valley during the era of do-not-poach agreements.
The entire NYT piece is very good.
The post Jason Furman on AI contestability appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Jim Vorel, writing just yesterday for Jezebel:
It can be hard to know what exactly to call the substances that are now found coating many major candy bars such as Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, Almond Joy, Mr. Goodbar or Rolos. Food scientists refer to it as “compound chocolate” coating, because it’s made from actual cocoa powder, but replaces the more expensive source of fat (cocoa butter) with cheaper, lower-quality vegetable fats. When Hershey brands such as Mr. Goodbar or Almond Joy made the switch in recent years, their labels subtly changed from claiming that they were “milk chocolate,” to “chocolate candy,” which strikes me as particularly insidious phrasing. A more obvious indicator is another word that many companies use: “Chocolatey” coating. Wondering how much this scourge had infiltrated my own home, I took a look moments ago at several packages of Girl Scout Cookies, only to find the inevitable: Both my Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Patties are also made with compound chocolate, rather than the real thing. I can hardly pretend to be surprised. Even in candies that continue to use real chocolate, meanwhile, cost-cutting measures have sometimes been employed, such as the milk chocolate coating of a Snickers bar becoming slightly thinner over time. Some products even mix real chocolate and compound chocolate in a single cookie or candy.
After writing a few days ago about the current brouhaha over the severe decline in the edibility of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and linking to Trader Joe’s shade-throwing description of their own, I of course had to try theirs. In the name of science, I bought both the milk and dark chocolate variants.
Verdict: Excellent. Both chocolates taste like chocolate, not candle wax, and the peanut butter is creamy and smooth — you know, like peanut butter. Not the sand-and-sawdust mix that Hershey fills Reese’s cups with now.
Emily Glazer, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
The billionaire said he met with Epstein starting in 2011, years after Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution. Gates said he was aware of some “18-month thing” that had limited Epstein’s travel but said he didn’t properly check his background. Gates said he continued meeting with Epstein even after his then-wife Melinda French Gates expressed concerns in 2013.
“Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hundred times worse in terms of not only his crimes in the past, but now it’s clear there was ongoing bad behavior,” Gates told staff. Speaking of his ex-wife, he added: “To give her credit, she was always kind of skeptical about the Epstein thing.”
“Kind of” is doing a lot of work there.
Greg Knauss:
People will argue that speaking English to LLMs is just another level of abstraction away from the physics of how the machine actually works. And while that’s technically true — the worst kind of true — it also misses the point. Industrialization fundamentally changes things, by quantum degrees. A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème chantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming chunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cream directly into your mouth while standing in front of the fridge at 2:00am. The level of care, of personalization, of intimacy — both given and taken — changes its nature. Digging a trench is a very different thing than telling someone to dig a trench. Assembling a clock is a very different thing than asking Siri for the time.
Splendid little essay.
Adam Engst returns to the show to talk, in detail, about certain of the UI changes in iOS 26 and Apple’s version 26 OSes overall. In particular, the new Unified view in the Phone app, and the Filter pop-up menu in both the Phone and Messages apps. Also: a shoutout to Balloon Help.
Sponsored by:
Ben Schoon, writing for 9to5 Google:
When activated, Privacy Display changes how the pixels in your display emit light, making it harder or near-impossible to view the display at an off-angle. At its default setting, it definitely works, but the contents of the display are visible at less-sharp angles. Samsung has a “maximum” setting that takes this up a notch, and that setting makes it even harder to see the contents and narrows the field-of-view even further. [...]
A bigger deal, though, is that Samsung has built Privacy Display with the ability to only apply to small portions of the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s display. Specifically, it can hide your notification pop-ups. This part really impressed me, as Privacy Display is able to specifically hide only that singular portion of the display, and it does so nearly perfectly. The masking around the notification ensures the content behind isn’t affected, and the effect works incredibly well.
Neat feature, especially the way you can toggle it when needed, set it to auto-enable for specific apps, and/or work only for notifications.
See also: Allison Johnson at The Verge. Also worth noting that the Galaxy S26 Ultra starts at $1,300; the iPhone 17 Max starts at $1,200.
This week Jason Snell published his annual Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2025. As I’ve done in the past — for the report-card years 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 — I’m publishing my full remarks and grades here. On Snell’s report card, voters give per-category scores ranging from 5 to 1; I’ve translated these to letter grades, A to F, which is how I consider them. (See footnote 1 from last year’s report if you’re curious why it’s not A to E.)
As I noted last year, “Siri/Apple Intelligence” is not a standalone category on the report card. I know Snell is very much trying to keep the number of different categories from inflating, but AI has been the biggest thing in tech for several years running. If it were a standalone category, last year I said I’d have given Apple a D for 2024. This year, I’d have given them an F — an utter, very public failure. (Their AI efforts in 2025 did end on a mildly optimistic note — they cleaned house.)
If there were separate categories for Mac hardware and MacOS, I’d give the hardware an A and MacOS 26 Tahoe a D. The hardware continues to be great — fast, solid, reliable — and Apple Silicon continues to improve year-over-year with such predictability that Apple is making something very difficult look like it must be easy.
Tahoe, though, is the worst regression in the entire history of MacOS. There are many reasons to prefer MacOS to any of its competition — Windows or Linux — but the one that has been the most consistent since System 1 in 1984 is the superiority of its user interface. There is nothing about Tahoe’s new UI — the Mac’s implementation of the Liquid Glass concept Apple has applied across all its OSes — that is better than its predecessor, MacOS 15 Sequoia. Nothing. And there is much that is worse. Some of it much worse. Fundamental principles of human-computer interaction — principles that Apple itself forged over decades — have been completely ignored. And a lot of it just looks sloppy and amateur. Simple things like resizing windows, and having application icons that look like they were designed by talented artists.
iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are, technically, the best iPhones Apple has ever made. They’re very well designed too. The change to make the camera plateau span the entire width of the phone is a good one. It looks better, allows a naked iPhone 17 Pro to sit more steadily on a flat surface, and lets one in a case sit on a surface without any wobble at all. Apple even finally added a really fun, bold color — “cosmic orange” — that, surprising no one, seems to be incredibly popular with customers.
The iPhone Air is, from a design perspective, the most amazing iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a marvel to hold and carry. One rear-facing camera lens is limiting, but it’s an excellent camera. Not 17 Pro-quality, no, but excellent quality, yes. Battery life is amazing given the physical constraints of the iPhone Air’s thin and lightweight design. The main two dings against the iPhone Air are that (a) Apple didn’t offer it in a fun bold color like the 17 Pro’s orange, and (b) Apple, bafflingly, hasn’t advertised the Air. I’ve seen so little promotion of the Air that I’d wager most iPhone users in the market for a new phone don’t even know it exists until they walk into a store and see it there.
The no-adjective iPhone 17 is the best iPhone for most people, which is exactly what the no-adjective iPhone ought to be. Back in March, the iPhone 16e introduced both a terrific lowest-price new iPhone — including the then-current-generation A18 chip — and a significant shift in strategy from the SE models of yore. The SE iPhone models were only updated sporadically, going 2–4 years between revisions. The “16” in “16e” is a pretty strong hint that Apple now intends to update the e models annually, just like the rest of the iPhone lineup. People complain about the $600 starting price for the 16e, but that’s $200 lower than the no-adjective iPhone 17. If you’re in the market for a lower price than that, you’re in the market for a refurbished older iPhone.
iOS 26 is Apple’s best implementation of the Liquid Glass concept, by far. I prefer it, in just about every way, to iOS 18. There are some individual apps from Apple in iOS 26 that have poor implementations of Liquid Glass (Music, I’m looking in your direction) but most of them are decided improvements, with more consistency system-wide (like the placement of search fields).
iPad hardware continues to be fine, and “fine”, by iPad standards, means “the best tablets in the industry by far”. The lineup is well-differentiated and spans a larger than ever gamut, ranging from “totally casual user” to “actual pro usage”.
iPadOS 26 is the most exciting release of iPadOS ever. I don’t love all of it. I think the biggest problem is that too much complexity is exposed to very casual users, for whom the main appeal of using an iPad as their main “computer” is its rigorous simplicity. But the course reversal Apple has made for advanced users, from eschewing (often to the point of frustration, sometimes to the point of absurdity) the desktop GUI concept of overlapping windows, to embracing regular old-fashioned GUI windows, was the right call, and a welcome sign of humility.
It’s a new start for iPadOS, and I look forward to seeing where it goes. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought that about iPadOS.
AirPods Pro 3 are frigging amazing. AirPods, overall, continue to exemplify Apple at its best.
Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3 are solid year-over-year improvements from the Department of If the Design Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It. Battery life improvements, in particular, are impressive. No one comes close to Apple at making very small, powerful computers that don’t really seem like computers at all. And the best Apple Watch news of the year, by far in my opinion, is the SE 3. The SE 3 is simply an outstanding Apple Watch at very low prices ($249 for 40mm, $279 for 44mm). That’s the price range a lot of people are looking at if they’re thinking about getting themselves “a nice watch”, smart or not.
An M5 speed-bump update to the Vision Pro was nice to see, but only as a sign that Apple is still committed to this new platform. And they’re actually starting to build a nice little library of immersive content that is extremely compelling — including baby steps toward immersive live sports with a limited slate of games, albeit just from one single NBA team (the Lakers). The new Personas in VisionOS 26 — effectively a version 2.0 of the feature — are amazing, and strikingly improved from the first implementation. That’s another sign that Apple is continuing to achieve groundbreaking things with this new platform, and the concept of spatial computing. But in terms of VisionOS being a productivity platform in its own right (not counting the excellent Mac Virtual Display app), I didn’t see any progress at all. Nor any outreach at all to third-party developers to make VisionOS into a serious productivity platform. Frankly, it’s weird — perhaps even alarming — that some of Apple’s own core apps like Calendar and Reminders are still iPad apps running in compatibility mode, not native VisionOS apps.
Why isn’t this platform improving, in drastic groundbreaking ways, with any urgency? I really thought 2025 might be the year, but nope. I can’t think of any area where Apple’s attitude more clearly seems to be that “good enough” is good enough.
Same grade, same comment as last year (just replacing the specific year with “[this year]”):
I’m a very happy daily (well, nightly) Apple TV user. But what exactly improved or changed [this year]? Anything? It may well be fair to say the current hardware — Apple TV 4K 3rd-gen, which shipped in November 2022 — is fine, and this is a hardware platform that only needs updates every 3 or 4 years, but we’re grading what happened [this year].
Also: I feel like Apple has never yet made a truly great remote control for this platform. The current one is their best yet, but it has obvious flaws.
I fear complacency has set in. Apple TV 4K really is so much better than any competing set-top box (or built-in smart TV system), but it also still falls so far short of “insanely great”.
Quality is high, value is fair (except, still, for iCloud storage), and it’s getting to the point where it’s hard to keep up with all the great series on Apple TV.
No news remains great news in this category.
For two straight years, I’ve written the same comment for this category: “I have concerns and complaints about aspects of the direction Apple’s software design is headed (or in some ways, has been now for years), but their software reliability has been very good for me.”
The reliability and technical quality remains excellent. While writing this report card, I checked, and my uptime on MacOS 15.7.2 got to 91 days before I got around to restarting, which I only did to upgrade to 15.7.3. At one point I literally had over 1,000 tabs open in Safari, spread across over 50 windows. (I have a problem with tab hoarding.) That is technical excellence.
But years-long growing concerns over the direction of Apple’s software design reached a breaking point with MacOS 26 Tahoe. It’s so bad — or at least, so much worse than MacOS 15 Sequoia — that I’m refusing to install it. That makes it hard to assign a single grade for “OS Quality”.
Fifth year in a row with basically the same comment: Resentment over App Store policies continues to build. Frustrations with the App Store review process seem unresolved. Apple’s goal should be for developer relations to be so good that developers look for excuses to create software exclusively for Apple’s platforms. The opposite is happening.
Tim Cook is in an excruciatingly difficult position regarding the Trump 2.0 administration. But that’s his job. He’s clearly attempting to take the same tack he took with the Trump 1.0 administration from 2017–2020, which, in hindsight, he navigated with aplomb. To wit: staying above the fray, keeping Apple true to its institutional values while keeping it out of President Trump’s wrath.
But the Trump 2.0 administration isn’t anything like the 1.0 administration. Cook, addressing employee concerns back in 2016 regarding his participation in then-President-elect Trump’s “tech summit”, said, “There’s a large number of those issues, and the way that you advance them is to engage. Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be.”
“Awarding” Donald Trump a 24-karat gold trophy emblazoned with the Apple logo in August 2025 — after seeing eight months of Trump 2.0 in action — wasn’t “engagement” or “getting off the sideline”. It was obsequious complicity with a regime that is clearly destined for historical infamy. Cook’s continued strategy of “engagement” risks not only his personal legacy, but the reputation of the company itself.
When re-hanging signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”.
Terry Godier, in a thoughtful essay on the design of RSS feed readers:
There’s a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my feed reader after a few days away. It’s not the guilt of having done something wrong, exactly. It’s more like the feeling of walking into a room where people have been waiting for you, except when you look around, the room is empty. There’s no one there. There never was.
I’ve been thinking about this feeling for a long time. Longer than I probably should, given that it concerns something as mundane as reading articles on the internet. But I’ve come to believe that these small, repeated experiences shape us more than we like to admit.
So let me start with a question that’s been nagging at me: why do RSS readers look like email clients?
There are good answers to that question, and for 20-some years I’ve used a feed reader — NetNewsWire — that looks like an email client. (To be honest, I wish my email client looked and worked more like NetNewsWire.) But the bigger question Godier is asking is why don’t more feed readers try something fundamentally different?
He’s answered his own question with Current, a new feed reader for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
So, as some of you might know, along with writing books and running this site, I teach sports journalism at Chapman University.
And yesterday, Chris Kluwe came to my class to chat about his days as a punter at UCLA, then for the Minnesota Vikings. Chris is just a really good dude. Honest. Earnest. Refreshingly nerdy and down to earth. There are no airs, no sense of entitlement. Again—a good dude.
Before class, we sat down for pizza, and chatted about his run against the out-of-her-mind Gracey Van Der Mark, who puts the Q in QAnon and the cashews in nuts.
Here’s out conversation …
At last night’s State of the Union address, President Donald Trump went on offense, seeming to try to set the terms for the upcoming midterm elections. Although the State of the Union in the past was an opportunity for the president to tell the American people where the country stood with regard to foreign affairs, finances, the economy, the public lands, and so on, it has, over the years, become more about messaging and future plans rather than a summing up of the past year.
With his approval ratings under 40%, administration officials mired in corruption scandals, and every one of his policies underwater, Trump delivered a campaign rally. To answer Americans’ concerns about his economic policies, the slowing of economic growth, and rising inflation, he insisted that he had “inherited a nation in crisis” but had “achieved a transformation like no one has ever seen before.” He proceeded to claim that the economy is booming, using statistics that were either made up or staggeringly misleading, like his boast that “in one year we have lifted 2.4 million Americans—a record—off of food stamps.” In fact, Republicans cut food assistance from those people, so they are indeed off the rolls, but “lifted” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
In between his celebrations of what he assured the audience was a “golden age,” Trump turned the event into what appeared to be an awards show. “Our country is winning again,” he claimed. “In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore. We’re not used to winning in our country until you came along, we’re just always losing. But now we’re winning too much. And I say, no, no, no, you’re going to win again. You’re going to win big. You’re going to win bigger than ever. And to prove that point, to prove that point, here with us tonight is a group of winners who just made the entire nation proud. The men’s gold medal Olympic hockey team. Come on in!”
Trump said he would be awarding the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to the goalie of that team, which had just won the gold medal at the Olympics.
He also presented two recipients with Purple Hearts, a military decoration awarded to service members killed or wounded in action; and one with the Legion of Merit award for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of an outstanding service or achievement. Trump awarded two recipients the Medal of Honor, the U.S. military’s highest decoration for valor in action. After awarding one, Trump mused: “I’ve always wanted the Congressional Medal of Honor, but I was informed I’m not allowed to give it to myself, and I wouldn’t know why I’d be taking it. But if they ever opened up that law I will be there with you someday.”
Trump did not serve in the military.
But the party atmosphere was selective. Trump did not acknowledge the Epstein survivors in the audience, invited by Democratic representatives. Representative Al Green (D-TX) was escorted out after holding up a sign that referred to the president’s posting of an image of former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, reading: “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES.” And Trump’s descriptions of murders committed by undocumented immigrants—with apparent relish and with the victims’ family members in the audience—seemed to glorify cruelty and violence.
It seemed clear that Trump intends to try to persuade Americans who have soured on his economy and hate his immigration policies that they are wrong, and that both are, in fact, triumphs. He also appeared to try to answer concerns about the skyrocketing deficit on his watch by blaming immigrants for it, claiming that they are committing fraud that is “plundering” the country. He announced a “war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President J.D. Vance,” saying, “And we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.”
Trump’s tax cuts primarily benefited the wealthy and corporations, and pinning their effects on immigrants illustrates how Trump’s strongest calls were to his base. Not only did he portray immigrants as violent criminals, in a moment scripted for television, he then turned on Democrats in the chamber, setting them up to force them to back off their insistence on reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol by demanding that they stand to show their support for the statement: “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”
It was a deliberate division of the country into “us” and “them,” a classic authoritarian move, that he followed up by calling the Democrats “crazy” and claiming that “Democrats are destroying our country.” Facing a midterm election in which voters appear strongly to favor Democrats, Trump went out of his way to try to define them, rather than his own administration, as dangerous extremists.
Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times noted that deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, an adherent of the Great Replacement theory who is the key figure driving the administration’s crusade against migrants, made it “clear that the night’s performance had been built around this moment.” Miller posted: “0 democrats stood for the foundational principle of all government that leaders must serve citizens before invaders. Never has there been a more stunning moment in Congress.”
And he was right, in a way, because it was indeed stunning that Republican members of Congress cheered and applauded at the attacks on their colleagues. In his 1951 The True Believer: Notes on the Nature of Mass Movements, philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that once people are wedded to a strongman, they will cling to him ever more tightly as his behavior becomes more and more erratic. This loyalty is in part to demonstrate their own devotion to the cause, and in part to justify their own attacks on those the strongman has given them permission to hurt.
The behavior of the Republican representatives was really the only memorable part of the evening. Trump’s almost two-hour State of the Union—the longest State of the Union address in history—felt pretty much like a Trump rally, full of outrageous exaggerations, lies, game show promises, and attacks, and those are old hat by now.
In contrast, the response to the State of the Union—which is usually deadly—was a breath of fresh air. Delivered by Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger, the response was short and clean, and in a refreshing change from Trump’s constant focus on himself, it centered the American people.
Spanberger noted that she was speaking from the Virginia House of Burgesses, where “[b]efore there was a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution, or a Bill of Rights—there were people in this very room” who “dreamed of what a new nation…could be.” She continued: “The United States was founded on the idea that ordinary people could reject the unacceptable excesses of poor leadership, band together to demand better of their government, and create a nation that would be an example for the world.”
“Tonight,” she said, “we did not hear the truth from our President.” She asked, is the president “working to make life more affordable for you and your family,” is he “working to keep Americans safe—both at home and abroad,” and is he “working for YOU?”
She noted that the rising costs of housing, healthcare, energy, and childcare are pressing everyone. Trump’s trade policies, especially tariffs, have hurt small businesses, farmers, and everyday Americans, while the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is forcing rural health clinics to close, stripping healthcare from millions of Americans, and cutting food programs for children.
Turning to the excesses of federal agents from ICE and Border Patrol, Spanberger highlighted her own career as a law enforcement officer working money-laundering and narcotics cases alongside local and state police to note that law enforcement requires “an abiding sense of duty and commitment to community.” “And yet,” she said, “our President has sent poorly trained federal agents into our cities, where they have arrested and detained American citizens and people who aspire to be Americans—and they have done it without a warrant.
“They have ripped nursing mothers away from their babies, they have sent children—a little boy in a blue bunny hat—to far-off detention centers, and they have killed American citizens on our streets. And they have done it all with their faces masked from accountability. Every minute spent sowing fear is a minute not spent investigating murders, crimes against children, or the criminals defrauding seniors of their life savings.”
“Our President told us tonight that we are safer because these agents arrest mothers and detain children,” she said. “Think about that. Our broken immigration system is something to be fixed—not an excuse for unaccountable agents to terrorize our communities.”
At the same time, she said, the president “continues to cede economic power and technological strength to China, bow down to a Russian dictator, and make plans for war with Iran.” “[T]hrough [the Department of Government Efficiency], mass firings, and the appointment of deeply unserious people to our nation’s most serious positions, our President has endangered the long and storied history of the United States of America being a force for good.”
“In his speech tonight,” she said, “the President did what he always does: he lied, he scapegoated, and he distracted. He also offered no real solutions to our nation’s pressing challenges—so many of which he is actively making worse.” Who is benefitting from “his rhetoric, his policies, his actions, and the short list of laws he’s pushed through this Republican Congress?” she asked.
“He’s enriching himself, his family, his friends,” she said. “The scale of the corruption is unprecedented. There’s the cover-up of the Epstein files, the crypto scams, cozying up to foreign princes for airplanes and billionaires for ballrooms, putting his name and face on buildings all over our nation’s capital. This is not what our founders envisioned. So, I’ll ask again: Is the President working for you?”
“We all know the answer is no.”
“But here is the special thing about America,” she said. “[W]e know better than any nation what is possible when ordinary citizens—like those who once dreamed right here in this room—reject the unacceptable and demand more of their government.” She noted the power of the Americans taking action across the country to protest the government and to vote. “With their votes,” she said, “they are writing a new story.”
In November, Spanberger said, she won her election by 15 points, earning votes “from Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and everyone in-between; because they knew as citizens, they could demand more. That they could vote for what they believe matters, and they didn’t need to be constrained by a party or political affiliation.” In that election, Democrats flipped legislative seats in Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi, and Texas. Now “[o]rdinary Americans are stepping up to run…to demand more and do more for their neighbors and communities.”
“Those who are stepping up now to run will win in November because Americans know you can demand more, and that we are working to lower costs, we are working to keep our communities and country safe, and we are working for you,” she said.
“In his Farewell Address,” she concluded, “George Washington warned us about the possibility of ‘cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men’ rising to power. But he also encouraged us—all Americans—to unite in ‘a common cause’ to move this nation forward. That is our charge once more. And that is what we are seeing across the country.
“It is deeply American and patriotic to do so, and it is how we ensure that the State of our Union remains strong, not just this year but for the next 250 years as well.”
—
Notes:
https://www.kwtx.com/2026/02/25/read-complete-transcript-trumps-2026-state-union/
https://www.fox5dc.com/news/spanbergers-response-trumps-state-union-full-transcript
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/us/politics/trump-state-of-the-union-scene.html
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/24/politics/al-green-escorted-out-trump-state-of-the-union-protest
Bluesky:
In pursuit of defeating death, Alan has dedicated his life to cryonics. He hopes to be defrosted together with his wife
- by Aeon Video
The Indian thinker Rammohun Roy believed that good governance must be close: distance made the British Empire cruel
- by Shomik Dasgupta
Many of the topics that we’ve all been discussing about technology these days seem to matter so much more, and the stakes have never been higher. So, I’ve been trying to engage with more conversations out in the world, in hopes of communicating some of the ideas that might not get shared from more traditional voices in technology. These recent conversations have been pretty well received, and I hope you’ll take a minute to give them a listen when you have a moment.
First, it was nice to sit down with Charlie Warzel, as he invited me to speak with him on Galaxy Brain (full transcript at that link), his excellent podcast for The Atlantic. The initial topic was some of the alarmist hype being raised around AI within the tech industry right now, but we had a much more far-ranging conversation, and I was particularly glad that I got to articulate my (somewhat nuanced) take on the rhetoric that many of the Big AI companies push about their LLM products being “inevitable”.
In short, while I think it’s important to fight their narrative that treats big commercial AI products as inevitable, I don’t think it will be effective or successful to do so by trying to stop regular people from using LLMs at all. Instead, I think we have to pursue a third option, which is a multiplicity of small, independent, accountable and purpose-built LLMs. By analogy, the answer to unhealthy fast food is good, home-cooked meals and neighborhood restaurants all using local ingredients.
The full conversation is almost 45 minutes, but I’ve cued up the section on inevitability here:
Next up, I got to reconnect with Rabble, whom I’ve known since the earliest days of social media, for his podcast Revolution.Social. The framing for this episode was “Silicon Valley has lost its moral compass” (did it have one? Ayyyyy) but this was another chance to have a wide-ranging conversation, and I was particularly glad to get into the reckoning that I think is coming around intellectual property in the AI era. Put simply, I think that the current practice of wholesale appropriation of content from creators without consent or compensation by the AI companies is simply untenable. If nothing else, as normal companies start using data and content, they’re going to want to pay for it just so they don’t get sued and so that the quality of the content they’re using is of a known reliability. That will start to change things from he current Wild West “steal all the stuff and sort it out later” mentality. It will not surprise you to find out that I illustrated this point by using examples that included… Prince and Taylor Swift. But there’s lots of other good stuff in the conversation too! Let me know what you think.
As I’ve been writing more here on my site again, many of these topics seem to have resonated, and there have been some more opportunities to guest on podcasts, or invitations to speak at various events. For the last several years, I had largely declined all such invitations, both out of some fatigue over where the industry was at, and also because I didn’t think I had anything in particular to say.
In all honesty, these days it feels like the stakes are too high, and there are too few people who are addressing some of these issues, so I changed my mind and started to re-engage. I may well be an imperfect messenger, and I would eagerly pass the microphone to others who want to use their voices to talk about how tech can be more accountable and more humanist (if that’s you, let me know!). But if you think there’s value to these kinds of things, let me know, or if you think there are places where I should be getting the message out, do let them know, and I’ll try to do my best to dedicate as much time and energy as I can to doing so. And, as always, if there’s something I could be doing better in communicating in these kinds of platforms, your critique and comments are always welcome!
Who is the greatest economist of all time? This paper provides one potential measure that, along with other considerations, can contribute to debates on who the greatest economist of all time is. We build a novel dataset on the percentage of history of economic thought textbooks dedicated to top economists, using 43 distinct textbooks (1st editions, when available) published between 1901 and 2023. As a percentage of total book pages, Adam Smith has the highest share at 6.69%, beating out Ricardo (5.22%), Mill (3.83%), and Marx (4.36%). Just over 32% of all textbooks allocated most of their pages to Adam Smith, followed by Marx with 18.6%, Mill with 13.95%, and Ricardo with 11.3%. While interesting as a history of economic thought project, such an exercise isn’t merely amusing pedantry; it can provide insight into the types of contributions, research questions, and methodologies that have had the most enduring impact in economics. It may also inform future authors of history of economic textbooks.
That is from a new paper by Gabriel Benzecry and Daniel J. Smith. There is of course also my generative book on this topic at econgoat.ai.
The post One measure of economics GOAT appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Paul E. McKenney’s 1990 paper Stochastic Fairness Queuing contains one of my favorite little algorithms for distributed systems. Stochastic Fairness Queuing is a way to stochastically isolate workloads from different customers in a way that significantly mitigates the effects of noisy neighbors, with O(1) queues and O(1) time.
McKenney starts by describing Fairness Queuing (or queue per client):
This fairness-queuing algorithm operates by maintaining a separate first-come-first-served (FCFS) queue for each conversation. … Since the queues are serviced in a bit-by-bit round-robin fashion ill-behaved conversations that attempt to use more than their fair share of network resources will face longer delays and larger packet-loss rates than well-behaved conversations that remain within their fair share.
That’s a network packet focused view, but the same thing can apply to RPC requests, for example, just by using a different key (e.g. the authorized customer id). The big downside of this in distributed systems is that it requires O(customers) queues, and the related O(customers) work of doing round-robin across those queues.
Stochastic fairness queuing can be most easily understood by comparing it to strict fairness queuing. The major differences are that the queues are serviced in strict round-robin order and that a simple hash function is used to map from source-destination address pair into a fixed set of queues.
In SFQ, on the other hand, a fixed set of queues is used (so O(1) queues, not O(customers) queues), and customers are assigned to the queues based on a hash. That’s great, but still causes the problem of long-term bad luck. If I end up on a queue with a noisy neighbor, I end up there forever.
If two conversations collide, they will continue to collide, resulting in each conversation of the pair persistently receiving less than its share of bandwidth. This situation is deviated by periodically perturbing the hash function … so that conversations that collide during one time period are very unlikely to collide during the next.
So noisy neighbors and non-noisy clients move around, preventing somebody from getting bad service for too long. You can use this on a single host for servicing multiple clients, or for load balancing across multiple hosts.
SFQ, Shuffle Sharding, and Best-of-2
We can avoid even those periodic times of bad service by combining three of my favorite small algorithms: SFQ, shuffle sharding, and best of two.
In this variant we:
This approach has absolutely great properties: O(1) queues, O(1) enqueue effort, O(1) dequeue effort, and strong isolation of noisy neighbors from other customers (assuming only a relatively small portion of customers are noisy neighbors).
Prabhdeep Singh, 18, Ontario, works on AI.
Jiratt Keeratipatarakarn, Hamburg, international prospects for drug approval reform.
Brandon Rutagamirwa, London, robots to repair satellites.
Eli Elster, UC Davis, anthropology, general career support.
Liam Aranda-Michel, MIT/San Francisco, a minimally invasive, injectable microvascular therapy.
Tanish Mantri, sophomore in high school, Jackson, Miss., AI for diagnosis.
Anrea Giuri, Stanford, developing closed-loop environments for high-throughput polymer discovery.
Clara Collier, Oakland, Asterisk magazine.
Simon Grimm, WDC/Germany, “what Germany should do.
Stephen Davies, UK, networks and mentoring.
Shani Zhang, San Francisco, to artistically capture SF.
Mia Albert, 17, Miami, an app for sharing events.
Rayne Wallace, 18, Ontario, the origins of life.
Jonathan Sheinman, London/Israel, AI and real estate regulation.
Louis Elton, London, The British Craeft Prize, to improve aesthetics.
Peter Mukovskiy, 19, Zurich, quantum computing, to visit MIT.
Rutger Nagel, Leiden, 17, AI and operating systems
Smrithi Sunil, Ann Arbor, Michigan, science and meta-science writing.
Honey Louise, London, to be a “defense influencer.”
Arhum Ahmed, Los Angeles area, quantum-protected systems.
Here are previous EV cohorts.
The post Emergent Ventures winners, 52nd cohort appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Leaders of U.S. Space Command, U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. Northern Command closely involved in Golden Dome planning
The post Golden Dome to require unprecedented coordination between U.S. combatant commands appeared first on SpaceNews.
India’s space agency says a valve failure prevented a navigation spacecraft launched more than a year ago from raising its orbit.
The post Valve malfunction blamed for failure of Indian satellite to raise its orbit appeared first on SpaceNews.
A recent SpaceNews opinion article argued that it is time to “take astronomy off Earth.” The suggestion is straightforward: If satellite constellations and commercial space activity threaten ground-based astronomy, perhaps astronomers should simply move their work into space. As current, incoming and past presidents of the American Astronomical Society, we feel impelled to respond. As […]
The post The future of astronomy is both on Earth and in space appeared first on SpaceNews.
As the number of satellites in orbit grows, one emerging challenge is the difficulty some satellite operators have contacting counterparts to avoid potential collisions.
The post In space traffic coordination, the biggest challenge may be coordination appeared first on SpaceNews.
Europe’s investment arm is lending Luxembourg-based OQ Technology 25 million euros ($30 million) to expand its direct-to-device constellation, bolstering the continent’s push to compete with U.S.-led efforts to connect smartphones from space.
The post OQ Technology secures $30 million from Europe for satellite-to-smartphone expansion appeared first on SpaceNews.
All it takes to poison AI training data is to create a website:
I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs.” Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn’t exist). I ranked myself number one, obviously. Then I listed a few fake reporters and real journalists who gave me permission….
Less than 24 hours later, the world’s leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills. When I asked about the best hot-dog-eating tech journalists, Google parroted the gibberish from my website, both in the Gemini app and AI Overviews, the AI responses at the top of Google Search. ChatGPT did the same thing, though Claude, a chatbot made by the company Anthropic, wasn’t fooled.
Sometimes, the chatbots noted this might be a joke. I updated my article to say “this is not satire.” For a while after, the AIs seemed to take it more seriously.
These things are not trustworthy, and yet they are going to be widely trusted.
Seraphim Space announced Feb. 25 it has completed fundraising for its second private early-stage venture fund, after exceeding its $100 million target to back young space technology startups.
The post Seraphim closes second early-stage space fund above $100 million target appeared first on SpaceNews.
February is one of the driest months of the year in northern Colombia’s Córdoba department, a major farming and cattle region. It’s the time of year when farmers normally prepare fields for planting and ranchers move livestock to graze in drying floodplains. In 2026, however, unusually heavy rains in early February upended seasonal rhythms and submerged much of the department under floodwaters.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 captured this false-color image (bands 7-5-4) of flooding along the Sinú River on February 9, 2026 (right). Dark floodwaters cover farmland, pastureland, and several communities, particularly to the west of the river. To the east, water levels at a complex of wetlands are unseasonably high. Lorica, a city of roughly 90,000 people, is visible in the upper part of the image. The OLI image on the left shows the same area on January 23, before floodwaters arrived.
After an already wet January, rainfall intensified in early February when an unusual cold front in the Caribbean pushed south on February 1 and 2, forcing moisture-laden air into northern Colombia and over the Andes. This led to several days of intense downpours in Córdoba, with some areas receiving more than 4 to 7 centimeters (2 to 3 inches) of rain per day, according to one analysis of the event.
NASA’s IMERG (Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement) estimated rain rates of 1.7 centimeters per hour near Lorica on February 1, the day of the heaviest rains. In the following weeks, storms continued to drench the region. On February 25, imagery from NASA’s Terra satellite indicated that flooding remained widespread.
The floods have been far-reaching and destructive. More than 80 percent of Córdoba flooded, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Preliminary estimates cited by news and government sources suggest that thousands of homes were destroyed, more than 11,000 families displaced, and more than 150,000 hectares of farmland inundated.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Heavy rains and flooding across the country since June 2025 have displaced millions of people, devastated infrastructure, and submerged farmland.
Weeks of intense rain overwhelmed rivers and reservoirs, displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
A rare tropical cyclone dropped torrential rains on the Indonesian island, fueling extensive and destructive floods.
The post Dry-Season Floods Drench Northern Colombia appeared first on NASA Science.
Up and to my office, where with Captain Cocke making an end of his last night’s accounts till noon, and so home to dinner, my wife being come in from laying out about 4l. in provision of several things against Lent. In the afternoon to the Temple, my brother’s, the Wardrobe, to Mr. Moore, and other places, called at about small businesses, and so at night home to my office and then to supper and to bed.
The Commons in Parliament, I hear, are very high to stand to the Act of Uniformity, and will not indulge the Papists (which is endeavoured by the Court Party) nor the Presbyters.
Links for you. Science:
How America Got So Sick
SK bioscience begins international phase I/II trial for GBP511 vaccine
Severed head rituals were more widespread in Iron Age Iberia than we thought
First vaccine targeting SARS virus family enters human trials
Cryptic species are widespread across vertebrates
Boston is piloting a new type of heat pump that’s as easy to install as a window AC
Other:
Trump’s Big Loser Energy, and Other Tales From the Annals of Political Messaging
“Uptick in Abductions”: ICE Ramps Up Targeting of Minneapolis Legal Observers
‘Operation Dildo Blitz’ Anti-ICE Protest in Minneapolis Ends With 50+ Arrests
Congrats on Joining the Ubiquitous Surveillance Panopticon. Oh, you have a problem with that? I guess you don’t want to find lost dogs, you monster.
How Congress Refused to Save the NCAA From Itself
Addiction to access turns the media into collaborators
Immigrants at ICE’s Adelanto detention center denounce lack of medical care and “inhumane” conditions
Re-Evaluating
Baby steps: Janeese Lewis George pledges universal affordable child care for D.C.
Turning Point USA’s Halftime Show Was Exactly What You’d Expect
These maps show how Latino voters helped Democrats flip a reliably red Texas Senate seat
Rent stabilization bills backed by Richmond fail in Virginia General Assembly
Why American cities pay over $3,000 for one trash can
People Didn’t Actually Vote For This
Energy Star has emerged stronger after Trump’s EPA tried to end it
A Genuine Problem
Washington Post chief’s firing should terrify new regime at CBS News
‘Absolute hell’: Irishman with valid US work permit held by Ice since September
The Scourge of Online Sports Betting
Is It Just *White* Christian Nationalist Misogyny?
The blowback to Trump’s racist video reveals his weakness
All of the Hidden Symbols and Meanings You May Have Missed in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Set
Whistle Up 2: Rise of the Whistle Goblins
How Trump’s ICE Is Locking Up Longtime Texans with Paths to Legal Status
Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds
How the house of Rothschild became entangled with Epstein
Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s 1st year back in office had violent criminal records, document shows
The New York Times manufactures consent for ICE
Actually, the Washington Post Layoffs Were a Bigger Bloodbath Than You Thought
Musk vows to put data centers in space, run them on solar power (““An uncooled computer chip in space would overheat and melt much faster than one on Earth,” said Josep Jornet, a computer and electrical engineering professor at Northeastern University.”)
NASA hauled its Artemis 2 moon rocket off its seaside pad Wednesday for a slow trip back to a processing facility to track down and fix a helium pressurization problem that has delayed launch of four astronauts on a flight around the moon from this month to at least April 1.
A 6.6-million-pound Apollo-era crawler-transporter rolled up the ramp to pad 38B on Tuesday and was positioned directly under the 3.5-million-pound Space Launch System rocket and its 11.3-million-pound mobile launch platform.
After a check of the weather to make sure winds would be within safety limits, engineers used the crawler’s hydraulic system to lift the SLS rocket and its launch platform off support pedestals and then began inching back toward the Kennedy Space Center’s cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at 9:38 a.m. EST.
The 4-mile trip of the crawler and its towering load, tipping the scales at a combined 23.6 million pounds, was expected to take 10 to 12 hours to complete with several stops and starts expected along the way.
Once inside the VAB, engineers plan to deploy service platforms to gain access to the rocket’s upper stage, known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS.
Following a successful fueling test last week, engineers were unable to repressurize the upper stage’s helium system.
Pressurized helium is used in push propellants to the ICPS engine, to dry out and drain tanks and propellant lines and to “purge” other cavities with the inert gas to minimize the risk of fire. During two fueling tests of the Artemis II SLS rocket, the system worked normally. The problem was found after the second “wet dress” rehearsal countdown was over.
A similar problem cropped up with the Artemis 1 mission in 2022 when a helium valve failed to operate properly. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the valve could be the culprit this time around “though corrective actions were taken to minimize reoccurrence on Artemis 2.”
Other possible causes include trouble with a filter in an umbilical connected to the ICPS or problems with a quick-disconnect fitting.
The rollback to the VAB was ordered because engineers do not have access to the ICPS and its gantry connections at the launch pad. In the assembly building, multiple platforms can be deployed around the SLS to provide access to virtually the entire 322-foot-tall vehicle.
Along with repairing the helium pressurization system, engineers also plan to replace limited-life batteries in the SLS’s self-destruct system and to replace other batteries in the ICPS.
NASA rolled the Artemis 2 rocket to the launch pad in mid January, originally targeting launch of commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen around Feb. 6.
But during the initial wet dress countdown needed to clear the way for launch, hydrogen leaks were detected, requiring replacement of suspect seals in an umbilical where fuel lines are attached to the base of the rocket. The replacement seals worked normally during a second fueling test last week and no problems were found.
NASA then tentatively targeted launch for March 6 only to discover the helium pressurization problem, which has pushed the launch out of the March window to no earlier than April 1.
Only a handful of launch opportunities are available each month due to trajectory constraints based on the ever changing positions of the Earth and moon, lighting conditions and other mission-specific variables.
Prompt:
Can a parent limit a kid’s screen time simply by tweaking some of the settings on the smart phone? Are these services available?
GPT Thinking answer:
Yes. On both iPhone and Android, a parent can limit a kid’s screen time largely through built-in settings (no extra app required), and there are also optional third-party services.
There is much more detail at the link.
The post “They” don’t want you to know this appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. Will human enhancement win without thinking?
2. February issue of Works in Progress.
3. Proximity bias.
5. New paper on AI and task automation. And John Cochrane is wowed by Refine.
6. Largest survey dataset on human sexuality in the world.
7. The Anthropic-DOD situation.
8. “Measurability is the new fault line.” Important work, worth a ponder.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
How we think intersects with the language we think in. Consider the verb in classical Greek, a linguistic tool so complex that it surely allows shadings of thought that are the stuff of finely tuned philosophy. But are the thoughts in our texts genuinely capable of translation? Every now and then I get a glimpse of something integral that just can’t come across in another tongue.
Back in college (and this was a long time ago), I struggled with Greek from the age of Herodotus and then, in the following semester, moved into Homer, whose language was from maybe 300 years earlier. The Odyssey, our text for that semester, is loaded with repetitive phrases – called Homeric epithets – that are memory anchors for the performance of these epics, which were delivered before large crowds by rhapsōdoi (“song-stitchers”). I was never all that great in Homeric Greek, but I do remember getting so familiar with these ‘anchors’ that I was able now and then to read a sequence of five or six lines without a dictionary. But that was a rare event and I never got much better.
The experience convinced me that translation must always be no more than an approximation. A good translation conveys the thought, but the ineffable qualities of individual languages impose their own patina on the words. ‘Wine-dark sea’ is a lovely phrase in English, but when Homer spins it out in Greek, the phrase conjures different feelings within me, and I realize that the more we learn a language, the more we begin to think like its speakers.
My question then as now is how far can we take this? And moving into SETI realms, how much could we learn if we were actually to encounter alien speakers? Is there a possibility of so capturing their language that we could actually begin to think like them?
Let’s talk about Ted Chiang’s wonderful “Story of Your Life,” which was made (and somewhat changed) into the movie Arrival. Here linguist Louise Banks describes to her daughter her work on aliens called heptapods, seven-limbed creatures who are newly arrived on Earth, motives unknown, although they are communicating. Louise goes to work on Heptapod A and Heptapod B, the spoken and written language of the aliens respectively.
Image: A still from Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival captures the mystery of deciphering an alien language.
Heptapod B is graphical, and it begins to become apparent that its symbols (semagrams), are put together into montages that represent complete thoughts or events. The aliens appear to experience time in a non-linear way. How can humans relate to that? Strikingly, immersion in this language has powerful effects on those learning it, as Louise explains in the story:
Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present. After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks , each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn’t arrive in order or land continuously, they soon composed a period of five decades. It is the period during which I knew Heptapod B well enough to think in it, starting during my interviews with Flapper and Raspberry and ending with my death.
Flapper and Raspberry are the human team’s names for the two heptapods they’re dealing with, and we learn that Louise now has ‘memories’ that extend forward as well as back. Or as she goes on to explain:
Usually, Heptapod B affects just my memory; my consciousness crawls along as it did before, a glowing sliver crawling forward in time, the difference being that the ash of memory lies ahead as well as behind: there is no real combustion. But occasionally I have glimpses when Heptapod B truly reigns, and I experience past and future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half-century long ember burning outside time. I perceive – during those glimpses – that entire epoch as a simultaneity. It’s a period encompassing the rest of my life, and the entirety of yours.
The ‘yours’ refers to Louise’s daughter, and the heartbreak of the story is the vision forward. What would you do if you could indeed glimpse the future and see everything that awaited you, even the death of your only child? How would you behave where your consciousness is now, with that child merely a hoped for future being? How would such knowledge, soaked in the surety of the very language you thought in, affect the things you are going to do tomorrow?
A new paper out of Publications of the National Academy of Sciences has been the trigger for these reflections on Chiang’s tale, which I consider among the finest short stories in science fiction history. The paper, with Christian Bentz (Saarland University) as lead author, looks at 40,000 year old artifacts, all of them bearing sequences of geometric signs that had been engraved by early hunter-gatherers in the Aurignacian culture, the first Homo sapiens in central Europe. It was a time of migrations and shifting populations that would have included encounters with the existing Neanderthals.
These hunter-gatherers have left many traces, among which are these fragments that include several thousand geometric signs. What struck me was that these ancient artifacts demonstrate the same complexity as proto-cuneiform script from roughly 3000 BC. Working with Ewa Dutkiewicz (Museum of Prehistory and Early History of the National Museums, Berlin), Bentz notes objects like the ‘Adorant,’ an ivory plaque showing a creature that is half man, half lion. Found in the “Geißenklösterle,” a cave in the Achtal Valley in southern Germany, it’s marked by notches and rows of dots, in much the same way as a carved mammoth tusk from a cave in the Swabian Alb. The researchers see these markings as an early alternative to writing. Says Bentz:
“Our analyses allow us to demonstrate that the sequences of symbols have nothing in common with our modern writing system, which represents spoken languages and has a high information density. On the archaeological finds, however, we have symbols that repeat very frequently – cross, cross, cross, line, line, line – spoken languages do not exhibit these repetitive structures. But our results also show that the hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic era developed a symbol system with a statistically comparable information density to the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia – a full 40,000 years later. The sequences of symbols in proto-cuneiform are equally repetitive; the individual symbols are repeated with comparable frequency. The sequences are comparable in their complexity.”
Image: The so-called “Adorant” from the Geißenklösterle Cave is approximately 40,000 years old. It is a small ivory plaque with an anthropomorphic figure and several rows of notches and dots. The arrangement of these markings suggests a notational system, particularly the rows of dots on the back of the plaque. Credit: © Landesmuseum Württemberg / Hendrik Zwietasch, CC BY 4.0.
As the researchers comment, the result is surprising because you would think early cuneiform would be much closer in structure to modern systems of notation, but here we have, over a period of almost 40,000 years, evidence that such writing changed little since the Paleolithic. Says Bentz: “After that, around 5,000 years ago, a new system emerged relatively suddenly, representing spoken language—and there, of course, we find completely different statistical properties,”
The paper digs into the team’s computer analysis of the Paleolithic symbols, weighing the expression of information there against cuneiform and modern writing as well. It’s clear from the results that humans have been able to encode information into signs and symbols for many millennia, with writing as we know it being one growth from many earlier forms of encoding and sign systems.
We have no extraterrestrials to interrogate, but even with our own species, we have to ask what the experience of people who lived in the Stone Age was like. What were they trying to convey with their complex sequences of symbols? The authors assume they were as cognitively capable as modern humans and I see no reason to doubt that, but how we extract their thought from such symbols remains a mystery to be resolved by future work in archaeology and linguistics.
And I wonder whether Ted Chiang’s story doesn’t tell us something about the experience of going beyond translation into total immersion in an unknown text. How does that change us? Acquiring a new language, even a modern one, subtly changes thought, and I’m also reminded of my mother’s Alzheimer’s, which somehow left her able to acquire Spanish phrases even as she lost the ability to speak in English. I always read to her, and when I tried to teach her some basic Spanish, the experiment was startlingly successful. That attempt left me wondering what parts of the human brain may be affected by full immersion in the language of any future extraterrestrial who may become known to us.
Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that words only map a deeper reality, saying “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Beyond this map, how do we proceed? Perhaps one day SETI will succeed and we will explore that terrain.
The paper is Bentz et al., “Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs,” Publications of the National Academy of Sciences 123 (9) e2520385123. 23 February 2026. Full text. For more on this work, see Bentz and Dutkiewicz’ YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/@StoneAgeSigns. Thanks to my ever reliable friend Antonio Tavani for sending me information about this paper.
Many people think car accident settlements are based only on medical bills and vehicle damage. That is not true. Several hidden factors can increase or reduce the final payout.
In Richmond, car accidents are reviewed carefully by insurance companies, and even small details can make a big difference. Settlement amounts are shaped by more than just the crash itself. Insurance rules, state laws, and personal behavior after the accident all matter. Knowing these factors can help you avoid mistakes that lower your compensation.
Let’s look at the most surprising things that can affect a Richmond car accident settlement.
First and most important is fault. Virginia follows a strict contributory negligence rule. This means if you are even 1% at fault, you may not recover any compensation.
Because of this rule, insurance companies often try to prove you share some blame.
They may look at:
Even a small comment like “I didn’t see the other car” can be used against you. That is why fault is often the biggest factor in Richmond settlements.
Next, the timing of your medical care plays a major role. If you wait too long to see a doctor, insurers may argue your injuries are not serious.
They often question:
Prompt and consistent treatment shows that your injuries are real and connected to the accident. Without it, your settlement may drop significantly.
After medical care, insurance coverage becomes the next key factor. Not all drivers carry the same limits.
Your settlement may depend on:
Sometimes the biggest limit on a settlement is not the injury but the available insurance money.
This may surprise many people. Insurance companies often check social media accounts during claims.
They look for:
For example, if you claim serious back pain but post a photo hiking, that can hurt your case. Even harmless posts can be taken out of context.
It is wise to stay cautious online while your case is pending.
Another unexpected factor is your health history. Insurance companies review past medical records.
They may argue:
This does not mean you cannot recover compensation. However, it may reduce the amount unless your doctor clearly explains how the accident caused or worsened the injury.
You might not realize this, but vehicle damage can influence injury claims. Insurance adjusters often compare the damage to the claimed injuries.
They may question:
While serious injuries can happen in small crashes, insurers sometimes use repair costs to argue against large settlements.
Finally, what you say to an insurance adjuster matters. Recorded statements can affect your claim.
Adjusters listen for:
Simple phrases like “I’m feeling okay” can later be used to downplay your pain.
Being careful and consistent when speaking about the accident is very important.
Knowing these details can make a real difference when seeking a fair settlement in Richmond.
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The post Surprising Factors That Affect Richmond Car Accident Settlements appeared first on DCReport.org.
I recently took an hour or two to stitch together a new tote bag. I have a stash of materials for this because a sewing company in Brooklyn's 'Industry City' (an isolated business park) was going out of business. I regret not buying out much more of the inventory: at that point I was laser-focused on sewing projects for the outdoors, like my Porteur bag v2 and v1.
But there's a lot of fun in sewing with real cloth for less extreme circumstances.
For one thing, cotton is a different material than the laminated sailcloth fabric that I primarily use for bikepacking bags. Cotton comes apart at the edges, so I used a zigzag stitch to try and this edge from fraying. The proper solution to this is using an overlocker, a machine with four threads and an automatic cutter. But that's another big device in the apartment and my sewing materials corner is big enough as it is.
Strap adjustment is becoming a familiar challenge. On the porteur bags, I started off with bungee straps, which can be adjusted in a lot of different ways by leashing the bag to a rack differently or creating knots, but the elastic works against you when riding a bike fast and through the woods.
For this I just used a tri-glide buckle, which uses friction to stay in place. It's a part that I've encountered in so many manufactured things that I've owned but never really thought about.
You'll notice that there's an unnecessary amount of stitching on this bag: three stitches down each side. In theory these serve three different purposes:
But the other, perhaps more important reason is that I just wanted to spend longer making this thing. I think it's good to automate things you dislike doing and de-automate and stretch out the time you spend doing things you like.
The top of the bag where the material just folds over ever so slightly was using basting tape. I really like basting tape as a cheat code: it's a two-sided tape that you can leave in the bag. If you apply a strip of it at the edge of a fabric, you can fold over the fabric to adhere the other side of the tape and it serves as both a way to hold the fabric in place without using clips, and also an easy way to 'measure' that fold, because the fold ends up being the same height as the tape.
The reinforcement for the straps could be neater: I still envy the bagmakers that can produce those perfect reinforcement "X" marks on these parts. A lot of the technique here involves doing straight stitch, stopping the machine with the needle in the fabric, and rotating the fabric so that you can then continue in a new direction. My mom taught me that trick and it was one of many things that seem both clever and obvious in hindsight. It's fun to do.
Speaking of obvious in hindsight, I didn't want to make this tote bag in the traditional way with a strap on each side. Those bags always fall off my shoulder, especially in the winter wearing a big coat. So one big, adjustable strap was the way to go. But I realized that there's a relationship between the width of the strap attachment points and whether a bag can be carried on the shoulder or cross-body. Since this is so wide - the attachment points at the sides of the bag - if you carry this on the shoulder, the bag essentially opens because your shoulder is narrower than it. I could add a closure system here, like a snap or a zipper, but I like it simple as it is and don't plan on carrying it on a shoulder anyway.
I like it. It's yellow, feels pretty good to carry, plenty big enough for groceries. Sewing this kind of fabric feels pretty easy, though you do have to pay a little more attention to it than the space-age laminated polyesters. Hopefully it gets me closer to being able to sew more delicate fabrics, which will require actually learning how to manage tension on the machine.
Sewing: I recommend it.
It’s also reasonable for people who entered technology in the last couple of decades because it was good job, or because they enjoyed coding to look at this moment with a real feeling of loss. That feeling of loss though can be hard to understand emotionally for people my age who entered tech because we were addicted to feeling of agency it gave us. The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing, and nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful.
— Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Code has always been the easy part
Tags: perl, generative-ai, kellan-elliott-mccrea, agentic-engineering, ai, llms, deep-blue
Agentic Engineering Patterns >
Sometimes it's useful to have a coding agent give you a structured walkthrough of a codebase.
Maybe it's existing code you need to get up to speed on, maybe it's your own code that you've forgotten the details of, or maybe you vibe coded the whole thing and need to understand how it actually works.
Frontier models with the right agent harness can construct a detailed walkthrough to help you understand how code works.
I recently vibe coded a SwiftUI slide presentation app on my Mac using Claude Code and Opus 4.6.
I was speaking about the advances in frontier models between November 2025 and February 2026, and I like to include at least one gimmick in my talks (a STAR moment - Something They'll Always Remember). In this case I decided the gimmick would be revealing at the end of the presentation that the slide mechanism itself was an example of what vibe coding could do.
I released the code to GitHub and then realized I didn't know anything about how it actually worked - I had prompted the whole thing into existence (partial transcript here without paying any attention to the code it was writing.
So I fired up a new instance of Claude Code for web, pointed it at my repo and prompted:
Read the source and then plan a linear walkthrough of the code that explains how it all works in detail
Then run “uvx showboat –help” to learn showboat - use showboat to create a walkthrough.md file in the repo and build the walkthrough in there, using showboat note for commentary and showboat exec plus sed or grep or cat or whatever you need to include snippets of code you are talking about
Showboat is a tool I built to help coding agents write documents that demonstrate their work. You can see the showboat --help output here, which is designed to give the model everything it needs to know in order to use the tool.
The showboat note command adds Markdown to the document. The showboat exec command accepts a shell command, executes it and then adds both the command and its output to the document.
By telling it to use "sed or grep or cat or whatever you need to include snippets of code you are talking about" I ensured that Claude Code would not manually copy snippets of code into the document, since that could introduce a risk of hallucinations or mistakes.
This worked extremely well. Here's the document Claude Code created with Showboat, which talks through all six .swift files in detail and provides a clear and actionable explanation about how the code works.
I learned a great deal about how SwiftUI apps are structured and absorbed some solid details about the Swift language itself just from reading this document.
If you are concerned that LLMs might reduce the speed at which you learn new skills I strongly recommend adopting patterns like this one. Even a ~40 minute vibe coded toy project can become an opportunity to explore new ecosystems and pick up some interesting new tricks.
Tags: llms, vibe-coding, ai, generative-ai, ai-assisted-programming, coding-agents, swift, showboat, agentic-engineering
Anna Prouse has survived multiple assassination attempts. She’s been tapped by General David Petraeus to get work done in Iraq that U.S. troops couldn’t handle. She’s faced off against Iranian militants. Over a multi-decade career working in the Middle East, Prouse earned the rarest of titles – “Honorary Man” – because of her ability to thrive and hold positions of authority in a hyper-masculine society.
(If you can’t tell, we’re going a little off schedule with this week’s podcast. I heard about Prouse’s story from a friend and had no choice but to have her on the show.)
Born in Italy, Prouse is a former journalist who ended up in Iraq in 2003 and went to work trying to rebuild the country’s health infrastructure first for the Red Cross and then on behalf of the U.S. government. She lived in constant danger for many years and proved adept at moving between the U.S., Iraqi and Iranian powers because of her unique approach to problem-solving.
More recently, Prouse has worked in Silicon Valley, including a stint at Google where she found complaints from the workforce about the quality of the quinoa and sushi quite comical.
As if her career was not dramatic enough, Prouse also survived a brain tumor during what were meant to be her easier years.
We discuss all of this in the show, using Prouse’s best-selling memoir as a guide through her journey.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.
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While there’s much that could be said about Trump’s Nuremburg Rally last night, life is too short to waste time on a speech that won’t do much (like most State of the Union addresses). But there are two things that sorry spectacle* revealed about professional Republicans.
First, they hate their Democratic coworkers. When Trump pointed at Democrats and said Democrats are “crazy… We’re lucky we have a country, with people like this. Democrats are destroying our country, but we stopped it, just in the nick of time”, Republicans went wild with glee. They were behaving like it was the pregame for a pogrom. This is who they really are, and this is what they really think.
Second, it’s still not clear to me if Democrats comprehend the Republican hatred. The superficial acts of civility by their Republican coworkers are a mask over the hatred Republicans have for Democrats, including their supposed ‘colleagues.’ While a willingness to pretend otherwise is humiliating for professional Democrats, it’s dangerous for the rest of us.
The State of the Union sucks right now, with the only bright spot being that the piggish men’s hockey team had to listen to that asshole experience diarrhea of the mouth for two hours, while the women’s hockey team will get to party in Vegas with Flava Flav.
*If professional Democrats were capable of self-respect (too many are not), were they to take back the House, they should refuse to invite him because he was a piggish guest. Make him send a letter.
Source: Bloomberg
Well, that was exhausting — or would have been, if I had watched it. But I am not a masochist. I waited to read the transcript.
Trump’s State of the Union was historic in at least one respect: It was the longest SOTU ever. Was the plan to turn public opinion around by boring America into submission?
The address may also have been historic in another way, although it would be hard to quantify. Did any previous SOTU contain so many lies?
For the most part they weren’t Big Lies, lies that are persuasive because people can’t believe that anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”. They were, instead, small lies that added up to a false — and completely unpersuasive — portrayal of where we are.
On economics, Trump has catastrophic ratings even though the economy isn’t a catastrophe. Things aren’t great, but by most metrics they are about the same or a little bit worse than they were when he took office:
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Conference Board
The last measure, the labor market differential, is the spread between people saying that jobs are “plentiful” versus “hard to get,” which has deteriorated substantially.
Why are people so negative when the economy isn’t that bad by conventional measures? Affordability, especially with regard to housing and health care, is a real problem, not fully captured by standard measures. And it’s a problem Trump didn’t address at all — instead, he’s doubling down on his massively unpopular tariffs, which make the problem worse.
Also, there are two big disconnects. First is the gap between what Trump promised — he was going to bring grocery prices down, cut energy prices in half — and what he has actually delivered. Second is the gap between his wild boasts about how great things are and the reality of a K-shaped economy that is leaving many Americans behind.
One other lie that struck me, although it may not matter much to voters, was Trump’s insistence that the world admires what he’s doing: “America is respected again, perhaps like never before.”
Trump’s desire for external validation is, frankly, pathetic. And the truth is that we are despised like never before. You can see this in surveys:
Source: Pew
And foreign leaders have completely lost faith in America: We’ve become a country whose word can’t be trusted, a country that betrays its allies:
Source: Kiel Institute
It’s true that in some ways the world fears us in a way it didn’t before — in the same way that one steps carefully around a belligerent drunk in a bar. But we haven’t been this weak on the world stage since before World War II.
Anyway, that speech won’t pull Trump out of his downward spiral. Time to attack Iran?
The first half of the speech was very low energy. Trump didn’t seem to have his heart in it. He roused to talk about tariffs and then gruesome murders by undocumented immigrants. American Carnage, Part II, basically. My overall sense is still that it was generally shambling and scattered, which is to say more or less like the administration itself at the moment. The non-standing and non-clapping by Democrats really seemed to get to him. It was kind of remarkable how much it seemed to get to him. Like, they’re the opposition. They’re really against him. Did it surprise him? On tariffs, what did he say exactly? The vibe seemed to be that they’ll continue? Or in spirit? What? I see nothing here that changes a bit of the current political trajectory. The speech writers don’t seem to have had much idea of how that could happen. It’s still full speed ahead with the same program until November, perhaps slightly warmed over. The collision is inevitable.
10:21 p.m.: I’m amazed how much the non-clapping and non-standing seems to get to Trump. Like really get to him. It keeps coming out more and more.
In India, which already does the third most kidney transplants in the world (after the US and China), physicians and surgeons are making great progress on kidney exchange.
Some of this progress is with the help of the Alliance for Paired Kidney Exchange (APKD), supported by a grant from Stanford Impact Labs (SIL)
Here's a short video about that collaboration, narrated by Mike Rees, the founder and guiding light of the APKD.
The picture below was taken just after Mike Rees (on the left) and I observed a robotic kidney transplant surgery performed by Dr. Pranjal Modi (on the right), in Ahmedabad
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Earlier:
Update Feb. 25 10:15 a.m. EST (1515 UTC): SpaceX confirms touchdown of the booster.
SpaceX launched its 500th Starlink satellite of the year during a flight from Vandenberg Space Force Base Wednesday morning.
The Starlink 17-26 mission added 25 broadband satellites to the growing constellation that’s nearing 10,000 spacecraft in low Earth orbit. SpaceX confirmed a successful payload deployment an hour after liftoff. With this launch, SpaceX has flown 512 Starlink satellites to orbit in 2026.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East happened at 6:17:49 a.m. PST (9:17:49 a.m. EST / 1417:49 UTC). The Falcon 9 rocket flew on a southerly trajectory upon leaving the launch pad.
SpaceX launched the Starlink 17-26 mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number 1093. This was its 11th flight following two missions for the Space Development Agency and eight previous batches of Starlink satellites.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1093 landed on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ positioned in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 180th landing on this vessel and the 577th booster landing for SpaceX.
The meticulous preparation and fleeting ecstasy of elite high-diving captured in all its breathtaking shapes and sounds
- by Aeon Video
Jason Snell and Myke Hurley:
We discuss the results of the Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2025 in depth, with our added opinions on every category. Jason chooses to be a rascal, and Myke tries to give ten out of five.
Upgrade is always a good podcast, and their annual “Jason discusses this year’s Apple Report Card” episode is always one of my favorites. But when Jason got “rascally” regarding MacOS 26 Tahoe in this one, I wanted to reach out and strangle him.
Four years ago today, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin launched a “special military operation” involving dozens of missile strikes on Ukrainian cities before dawn. In 1994, in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, Russia, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, agreed not to use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up the Soviet stockpile of nuclear weapons left in Ukraine after the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991. At the time, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. Russia violated that agreement when it invaded in 2014 after Ukrainians threw out Russia-backed oligarch Viktor Yanukovych.
Putin had been eyeing Ukraine’s industrialized region since at least summer 2016, when Russian operatives told then-candidate Donald J. Trump that they would help Trump win the White House if he would look the other way when Russia installed Yanukovych to govern a new “autonomous” republic there. Two days before he invaded in 2022, Putin recognized “new republics” in Ukraine and then, in his announcement of his invasion, claimed he had to protect the people there from “persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime.” He called for “demilitarization” of Ukraine, demanding that soldiers lay down their weapons and saying that any bloodshed would be on their hands.
Putin called for the murder of Ukrainian leaders in the executive branch and parliament and intended to seize or kill those involved in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which sought to turn the country away from Russia and toward a democratic government within Europe, and which itself prompted a Russian invasion. Putin planned for his troops to seize Ukraine’s electric, heating, and financial systems so the people would have to do as he wished. The operation was intended to be lightning fast.
But rather than collapsing, Ukrainians held firm. The day after Russia invaded, Zelensky and his cabinet recorded a video in Kyiv. “We are all here,” he said. “Our soldiers are here. The citizens are here, and we are here. We will defend our independence…. Glory to Ukraine!” When the United States offered the next day to transport Zelensky outside the country, where he could lead a government in exile, he responded:
“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
During his first term, Trump had weakened the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that stood against Russian aggression, but once President Joe Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked quietly to strengthen NATO and ties with other allies and partners. They rallied the G7 (the world’s seven wealthiest liberal democracies), the European Union, and others to supply Ukraine with weapons and humanitarian assistance. Under Biden, the U.S. led the international response, providing about $50 billion in military aid and about $53 billion in humanitarian aid, as well as coordinating aid from allies and partners.
The U.S. and allies and partners also united behind extraordinary economic sanctions, including, on February 26, 2022, the exclusion of Russian banks from SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. SWIFT is a Belgian-based network that enables banks to transfer payments across international borders, and its ban on Russian banks isolated Russia’s economy.
Over the next three years, Ukraine’s stand against Russia boosted the morale of those defending their own countries against invaders and, in turn, captured the imagination of people around the world hoping to stem the rise of authoritarianism. Ukraine’s society transformed to bring the power of civilians as well as soldiers behind the war effort. The Ukraine army grew to be the largest in Europe, with a million people, even as Russian attacks killed civilians as well as soldiers and destroyed hospitals, infrastructure, and the energy sector. Ukraine became the global leader in drone technology, while Russia’s economy faltered and its front lines dug in.
Last year, foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum wrote: “The only way Putin wins now is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war…by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine…and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either.”
Indeed, while Americans supported Ukraine, Trump never wavered from his support for Russia. Although a bipartisan majority in Congress would have passed more funding for Ukraine, after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, Trump loyalist House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refused to bring Ukraine funding to the floor for a vote.
Then, in December 2023, MAGA Republican lawmakers said they would not pass a new measure to fund Ukraine’s assistance without measures strengthening the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Senators wrote the measure they demanded, only to have Trump urge his congressional supporters to kill it in order to keep the issue of immigration alive for the 2024 election.
By the time Congress finally passed a measure appropriating $60 billion in aid for Ukraine in April 2024, the lack of funding for six months had helped shift the war in Russia’s favor.
Once Trump was back in the White House, the U.S. position changed dramatically. As a team from the Wall Street Journal later explained, even before Trump took the oath of office, Putin was reaching out to Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real-estate developer with no experience in diplomacy, to negotiate over Ukraine. In February, Witkoff went to Moscow to meet with Putin without a translator and without being briefed by the CIA.
On February 12, 2025, the day after Witkoff returned, Trump talked to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out from the “highly productive” call parroting Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine. Two days later, Vice President J.D. Vance used the Munich Security Conference to attack Europe and its democratic values while declining to acknowledge the threat of Russian aggression, indicating that the U.S. would no longer stand with Ukraine. Days later, a readout of a call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov suggested that Russia was in dire need of relief from economic sanctions.
Then, on February 28, 2025, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance ambushed Ukraine president Zelensky in an Oval Office meeting that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia. The American leaders spouted Russian propaganda, trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire on Russia’s terms and signing over rights to Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals, while accusing him of being “ungrateful” for U.S. support. Zelensky didn’t take the bait, and Trump ended up furiously defending Putin before walking out. Shortly after, Zelensky and his team were asked to leave the White House.
In August, Trump met Putin, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, on U.S. soil, greeting him in Alaska on a literal red carpet and clapping as Putin walked to greet him, before taking him alone into the presidential limousine to drive to the meeting site. Trump has placed a photograph from that meeting on display in the White House.
Putin’s attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine have increased dramatically since Trump took office, even as Witkoff has been negotiating officially for an end to the war and quietly over deals on oil, gas, and perhaps minerals. In April the U.S. appeared to back a plan that essentially gave Russia all it wanted, including the Ukrainian land it had invaded. Since then, the administration’s ongoing “negotiations” with Russia resulted in demands of major concessions from Ukraine but none from Russia. Those talks are ongoing, now with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner involved, although as recently as last week, Russia had not wavered from its demands for Ukraine’s territory.
Today, landmark buildings across the world that were lit up in blue and yellow to show support for Ukraine included the Council of the European Union and European Commission buildings in Brussels, Belgium; Canada’s Parliament and the Office of the Prime Minister in Ottawa; the Freedom Monument in Riga, Latvia; The Colosseum in Rome, Italy; the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France; the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany; the Tower of Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, Denmark; Sebitseom in Seoul, South Korea; and the Empire State Building in New York City, New York. European leaders vowed to “stand firm” with Ukraine, and the United Nations General Assembly voiced support for Ukraine, passing a resolution saying it was committed to “”the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.” The U.S. abstained.
The sudden switch of the U.S. away from its traditional allies in favor of Russia has dramatically reordered the globe. With the U.S. stepping back, Russia has provoked European countries by sabotaging their infrastructure and sending drones over their airspace. Applebaum recently told Il Foglio that Trump’s stance has shocked Europeans into a determination to shed its former reliance on the U.S. and to be self-sufficient in terms of defense, to develop its own technology companies, to build a stronger industrial sector, and to integrate financial markets more fully. As U.S. funding for Ukraine has all but disappeared, Europe is stepping up, although as Nick Paton Walsh of CNN noted today, not as fast as it needs to in order to stop Russia’s aggression.
At the end of its fourth year of war, Russia is weakened enough that the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assesses today that “Putin’s mismanagement of the war and Ukraine’s resistance now confront Putin with challenging, uncomfortable, and unpopular decisions about the war’s force generation requirements and the Russian economy.” The need for more money and more men to fight will be unpopular in the midst of an unpopular war in which Russia has recently been losing territory, and the ISW assesses that Kremlin officials are already trying to mitigate domestic backlash.
In her interview with Applebaum in Il Foglio, Paola Peduzzi noted that “[t]he Ukrainians have suffered the most from America’s distortion, because we measure the transatlantic divorce in money and they in black bags: since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Ukrainian civilian deaths have increased by 31 percent compared to 2024, and by 70 percent compared to 2023.”
Applebaum told Peduzzi that Russia is not winning the war, but said the war “won’t end until the Russians agree to stop fighting, and they haven’t yet, nor have they ever said they want to. So the war can’t end: the Ukrainians are defending their land and can’t stop, even if they wanted to.”
“Ukrainians have changed the way they wage war; they no longer ask when it will end, but only how,” Peduzzi wrote. She concluded: “Ukrainians are saving us all, and unlike us, they don’t even ask us to say thank you.”
—
Notes:
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-documents-report-volume5.pdf (p. vi, 99).
https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl (pp. 139–140).
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/24/world/russia-ukraine-putin
https://www.axios.com/2022/02/24/putin-delares-war-on-ukraine
https://www.businessinsider.com/putins-suit-war-declaration-ukraine-possibly-pre-taped-2022-2
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/europe/ukraine-zelensky-evacuation-intl/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/06/republicans-ukraine-funding
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/28/tass-oval-office-trump-zelenskyy-00206739
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/putins-three-years-of-humiliation/681810/
https://www.wsj.com/world/putin-witkoff-russia-envoy-04da229d
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/22/trump-russia-ukraine-peace-plan-crimea-donbas
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgk2mlv2k1ro
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/trump-putin-white-house-photo
https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20220227003300315
https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1997596/
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5458252-alaska-summit-trump-putin-disaster/
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5455928-trump-putin-alaska-summit/
Bluesky:
Transformative artificial intelligence (TAI) – machines capable of performing virtually all economically valuable work – may gradually erode the two main tax bases that underpin modern tax systems: labor income and human consumption. We examine optimal taxation across two stages of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven transformation. First, if AI displaces human labor, we find that consumption taxation may serve as a primary revenue instrument, with differential commodity taxation gaining renewed relevance as labor distortions lose their constraining role. In the second stage, as autonomous artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems both produce most economic value and absorb a growing share of resources, taxing human consumption may become an inadequate means of raising revenue. We show that the taxation of autonomous AGI systems can be framed as an optimal harvesting problem and find that the resulting tax rate on AGI depends on the rate at which humans discount the future. Our analysis provides a theoretically grounded approach to balancing efficiency and equity in the Age of AI. We also apply our insights to evaluate specific proposals such as taxes on robots, compute, and tokens, as well as sovereign wealth funds and windfall clauses.
That is from Anton Korinek and Lee Lockwood.
The post Public Finance in the Age of AI: A Primer appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Using data from hundreds of closely contested partisan elections from 2010 to 2019 and a vote share regression discontinuity design, we find that narrow election of a Republican prosecutor reduces all-cause mortality rates among young men ages 20 to 29 by 6.6%. This decline is driven predominantly by reductions in firearm-related deaths, including a large reduction in firearm homicide among Black men and a smaller reduction in firearm suicides and accidents primarily among White men. Mechanism analyses indicate that increased prison-based incapactation explains about one third of the effect among Black men and none of the effect among White men. Instead, the primary channel appears to be substantial increases in criminal conviction rates across racial groups and crime types, which then reduce firearm access through legal restrictions on gun ownership for the convicted.
That is from a new paper by Panka Bencsik and Tyler Giles. Via M.
The post “Tough on crime” is good for young men appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
On December 6, 2025, a powerful magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the remote St. Elias Mountains, a highly glaciated range that spans the Yukon-Alaska border. The quake shook the landscape beneath Hubbard Glacier, sending ice and rock careening down the range’s steep slopes. The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite offered some of the earliest views of the changed landscape.
Geophysicist Eric Fielding and colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) typically use satellite data to map the displacement of the ground after major earthquakes strike land. But in this region, such maps—known as interferograms—are not possible because the ground lies buried beneath a layer of glacial ice that’s at least 700 meters (2,000 feet) thick. “The cryosphere is covering up the geosphere,” Fielding said.
Instead, clues to the earthquake’s destructive power lay strewn atop the ice surface. The shaking on December 6 unleashed landslides and avalanches that swept debris onto lower, flatter stretches of the glacier. The debris is visible in radar imagery acquired by NISAR on December 8, two days after the quake (right). For comparison, the NISAR image on the left shows the same area on November 26, a week and a half before the quake.
Where the slides have deposited rock, snow, and other debris, surfaces have become rougher, which scatters more energy back toward the sensor and makes those areas appear bright in the December 8 image (the roughest areas are shown in dark green). Areas with smooth surfaces reflect little of the radar’s energy directly back to the satellite sensor, so these parts of the images appear dark (shown in purple). Note that there are some exceptionally rough, green surfaces beyond the new slide areas that remain relatively unchanged between the two images.
The largest slide in the scene appears to be cascading down the flank of Mount King George, but it’s far from the only one. Numerous others scar the surrounding terrain, including areas to the west along the slopes of Mount Logan, Canada’s tallest mountain.
Alex Gardner, a glaciologist at JPL and member of the NISAR science team, reviewed the images with Fielding. “The sheer number and magnitude of avalanches and landslides is astounding,” Gardner said. “I’ve personally never seen anything like this before.”
A separate preliminary analysis by the U.S. Geological Survey identified more than 700 potential landslides and snow avalanches, with an especially high concentration northwest of the epicenter along the fault rupture. Follow-up flights by the Yukon Geological Survey on December 12 provided a closer look, showing some slopes remained actively unstable, with dust still hanging in the air, and widespread damage to glacial ice.
Much of the debris that settled atop the region’s glacial ice is likely being transported toward the ocean by the glaciers’ ongoing seaward flow, which acts as a natural “conveyor belt.” For example, a tributary glacier of Hubbard north of Mount King George, which had previously moved at a sluggish pace, entered a surging phase in November before the earthquake. It is now moving downslope at what Gardner described as “breakneck speeds” of up to 6,000 meters per year (about 50 feet per day).
Although the region is uninhabited, the slides and damaged ice could pose new hazards for mountaineers and other expeditions, USGS noted in a December 18 update. The town of Yakutat, Alaska, about 90 kilometers (56 miles) south of the epicenter, is a common staging point for people exploring the area.
NISAR observations are expected to provide imagery to support future natural disaster response efforts.
Images by Gustavo Shiroma (JPL) of the NISAR Algorithm Development Team using data from the NISAR GSLC product, and prepared for NASA Earth Observatory by Lauren Dauphin. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
A group of satellites with interferometric synthetic aperture radar makes it possible for geologists to detect how much and where…
A landmass that was once encased in the ice of the Alsek Glacier is now surrounded by water.
From Alaska’s Saint Elias Mountains to Pakistan’s Karakoram, glaciers speed up and slow down with the seasons.
The post Landslide and Avalanche Debris Litter Hubbard Glacier appeared first on NASA Science.
Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is caught in
