Marginal Revolution

Will U.S. cities face a knock-on fiscal crisis from the feds?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Federal money flows to cities in three flavors: direct transfers, indirect transfers, and what we call fiscal dark matter. Direct transfers are exactly what they sound like — money sent directly from the federal government to various localities. These include funds disbursed through programs like the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), which supports things like public infrastructure and neighborhood services.3 In 2022, direct transfers like the CDBG totaled $146.3 billion.4 That’s significant, but actually the smallest of the three categories.

Less visible are the indirect transfers. These monies are initially awarded to state governments, which then allocate funds to municipal-level programs and services in accordance with state prerogatives. The cleanest example is probably K-12 education, which receives federal Title I dollars to pay for teachers and programs, but federal highway dollars work essentially the same way. All told, in 2022, the federal government handed down $1.1 trillion to state governments. That amounted to 36% of overall state revenue for that year and, depending on the individual state, ranged from roughly 22% to 50% of state revenue. How much of that ultimately flowed down to cities is hard to say, which is itself a problem: it’s difficult to even establish how exposed local governments are to a pullback in federal support of state budgets.

The third category – our fiscal dark matter – is all the federal money spent into local communities that never shows up in a local budget. This includes housing subsidies like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and Section 8. It also includes food support programs like SNAP and even some direct funding for local food banks.

Rightfully or not, when the flow of federal money in this category starts to dry up, the resulting problems will fall squarely on the mayor’s desk. After all, the median voter is never going to see increasing numbers of homeless encampments and think to blame the head of HUD.

Here is the full piece by Jeff Fong.

The post Will U.S. cities face a knock-on fiscal crisis from the feds? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

      

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Marginal Revolution

Who Pays for Unions?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

If unions raise worker wages, who pays? We provide a comprehensive assessment of firm responses to increased unionization, using changes in the tax deductibility of union dues in Norway as a quasi-exogenous source of variation in firm-level union density. In the average private sector firm, higher union density raises labor costs and leads firms to contract employment and production, lowering profits without increasing the labor share. The incidence is shared: consumers bear part of the cost through higher prices, shareholders through lower profits, and the remainder is offset by productivity improvements. The total wage bill falls, with losses concentrated among less-attached “outsider” workers. Firm responses vary systematically by the degree of market competition. In manufacturing, where firms operate in less competitive product and labor markets, the response is reversed: the average firm expands employment and production, reduces labor markdowns, and does not experience profit declines. Instead, higher labor costs are largely passed on to consumers through higher prices, with the remainder offset by productivity gains. Workers benefit as both wages and employment rise. These patterns suggest that unions can offset employer monopsony power and that firm responses–and therefore who ultimately bears the cost-depend importantly on market structure. Overall, unionization in this setting primarily redistributes from consumers rather than shareholders and has effects that differ sharply across firms, including a reallocation toward larger and more productive firms. We rationalize these patterns using a partial-equilibrium model of union bargaining with product- and labor-market power.

That is forthcoming in the QJE by , , and

The post Who Pays for Unions? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Eric Berger - Ars Technica

This Atlantic hurricane season is looking like a dud, but there will be a price to pay

Eric Berger
Updated

The city of Houston, where I live, has been ground zero for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season. So far this year there have been two named storms, Arthur and Bertha, that have formed. And the centers of both have passed near or directly over Houston.

Two "strikes" in a year might seem notable, but like the middling hurricane season to date, Arthur and Bertha were both middle-of-the road tropical storms in terms of intensity.

As a resident of a coastal region prone to hurricanes, one never wants to tempt fate. And in truth, since it is only early August, the bulk of seasonal activity definitely lies ahead of us. But all indications are we can look forward to a quiet season.

Read full article

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NASA Science

How the Tide Turns at the Mouth of the Elbe

Lindsey Doermann
Updated
 
August 15, 2025
May 11, 2025
The Elbe river in Germany into the North Sea on the left side of the image. Low tide exposes wide, light-colored tidal flats interrupted by branching channels of dark water.
The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the German coast.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
The Elbe river in Germany into the North Sea on the left side of the image. At high tide, a handful of small islands and crescent-shaped sandbars remain exposed above the water level near shore. Ships are visible as small, bright specks on the water.
The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the German coast.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
The Elbe river in Germany into the North Sea on the left side of the image. Low tide exposes wide, light-colored tidal flats interrupted by branching channels of dark water.
The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the German coast.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
The Elbe river in Germany into the North Sea on the left side of the image. At high tide, a handful of small islands and crescent-shaped sandbars remain exposed above the water level near shore. Ships are visible as small, bright specks on the water.
The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the German coast.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
August 15, 2025
May 11, 2025

One of the major rivers of Europe, the Elbe flows more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) across the continent before reaching the North Sea. At its mouth, the low-lying landscape is continually reshaped by the rise and fall of the tides. These dynamic tidal flats are a boon to biodiversity while sometimes posing challenges for those navigating its waters and for communities living along its shores.

The images above illustrate how the area changes with the tides. They were acquired on August 15, 2025, at low tide (left) and on May 11, 2025, at high tide (right) with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9. The mean tidal range at Cuxhaven is 2.9 meters (9.5 feet), which is considered intermediate, or mesotidal. The tides are also asymmetrical, meaning the flood period is shorter than the ebb. This causes the incoming current to run faster and typically carry more sediment up the 140-kilometer-long (87-mile-long) estuary than it does out.

The low tide exposes complex channels, sandbars, and mudflats around the river mouth. This wide zone of coastal wetlands is part of the Wadden Sea, which stretches from the Netherlands to southern Denmark and represents the largest continuous system of intertidal sand and mud flats in the world. Its habitats serve as important staging, molting, and wintering grounds for migratory birds, with more than 10 million passing through every year.

A channel cuts through these natural features near the river’s mouth, allowing ships to reach Cuxhaven and Hamburg—the third-largest container port in the European Union—farther upriver. Dredging is required to remove accumulated sediment in the channel, and some ships can only pass through when the tide is high enough. The Elbe’s mouth also provides access to the Kiel Canal, which connects the North Sea and Baltic Sea and is the world’s busiest human-made waterway navigable by seagoing ships. 

A broad tidal mudflat fills the foreground of this photo. A sliver of deeper water is visible on the horizon, where a cargo ship loaded with shipping containers and cranes appears to be traveling to the left.
A cargo ship passes by mudflats at the mouth of the Elbe.
Thomas Gölles, April 5, 2009.

At high tide (right), only a handful of small islands and sandbars remain above the waves. One of these islands, Neuwerk, is a tranquil tourist destination that is home to a few dozen inhabitants and the oldest building on the German coast. A brick tower, completed in 1310 and later converted to a lighthouse, was built to protect shipping on the Elbe from pirates and wreckers.

These images show normal tidal variation in the area, but storms can push water levels much higher than a typical high tide. The highest water level measured at Cuxhaven—5.1 meters (16.7 feet) above Europe’s official sea level reference—occurred on January 3, 1976, when a fast-moving storm swept across the North Sea and slammed the coast with high winds. Researchers who reconstructed historical storms noted that the storm surge was worsened by its timing relative to the tide. The strongest winds arrived around low tide, preventing water that had propagated upstream at high tide from flowing back out to sea and causing further inundation inland.

Scientists study past extreme events like this to better understand how future storms might affect low-lying coastal areas and how flood protection could be improved. Flooding risks can be exacerbated by rising sea levels, which at Cuxhaven have trended upward by 2.12 millimeters per year, or 0.70 feet per century.

Two new Earth-observing satellites are making it possible to measure water levels in coastal areas in greater detail. The dual-band radar on the NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite is expected to track long-term phenomena such as sea level changes, as well as to map flood inundation and other ephemeral events. In addition, early data from NASA’s SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite has demonstrated the potential to accurately measure water levels around complex coastlines and to improve tidal models.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo by Thomas Gölles. Story by Lindsey Doermann. 

Downloads

The Elbe river in Germany into the North Sea on the left side of the image. Low tide exposes wide, light-colored tidal flats interrupted by branching channels of dark water.

August 15, 2025

JPEG (6.33 MB)

The Elbe river in Germany into the North Sea on the left side of the image. At high tide, a handful of small islands and crescent-shaped sandbars remain exposed above the water level near shore. Ships are visible as small, bright specks on the water.

May 11, 2025

JPEG (6.02 MB)

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Daring Fireball

David Pogue: ‘Alexa+ Is a Buggy Embarrassment’

John Gruber
Updated

David Pogue, at Pogue’s Posts:

Amazon’s “50+ things to try” list mentions that Alexa can “find a home maintenance professional.” So I tried it.

ME: I need a septic-system repair.

ALEXA: That service isn’t currently supported. I can help with plumbing services instead.

ME: Okay, fine. Plumbing services.

ALEXA: What’s your plumbing issue?

ME: I have untreated sewage pouring out of my kitchen faucet.

ALEXA: Is this urgent?

Uh … what do YOU think, dumbass? But OK:

ME: Yes.

ALEXA: When do you need it by?

Displays four responses: ASAP, Within a week, Further out, and I haven’t decided yet.

ME: ASAP.

ALEXA: I’m Alexa, not Shaq.

This could only have been funnier if Alexa had responded “The Aristocrats!”

(Which great film, is, in fact, available to stream on Amazon Prime.)

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Apple News Ad of the Week

John Gruber
Updated

I look forward to this level of class and brand prestige coming to Apple Maps.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Paul Thurrott Reviews the HP OmniBook Ultra 14, With Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2

John Gruber
Updated

Paul Thurrott:

We didn’t need more evidence that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 compute platform is superior to anything in the x86 world. But here it is, regardless: The HP OmniBook Ultra 14 is yet another nearly-perfect laptop running Windows 11 on Arm, an ideal combination of hardware and software that delivers a superior overall experience.

Thurrott has high praise for the performance, battery life, and silence (it has a fan, but Thurrott says he never heard it engage). Intel and the x86 platform seem well and fully cooked. They completely lost Apple 6 years ago and the Windows world is finally catching up. Maybe they can hold onto the gaming market for a while but for a work laptop it sounds like you’re crazy if you don’t go with Qualcomm’s ARM chips.

Thurrott likes the design too:

In Snapdragon X2 guise, the laptop comes in a unique blue-gray Stone Blue color that’s nicely complemented by the darker gray of the keyboard keycaps. But if you get an Intel model, oh the horror, you can choose between Eclipse Gray and Silk Sand colors instead. Either way, the branding is minimal and classy and premium all the way.

He helpfully includes this photo of the “Snapdragon X2 Elite / Copilot+PC” sticker on the palm rest to prove how minimal and classy and premium all the way” it is.

Coming from the Mac world, I think the irregular shape of the OmniBook case is ungainly and bizarre. And the default display is criminally crude — low-res and only 300 nits. But if you spend to upgrade the display it seems like a nice machine, and 2.8 pounds is lighter than a MacBook Air (3.0 pounds).

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Hacker News Thread on OpenAI’s ‘Apple Is Getting This Wrong’ Post

John Gruber
Updated

There’s an old adage that you should never bring a knife to a gunfight. My take on OpenAI’s response yesterday was expressing incredulity that OpenAI was bringing, like, a box of chocolates to the gunfight. Apple is trying to kill io, and OpenAI’s public response is basically “We love you guys, can’t we just be friends?”

This thread on Hacker News though points out that their response doesn’t even explain what they’re responding to. There’s no context. They just assume the reader is up to date on the lawsuit Apple filed. If you didn’t know anything about the suit and started with this post, it would make no sense at all. I’ve heard from friends there that the OpenAI culture is “too online”, and this might be the best proof of it.

 ★ 
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

About Last Night: Michigan Edition

Josh Marshall
Updated

Though the AP called Abdul El-Sayed the winner of the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan as I went to publish this post, this race turned out to be much, much closer than people expected or what polls predicted. The margin ended up being just under 1% or about 15,000 votes. We become so entranced by polls that we often fall into thinking that a candidate like El-Sayed bobbled the race at the end or Stevens mounted a comeback. There may have been some late movement. But it’s important to remember that our narrative of the race was built around polls that were simply wrong. Very wrong. It was probably always much closer than people realized. Indeed, the margin is close enough that those polls might actually have shifted the outcome of the race by depressing Stevens’ turnout or juicing El-Sayed’s. It’s a good reminder that whether you’re a volunteer, a voter, an activist, or a campaign worker you play these things out till the very end. Polls are usually right. And they’re a good guide. Except when they’re not. And this was a big “except.”

Indeed, it was a big enough “except” that it requires more than a standard uncertainty interval or random chance explanation. The late polls had El-Sayed at least 10 points up, with many in the mid-teens. What’s equally notable is how relatively consistent they were. That could be an example of what pollsters call “herding,” where pollsters start getting influenced by each other and dismissing or adjusting results that don’t fit the trend or conventional wisdom. But it sounds like something more fundamental. I heard one knowledgable person last night say that it looked like pollsters had been modeling too young of an electorate. We may learn more about that once analysts get a closer look at the regional and demographic breakdown of the results.

As noted above, the near-upset storyline is really just a figment of inaccurate polls and the narrative that was built on them. Probably nothing actually “happened” in the race itself. That said, I think El-Sayed’s narrow win is a better result than a 15 point-plus blowout in terms of what’s really important for Democrats, which is uniting around the primary winner. A very narrow win will drain some of the triumphalism from the El-Sayed faction; a narrow defeat will allow the Stevens’ faction to hold their heads a little higher, having run a campaign they can feel good about even if they lost. Perhaps I’m misreading how that will affect the next three months. But that’s my read. That said, I spoke to a prominent Stevens supporter this morning who thinks it’s the precise opposite – mostly on the argument that undercuts key arguments for El-Sayed’s strengths as a general election candidate. That person knows the state and the people involved better than I do. So take it for what you will.

There’s lots of commentary about El-Sayed’s massive support in the state’s Arab American community and deep challenges in the state’s Jewish community. But those are both very small, albeit visible, slices of the population. His real challenge will be consolidating support among the state’s Black voters which are of course absolutely critical for any Democratic campaign in Michigan. They appear to have gone decisively for Stevens, though I’m not aware of any really concrete and granular data from last night that is yet available.

El-Sayed has his work cut out for him, as Stevens would have had if she’d won. A lot of that will mean outreach to key factions and demographic groups in the state. But probably just as important is going on the attack against Republican Mike Rogers, who has real vulnerabilities. Nothing activates Democratic partisan muscle memory like attacking and successfully attacking Republicans, really landing punches.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Tight Race in Michigan

John Light
Updated

Tighter than we expected based on the polls, at least!

NBC has called the Democratic Senate primary for Abdul El-Sayed. TPM tends to go with the AP for calls, or wait for multiple networks to call it.

Seemingly based on the NBC call, Mallory McMorrow, a third Democratic primary candidate who sought to occupy the middle ground between El-Sayed and Haley Stevens before dropping out, congratulated and endorsed El-Sayed early this morning.

Update, 6:41 a.m.: With the vast majority of the votes now in, El-Sayed and Stevens are separated by less than 20,000. El-Sayed still leads by roughly a percentage point.

Daring Fireball

Shawn Smucker: ‘Please Use AI’

John Gruber
Updated

I find most poetry obtuse, dancing around a point rather than making one sharply. Not this one.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Uh, I’m Pretty Sure People Would Know

John Gruber
Updated

New York Times Magazine story editor Willy Staley tried Sean O’Mara’s “Living Diet” (nothing but steak and fermented foods like sauerkraut) for a week:

To O’Mara, the diet is not just a temporary means of losing weight but a way to eat for good. He has been doing it for 10 years, and credits it with turning his life around. At one point in our conversation he pulled up the Bristol Stool Chart, which ranges from Type 1 (“separate, hard pellets”) to Type 7 (“watery, no solid pieces”). O’Mara is consistently delivering Type 4 (“smooth, soft, like a snake”), with pointed ends, indicative of healthy rectal function, he told me. “When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.” He described a proper bowel movement to me this way: odorless, wipe-free, over in three to seven seconds and “nearly orgasmic.”

“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”

My first thought upon reading this was, What a load of shit. Then I realized, well, yes, literally.

Then I thought about it some more and realized this is the Platonic ideal of a bullshit claim. If I told you that, say, I can eat an entire meal while doing a headstand, you could say, “I don’t believe you, show me.” But who in their right mind would challenge this quack O’Mara on this one? Certainly not the hosts of the dinner party, that’s for sure.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Sam Altman, Definitely Not a Ghoul

John Gruber
Updated

Sam Altman, on Twitter/X:

cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night:

connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests.

every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.

Katie Notopoulos, at Business Insider:

Talking to your kids about their upcoming soccer game or birthday is one of the enjoyable, pleasurable experiences of parenting. Those nice moments of positive connection, chatting in the car, are something I suspect most parents aren’t looking to give up or outsource.

This is one of the overall challenges with where we are with AI right now: AI might be capable of doing some of the tasks we find pleasurable and enjoyable (like creative writing or drawing), but what many people want is for it to take on the ones we don’t want to do.

I’m starting to think maybe Sam Altman isn’t hooked up right.

 ★ 
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

There’s a Bizarre Situation Unfolding in a Michigan Congressional Race

John Light
Updated

Three Republicans were running in Michigan’s 8th Congressional District primary. Trump in June endorsed Amir Hassan, a Navy Veteran, former Guantánamo guard, and Department of Homeland Security official. Hassan was up against Thomas Smith, a retired engineer, and Al Lemmo, an anti-abortion activist. In July, Smith suspended his campaign and endorsed Lemmo, who had decried Hassan as a “possible Trojan Horse candidate and lifelong Democrat.”

On Tuesday, Smith, who was no longer running, won a pretty clean victory over his Trump-endorsed former opponent.

The Associated Press has not called the race, but with most votes in, Smith appears to have more than 50%. Hassan has 33% and Lemmo, endorsed by Smith, has only 16%.

Smith, the winner, seems like a special type of guy.

As far as I can tell, those “Trojan Horse” comments by Lemmo are based on not much. Hassan, it may be worth mentioning here, is Black and may have been the first Muslim Republican in Congress, though this situation too is complicated: Hassan launched his campaign describing himself as a “proud Muslim,” but later said that he was “100% Christian,” stating that Jesus Christ “saved me even when I chose to go a different path.”

The seat is held by Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet (D). Even before the Republican primary trainwreck, she was slightly favored to win in November.

Updated with additional information about Hassan’s background.

California
The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Wednesday 5 August 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

All the morning at the office, whither Deane of Woolwich came to me and discoursed of the body of ships, which I am now going about to understand, and then I took him to the coffee-house, where he was very earnest against Mr. Grant’s report in favour of Sir W. Petty’s vessel, even to some passion on both sides almost.

So to the Exchange, and thence home to dinner with my brother, and in the afternoon to Westminster hall, and there found Mrs. Lane, and by and by by agreement we met at the Parliament stairs (in my way down to the boat who should meet us but my lady Jemimah, who saw me lead her but said nothing to me of her, though I ought to speak to her to see whether she would take notice of it or no) and off to Stangate and so to the King’s Head at Lambeth marsh, and had variety of meats and drinks, but I did so towse her and handled her, but could get nothing more from her though I was very near it; but as wanton and bucksome as she is she dares not adventure upon the business, in which I very much commend and like her.

Staid pretty late, and so over with her by water, and being in a great sweat with my towsing of her durst not go home by water, but took coach, and at home my brother and I fell upon Des Cartes, and I perceive he has studied him well, and I cannot find but he has minded his book, and do love it.

This evening came a letter about business from Mr. Coventry, and with it a silver pen he promised me to carry inke in, which is very necessary. So to prayers and to bed.

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Antiques Roadshow

The family lore was that we've had it ever since it was ejected from a star-forming gas cloud, but it seems more likely that my great-grandparents probably just bought it while on vacation in the galactic thin disk.
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Rands in Repose

The Title Cards in Blade Runner Are Fucking Amazing

rands
Updated

Appreciating typography is a study in paradox. The primary goal of well-designed typography is to help you read the words, not appreciate how the words are composed of letters and how each of those individual letters has been designed to convey a small bit of meaning. If you see the typography rather than read the words, the typography has failed in its job, right? You should be reading, not staring at the shape of that uppercase A.

The goal with typography is functional, right? To convey the meaning, not the feeling?

Wrong.

Feeling is always conveyed. The question is, depending on the project, “How much feeling is required?”

Fixed Width

I’ve created a full-time job for myself talking to Claude Code. This is Claude running from the command line of macOS, which gives me unhindered access to my data. I’m using Ghostty. I’m staring at a fixed-width typeface all day. Apple provides a functional and gorgeous fixed-width variant of their San Francisco typeface called SF Mono, which I’ve been using for months, but, well, I have a short attention span — typographically speaking.

In the past month, I’ve evaluated many additional fixed-width typefaces favored by the nerdcore. Here are the six that have made my cut:1

The same line of code — if (O0 == 0O) { quit("Il1"); } — set six times, each in a different fixed-width typeface: SF Mono, Inconsolata, IBM Plex Mono, MonoLisa, Berkeley Mono, and PT Mono

The question is: how do they make you feel? For a typeface designed for coding, you first want fixed-width. Every letter and symbol is the same width, giving you a predictable and readable grid. But how wide? And how tall? Also, how much information do you want to be able to see on a screen?

Your brain builds a very personal and emotional impression of the collection of letters that make words that convey meaning. In the case of terminal or coding typefaces, the design goal is certainly to provide structural function and not feeling, but here’s the deal:

They do.

Isn’t this about the Blade Runner Title Sequence?

Flight to New York. My boarding procedure for moderate to long flights is: sit down, find a movie I’ve seen a dozen times, and hit play. No sound. This is visual background noise while I sort wifi, prepare for a meal, and find a project. On this flight, I picked Blade Runner. Fun fact: I can recite 50% of the dialogue from this movie from memory.

As I’ve been researching typography for Ghostty, novel typography tends to jump out at me. Like when you buy a car, and all you see is your new car on the road. Except it’s typography.

Here are clips from the title sequence for Blade Runner:

BLADE RUNNER main title card from the theatrical cut, set in red Goudy Oldstyle on black
HARRISON FORD title card from the Blade Runner theatrical cut, set in Goudy Oldstyle, white on black
Opening text crawl from Blade Runner theatrical cut in Goudy Oldstyle, with small caps for The Tyrell Corporation and Nexus, and the word Replicant in red italic

There’s a lot to dissect in this sequence, but let’s start with the punchline. This is a single typeface. It’s Goudy Oldstyle — that’s it. However, this is how they used typography:

  • ALL CAPS for names, proper names, the title2, and a slightly larger version for the introduction of Los Angeles, November, 20193
  • A smaller ALL CAPS for intros and other small important words
  • For the exposition crawl, they use standard capitalization except for two variants: small caps for proper names (like The Tyrell Corporation) or (spoiler alert) a red version of the text for the word Replicant — which is italicized every time it appears, but only the debut gets the red — and (spoiler alert) it’s the same red as the title of the movie4

Keep looking. The crawl is set like a book, not a movie — first-line indents, generous word spacing — and Frederic Goudy would approve: they letterspace the caps, never the lowercase, obeying his famous dictum that “anyone who would letterspace lowercase would steal sheep.”5 Also, what’s up with that chonky em dash? It’s probably been years since you’ve seen this, so here it is again:

Unlike our functional fixed-width typefaces, the role of typography in this title sequence is partly functional — to set the story — but the primary purpose is establishing mood. Director Ridley Scott expertly drops us into the middle of a dystopian future where we’ve enslaved the robots and, duh, they are rebelling.

How Much Feeling is Required?

Chances are, you never think about typography. You happily scribe your Messages (SF Pro), Mails (Helvetica), and Slacks (Lato), thinking nothing of serifs, ligatures, or kerning. You are content trusting that a someone else has chosen a proper typeface for your current task. Maybe you bold, you underline, and you italicize to slightly adjust meaning. No issue. Respect.

However, we now live in a world where everyone is capable of building whatever they want thanks to the robots. They’re doing it — right now. They find immense joy in typing in a couple of sentences and watching the robots merrily build whatever they ask. See? I don’t need to be an engineer to build an app. And they are correct. Sorta.

With optimism in my heart and a firm belief that the robots can legitimately help many humans, I can confirm that the majority of consumer-facing things being built by humans who’ve never built a thing… are garbage. Building a tool for yourself? A quick script to read your feeds and generate a pleasant-to-read output? A+. Robots crush that… for you. Building a feed reader anyone on the planet can easily use to read any number of feeds? No. No, you aren’t; you can say you are, but until you’ve built a thing for everyone, you will not appreciate that the last 10% of the work:

  1. Takes most of the time.
  2. Contains an endless list of small decisions that feel unimportant, but collectively make the difference between acceptable and fucking amazing.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the first version of the title sequence for Blade Runner’s work print, the close-to-complete cut before the theatrical release:

That title typeface? Impact. A fine typeface, but a clumsy path-of-least-resistance slap-to-the-face choice to set the tone of a future science fiction masterpiece. Garbage6.

I’ve never filmed a movie, but I have built quite a few products that you are using right now. In all the design debates, we never explicitly debate feeling: we obsess over the details. That obsession is what you feel when you use our products. It’s the collective voice of every single human who contributed small and large decisions to the product.

A good product sounds like the humans who created it, and that’s what you will feel.

  1. As I type this: IBM Plex Mono. By the time you read this: anyone’s guess. See: short attention span.
  2. Type nerds, yes, I know the title of the movie is hand drawn, but it’s certainly inspired by Goudy Oldstyle
  3. Hey LA, I might rip on you because you steal our water, but you’re doing better than Ridley Scott predicted. Good job.
  4. It’s been there all along, folks, why did we argue for all those years?
  5. Type nerds: Goudy’s original grievance was reportedly about blackletter, not lowercase. The lowercase version is the misquote that stuck — Erik Spiekermann liked it enough to name a book after it. The rule holds either way.
  6. Yes, it doesn’t help that there is no Vangelis soundtrack, yet.
Letters from an American

An Unconscionable Deal

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Letters from an American

Politics Chat, August 4, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated
Letters from an American

Representative Chellie Pingree | American Conversations

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated
The Truth OC: Because it's time to fight back.

Why would anyone ever believe Will O’Neill?

Jeff Pearlman
Updated

In case you missed this gem, yesterday’s Orange County Register ran a piece headlined, PHOTOGRAPH AT OC FAIR CONDEMNED BY COUNTY REPUBLICANS AS CALL TO VIOLENCE AGAINST TRUMP.

This, from Claire Wang’s article …

And I’m going to say something that may well shock some readers of this website.

Deep breath.

Deep breath.

Deep breath.

I (gasp) can see Will O’Neill’s point.

I mean it—I can.

Here is the photograph he is referring to, which languishes inside one of the hangars within the OC Fair …

And while I don’t think it’s a particularly big deal, it does seem sorta weird to highlight the image of a bunch of kids wishing the United States president a “happy last birthday”—aka: we hope you die.

So, again, on the surface I don’t fully disagree with Will O’Neill’s point.

But …

I’m just wondering, for kicks and giggles. Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump supporters attacked and destroyed the United States Capitol? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump supporters (on that same day) set up a noose for the purpose of hanging Mike Pence? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump praised Montana congressman Greg Gianforte for physically assaulting a reporter? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump respond to George Floyd protests with “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump advised the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump said of a heckler at his rally, “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.” Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump saw protesters outside the White House and said to Defense Secretary Mark Esper, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump said this of journalistic protections: “You take the writer and/or the publisher of the paper … and you say, ‘Who is the leaker? National security.’ And they say, ‘We’re not gonna tell you.’ They say, ‘That’s okay, you’re going to jail.’ And when this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner very shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that leaker is!’”

Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump bragged about grabbing women by the pussies? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump cheated on his wife with a porn star he raw dogged? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump mocked a disabled reporter? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump referred to myriad women as ugly and dumb? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when the only refugees Trump allowed into America were white South Africans?

Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump mocked POWs for being captured? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump had John McCain’s name covered on a battleship? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when we learned Trump made $2 billion over the past 1 1/2 years?

Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump tried to overturn an election he lost? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump said he won California three-straight times? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump said the fix was in on Spencer Pratt? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump lied about decreasing drug prices by “2,000%, 3,000%.” Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump said he “opened up the water” for SoCal?

Honestly, I can go on. And on. And on. And on.

Truth be told, Will O’Neill doesn’t care about a photograph in the OC Fair. Like, truly doesn’t care. He’s not actually offended. Or bothered. Or even irritated. It’s just an opportunity to make some noise, and were the image a bunch of kids mocking Joe Biden or Barack Obama, O’Neill wouldn’t have uttered a peep.

But, alas, Will O’Neill is nothing more than a sad, pathetic, little political opportunist; a dime-a-dozen regional hack who somehow looks at his children and looks at his wife and still—despite their gazes—believes this is how he should behave.

So, hey, take the picture down, OC Fair. Make Will O’Neill happy.

But just be warned: The silence will last, oh, a week. Maybe 10 days, max.

Then he’ll find something else to complain about—while ignoring the cruel, violent, disgusting, irredeemable pig in the White House.*1

1

Whose death, to be clear, I eagerly anticipate with streamers, balloons and a seven-layer cake.

Letters from an American

August 4, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

On Friday night, a court filing from Capital One denied there was any political motivation behind the closure of more than 380 bank accounts in the names of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization. Instead, it stated, the accounts were closed “for anti-money laundering reasons.” It said “transaction patterns” had triggered the review.

President Donald J. Trump has maintained that banks refused to do business with him after January 6, 2021, for political reasons. As Allison Morrow of CNN reported yesterday, Trump and his supporters, including cryptocurrency ventures, have used the idea that they were being “debanked” because of their political beliefs to claim they are victims. Last year, Trump and the Trump Organization sued Capital One in federal court in Florida, saying they had sustained “considerable financial harm” after the bank closed about 385 of their accounts.

Observers note that the story of Trump wanting immunity from IRS audits and the revelation that his bank activity mirrored that of money launderers might well be the same story.

That story recalls the work of national security specialist Natasha Bertrand in 2018, when she reported in The Atlantic that Trump’s rabid attacks on FBI and Justice Department officials centered on those with extensive experience in investigating money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they interfaced with Russia.

Trump went after officials he claimed were “Democrats” who were part of a “witch hunt” against him as they examined the ties of his 2016 campaign to Russian operatives. But Bertrand pointed out that his primary targets—Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, Andrew Weissmann, Andrew McCabe—all specialized in investigations into organized crime and money laundering. She noted that the probe into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian operatives was primarily a counterintelligence investigation and that Russia’s criminal syndicates and intelligence services had become increasingly intertwined.

In July 2017, Trump told the New York Times that it would be unacceptable for those investigating his campaign’s ties to Russia to look at his or his family’s personal finances. That would be a “red line,” he said. “I have no income from Russia. I don’t do business with Russia.” (This denial contradicts Donald Trump Jr.’s 2008 statement that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets” and Eric Trump’s 2014 boast, “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”) Bertrand noted that Trump’s links to “Russian oligarchs and mobsters” were “documented” and that his Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, “was repeatedly cited by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for having inadequate money-laundering controls.”

Financial irregularities surrounding Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein are also in the news today. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who is famous for following money trails doggedly, released a report saying that JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank held off on filing required suspicious activity reports in transactions associated with Jeffrey Epstein.

The report, titled “Looking the Other Way: How Wall Street Banks Enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s Sex Trafficking,” came out of a multi-year investigation. Investigators “found significant evidence that JPMorgan Chase (JPMC), Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America violated anti–money laundering laws by failing to screen and report Epstein’s suspicious financial transactions in a timely manner.”

It describes how top banks enabled Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation by ignoring suspicious financial transactions by those associated with him, appearing eager to use Epstein’s connections to other wealthy individuals. The report explains that Epstein’s lawyer Darren Indyke and his accountants Richard Kahn and Harry Beller “executed thousands of suspicious cash withdrawals and wire transfers, potentially in furtherance of human trafficking. Disturbingly, federal prosecutors have never even questioned them in connection with criminal investigations.”

Federal law designed to prevent money laundering requires banks to notify the Treasury with a suspicious activities report (SAR) within 60 days of detecting activity that raises red flags. The investigators found that the three banks most closely associated with Epstein put off reporting suspicious activity for years, filing reports of more than $1.4 billion retroactively only after Epstein was arrested for the second time in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking. The suspicious transactions included “thousands of wire transfers, major withdrawals of cash, payments to women and girls, and correspondent banking in high-risk foreign jurisdictions (including Russia). They also include tens of millions in payments to his conspirator and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.”

The report concludes that “top executives at major Wall Street banks were aware of Epstein’s suspicious financial activity for years but withheld information from the U.S. government, protecting Epstein from federal scrutiny” as they sought access to his money, which generated millions in fees every year, and to the money of his friends.

Top of the list of those friends was billionaire Leon Black, the former chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management Inc. The report concludes that Black “was overwhelmingly the largest source of funding for Epstein’s sex trafficking,” providing Epstein’s primary source of income between 2012 and 2017. Those payments amounted to about $166 million.

Bank of America took five to seven years to report those transactions even though bank officials thought they had “no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose.” Black told the Republican-dominated House Oversight Committee that he paid that money to Epstein for “tax, estate planning and other related services” and was not aware of Epstein’s “nefarious activity.”

The report concludes that “Bank of America likely violated federal anti-money laundering laws by failing to properly screen and report” those payments.

The report also covers already-released SARs from JPMorgan Chase, showing that the bank waited years to file those SARs despite the fact that bankers flagged more than $1 billion of transactions as suspicious, including payments to women in many countries and large cash withdrawals. It explains how Deutsche Bank AG, as well, delayed for years reporting more than $250 million in suspicious transactions tied to Epstein.

The report notes that JPMorgan Chase cut ties to Epstein as a client in 2013 out of concerns he was engaged in money laundering. This is an interesting mirror of the recent news from Capital One, since Trump also sued JPMorgan Chase and its chief executive officer Jamie Dimon for $5 billion, alleging they “debanked” him after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Wyden, who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, chastised Republicans for not working with him on this project. He noted that Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) who is currently running for governor, refused to join him in subpoenaing records in the Epstein banking matter even as she publicly complained that Democrats were hampering the investigation into those records.

The report also pointed out that Republicans have blocked Wyden’s measure that would require the Treasury Department to produce copies of all suspicious activity reports related to Epstein and his co-conspirators for congressional committees, and it singled out U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for refusing to produce those records to the Senate Finance Committee.

The report called for the Department of Justice, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the Comptroller of the Currency to “conduct thorough investigations of the activities laid out in this report and…levy fines or criminal penalties, as appropriate.” The report emphasized that such an investigation should include looking at the behavior of individual bankers, as well as the banks themselves.

“Investigations into the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein have thus uncovered an important finding that extends beyond Epstein himself: Wall Street banks have been willing to turn a blind eye to the suspicious transactions of ultra-wealthy clients, even if the failure to scrutinize and report these transactions runs directly afoul of federal law,” the report said. “If federal prosecutors are serious about preventing the next Jeffrey Epstein, they must hold Wall Street accountable.”

Congress passed federal securities laws and banking regulation in the 1930s after it became clear that a small group of wealthy investors had manipulated the markets and misused bank funds. Pressure to clean up Wall Street came from entrepreneurs and small investors, who knew they could not do business or make gains in the market if the system was rigged against them. A healthy economy depended on a level playing field for everyone.

Now, it appears, we are watching the dismantling of those protections and not only the long-term skewing of our system toward the very wealthy, but also a dramatic skewing in real time. On Saturday, Trump began selling access to his social media posts to Wall Street trading firms milliseconds before they go public, permitting them to buy and sell with insider information. The cost for this service, according to Marina Dunbar of The Guardian, is up to $100,000 a month.

Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law, an expert in government conflicts of interest rules, told Bernard Condon of the Associated Press that this scheme is “yet more brazen corruption, an improper exploitation of government power to enrich himself.”

—

Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/business/capital-one-trump-org-money-laundering

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/07/trump-organization-lawsuit-capital-one-account-closures-jan-6-riot.html

https://abcnews.com/US/capital-closed-hundreds-trumps-bank-accounts-2021-anti/story?id=135273257

https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-sessions-russia-recusal-new-york-times/3951596.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trumps-top-targets-in-the-russia-probe-are-experts-in-organized-crime/569056/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-04/deutsche-bank-jpmorgan-bofa-enabled-epstein-wyden-report-says

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/billionaire-leon-black-defends-158m-paid-to-epstein-i-knew-jekyll-i-didnt-know-hyde

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/22/business/jpmorgan-chase-trump-lawsuit-debanking

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/01/trump-truth-social-early-access

https://apnews.com/article/truth-social-trump-media-trump-post-conflicts-of-interest-truth-api-759fa71769729a26024914dd681c1953

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/the-brief/truth-socials-audacious-plan-to-sell-banks-early-access-to-trumps-posts-goes-live

https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_wall_street_epstein_report.pdf

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Letters from an American

Politics Chat, August 4, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

DCReport.org

UAE VPS Server: A Practical Choice for Growing Online Projects

Our Friends
Updated

Businesses serving customers in the United Arab Emirates need more than a website that simply stays online. Pages must load quickly, applications must respond consistently, and infrastructure must remain stable during advertising campaigns, product launches, seasonal sales, and other periods of increased demand. When shared hosting can no longer provide predictable performance or sufficient control, moving to a UAE VPS server becomes a practical next step.

A virtual private server gives a project an isolated environment with allocated computing resources. The business can choose the operating system, install the required software, configure access rules, monitor usage, and resize the server as the workload changes. This makes VPS hosting suitable for online stores, corporate websites, SaaS products, APIs, development environments, and internal business services.

For projects focused on users in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and the wider Gulf region, server location matters as much as the configuration itself. Hosting an application closer to its audience can reduce network distance, improve response times, and create a more consistent experience for regional users.

Why Server Location Matters

Every request between a user and a server passes through a network route. The greater the physical and network distance, the longer the response may take. A website hosted far from its primary audience can still work, but customers may notice slower page generation or delayed API responses.

A UAE VPS server  places infrastructure in Dubai instead of relying on a remote location in Europe, North America, or Asia. This can be valuable for e-commerce platforms, booking services, fintech applications, media projects, business portals, and other systems used mainly by customers in the UAE or nearby countries.

Local hosting is not a replacement for application optimization. Heavy scripts, inefficient database queries, oversized images, and unnecessary plugins can slow down any website. However, selecting an appropriate location removes one source of avoidable delay and gives the technical team a better foundation for performance improvements.

When Shared Hosting Is No Longer Enough

Shared hosting is often a convenient starting point for a small website. The provider manages most server-level tasks, and the customer does not need to configure the operating system. This simplicity comes with limitations.

Several websites may use the same pool of resources, while access to system settings is restricted. The project may be unable to install specific software, change database parameters, run persistent background processes, or configure custom security tools.

These restrictions become more visible as the project grows. An online store may need additional workers to process orders. A SaaS platform may require queues, scheduled jobs, containers, and monitoring agents. A corporate application may need stricter access rules than standard hosting can provide.

A UAE VPS server gives administrators full access to the virtual environment. They can configure the server around the application instead of adapting the application to the limits of a shared platform.

Preparing for Traffic Peaks

Traffic is rarely constant. Retailers experience seasonal sales, travel services receive more bookings during holidays, and marketing campaigns may bring thousands of visitors within a short period.

The first step in preparing for a peak is understanding the current workload. The team should review traffic analytics, CPU utilization, memory consumption, disk activity, database response time, and application errors. Historical data from previous campaigns can help estimate how much demand may increase.

Load testing can simulate multiple customers opening pages, searching a catalog, logging in, submitting forms, or completing purchases at the same time. The goal is not only to determine when the server fails, but also to identify which component becomes the first bottleneck.

A UAE VPS server can be resized when the project needs more CPU, RAM, or storage. These changes should be made before the campaign begins, leaving enough time to test the updated configuration under realistic conditions.

Scaling the Infrastructure

Vertical scaling increases the resources assigned to an existing virtual machine. It is usually the simplest option when a project needs additional capacity quickly. More processor cores can help with concurrent requests, while additional RAM can support databases, application processes, and caching.

Horizontal scaling adds more virtual machines and distributes the workload between them. Several web servers can operate behind a load balancer, while databases, caches, and background workers run separately.

A smaller project may begin with one UAE VPS server and scale vertically as demand grows. Later, the architecture can be divided into several components. Horizontal scaling requires more preparation because sessions, files, and database connections must work correctly across multiple servers.

Optimize Before Adding Resources

More powerful infrastructure cannot fully compensate for an inefficient application. Before increasing the VPS configuration, the team should check whether the existing resources are being used effectively.

Frontend optimization may include compressing images, reducing unnecessary JavaScript, and enabling browser caching. Backend work may involve improving slow database queries, adding indexes, limiting excessive logging, and removing unnecessary operations.

Caching can reduce repeated work. Frequently requested public pages and application data can be stored temporarily instead of being generated again for every visitor. Personalized areas, shopping carts, payment pages, and account information should be excluded from inappropriate caching rules.

Administrators can also configure the web server, database, process manager, PHP workers, container limits, and other components based on real workload data. This level of control is one of the main advantages of a UAE VPS server over basic hosting.

CDN and External Storage

The main server does not need to deliver every file directly. Product images, videos, stylesheets, scripts, and documents can create significant network and disk load.

A content delivery network can cache static resources and serve them from distributed nodes. Object storage can keep images, archives, backups, and exports outside the local system disk.

Separating files from the application simplifies scaling because additional virtual machines can access the same storage. The UAE VPS  server can then focus on authentication, database queries, checkout processes, API requests, and business logic.

Monitoring and Alerts

Monitoring should be configured before the project experiences a serious problem. Basic metrics include CPU load, RAM usage, free disk space, network traffic, and the status of critical services.

Application monitoring provides another layer of visibility. A virtual machine may be running normally while customers are unable to log in, submit an order, or complete a payment. External checks can verify whether important pages and customer actions work correctly.

If the UAE VPS server regularly approaches its resource limits, the business can upgrade it before performance deteriorates. If most resources remain unused, the configuration may be larger than necessary.

Backups and Recovery

Backups protect a project only when they are complete, stored safely, and ready to be restored. Database copies, application files, configuration files, access settings, and certificates may all be required for recovery.

Copies should not be stored only on the same virtual machine as the production environment. If the server becomes unavailable, local backups may also be inaccessible. The team should test restoration in a separate environment and document the required steps.

Before a major campaign, everyone involved should know who initiates recovery, where backups are located, and how long the procedure is expected to take.

Security Responsibilities

A VPS offers more control than shared hosting, but server administration must be taken seriously. The operating system and installed software should be updated, unused services should be disabled, and administrative access should be limited.

Firewall rules can restrict access to databases and management interfaces. SSH keys can protect remote access, while two-factor authentication can secure the provider control panel. Logs should be monitored for repeated login attempts and unusual traffic.

Security rules should be tested before a high-traffic event. An overly strict configuration can block customers, external integrations, payment callbacks, or search engine crawlers.

Choosing the Right Configuration

The correct configuration depends on how the application uses resources. CPU-intensive services need sufficient processing capacity, while database-heavy applications often benefit from additional RAM and fast storage. Projects serving large files may need more disk space and network bandwidth.

Linux is commonly used for web servers, containers, databases, and development tools. Windows may be required for Microsoft-based applications or remote desktop environments.

The team should avoid selecting a server only because it is the cheapest option. An undersized environment may become unstable as soon as traffic increases, while excessive capacity creates unnecessary costs.

A reasonable starting configuration should support the current workload and include a resource reserve. After deployment, monitoring data can show whether the UAE VPS server should be expanded or reduced.

UAE VPS Hosting in Dubai

Serverspace deploys UAE cloud  servers in the Equinix DX1 data center in Dubai. The facility is designed to Tier III standards and hosts the UAE Internet Exchange, making it an important connectivity point for the Middle East. Users can configure CPU, RAM, SSD, and bandwidth parameters and select Linux, Windows, or FreeBSD templates. The service also provides control-panel management, 24/7 support, billing in ten-minute intervals, and unlimited traffic.

These features allow businesses to create infrastructure for a long-term production system or a temporary project without being tied to a fixed standard plan. The environment can be adapted for websites, APIs, e-commerce backends, development systems, databases, and corporate services.

Conclusion

A UAE VPS server is useful when a business needs regional infrastructure, allocated virtual resources, administrative control, and room for future growth. It provides a stronger foundation than shared hosting for projects that depend on stable performance and custom server configuration.

The server location can improve the experience of users in the UAE and neighboring markets, while flexible resources make it easier to prepare for traffic peaks. Monitoring, backups, security controls, caching, and application optimization remain essential regardless of the selected configuration.

The best results come from treating VPS hosting as part of a complete infrastructure strategy. The business should understand its workload, test expected traffic, prepare a recovery plan, and scale resources before customers notice a problem. With this preparation, a UAE VPS server can support both everyday operations and the periods when demand is at its highest.

Photo: Brett Sayles via Pexels

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The post UAE VPS Server: A Practical Choice for Growing Online Projects appeared first on DCReport.org.

SpaceNews

NOAA purchases Spire hyperspectral microwave sounder data

Debra Werner
Updated

SAN FRANCISCO – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will continue to evaluate data from Spire Global’s Hyperspectral Microwave Sounder (HyMS) under a $3 million contract extension announced Aug. 4. […]

The post NOAA purchases Spire hyperspectral microwave sounder data appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Neuraspace raises $18 million to expand sovereign space awareness

Jason Rainbow
Updated

Neuraspace, the Portuguese space traffic management startup, announced around $18 million in fresh funding Aug. 5 to expand European space domain awareness and defense capabilities.

The post Neuraspace raises $18 million to expand sovereign space awareness appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Voyager seeks relaxed requirements in NASA commercial space station RFP

Jeff Foust
Updated
Starlab

Voyager Technologies remains upbeat about the prospects for its Starlab commercial space station but is hoping for some tweaks to NASA’s plans to support the station’s development.

The post Voyager seeks relaxed requirements in NASA commercial space station RFP appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

SpaceX to begin Starship orbital flights

Jeff Foust
Updated
Starship Flight 13 liftoff

SpaceX plans to start deploying upgraded Starlink satellites into orbit on the next flight of its Starship vehicle, scheduled for as soon as the end of the month.

The post SpaceX to begin Starship orbital flights appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Rocket Lab, STR win Space Force contracts for airborne-target tracking

Sandra Erwin
Updated

The companies, along with a third unidentified vendor, won $615 million in contracts for the AMTI satellite program

The post Rocket Lab, STR win Space Force contracts for airborne-target tracking appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Telesat lands $1.63 billion Canadian defense contract

Sandra Erwin
Updated

Arctic communications award will fund an expansion of Telesat’s Lightspeed, taking the planned LEO network to 225 spacecraft

The post Telesat lands $1.63 billion Canadian defense contract appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Finding room in Starlink’s shadow

Jason Rainbow
Updated

Another wave of constellations has staked claims for communications satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO), but what hope do newcomers have alongside the industry’s entrenched, vertically integrated giants? A mix of […]

The post Finding room in Starlink’s shadow appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Satellite manufacturing thrives in California despite cost and regulatory pressures

Debra Werner
Updated
California Gov. Gavin Newsom visited Vast Space headquarters in early June with Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson. From left: Vast CEO Max Haot, Newsom, Vast chief operating officer Kris Young and Richardson. Credit: Vast Space

The mood was celebratory at the ribbon-cutting for Muon Space’s San Jose, California, manufacturing facility in June. State, local, United States Space Force and Pentagon representatives lauded the startup and, […]

The post Satellite manufacturing thrives in California despite cost and regulatory pressures appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Think tank warns Europe’s orbital compute gap is widening

Jason Rainbow
Updated

Europe risks becoming dependent on foreign orbital computing infrastructure as U.S. companies and China’s government-led push accelerate the development of space-based data centers, according to the European Space Policy Institute.

The post Think tank warns Europe’s orbital compute gap is widening appeared first on SpaceNews.

Marginal Revolution

Wednesday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. A catalog of past AI predictions.

2. Jasmine Sun on why people do not want data centers.  And Jasmine Sun on Ezra Klein, on data centers (NYT).

3. A bot running an SF retail boutique? (NYT)

4. Elise Cawley, RIP.

5. On the NYC grocery store plan.

6. New credit card gives you tokens instead of miles.

7. Does AI mean the end of math heroes?  Some other heroes too?

The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

 
NASA Science

NASA’s Perseverance Captures Phobos and Earth

Rafael Alanis
Updated
2 Min Read

NASA’s Perseverance Captures Phobos and Earth

A grainy black image showing a horizontal sequence of seven faint crescent shapes evenly spaced from left to right. A tiny bright white dot moves diagonally from the upper left to the lower right, appearing to pass behind the crescent shapes.
PIA26758
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI
 

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NASA’s Perseverance Captures Phobos and Earth

PNG (1,001.21 KB)

PIA26758 Figure A

PNG (4.68 MB)

PIA26758 Figure B

PNG (4.65 MB)

Description

This composite of seven images from the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover shows Earth, visible as a small bright dot moving from upper left to lower right, passing behind the Martian moon Phobos on July 2, 2026, 1,907th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

The black background is the result of image processing that removed extraneous light in the background to enhance detail.

A desolate landscape with a dark horizon sits under a hazy, gray-blue sky. A large rectangular inset in the sky, connected by lines to a smaller rectangle, shows a sequence of five faint crescent shapes with a tiny bright dot moving downward.
Figure A

Figure A is an annotated composite of nine images taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard Perseverance on July 2, 2026. The inset on the upper right, comprised of five images, shows Earth — the small bright dot moving from upper left to lower right — passing behind the Martian moon Phobos. 

The rectangle outlined at the left in the annotation indicates the patch of sky that was imaged several times to capture Earth passing behind Phobos. In the larger rectangular inset, the images captured from that patch of sky are displayed in time order from left to right, with Phobos moving up and Earth moving down. 

The gray of the Martian sky is the approximate true color of the twilight (about 40 minutes after sunset) on that sol. It is blue-gray lower, where it is brighter, and reddish gray above.

A dark horizon under a hazy gray-blue sky. A red-outlined rectangular inset, connected by lines to a smaller rectangle, shows five faint crescent shapes with a bright dot moving downward. Timecodes beneath each crescent indicate a span of 40 seconds.
Figure B

Figure B includes annotations showing the local solar time on Mars during which the five individual images that captured the occultation were taken. 

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which is managed by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Arizona State University leads the operations of the rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument, working in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, on the design, fabrication, testing, and operation of the cameras.

For more about Perseverance:

science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/

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The post NASA’s Perseverance Captures Phobos and Earth appeared first on NASA Science.

Mike the Mad Biologist

With the National Guard in D.C., There Is Always the Threat of Completely Unaccountable Violence

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

They’re not always just standing around like people claim. There is always the threat of unaccountable violence.

While I’m not naive about the various immunities and protections police departments receive, there are still some safeguards in place and some political response to dissent by the governed. But when it comes to the National Guard deployment, there is no political authority to which the residents of the mainland colony known as the District of Columbia can turn. And that means there is no recourse other than after-the-fact civil suits when something like this happens (boldface mine):

Anna King was sitting on a bench one afternoon outside her home on a busy street in Washington, D.C., scrolling on her phone when three National Guard members entered her front gate, confronted her and pushed her to the ground, tying her hands behind her back with zip ties…

“Get away from me right now,” King, a retired U.S. Army captain who served in Iraq and earned both a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, can be heard telling the three male guard members in the video as they approach her on the bench. “You have absolutely no authority to detain me.”

As she tries to make her way to her front steps to go inside, the three Idaho National Guard members grab King and wrestle her to the ground. You can hear King yelling “Get off of me!” and coughing, while two of the troops tighten the zip ties on her hands…

Now, the ACLU of the District of Columbia and the private law firm Levy Firestone Muse have filed a federal tort claim against the Idaho National Guard on King’s behalf, seeking $3 million in damages from what they describe as an assault that led to lasting and serious injuries…

The National Guard says King was approached by the troops because she was suspected of assaulting a guard member two days earlier, something her attorneys called “baseless” in their filing. They say no charges around such an incident have been filed against King.

King’s attorneys say that they believe she was approached by the guard because she has been a vocal critic of their deployment in the city for months, hanging large signs outside her house with messages like “Occupation: Troops Out” and “National Guard Stop Being So Embarrassing.”

…Perloff says King sustained serious injuries to her wrist from the tight zip ties and required surgery, but is also suffering from post-traumatic symptoms from the incident.

Again, I’m not naive about the reality of policing, but we should not have unaccountable dipshits from Idaho entering people’s private property without warrants and arresting them without cause.

For most readers, D.C. statehood is about two more Democratic senators, but for the residents of the mainland colony is about self-governance and governing with consent.

D.C. statehood now.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

What causes unusual knots of gas and dust in What causes unusual knots of gas and dust in


Market Design

Kidney exchange in Mississippi (endorsed by celebrities)

Al Roth
Updated

 Mississippi Today has the story:

‘Kidney chains’ could save lives and billions of healthcare dollars, advocates say.  by Pat Boone, Robert Hays and Steve Young 

"Editor’s note: Entertainer Pat Boone, Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young and actor Robert Hays of “Airplane” fame signed on as authors of a guest essay provided by US Blood Donors.org for Mississippi Today on “Kidney Chains.”

"This guest essay, though, written from a national perspective is of special importance to MT Ideas since Mississippi is among the states with the highest number of kidney disease-related deaths per 100,000 adjusted for age, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.* 

"Hundreds of thousands of dialysis patients in the United States could receive lifesaving kidney transplants sooner if one simple idea became widely known: “kidney chains”— sequences of living-donor transplants that allow one donor to save multiple lives. 

The goal is simple: Make “kidney chains” a household phrase. 

Kidney chains allow living donors who are incompatible with their intended recipient to help initiate a sequence of transplants that can save multiple lives. The concept builds on Nobel Prize-recognized work** in market design and has already enabled thousands of lifesaving kidney transplants. 

 

 ########

*Figure from the NCHS 

 

###########

** The video link is to the last three minutes of this 15 minute talk from 2014

Thursday, September 18, 2014  Kidney exchange at Google Zeitgeist 2014: 15 minute video

 

Marginal Revolution

Dominant Assurance Contract aka Refund Bonus Explainer

Alex Tabarrok
Updated

I created the dominant assurance contract aka the refund bonus mechanism in 1998–it’s a mechanism capable of producing some types of public goods privately–in recent years working with Tim Cason and Robertas Zubrickas I’ve put refund bonuses to the test in lab experiments and they work! I’ve written an accessible Refund Bonus Explainer that covers this body of work. Here’s one bit:

The dike is a public good. Once it stands, it protects everyone nearby, and a neighbor who contributed nothing cannot easily be excluded. That property is what makes it hard to finance.

Paul Samuelson defined public goods in 1954, and he was pessimistic about them. Each person does better by understating what the good is worth to him, so it is, in Samuelson’s words, “in the selfish interest of each person to give false signals, to pretend to have less interest in a given collective consumption activity than he really has.” From this he concluded that “no decentralized pricing system can serve to determine optimally these levels of collective consumption.” Public goods, on this view, are what governments are for. Refund bonuses challenge that conclusion.

Read the whole thing and here is my Rent Control Explainer.

The post Dominant Assurance Contract aka Refund Bonus Explainer appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

 
Schneier on Security

Vulnerabilities in Car Anti-Theft Device

Bruce Schneier
Updated

This is disturbing:

…a team of security researchers at UC San Diego, who found that a model of aftermarket car alarm known as the KARR Security System, installed in more than 2 million vehicles across the US by their estimate, can let any hacker within Bluetooth range send radio commands to silently unlock the car at will, turn off its alarm, honk the car’s horn or flash its lights, or even disable its ignition and leave a driver stranded.

Schneier on Security

Iran Cyberattacks Against Minnesota Water Systems

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Attribution is preliminary, and so far it seems no real damage.

And it seems like this is a campaign that has targeted at least seven states. And, because this is where the US is right now, Trump doesn’t believe it’s Iran and that Minnesota…I guess…hacked itself.

“I think I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent,” Trump said. “I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. They like to say, ‘Oh, it’s Iran.’ Iran should be so lucky. Iran’s got bigger problems than worrying about Minnesota.”

No word on whether he believes the other six states have hacked themselves as well.

Slashdot thread.

The Aviationist
Simon Willison's Weblog

PipeNetwork/minimax-h3-mlx

PipeNetwork/minimax-h3-mlx

MiniMax released MiniMax-H3 two days ago - they describe it as a "a general-purpose, omni-modal generative system", which in practice means it accepts text, images, audio and video and can use them to generate up to 15 second video clips with audio included.

This Python package ports it to MLX for running on Apple Silicon.

I got it running on my M5 Max MacBook Pro. I cloned the repo and ran the model like this:

# First download the models
uvx --from huggingface_hub hf download MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3 \
  --include 'FL2VA/*' --exclude 'FL2VA/transformer/*'
uvx --from huggingface_hub hf download pipenetwork/MiniMax-H3-MLX-8bit

# Now run the prompt
uv run --with mlx-vlm \
  --with-requirements requirements.txt python scripts/generate.py \
  "a rainbow colored skunk leaps over a mossy log in a supermarket" \
  -o skunk.mp4 \
  -c ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--MiniMaxAI--MiniMax-H3/snapshots/fa9c8ab1eaa21c8ae25e7e40b83b2e6002f340af/FL2VA \
  -t ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--pipenetwork--MiniMax-H3-MLX-8bit/snapshots/3ac52081470b0488921c3ec3ba84a39097bf2361

Here's the video I got for the prompt:

a rainbow colored skunk leaps over a mossy log in a supermarket

It downloaded ~115 GB of model files, and the video generation took just under 45 minutes.

The video is impressive, but the audio is weird speech-like garbage, because I didn't provide any prompt guidance as to what the audio should be. The prompting guide (which I didn't read prior to this experiment) has a whole bunch of information on how to get this to work.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, mlx, text-to-video, minimax

Simon Willison's Weblog

llm 0.32

Release: llm 0.32

See my detailed blog post about this release.

Tags: llm

Paul Krugman

An Explosion of Misery

Paul Krugman
Updated

For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube.

Transcript

Contrary to what Trump administration officials say, we are not experiencing explosive economic growth. We are, however, experiencing an explosion in misery — and Donald Trump deserves full credit.

Hi, Paul Krugman here, slightly different location. I want to talk about food stamps and health insurance, two areas where things have gotten dramatically worse just in the past year and are continuing to get worse. There's going to be a lot more hungry people in America, especially hungry children, by the end of this year, and a lot more people without health insurance or with inadequate health insurance. And it all can be tied directly to legislative action or inaction on the part the Trump administration and its allies.

Here's what has happened. So we have what everybody still calls food stamps, though it's officially Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But we have a situation now where the One Big Beautiful Bill didn't exactly cut the rate of benefits, but what it did was to impose work requirements.

You might say, well,shouldn't people who can work work? Yeah, but that's not really what's happening. What's happening is that people who can work and do work —because among those who can work who are receiving food stamps, the vast majority do in fact work — must show proof of work. And that is, for many such people, a basically impossible burden.

I mean, think of who is likely to be on food stamps. They may well be irregularly employed. They certainly may not have a job where they can call up the HR department and get the necessary forms. They are also presented with a complicated paperwork requirement. We're talking about people who are, to some extent, lacking in formal education. But above all — I've never been poor, thank God — but as everyone who's studied or been poor can tell you, the biggest issue of poverty in some sense is the cognitive burden, the constant struggle to just make ends meet, which is a huge burden on everything else.

So you're imposing a bureaucratic hurdle, really a bureaucratic barricade in front of exactly the people least able to get across it. So of course, we're seeing a lot of people losing nutritional assistance with millions of those people children.

Health insurance is a rather different story. The Affordable Care Act made a huge positive difference to many people's lives — in this case some people I do know quite well, small business people and so on. But the way it was set up, there are subsidies to help you purchase insurance through the exchanges. The subsidies are means tested. I could not get a subsidy for health insurance, nor should I. So they fade out with income. But as originally set up, they faded out too quickly with rising income, and there was a cliff at 400% of the poverty line, no more subsidies, which was clearly bad policy. And they knew that at the time. It was just that trying to scrape together enough votes to get that thing enacted was hard.

So during the Biden years, the subsidy program was improved. It became somewhat more generous, but more important, it no longer had a cliff. It just gradually faded out.

Unfortunately, that was not a permanent change. It wasn't enacted into legislation for forever. There was a cutoff date. Why? Well, two words, Joe Manchin. But in any case, obviously, Trump and Republicans in Congress refuse to even contemplate extending those enhanced benefits. And so a lot of people are now faced with vastly higher costs if they want to retain their health insurance.

Interestingly, these are not the poorest. The poorest are going to be on Medicaid and even people a little bit above that are still going to have the full subsidy. But it's people in the middle class whose income is a little above 400% of the poverty line and suddenly have no subsidy available. That is a hardship for, again, millions of people.

So far we know that enrollment on the exchanges that were set up to buy health insurance has dropped by about three million so far. Probably a lot more to come. And probably that understates the loss because people trying to save money because things are more expensive are in many cases stepping down to less comprehensive plans. So there's an increase in the number of underinsured too. Which means that a large number of Americans who had adequate health insurance no longer do.

How should we think about all of this? The Trump administration has put out a report on the decline in Affordable Care Act enrollment, which is really a blood-boiling document because it portrays the big rise in enrollment that took place during the Biden years as a problem because it was an increase in fraud.

Now, is there fraud? Yes, there's fraud in the Affordable Care Act. Is there fraud in the food stamp program? Yes — there's fraud in every program, public and private sector as well. There's fraud in the endless pasta deal at Olive Garden. There's fraud in frequent flyer schemes. There is no reason to believe that there is significant fraud in the sense that it's a significant, important part of any of these programs.

And one thing that you always want to bear in mind when we're talking about these means-tested programs is how cheap they are. The average food stamp recipient receives $187 a month in nutritional assistance — $187 a month, a little over $2,000 a year. Maybe one way to put that in context is to say that Donald Trump's East Wing Ballroom Project, the one that is so far still just a hole in the ground and hopefully will never be finished, is costing $600 million. So that project alone, that scam, because we know that there's a lot of corruption involved, that is the equivalent of food stamps for 300,000 people for a year.

So the things that we're talking about here are, it's not really about the money. It is one of those “the cruelty is the point” stories. And we could go on about that, but clearly the fact that a lot of people are going to suffer is not an unintended byproduct of these policies. It is kind of, in some ways, the goal.

It's also enormously destructive, not just for people's lives now, but for the future.

One of the best established facts about the benefits of government spending is that nutritional and health assistance to children pays off for society as a whole. That children who received food stamps or Medicaid in their early years grow up to be healthier, more productive adults who pay more in taxes and are less likely to need government assistance. The rates of return on both the food stamp program and Medicaid, the original aid for health care for the poor, are enormous. They're far bigger, far better substantiated than almost anything else you can do.

If you ask, you know, what do we know about the payoff to infrastructure investment? Well, we think it's pretty big, but... that's not based on solid evidence. The evidence on these programs is enormous.

So by cutting back on these programs, by creating this explosion of misery, they're not only making millions of Americans much, much poorer than they were, they're also making the country as a whole substantially poorer in the long run. It's an anti-growth policy. But of course, the cruelty is the point.

And here we are. Many things happen to the economy, many things happen to society that are outside the control of the guy in the White House. Many bad things aren't really the fault of the party in power. This is absolutely, totally Donald Trump's fault.

Paul Krugman

The Oligarchs are Doubling Down on Republicans

Paul Krugman
Updated
Trump's inauguration billionaires, CEOs: Ambani, Zuckerberg, Bezos attend church, ceremony | Reuters

Inauguration Day 2025 looked and felt like a coronation, as Donald Trump was installed in a position of immense, unprecedented power. Since he had returned to office despite the Jan. 6 insurrection, it was obvious that time-honored checks and balances on presidential authority wouldn’t apply to him. And the megabillionaires who had spent vast sums to assure Trump’s victory had no qualms about appearing as the new MAGA oligarchy. Through their political and monetary fealty to Trump, they had positioned themselves to dictate policy, free from petty democratic constraints and concern for public welfare. They evidently expected that they would spend years effectively ruling the nation in their interests, along with the president they had bought.

Now, a year and a half later, the oligarchs’ victory celebrations look premature. Newly elected presidents usually experience a few months of positive net approval, but Trump’s “honeymoon” barely lasted a month. He is now plumbing new depths of public disapproval:

Furthermore, Trump’s plunge is like a vortex pulling the entire Republican Party down with him. G. Elliott Morris’s model gives Democrats an 85 percent chance of taking the House despite extreme GOP gerrymandering. He also gives the Democrats a 55 percent chance of taking the Senate, despite its overrepresentation of small, rural states that strongly tilts its composition towards the Republicans.

And you know what has an even worse approval rating than Donald Trump? AI data centers:

There are substantive reasons to oppose these centers, but beyond concerns over rising electricity bills, pollution, water depletion and noise, the controversy over data centers has become a proxy for public backlash against the power of the broligarchs and their disregard for the welfare of ordinary Americans.

According to historical experience, this kind of massive shift in public sentiment should have induced hedging on the part of the big money. That is, based on past patterns we would have expected billionaires to give more money to Democrats during the midterm elections compared to the 2024 election as a way to maintain influence if the balance of power in Washington shifts.

But that’s not what is happening this time: instead, oligarchs are doubling down on MAGA. An analysis by the Washington Post finds that megadonors have already spent more than $1.6 billion on the November midterms. Here’s how that spending breaks down:

What’s the rationale here? Why are the billionaires doubling down in support of a hugely unpopular president and his hugely unpopular agenda?

This partly reflects a change in the nature of billionaires’ relationship with the extreme right. Twenty years ago American conservatism was dominated by a “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” strategy in which corporations and the wealthy used racism and bigotry to advance their goals — tax cuts and deregulation — without necessarily being racists and bigots themselves. Today Elon Musk isn’t putting on a show of being a neo-Nazi, because that’s who he really is.

Beyond that, Trump’s second presidency is so pervasively corrupt, abusive and destructive that it will be virtually impossible for anyone who supported him to move on and rehabilitate themselves. Outside of MAGA, who will ever be willing to trust Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos again? Frankly, what political hopeful would be stupid or venal enough to associate with them?

Indeed, I believe and hope that if Democrats regain power, they won’t repeat past mistakes by trying to “move on” from the corruption and scandals of the previous regime. It’s now clear that Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, enabled Trump’s return to power by slow-walking the investigation of January 6th. Earlier, Barack Obama let Republicans off the hook by not pursuing the lies that led to the Iraq war. Let’s hope that this time the Democrats, once in control of one or both houses of Congress, will quickly initiate investigations, hearings and, where warranted, prosecutions. And it’s unlikely that Trump’s billionaire money men will escape unscathed.

So rather than trying to mollify the Democrats and defuse the coming political reckoning, the billionaire class is opening the money taps, going all out to prevent Democrats from being elected. And why not? For Musk, the Koch Brothers, Ken Griffin, Alex Karp and others hundreds of millions is pocket change, while billion-dollar business interests and, in some cases, possible criminal charges are at stake.

Rather than being daunted by the flood of billionaire money, Democrats should treat this as a campaign theme. Robert Reich had a good post yesterday titled “The Stink of Musk,” arguing that “Musk’s money shouldn’t be viewed as a problem. It’s an opportunity.” If Musk supports a candidate, that in itself can be used as an argument that said candidate is not on the side of ordinary Americans.

Reich is not only right, but the strategy of highlighting oligarch support as a reason not to vote for politicians can and should extend beyond Musk money. A case in point: when Forbes magazine finds it noteworthy that the likes of Ken Griffin, Stephen Schwarzman and Paul Singer are pouring large sums into Susan Collins’s campaign in Maine, there is an obvious case to be made that Collins is working for the billionaire class and not the working class, the middle class, or even the bottom 99 percent.

Just as the billionaires have come to the obvious realization that there is no turning back on MAGAdom, Democrats must also realize that there is no turning back on opposition to the billionaire agenda. Any failure to address corporate tax giveaways, shrinking paychecks, loss of healthcare, epidemics, loss of SNAP benefits and, yes, predatory data centers, will be perceived by ordinary Americans for the betrayal that it is. We, as a country, are at an unavoidable fork in the road. Perhaps we should extend some thanks to the billionaire class for clarifying that.

MUSICAL CODA

Nothing to do with the topic

Simon Willison's Weblog

New release of LLM adds support for reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses, server-side tools, and smarter logging

I released LLM 0.32 this morning, the most significant new version of LLM since the initial launch of the project. The new version includes support for visible reasoning traces, server-side provider tools, redesigned content-addressable SQLite logs, new models, and new features enabled by the OpenAI Responses API. I also released a new version of the llm-anthropic plugin with substantial updates of its own.

Headline features for LLM CLI users

Running LLM against reasoning models now displays their reasoning traces to standard error, so you can see what they are "thinking" without that information being included in the standard output that you might pipe to another tool. Add -R/--hide-reasoning to turn this off.

Running llm "think about the best thing about pelicans" in the macOS terminal window - grey text outputs saying Exploring pelican qualities, then after a paragraph of that a white paragraph of text comes out saying: The best thing about pelicans is their wonderfully oversized, practical design: that enormous bill and pouch look comical, but they make pelicans remarkably skilled fishers. Even better, many species cooperate—working together to herd fish before scooping them up. They’re a great mix of goofy, graceful, and surprisingly clever.

LLM includes support out-of-the-box for the GPT-5.6 model family, and the new default model used with llm "prompt" is now the inexpensive but capable GPT-5.6 Luna.

LLM calls can now use server-side tools from various providers. OpenAI provide a code execution environment as a server-side tool; LLM can now run prompts that benefit from that like so:

llm --tool CodeInterpreter 'Show current python and SQLite versions'

OpenAI also gets a WebSearch tool.

The llm-anthropic plugin adds WebSearch, WebFetch, CodeExecution, and AnthropicMCP, which looks like this:

llm -m claude-sonnet-5 -T 'AnthropicMCP("https://datasette.simonwillison.net/-/mcp")' \
  'how many rows in the blog_blogmark table?'

That causes Anthropic to execute MCP calls against my new datasette-mcp plugin as part of a single request/response interaction with their API.

The new llm openai endpoint command provides a tool for executing prompts against any OpenAI compatible endpoint as a one-liner. These aren't logged, which makes this a handy tool for running one-off prompts against anything that speaks the lingua franca of the LLM API world.

Here's how I use that to run prompts against Gemma 4 12B running in my localhost LM Studio API, via uvx (no LLM installation required) and mixing in the llm-tools-quickjs tool plugin for good measure:

uvx --with llm-tools-quickjs \
  llm openai endpoint http://localhost:1234/v1 -m google/gemma-4-12b \
  -T QuickJS 'Use QuickJS to multiply 3434 * 2434' --td

Output reads Tool call: QuickJS_execute_javascript({'javascript': '3434 * 2434'}) 8358356 The result of 3434 * 2434 is 8,358,356.

New features in the Python API

LLM's Python API previously required you to create a conversation and then send messages to it one at a time. This was an abstraction over the true nature of LLMs, where each request carries a complete history of the messages that came before it. That abstraction started to get in the way for some more advanced cases, so the new release introduces a model.prompt(messages=[]) parameter that can be used like this:

import llm
from llm import user, assistant, system

model = llm.get_model("gpt-5.6-luna")

response = model.prompt(messages=[
    system("You are a helpful pirate."),
    user("What is the capital of France?"),
    assistant("Paris, matey."),
    user("And Germany?"),
])
print(response.text())

LLM previously returned an iterable sequence of strings from each prompt. This worked great when models returned a string response, but failed to predict the weird shape that models would evolve towards. Today many models return a mix of reasoning text, output strings, tool calls, and even image attachments. With LLM 0.32 you can do this instead:

for event in model.prompt("Explain cats").stream_events():
    if event.type == "reasoning":
        print(f"[thinking] {event.chunk}", end="", flush=True)
    elif event.type == "text":
        print(event.chunk, end="", flush=True)
    else:
        print(f"Other event: {event}")

Combine these features and we can finally provide a robust implementation of the semi-standard OpenAI chat completions API, which I've now released as the llm-chat-completions-server plugin:

llm install llm-chat-completions-server
llm chat-completions-server --port 9000
# Server is now running on http://127.0.0.1:9000/v1

Now you can run prompts against LLM via that server, using the new llm openai endpoint command!

llm openai endpoint http://127.0.0.1:9000/v1 'hello' -m gpt-5.4-mini

The bigger challenge with that kind of API concerns logging. If we're going to support the pattern where the message sequence is appended to on every request, ideally we can avoid logging all of that duplicate JSON for every turn.

The solution is the new content-addressable message store, modeled after Git. You can see the new schema for that in the documentation, but the llm logs and llm logs --json commands have both been upgraded to convert that format back into something that's easy to consume.

And the rest

There is a whole lot more in this release. The 0.32 release notes are pretty comprehensive, and the notes for 0.32rc2, 0.32rc, 0.32a3, 0.32a2, and 0.32a0 should fill in any gaps.

Existing LLM plugins should all continue to work, but plugins that provide extra models will need to be upgraded to 0.32 in order to participate fully in the new streaming events system. There's a guide to implementing plugins with Structured messages and streaming events in the documentation.

I've updated some of my own plugins:

I guess LLM is an agent framework now

Quite a few of the lower-level tools changes in this release were driven by the needs of Datasette Agent. When I started work on LLM, the term "agent" had such a vague definition that I refused to use it. In September 2025 I came around to the idea that "An LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal" is well established enough now that I could stop avoiding the term entirely.

Tool chains can now pause for human approval and resume from a stored message history - both needed by Datasette Agent.

Looking at LLM today it's beginning to look very agent-shaped to me. There's something neat about having a CLI utility that can mix and match different tools from different sources with different models all as a one-liner, and that includes a Python library powerful enough to build systems like Datasette Agent and llm-coding-agent.

Maybe the next version of LLM will bake the concept of an "agent" into the core library. I'm still trying to figure out what that would look like.

Tags: projects, releases, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, llm, anthropic, llm-tool-use, llm-reasoning, model-context-protocol

Simon Willison's Weblog

llm-anthropic 0.26

Release: llm-anthropic 0.26

Includes new features enabled by LLM 0.32:

  • New models: claude-fable-5, claude-sonnet-5, and claude-opus-5. #75, #76
  • Added server-side tools for WebSearch, WebFetch, CodeExecution, and AnthropicMCP, available through LLM's -T interface or Python tools=. The previous -o web_search* options have been removed in favor of -T WebSearch. #79
  • Upgraded to llm>=0.32. Reasoning, tool calls, tool results, and server-side tool results now stream as typed events. Reasoning for llm CLI prompts now displays to standard error unless you pass --hide-reasoning/-R.
  • Simplified extended thinking to thinking and thinking_effort (low, medium, high, xhigh, or max). Claude 5 models think by default; -o thinking 0 disables thinking for Sonnet 5 and Opus 5, while Fable 5 always thinks. -R/--hide-reasoning now omits reasoning from responses and logs. The thinking_budget, thinking_display, and thinking_adaptive options have been removed. #80

Tags: llm, anthropic, claude, model-context-protocol

Aeon | a world of ideas

The last ice age

Aeon Video
Updated

Vintage photo of three people skiing across a snowy landscape with poles in hand under a cloudy sky.

Retracing his grandparents’ journey to Iceland’s Vatnajökull glacier, a writer draws on storytelling to grasp climate change

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Oklahoma Watch
Marginal Revolution

Is this why China finds it so hard to inflate producer prices?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

This paper investigates why China’s recurrent credit expansions have coincided with persistently weak inflation. We argue that this pattern reflects the country’s production-oriented monetary regime. At the aggregate level, faster monetary-financial expansion temporarily raises PPI inflation but depresses it over longer horizons. At the sectoral level, liability growth among listed industrial firms is followed by weaker producer prices, lower profitability, higher leverage, rising inventories, and reduced capacity utilization. We also find asymmetric supply-chain transmission: downstream liability growth raises upstream PPI inflation, while upstream liability growth does not generate a corresponding downstream price response. These findings indicate that credit expansion in China tends to sustain production and balance sheets rather than stimulate final demand. As a result, monetary policy operates less as a conventional tool for demand management and durable reflation, and more as a mechanism for preserving production capacity and supporting growth.

That is from a new paper by Jeffery (Jinfan) Chang & Wei Xiong.  I have to say I understand the result but not exactly the mechanism.  I am reminded of Milton Friedman’s dictum not to focus too much on the first-order effects of an increase in money supply.

The post Is this why China finds it so hard to inflate producer prices? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer

[RODEN] Oooohhh Summer, How Much Risk Is a Useful Amount of Risk?

Craig Mod
Updated

Roden Readers —

There is sweat and then there is s-w-e-a-t and the out-of-doorsness in Japan is presently a natural machine that produces nothing but sweat and sweat and sweat and swelter. Dryness has been eradicated. Fire is impossible to start. Blowtorch any single thing and it will laugh in your face. The implicit ubiquity of moistness inspired Japanese dictionary publishers to excise “dry.” A useless word. The only sane response is to find a cool cave at the top of a mountain and hibernate until November. (Or go to Victoria, Canada, which I did; more on that below.)

Spaceflight Now

SpaceX launches 3 AST SpaceMobile BlueBird satellites on Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to deliver three of AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird Block 2 satellites into low Earth orbit on Aug. 5, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

Update Aug. 5, 6:09 a.m. EDT (1009 UTC): SpaceX confirmed deployment of the three BlueBird satellites.

SpaceX launched the latest trio of AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in the predawn hours of Wednesday morning.

The Falcon 9 rocket carried satellites numbered 11, 12, and 13 in to orbit. The mission came about a month-and-a-half after SpaceX launched the BlueBird 8-10 mission.

Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 3:49 a.m. EDT (0749 UTC). The rocket flew on a northeasterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.

The 45th Weather Squadron forecast an 85 percent chance for favorable weather during liftoff. Meteorologists are tracking the possible interference from anvil, thick, and cumulus clouds.

“A weak mid-level low centered over Georgia this morning will begin to dissipate through the overnight period,” launch weather officers wrote. “Lingering influence from this feature will promote continued light southwesterly low-mid level flow during the primary launch window.”

SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1077. It became the fifth Falcon booster to achieve at least 30 flights, with four out of those five boosters are still in operation.

More than 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1077 landed on the droneship, A Shortfall of Gravitas, positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. This was the 162nd landing on this vessel and the 645th Falcon booster landing to date.

The trio of BlueBird satellites were deployed several minutes apart beginning about 54 minutes after liftoff. Because of the size of the payload adaptor, SpaceX didn’t broadcast the deployment live, but rather confirmed the release on social media.

The 2,400-square-foot sized satellites will take a couple of weeks to deploy to their full size and complete checkouts before entering into the broader constellation.

In late July, AST SpaceMobile CEO Abel Avellan said on social media that the next trio of satellites following this launch are not too far behind the three satellites launching on Wednesday morning. He said they have production in flow through satellite 42.

“We invented a new way to design, manufacture at scale, deploy, and fly lightweight composite stackable architecture combined, with the world’s largest and most advanced direct-to-device and radar phased-array with the ability to launch them in groups of 3, 5, 6, or 8 on a single launch,” Avellan wrote.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is able to launch three satellites at most with its Falcon 9 rocket with the eight-satellite configuration reserved for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which has a seven-meter diameter payload fairing. However, the latter rocket is grounded for an undetermined amount of time following the May 28 pad explosion.

Marginal Revolution

Victor Niederhoffer, RIP

Tyler Cowen
Updated

In addition to his well-known public roles, he worked very hard to help and befriend me when I was younger.  Here are the Google searches for Victor.  Less well known about Victor is that he had one of the world’s best collections of private letters.  He also once gave me a very nice small painting by Jack Savitzky, for which I remain grateful.

The post Victor Niederhoffer, RIP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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The Cross Section

We've Been Thinking About Electability All Wrong

Paul Waldman
Updated
Abdul El-Sayed campaigning in Michigan

The Democratic primaries, especially those in Michigan (today) and Wisconsin (next Tuesday) have once again brought up the issue of “electability.” As usual, the more moderate candidates argue that primary voters should choose them because they’re electable, and the progressives argue that in fact they’re the electable ones. There’s no question that the Democratic Party, in the states but especially in Washington, agrees with the moderates.

One way to address this question, which I’ve advocated in the past, is to say that primary voters should stop worrying about electability altogether. Instead of trying to figure out which candidate someone else might like, vote for the candidate you like, and you’ll probably wind up doing better in the end.

Unfortunately, primary voters, who are more aware and involved than the average voter, love playing amateur political consultant; it’s difficult to get them to stop thinking about the general election. So rather than ignoring it, we should rethink what we talk about when we talk about electability.

The old way of thinking about electability

The traditional conception of electability is simple and straightforward:

“The more ideologically moderate candidate is the more electable one”

Sometimes you might throw in features of identity, like race and gender (i.e. white candidates are supposedly more electable than non-white candidates and men are more electable than women), but in this line of thinking, ideology is what matters most. If you need to win over a general electorate, especially in a closely divided state like Michigan or Wisconsin, you have to appeal to the middle, and you do that with moderate positions on policy issues.

As I’ve noted many times, in congressional races, policy moderation has lost much of the power it once had to give candidates an advantage. But even if it still helps rather than hurts in and of itself, it may be far less important than other factors — and it’s certainly not so powerful that we should assume that it swamps everything else.

Yet that’s how the Democratic Party often treats it. When the party apparatus like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee are trying to figure out which candidate to throw their support behind and which to try to push out of a race, they look for candidates who can raise money (i.e. they’re either rich enough to self-finance or they have a lot of rich friends), candidates who are already known to voters, and perhaps above all, candidates who are safe centrists.

It’s not always a bad formula. For instance, former governor Roy Cooper was recruited by Chuck Schumer to run in North Carolina, and he checks all the boxes — and it looks like he’s probably going to win. But apply the same formula everywhere, and you get candidates like Haley Stevens, an uninspiring normie Democrat who was also the party’s choice, and looks like she’s going to get beaten by Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate primary.

A better way to think about electability

I can’t say for sure which of those two is more electable, because we can’t run the experiment twice. Polls taken now aren’t all that useful given that the general election hasn’t started, but they seem to show Stevens doing a tiny bit better than El-Sayed against Mike Rogers, who will be the Republican nominee — but within the margin of error, so no meaningful difference.

While it’s certainly possible for a candidate to be so at odds ideologically from the state they’re running in that they can’t win, that’s usually not what people highlight when they argue that electability ought to be the top concern. Instead, they often point to candidates who flamed out spectacularly and lost winnable races, like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware in 2010, or Todd Akin in Missouri in 2012.

But those examples almost never have anything to do with ideology. O’Donnell was so wacky that she felt compelled to air an ad making clear that she was not, in fact, a witch. Akin averred that rape exceptions in abortion bans were unnecessary because in a “legitimate rape,” a woman’s mysterious ladyparts will render a pregnancy impossible. They were just terrible candidates.

On the other side, Barack Obama wasn’t electable because Black men with thin resumes and the middle name “Hussein” are always great to nominate for president. And Donald Trump wasn’t electable because vulgar con men who sexually abuse women are the strongest candidates.

So if ideological moderation isn’t the most important factor in genuine electability, what is? I’d argue there are three key variables:

Electability factor #1: The timing. Timing is perhaps the most under-considered determinant of political outcomes, but it affects everything. Obama’s timing was perfect in 2008; the Iraq War, the financial meltdown, and the end of the unpopular Bush presidency primed the public for someone who represented the most dramatic break possible with the status quo, and he was it. Likewise, in 2016, with the gnawing feeling that the system wasn’t serving people well, plus the yearning among so many voters for an authentic racist and misogynist (especially given that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee), Trump’s despicable personality and outsider status allowed him to squeak to victory when he might not have been able to in a different year.

Electability factor #2: The candidate. This seems obvious, but it apparently isn’t. Good candidates are more electable than bad candidates, whatever their ideology, and charisma matters. Watch Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed for any length of time, and it becomes clear that he’s just a better politician on the campaign trail than she is. He’s more articulate, he speaks less in bromides and cliches, he’s confident where she’s cautious, he’s willing to try to persuade anyone while she doesn’t quite know how to deal with being challenged, and he seems to be outworking her. Good campaigners don’t always make good officeholders, but being good at campaigning makes a difference in getting elected.

Electability factor #3: The message. This is directly related to factor #1: Has the candidate hit upon a message that is not just compelling, but compelling at this particular moment? The political situation of this moment is that voters are pissed off — they’re pissed off at Trump, they’re pissed off about the economy, they’re pissed off about corruption, and they’re pissed off at the fact that ten years after Trump himself said he was going to fight a “rigged” system, the system seems more rigged than ever.

El-Sayed’s answer is a simple slogan that he repeats over and over and has even turned into a call-and-response at his rallies: “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all.” It may not be all-encompassing, but it’s easy to remember and it communicates what he’s about.

Stevens says some of the same things — her website says “Haley is running for Senate to continue to fight for Michiganders and our economy while standing up to the Trump-Musk chaos agenda” — but in part because she is in fact a creature of the establishment, the “fighter” stuff doesn’t come off as particularly authentic, and she can’t plausibly say she’s going to challenge the status quo.

In a different year, Stevens might be able to argue persuasively that she’s the more electable one. But to make that argument this year, you’d have to still believe that ideology is all that matters. Or that the inevitable torrent of hateful anti-Muslim bigotry Republicans will pour down on El-Sayed will be enough to defeat him (which maybe it will).

Anyhow, this is my plea: If we’re going to talk about electability, don’t limit it to ideology, because that’s only a small part of the story.

One final note, especially given that it looks like El-Sayed is going to win, as will Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin governor race, as have a number of other progressive candidates who have challenged Democratic incumbents. If you haven’t seen it yet, I wrote a piece at Public Notice about the decision moderate Democrats will face once the primaries are over: Should they keep attacking progressive candidates who won, in order to fight a supposed “battle for the soul of the party,” or should they do everything they can to help those candidates win even if they aren’t all that comfortable with them? You can probably imagine which position I take, but I think the full argument might be worth your time.

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The Honest Broker

How to Lose $35 Billion with Philosophy

Ted Gioia
Updated

In the last few days, you may have heard about Leopold Aschenbrenner—the wonder kid hedge fund manager who lost tens of billions over the course of a few days. It’s the biggest financial fiasco of the year.

If you didn’t read about it in the news, don’t worry. Hollywood will certainly make it into a movie. This 25-year-old hot shot’s financial empire was literally collapsing while guests were showing up for his blowout wedding at a fake Tuscan villa in California. The screenplay practically writes itself.

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It’s Wolves of Wall Street meets Under the Tuscan Sun. Throw in a dose of Margin Call for good measure.

This tyro’s investing strategy looks more like gambling addiction than high finance. Aschenbrenner borrowed to the hilt, using four times leverage to buy AI stocks by the truckload. Then he added to his risk by shorting companies he was sure AI would replace. In other words, instead of hedging his AI position—which is standard practice (and why they call them hedge funds), he doubled down, setting himself up for a failure of Biblical proportions.

When you take chances like this, even a small downturn in AI stocks will wipe out your entire capital. That’s pretty much what happened last week.

I wanted to learn more about the young man behind this collapse—so I went to his Wikipedia page. There I discovered his connection to fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and the latter’s Effective Altruism philosophy.

Screenshot of Wikipedia page

What are the odds that the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the year is connected to the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the decade?

But there it is.

And—another coincidence!—the woman who assisted Bankman-Fried, and served 14 months in prison for fraud and money laundering, also helped run her college’s Effective Altruism club.

This is getting to be a trend.

Screenshot of Wikipedia page

But, of course, none of this is coincidence.

I wrote about Effective Altruism back in 2023, and shared my own history with consequentialist ethical systems of this sort.

I really could have pursued a career in philosophy—as hard as that is to believe. You’re asking: Can anybody get hired in that field? But as a young man, I managed to beat out a dozen Rhode Scholars when I took a first in the subject at Oxford. I even got exempted from the oral exams on the strength of my performance. I could have parlayed that into a PhD and a sweet teaching gig.

Lord Quinton, president of my Oxford college and a famous philosopher in his own right, was the first person to congratulate me. But I could tell he was a little shocked. He knew me as an eccentric jazz musician from Los Angeles, and here I was making a mark in analytic philosophy.

Oxford exam results for Ted Gioia
At age 23, I got my name in The Guardian for my first in PPE—pretty good for a working class kid from Hawthorne—but my encounters with consequentialist ethical systems soured me on philosophy

But I walked away from all this—because I‘d grown disillusioned with analytical philosophy, and especially the misguided ethical systems that were at the core of my studies. These were the predecessors of Effective Altruism. That term didn’t exist back then, but the worldview did—these systems are all variants of utilitarianism, a starry-eyed moral calculus invented by Jeremy Bentham two hundred years ago.

By the way, Bentham also invented the Panopticon, a prison concept that is the model for today’s surveillance capitalism.

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Marginal Revolution

The Value of Behavioral Policies

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Behavioral interventions have become central to modern public policy, but their empirical promise remains contested because estimated treatment effects often appear small. We argue that a policy response is economically meaningful only relative to the response generated by alternative policies. We assemble more than 1,200 estimates from over 600 studies comparing “nudges” and traditional price interventions in the markets for cigarettes, alcohol, influenza vaccination, electricity, and residential water. Translating nudge effects into equivalent price changes, we find that behavioral interventions often correspond to enormous fiscal interventions, from an 11% tax on electricity to a 100% subsidy on influenza vaccinations. Nudges are also more cost-effective than price instruments in all markets, but cost-effectiveness does not predict the welfare ranking of policies. Using a behavioral extension of the Marginal Value of Public Funds, we show that nudges have high welfare returns at the margin, while price instruments often generate larger total surplus at scale.

That is from a new NBER working paper by John A. List, Matthias Rodemeier, Sutanuka Roy & Gregory K. Sun.

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NASA Science

The Paradox of Lençóis Maranhenses National Park

Michala Garrison
Updated
 
Bright white sand dunes stretch for dozens of kilometers between the dark blue Atlantic Ocean and green coastal vegetation. Blue and green freshwater lagoons fill low areas between the dunes, while dark-green vegetated patches lie within the dune field.
A mosaic of hundreds of freshwater lagoons partially filled the troughs around many of the park’s dunes when the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 captured this image on June 8, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

The coastal dune system in Lençóis Maranhenses National Park in northeastern Brazil is among the most surreal landscapes on Earth. At first glance, the park looks like a desert, but it is far from it. This place receives about 125 centimeters (50 inches) of rain per year—slightly more than Seattle and double what falls in London. 

The result is a paradox: rows of sparkling white quartz dunes, some rising 30 meters (100 feet), soar over a mosaic of blue and green freshwater lagoons. The park’s name stems from the Portuguese word lençóis, meaning “bedsheets,” a reference that makes the most sense when the park is viewed from afar. From that perspective, the sweeping curves of the largest coastal dune field in South America resemble a rumpled, white bedsheet.

These Landsat 9 images were captured in June 2026, around the time when lagoon water levels typically peak. The partially impermeable layer of bedrock and clay beneath the sand prevents the lagoons from draining during the wet season. However, as rains subside between August and November, the water table falls, and by December, most of the lagoons dry up.

The various blue and greens of the lagoons are more visible in this view of a portion of the dune field. A small river with brown water is visible running northward through the dune field.
Winds blowing from the northeast created the lines of dunes visible in this detailed view of a portion of the Landsat 9 image shown above.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

The dune field, a tan area within an expanse of green, is the centerpiece of the park. It spans about 900 square kilometers (350 square miles), roughly the size of New York City. From above, shallower lagoons appear light blue, often taking on turquoise or aquamarine hues as sunlight reflects off the sand below. Deeper lagoons are darker, a result of the deeper water absorbing more red, yellow, and green wavelengths, leaving mostly blue light to scatter back. Suspended sediment, microscopic algae, and dissolved organic matter also contribute to the array of colors, giving some lagoons greener and browner tones.                                    

Green vegetation surrounds the dune field, which sits at the intersection of three Brazilian biomes: the Amazon rainforest to the west, the tropical wooded savannas of the Cerrado to the south, and the dry shrublands and thorn forests of the Caatinga to the east. Closest to the dunes are mangroves and restinga forests, ecosystems well adapted to sandy, coastal soils.

The dune field exists because of the rare convergence of geologic and climatic conditions. Rivers, including the Mearim and Parnaíba, deliver the key ingredient—quartz sand—to this unusually flat portion of the Maranhão coastline in massive quantities. It has accumulated here over the past few hundred thousand years driven in part by fluctuating sea levels and shoreline transgression and regression. Persistent easterly trade winds have also played a critical role. During the dry season, winds often reach at least 50 kilometers per hour, fast enough to build the dunes and push them westward at a pace of roughly 4 to 25 meters per year. That is fast for sand dunes, though not the fastest in the world. Satellites have tracked small barchan dunes in Namibia’s Sperrgebiet region moving at rates exceeding 80 meters per year.

Bright white sand dunes stretch for dozens of kilometers between the dark blue Atlantic Ocean and green coastal vegetation. Blue and green freshwater lagoons fill low areas between the dunes, while dark-green vegetated patches lie within the dune field.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

Landsat images, meanwhile, show the dune field at Lençóis Maranhenses has extended westward by about 0.5 kilometers between 1986 and 2026 in some areas due to the conveyor belt of dunes running inland from the coastline. The nearly constant movement of sand prevents vegetation from becoming established across much of the dune field.

UNESCO declared the park a World Heritage site in 2024, citing its remarkable geology and rich biodiversity. The park is home to more than 850 documented species, including fish, birds, reptiles, mammals, and phytoplankton. Among them are four endangered species, including the neotropical otter, West Indian manatee, scarlet ibis, and oncilla (a type of wild cat). Among the lagoons’ most remarkable inhabitants are the trahira (Hoplias malabaricus), a predatory fish species with large canine-like teeth. During the dry season, it burrows far enough under the sand to find damp mud, where it enters a dormant state, emerging after the rains to hunt insects and other fish.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.

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Bright white sand dunes stretch for dozens of kilometers between the dark blue Atlantic Ocean and green coastal vegetation. Blue and green freshwater lagoons fill low areas between the dunes, while dark-green vegetated patches lie within the dune field.

June 8, 2026

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The Map Room

Nauru Changes Its Name to Naoero

Jonathan Crowe
Updated
AP: “The Pacific Island country of Nauru has changed its name to the Republic of Naoero, its president said, matching the spelling and pronunciation in the national language.” See also RNZ coverage. This follows other countries’ name… More
DCReport.org

Back to School in a Mixed-Status Household

Our Friends
Updated

School buses return to their routes this month. For millions of households where parents and children hold different immigration statuses, so does a question the buses do not answer: what a school district may ask at the registration desk, and what federal agents may do at the curb.

The mixed-status families’ school year now runs on two tracks: a constitutional guarantee that has not moved since 1982, and a federal enforcement posture that changed in January 2025.

Why This August Is Not Like Other Augusts

On Jan. 20, 2025, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman rescinded the guidelines  that had kept immigration agents away from schools, churches and health care facilities. A department spokesperson said the change meant “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches,” and that the administration trusted officers to use common sense.

The rescission of these policies has heightened community concerns regarding immigration enforcement near schools, altering the calculus for families making everyday decisions about transportation and classroom participation.

Enforcement volume followed. Immigration and Customs Enforcement booked more than 43,000 people into detention in June, averaging 1,438 a day, and 1,593 a day over the first 11 days of July, according to agency figures reported by Government Executive . Preliminary Homeland Security data reported by CBS News in early August put July’s total above 46,000. School attendance and deportation fear now collide inside districts that answer to state truancy law but have no say over federal enforcement.

What “Protected Areas” Used to Cover

DHS’s Protected Areas  policy, issued in October 2021, prohibited arrests, interviews, searches and surveillance at K-12 schools, early learning centers, school bus stops and school events, except in extraordinary circumstances involving an immediate threat to public safety.

Its rescission in January 2025 left districts dealing with federal agents without any written limit on where those agents could go.

What Federal Law Still Guarantees Every Student

The constitutional floor has not moved. The U.S. Supreme Court precedent established in Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982)  continues to dictate that state and local education agencies cannot deny K-12 public school enrollment based on immigration status. The court determined that withholding basic public education creates a distinct subclass of residents, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Consequently, immigrant students’ rights in public schools remain constitutionally protected across all 50 states, regardless of state legislative proposals or executive directives attempting to restrict municipal funding.

This legal precedent guarantees education access regardless of immigration status, establishing that local school districts are legally obligated to enroll all eligible children residing within their geographic boundaries. School districts that attempt to impose conditions designed to deter undocumented children or require proof of legal residency face immediate federal judicial challenge.

What a School Cannot Ask For

Joint guidance from the Justice and Education departments  defines what documentation a public school may request at registration . School districts cannot require a Social Security number, foreign passport details or specific citizenship documentation as a condition of enrollment.

Furthermore, administrative staff are prohibited from inquiring into the legal status of students or their parents. The same guidance covers children of undocumented parents and enrollment: districts must accept alternative proof of residency, such as a utility bill, a lease or a sworn affidavit

Parents who read Spanish can consult a Spanish-language guide to immigrant children’s rights  that walks through enrollment documents and the privacy rules covering student records.

The Attendance Numbers Tell the Story

The Urban Institute surveyed immigrant families in December 2025  and found that 10% of those with children had kept a child home from school, child care or after-school activities to avoid drawing attention to a family member’s immigration status. Among mixed-status families the figure was 18%, and 37% said they worried about sending their children, compared with 11% of immigrant families made up entirely of citizens.

District records show the same pattern . Daily absences in one California district rose 22% after ICE raids in early 2025, with the sharpest increase among the youngest students. In a UCLA survey of high school principals conducted between June and August 2025, 64% said students from immigrant families had missed school that year because of immigration policy or rhetoric.

The funding consequences follow the absences. States allocate money to districts largely through average daily attendance formulas, so when families keep children home, districts lose revenue that pays for teachers, special education staff and after-school programs.

What the Supreme Court Settled in June — and What It Didn’t

A separate change came from Congress, not the court. H.R. 1 , passed by the 119th Congress, narrows Medicaid and CHIP eligibility for some immigrant households starting Oct. 1, 2026. The cuts do not touch public school access, but they add paperwork for the same low-income families managing the school year.

However, the court permitted the implementation of statutory restrictions regarding state-level administrative access to federally funded safety-net benefits, including emergency healthcare expansion and subsidized family coverage options. While these health coverage adjustments do not alter public education mandates, they impose additional administrative burdens on low-income households.

Preparedness Before the First Bell

Legal aid groups recommend that mixed-status households put a family preparedness plan for detention in writing before the first day of class. In practice that means three things on file: a signed caregiver authorization naming the adult who can pick a child up and consent to medical care; copies of birth certificates, passports and any immigration paperwork held by someone outside the home; and a written instruction to the school about who may be contacted and what a district may release.

School boards now sit between a state mandate to educate every resident child and a federal enforcement posture they do not control. Whether federal policy treats that enforcement as more urgent than educational continuity is the question shaping the coming school year.

Photo: kimmi jun via Pexels

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DCReport.org

The Workers Who Rebuilt Western North Carolina Speak Spanish

Our Friends
Updated

Spanish-speaking construction workers cleared the debris Hurricane Helene left across Western North Carolina in September 2024.

They gutted flood-soaked buildings in Asheville’s River Arts District and repaired homes throughout the mountain counties, alongside local crews and laborers brought in from other states.

HUD allocated the state $1.4 billion in disaster-recovery funding, and the N.C. Department of Commerce counted more than 7,000 housing applications  by Dec. 31 in its 2025 Helene recovery summary. The state’s recovery reports offer no comparable count of the workforce.

DCReport documented in July  that Spanish speakers struggled to get aid and storm information in their own language. That fits a wider national pattern: recovery programs track money and finished projects more closely than the people hired to do the work.

Who actually rebuilt the mountain counties?

Enlace Latino NC  described the Asheville cleanup as work that required Latino labor. Its reporter found about 10 workers from Winston-Salem gutting a flooded building in the River Arts District.

When she approached them, a man walked over and asked her to leave, saying he paid their salaries. “This is a free country, but they’re working for me,” he said.

Einar Rojas came from Chicago, recruited by a contractor who organizes disaster crews, the same route that had taken him to Florida after Hurricane Ian. He had been in Asheville almost two weeks, working more than 10 hours a day, seven days a week.

Rojas said roughly 100 Venezuelan workers in his group stayed in a hotel the contracting company paid for, a company the outlet could not identify. Buncombe County said contractors were responsible for the safety and treatment of those workers, and that it had no data on how many temporary workers arrived.

How dangerous is this work?

Nationally, Hispanic or Latino workers died at a rate of 4.3 per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers  in 2024, against 3.3 for all workers, and 68.5% of those deaths involved workers born outside the United States. By the National Safety Council’s count , 2024 marked the eighth straight year of Hispanic or Latino workers recording the highest death rate of any group.

The state picture moves year to year. N.C. recorded 196 workplace deaths in 2024 , up 10.7% from 177 the year before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in March. Latino worker deaths fell from 41 to 30 over that year, and construction deaths dropped from 43 to 36, still the most of any private industry in the state.

A study of N.C. fatalities from 1992 through 2017  found Hispanic men died on the job at 2.11 times the rate of white men. Hispanic workers logged 32% of their worker-years in construction but 58% of their fatalities there.

Pay disappears too. Among 171 day laborers surveyed in Louisiana after Hurricane Ida, half reported wage theft , and 91% of them said it happened during the previous two months of recovery work.

Does safety training reach Spanish-speaking construction workers?

Employers must provide safety training  in a language and vocabulary workers can understand, OSHA policy states. The agency tells its own inspectors to look past the paperwork, because a company may hold training records for employees who never understood what the training covered.

That gap matters on disaster sites, where crews enter flood-damaged buildings, pull apart unstable debris and work around electrical hazards. Rojas said his Asheville crew used helmets, gloves, masks and boots. Equipment is not instruction. In that same Louisiana survey, only 15% of workers said they had received any training at all for the sites they were entering.

Contractor chains blur that responsibility further. A recruiter assembles the crew, a subcontractor assigns the task and a supervisor gives directions out loud at the site. The state’s Helene recovery reports do not state what safety instruction those crews received, who gave it or in what language.

What happens when a rebuild worker gets hurt?

Establishing who the employer was comes first. A rebuild crew can sit under a general contractor, a subcontractor, a labor recruiter and a crew leader at once. Whoever directs the work may call a worker an independent contractor, though the N.C. Industrial Commission can look past that label to ask who controlled the job.

Most N.C. businesses with three or more employees must carry workers’ compensation insurance. An injured worker generally faces two deadlines: written notice to the employer within 30 days, then a Form 18 claim filed with the commission within two years. The commission warns that an employer’s own accident report does not satisfy the second , so a worker who assumes the boss handled it can lose the claim.

An uninsured subcontractor is not the end of the inquiry. State law can make a principal contractor liable when a subcontractor lacks required coverage. N.C. courts have held  that immigration status does not automatically erase eligibility. A separate claim may exist when another company or a defective product caused the injury.

A Spanish-language guide to how North Carolina handles on-the-job injury claims , walks through the same sequence, from first report to filing deadline.

Who is supposed to inspect the rebuild?

N.C. handles most construction inspections within the state. Under an OSHA-approved State Plan , the N.C. Occupational Safety and Health Division has authority over most private workplaces, so the inspectors who reach a Buncombe County job site work for the state.

Federal money still shapes that capacity. For fiscal 2026 the Labor Department asked Congress to cut 223 OSHA positions and eliminate the $12.8 million Susan Harwood Training Grant Program, which trains workers on workplace hazards, calling the grants “wasteful and unnecessary.” Congress refused. It funded Harwood in full and raised state-plan grants to $120 million, though OSHA staffing still fell to 1,639 positions from 1,810.

The request is back. For fiscal 2027  the department again proposes eliminating Harwood, cuts state-plan grants by $4.8 million and projects 36,323 state-program inspections nationwide, down from 38,642 for fiscal 2026.

The state’s recovery reporting does not show how many Helene-related inspections N.C. OSH conducted, what violations inspectors found or how many followed an injury complaint.

What would actually change the pattern?

Some of this needs no new law. Employers already owe training in a language each worker understands, and no Helene recovery report shows whether that happened. State-funded rebuild contracts could require naming subcontractors, labor recruiters and insurance carriers. N.C. OSH could publish Helene-related inspections, violations and injury complaints as a set.

Reporting channels matter as much as rules. After Ida, 96% of surveyed day laborers could not name a single organization that would help them file a wage claim. Community groups reach workers that agency notices miss, without carrying the legal duty that sits with employers and inspectors.

Major disasters create a workforce after the emergency crews leave. Those crews move from storm to storm, as Rojas did from Florida to N.C., while recovery programs count dollars and finished homes.

The people who cleared the mud remain outside that record, in N.C. and in every state that rebuilds, and leaving them there is a choice public agencies can reverse.

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Why Workers’ Compensation Information Doesn’t Reach Spanish-Speaking Workers

Our Friends
Updated

DCReport reported on July 17 that Spanish-speaking residents of western North Carolina were left at the margins of disaster information after Hurricane Helene. Language barriers in government benefits work more quietly: the explanation appears in one language, the number in another.

Workers’ compensation language access decides one narrow thing: whether an injured worker can find out what an injury is worth under state rules without asking someone else to read it. New York makes that harder than its own record suggests.

The New York State Workers’ Compensation Board translates a great deal: Spanish fact sheets, claim guides, a free phone line that arranges interpreters. The current dollar figures are another matter. They sit on English pages, beside the tables that set what a permanently damaged hand is worth in weeks of pay.

How Many Workers Face a Language Barrier on the Job?

The workforce numbers usually cited here track country of birth, ethnicity and occupation. None were built to answer the language question.

Immigrants made up 26.3% of the U.S. construction workforce in 2024, a record share, according to a National Association of Home Builders analysis of Census Bureau data reported by Construction Dive. Among workers in the trades, about one in three is foreign-born.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the same population from the other end: fatal injuries to foreign-born Hispanic or Latino workers, counted separately because the group is large enough to count.

That analysis sorts workers by where they were born, not by what language they read, and, Construction Dive noted, not by work authorization. So the 26.3% measures a workforce, not a language barrier. It does show where the risk sits: the trades are where a crushed hand becomes lost paychecks and a claim.

What New York Publishes and in Which Language

New York explains its workers’ compensation rules in two languages. The Board’s pages on disability classifications and on awards for permanent loss of use set out the categories in detail. The current dollar amounts sit on an English page.

The Board’s Spanish guide to Schedule Loss of Use awards carries the full table of benefit weeks by body part. Its Spanish fact sheet on lost wages carries the formula: two-thirds of average weekly wage, adjusted by the degree of disability, capped at two-thirds of the statewide average wage.

What that fact sheet does carry is a table of maximum weekly amounts, and the table stops at $1,222.42, the cap for accidents from July 1, 2025, through June 30, 2026. The cap that took effect July 1, 2026 — $1,281.50 — is not in it. Neither is the current $384.45 minimum; the Spanish sheet lists the 2024 and 2025 minimums and then says the figure will be indexed to a fifth of the statewide average wage. The workers’ compensation translation gap is that narrow and that consequential: a worker reading only Spanish can follow the rule, find a dollar figure, and have last year’s.

What the Benefit Schedule Actually Says

New York sets a maximum number of benefit weeks for the permanent loss of use of certain body parts, whether or not the part is gone. An arm carries 312 weeks, a leg 288, a hand 244, a foot 205, an eye 160, a thumb 75 and an index finger 46.

Those are ceilings for total loss, not automatic payouts; a partial loss earns the matching share of the weeks. For accidents from July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2027, the weekly rate cannot top $1,281.50, and cannot fall below $384.45 or the worker’s actual wage, whichever is lower. A year earlier the cap was $1,222.42, and an injury keeps the numbers in force that day.

Those week values and current rates sit together, with the same benefit schedule explained in Spanish  and a worked example.

That matters more than it should, because the Board’s own Spanish table is wrong. Both editions of “Understanding Your Schedule Loss of Use Award” carry January 2019 version codes — SLU-UnderstandingSLU-flat-1-v1 in English, ES-SLU-UnderstandingSLU-flat-1-v1 in Spanish — and both remain posted. The English table follows state law: first finger, 46 weeks; second finger, 30; third finger, 25; fourth finger, 15. The Spanish table keeps those numbers and shifts the names, so the little finger appears at 46 weeks and the index finger at 30.

The pamphlet cannot change the law. It can change what a worker expects when an offer arrives. Sixteen weeks separate 46 from 30, and at the state’s top rate that is $20,504.

How a Scheduled Loss of Use Award Is Calculated

A Schedule Loss of Use award multiplies the weeks the law assigns to a body part by the share of permanent use lost, paid at two-thirds of average weekly wage. The Board’s example takes a 25% loss of an arm, turns 312 weeks into 78, and at a $900 weekly wage arrives at $46,800 before deductions.

A doctor reports that percentage once the injury stops improving, and a Board judge decides it when the insurer’s examiner disagrees. Temporary benefits already paid come off the total. The arithmetic is simple. Finding out which week figure applies, and which cap was in force that day, is not.

Does Immigration Status Change Eligibility?

In New York, immigration status does not by itself disqualify an injured worker from benefits. The state attorney general’s guidance for immigrant workers lists workers’ compensation among the protections that hold whatever a worker’s status.

Section 17 of New York’s Workers’ Compensation Law, headed “Noncitizens,” sets compensation for noncitizens who are not residents of the United States or Canada, or are about to leave, at the same amount provided for residents. The section does carve out one limit: dependents in a foreign country are restricted to a surviving spouse and children, or, absent those, a parent the worker supported for the year before the accident.

The attorney general’s guidance itself appears in 13 languages, from Spanish and Chinese to Haitian Creole and Yiddish. The Board’s current benefit figures appear in one

New York legislated on that problem too. The next section, 17-a, is titled “Limited English proficiency.” It orders the Board to translate the forms injured workers fill out, the guides explaining how to apply and all other vital documents, and to name a language access coordinator.

What the Fatality Data Shows About Who Is Affected

Hispanic workers are dying on the job at a higher rate than the workforce as a whole. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 5,070 fatal work injuries nationwide in 2024, a rate of 3.3 per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers, the second yearly drop.

Hispanic or Latino workers accounted for 1,229 of those deaths, at a rate of 4.3. Of those 1,229, 842, or 68.5%, were born outside the United States.

The AFL-CIO’s 2026 “Death on the Job” reads those same figures as a trend rather than a snapshot: Latino workers face the highest fatality risk of any group, 30% above the national average, and the immigrant share of those deaths is larger than in previous years. Construction ran 9.2 per 100,000, nearly three times the national rate.

Those numbers do not measure English proficiency, and cannot show that a language barrier caused any death. What they do show is who is dying at work. Behind each of those deaths is a family that has to work out what the system pays.

Section 17-a tells the Board’s coordinator to gather data each year on language services, translated materials and signage. Availability is what the statute names. It does not name a check that the Spanish figures match the English ones.

The test is mechanical: follow each version to an answer and the two either agree or they don’t. When one version needs an English search box, a phone call or a bilingual relative to get there, the information is public without being equally usable. The same test applies to any agency publishing in two languages.

The Board’s Spanish pamphlet, dated January 2019 and still posted, caps an index finger at 30 weeks of benefits. New York law caps it at 46. A worker deciding whether to take a settlement offer is deciding with that gap in hand.

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DCReport.org

A Conviction Can Follow You Into Immigration Court

Our Friends
Updated

In the American legal system, criminal convictions and federal immigration enforcement run on separate tracks that meet at one point: the record of conviction. Public perception treats criminal trials and immigration hearings as distinct realms, but the immigration consequences of criminal convictions outlast the sentence.

A single guilty plea, plea bargain or misdemeanor conviction in local court can trigger removal proceedings, mandatory detention and a bar on return.

<h2> Two Court Systems, One Set of Facts

Criminal courts and immigration courts operate under entirely separate jurisdictional frameworks, administrative structures and legal standards. Criminal courts, whether state or federal, determine guilt or innocence and assign punitive measures such as probation, fines, community service or incarceration. Once an individual completes an ordered sentence or satisfies probation, criminal court jurisdiction over the matter formally terminates.

In contrast, federal immigration enforcement operates primarily under the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These administrative bodies do not retry underlying criminal facts; instead, they review the certified record of conviction to determine whether an individual retains the statutory right to remain in the United States under Section 237 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Consequently, an outcome deemed minor in a state courtroom can serve as the sole evidentiary foundation for federal deportation.

<h3> Why a Finished Sentence Isn’t a Finished Case

For non-citizens, the conclusion of a criminal proceeding rarely guarantees the end of legal exposure. Under federal immigration statutes, administrative sanctions operate completely independently of state judicial sentencing. The civil legal impacts stemming directly from a criminal case disposition are recognized as the collateral consequences of a plea.

Even when a criminal judge waives jail time, orders conditional discharge or later expunges a record under state rehabilitation statutes, federal immigration law continues to evaluate the initial admission of guilt. Under Section 101(a)(48)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), a conviction exists for federal immigration purposes whenever there is a formal finding of guilt or a plea of guilty or nolo contendere, combined with any judge-ordered penalty, fine or restraint on liberty.

<h2> Which Convictions Make Someone Deportable

Federal immigration law establishes explicit statutory categories under Section 237 of the INA that render non-citizens subject to expulsion. A conviction that falls within these federal categories is a deportable offense, and it can expose a lawful permanent resident or temporary visa holder to removal years after the sentence ends.

Among the primary grounds for deportation are crimes involving moral turpitude (CIMT). Although the INA does not explicitly define “moral turpitude,” judicial precedent characterizes these offenses as acts involving grave baseness, vileness or dishonesty contrary to societal duties.

<h3> The “Aggravated Felony” Label Is Not What It Sounds Like

A widespread misconception in criminal law is that mandatory deportation applies exclusively to violent offenders. In reality, federal immigration statutes apply an expansive aggravated felony classification under Section 101(a)(43) of the INA that encompasses numerous non-violent and minor state-level offenses.

State-level misdemeanors — such as theft carrying a one-year suspended sentence, or tax and fraud offenses where the loss exceeds $10,000 — can be categorized as aggravated felonies under federal law. The classification is determined by federal statutory definitions rather than the label assigned by state courts.

<h2> The Supreme Court Said Defense Lawyers Have to Warn You

The Supreme Court addressed that gap in Padilla v. Kentucky, 559 U.S. 356 (2010):

In a 7-2 decision authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court held that the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel requires criminal defense attorneys to inform non-citizen clients of deportation risks before entering a guilty plea. The petitioner, Jose Padilla, was a lawful permanent resident and Vietnam War veteran who pleaded guilty to transporting marijuana after defense counsel erroneously assured him he faced no immigration risk.

<h2> A Record Can Also Block Citizenship

Beyond triggering immediate removal proceedings, criminal adjudications directly affect a non-citizen’s eligibility to adjust legal status, renew green cards or obtain U. S. citizenship through naturalization. Federal immigration adjudicators, applying the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Policy Manual, evaluate an applicant’s complete record to determine whether the individual satisfies the statutory requirement of Good Moral Character (GMC) during the required look-back period — typically five years preceding the naturalization application.

The direct link between an individual’s immigration status and criminal record means that minor offenses that do not trigger immediate deportation can still prevent naturalization. Under Section 101(f) of the INA, convictions involving controlled substances, multiple gambling violations or a cumulative penal confinement of 180 days or more automatically preclude a finding of Good Moral Character, stalling an applicant’s path to citizenship.

<h2> Most People Face This Without a Lawyer

Unlike the federal criminal justice system, civil immigration court does not guarantee court-appointed counsel for people who cannot afford it. Vera Institute of Justice data shows 67% of people in removal proceedings appear without a lawyer. The American Immigration Council reports that detained respondents without counsel are ordered removed 93% of the time, compared with 82% of those who have a lawyer, and that representation correlates with a 97% hearing appearance rate.

The gap is widest for people who enter removal proceedings after conviction, where a case straddles both systems. Nevada offers a concrete example: a plea negotiated in a Las Vegas courtroom can decide a federal admissibility question years later, which is why the work is often handled by a Las Vegas criminal and immigration law firm  rather than split between two separate lawyers.

<h2> The Backlog Turns Delay Into Its Own Penalty

According to the Congressional Research Service report on U.S. immigration courts and the pending cases backlog, the federal immigration court backlog exceeded 1.7 million pending cases as of February 2026. Counts vary by methodology and reporting source. In several high-volume immigration courts, average wait times for an initial master calendar or individual merits hearing now exceed four years.

Non-citizens in administrative detention or released on bond wait years while federal policy and case law shift around them, turning the backlog into a secondary penalty the sentence never imposed.

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The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Tuesday 4 August 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

We were called up about four a-clock, and being ready went and took a Gravesend boat, and to London by nine a-clock. By the way talking of several businesses of the navy. So to the office, where Sir Wm. Pen (the first time that he has been with us a great while, he having been long sick) met us, and there we sat all the morning.

My brother John I find come to town to my house, as I sent for him, on Saturday last; so at noon home and dined with him, and after dinner and the barber been with me I walked out with him to my viall maker’s and other places and then left him, and I by water to Blackbury’s, and there talked with him about some masts (and by the way he tells me that Paul’s is now going to be repaired in good earnest), and so with him to his garden close by his house, where I eat some peaches and apricots; a very pretty place. So over the water to Westminster hall, and not finding Mrs. Lane, with whom I purposed to be merry, I went to Jervas’s and took him and his wife over the water to their mother Palmer’s (the woman that speaks in the belly, and with whom I have two or three years ago made good sport with Mr. Mallard), thinking because I had heard that she is a woman of that sort that I might there have lit upon some lady of pleasure (for which God forgive me), but blest be God there was none, nor anything that pleased me, but a poor little house that she has set out as fine as she can, and for her singing which she pretends to is only some old body songs and those sung abominably, only she pretends to be able to sing both bass and treble, which she do something like, but not what I thought formerly and expected now; nor do her speaking in her belly take me now as it did then, but it may be that is because I know it and see her mouth when she speaks, which should not be.

After I had spent a shilling there in wine I took boat with Jervas and his wife and set them at Westminster, and it being late forbore Mrs. Lane and went by water to the Old Swan by a boat, where I had good sport with one of the young men about his travells as far as Voxhall, in mockery, which yet the fellow answered me most prettily and traveller-like unto my very good mirth. So home, and with my brother eat a bit of bread and cheese, and so to bed, he with me.

This day I received a letter from my wife, which troubles me mightily, wherein she tells me how Ashwell did give her the lie to her teeth, and that thereupon my wife giving her a box on the eare, the other struck her again, and a deal of stir which troubles me, and that my Lady has been told by my father or mother something of my wife’s carriage, which altogether vexes me, and I fear I shall find a trouble of my wife when she comes home to get down her head again, but if Ashwell goes I am resolved to have no more, but to live poorly and low again for a good while, and save money and keep my wife within bounds if I can, or else I shall bid Adieu to all content in the world. So to bed, my mind somewhat disturbed at this, but yet I shall take care, by prudence, to avoid the ill consequences which I fear, things not being gone too far yet, and this height that my wife is come to being occasioned from my own folly in giving her too much head heretofore for the year past.

Read the annotations

Daring Fireball

Apple Seeks Preliminary Injunction Against OpenAI in Trade Secrets Case

John Gruber
Updated

Reuters:

Apple on Monday asked a U.S. judge for a preliminary injunction barring two former employees ​and OpenAI from accessing, acquiring, using or disclosing alleged confidential information as it moves ahead with its trade secrets case. [...]

The iPhone maker also filed a concurrent motion on Monday seeking expedited discovery, including production of documents relating to the defendants’ alleged access ​of Apple’s proprietary and trade secret information. It asked the judge to order the two ​former Apple employees named in the lawsuit, Chang Liu and Tang Yew Tan, to sit for depositions, along with OpenAI employee Yu-Ting Peng and an unnamed OpenAI employee who previously worked at ​Apple.

The request for expedited discovery and the depositions, I understand. Apple wants to move fast, and they want to get depositions (especially, I’m sure, with Tan) now. The preliminary injunction request, though, I think Reuters is underplaying here.

I suggest reading Apple’s actual motion, not the news coverage. From Apple’s motion:

OpenAI, its people, and partners should not be permitted to develop, release, and benefit from products using and developed with the benefit of Apple’s trade secrets.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Bending Spoons to Buy Airtable for $1.3 Billion

John Gruber
Updated

Ivan Mehta, reporting for TechCrunch:

In its first acquisition since going public last month, Bending Spoons on Tuesday said that it has agreed to buy spreadsheet and database startup Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash.

Founded in 2013, Airtable has so far raised over $1.4 billion over multiple funding rounds. At its peak, during the boom days of 2021, it was valued at over $11 billion, but earlier this year, its shares were said to be trading on the secondary markets at a valuation of $4 billion.

With its current net cash-and-cash-equivalents balance, Airtable is now valued at about $2.25 billion, Bending Spoons said.

The problem isn’t that Airtable isn’t a good product with a good business. According to the announcement, Airtable’s revenue is up to $480 million/year and grew 20 percent year-over-year. That’s good. That’s just not $11-billion-valuation good. In the abstract building a company worth $1 billion is a success; it’s a problem, though, if its financials are such that it needs to justify a valuation an order of magnitude greater than what it’s actually worth.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

TerminalWidget 1.0

John Gruber
Updated

New app from Brett Terpstra:

TerminalWidget lets you send output from commands, scripts, APIs, and Shortcuts directly to widgets across macOS, iOS, and iPadOS with rich formatting, progress bars, sparklines, and image support. It is available as a universal app on the App Store for $19.99.

I don’t know what I’m going to use this for, but I know I want to use it.

 ★ 
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Trump Is Conceding a Hormuz Tolling Regime to Iran

Josh Marshall
Updated

President Trump is now demanding that Iran reach a deal with Oman on the Strait of Hormuz as soon as today or face devastating attacks from the United States. On its face, you can put this in the same bucket of Trump’s last six months: threats about ending Iranian civilization or committing various war crimes or whatever. But this is actually an example of how deep a hole the U.S. is now in, and how rapidly it’s sliding into conceding a system of post-war Iranian tolls on the Strait as a given.

What Iran and Oman are negotiating is an interim agreement in which they will jointly manage a system of tolls (calling them “service fees”) over what is an international waterway. The White House would certainly point out that this is a temporary rather than a permanent deal. But something so fundamental conceded in a provisional or temporary agreement is seldom withdrawn in a final accord. The mix of control and revenue this provides to Iran amounts to a massive strategic gain from the war Trump began back in February. But it seems well on the way to becoming a given in U.S. post-war plans.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

The Backstory of the Data Center Backlash

Josh Marshall
Updated

In response to last week’s post about AI data centers, I got this fascinating response from TPM Reader RK. Very interesting details and nuanced. But mostly I find it fascinating because it complicates the storyline by placing the data center rebellion in a line of continuity with earlier opposition, in the same or similar communities, to efforts to build wind turbines or solar arrays — stuff liberals obviously think is great.

Intrigued by this post, as I’ve spent the past 2+ years lurking at township halls in Michigan, working on a book about the rising backlash against big companies with big plans to transform how land is used in rural communities. 

It didn’t start with data centers. I was originally interested in how rural communities are pushing back hard against solar and wind farms. In Michigan, you have Gov Whitmer pushing a clean energy agenda, which requires vast swaths of open land. It takes a lot of real estate to replace an oil or gas plant with a solar or wind farm, and that much open space is not available in cities or suburbs. So you wind up in rural areas where voters lean conservative, are skeptical about climate change, and would prefer to see their pleasant landscape left alone. Lots of yelling, recall elections, angry rhetoric as formerly sleepy town halls turn into sights of intense conflict.

This pits one groups of residents against another. Farmers who are offered leases from utility companies are happy to sign, for a steady source of income that doesn’t depend on weather or commodity prices.  Their neighbors, with smaller holdings and no lease $$ available, are not happy to see their communities transformed on behalf of the “Green New Scam.”  The utility companies, interestingly, wind up on the side of the progressive governor.  Not because they’re climate warriors, but because they make good –and guaranteed — money every time they build new power generating facilities (regardless of the energy source.)

I thought I was onto a nice, tight story about possible obstacles to decarbonizing the electric grid, and how they might be overcome, with big business, for a change, on the side of the enviros. Then the data center guys showed up. 
This happened in early 2025, after the same governor pushed a sweet tax break for data center developers at end of 2024.  Now you have the same dynamic, angry neighbors pitted against large landowners who want to cash in on data center bonanza (in this instance, selling land instead of leasing it.)  But the coalition of opponents is  different, this time including liberals and enviros (who love solar farms but energy-sucking data centers.)  Township meetings have to be moved to the local high school to accommodate overflow crowds, there’s lots of yelling, death threats against township officials, a number of local elected resigning their posts rather than face all this pressure.

The oppo to data centers is a horseshoe coalition, joining left and right. People are kinda happy about this, that MAGA red hats can unite with true blue tree-hugging Sierra Club members to fight a common elite enemy.  Among other things, shows you how the right vs left typology that is on autopilot among political journos and other influencers just doesn’t match lived reality for a lot of people.

And I think Josh is exactly right that in our federal system, the hyperlocal authority of local governments is pretty much the only place left where regular people can fight back, successfully, against the tech lords who have intruded into every corner of our lives.  In the 20th century, business elites had to contend with powerful unions, high corporate and personal taxes, robust antitrust enforcement and an emerging regulatory state that was enforcing a growing body of enviro and consumer protections.

Not much of that left anymore. As state and non-state actors wither away, who is left that can say “No, and Fuck NO!” to the likes of Zuckerberg, Ellison, Musk, etc.?  Rural peeps in ballcaps and bluejeans, that’s who.

Book should be out in a year or so, stay tuned.

To be clear, I don’t think this backstory in Michigan is the totality of the data center story. It’s taken root in the politics of 2025 and 2026 in unique and distinct ways. But it’s important to see these movements in their totality and unruliness. Just in the nature of things, we see the parts that are most relevant and comprehensible to us. A lot of the rest we miss.

Another aspect of this is that there’s nothing new about conflicts between cities and rural hinterlands. The town about 60 miles north of New York City where I do most of my woodworking was effectively destroyed by New York City about 130 years. New York City needed more water and more places to put it. So it went to the state legislature and got empowered to find and condemn land to build new reservoirs. It found that land in the town of Southeast, where it went about building a series of reservoirs on the Croton watershed. The state of New York, the sovereign entity, decided the needs of the millions in New York City outweighed those of the few thousands who lived in these farms, villages and small towns in a dairy farming community. Whole farms, village centers and communities are now permanently submerged in those reservoirs which remain the lynchpin of New York City’s water supply. The region’s dairy farms and a factory built there by the Borden company to produce condensed milk provided a key source of supply for the Union Army during the Civil War. But that whole economy was destroyed and eventually replaced by a new economy, first providing weekend getaways for city residents and finally transitioning into a far-flung commuter town.

One can imagine similar — if perhaps less draconian — battles and transformations as resource-hungry cities need renewable electricity to power them. What makes the current data center boom and backlash distinct is that cities aren’t asking for this, certainly not in the basic infrastructure sense that tends to unite whole regions. So the demand for data centers isn’t pitting city against rural hinterland. They don’t have a real base of support anywhere. And people across the political spectrum have found passionate reasons to oppose them.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

El-Sayed Looks Set to Trounce Stevens in Michigan

Josh Marshall
Updated

Tomorrow is primary day in a number of states. Michigan is the state that will get the most attention. There are several big primaries but the Senate one on the Democratic side will get by far the most attention. It pits Abdul El-Sayed against Rep. Haley Stevens. Unless the polls are wildly far off the mark (not impossible in a primary election), El-Sayed will win handily. About a half dozen polls conducted over the last two weeks show El-Sayed winning by 10 points or more, many in the mid to high teens. Meanwhile the balance of general election polls show Stevens very narrowly beating former Rep. Mike Rogers while El-Sayed very narrowly loses to him.

On the general election polls, if we look only at the four polls released in July, they’re sort of scattershot. (I’m going by the polls listed on the New York Times website.) One is very bad for El-Sayed, showing him losing by 10 and Haley winning by one. Another shows El-Sayed tied with Rogers and Stevens losing by three. Two other polls show Stevens narrowly winning and El-Sayed narrowly losing. One of those is Republican sponsored. The other just came out today and is from EPIC-MRA, generally considered the marquee pollster in the state. That one shows Rogers beating El-Sayed by three points and losing to Stevens by two points.

Michigan Democrats definitely have their work cut out for them. That’s not so much because the likely primary winner, El-Sayed, is currently behind by three points, according to EPIC-MRA, but because this has been an incredibly hard-fought, personal and increasingly nasty battle. El-Sayed has a lot of work to do getting Stevens supporters coalesced behind him (the same if Stevens wins in an upset).

I know Stevens supporters in Michigan who think El-Sayed is unelectable. Republicans will run a kind of campaign against El-Sayed a Democrat either cannot or would not; Rogers’ campaign has already taken to referring to El-Sayed by his full name, “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed,” as a taste of the kind of campaign they’ll run.

This prediction may or may not be the case. I’m not without anxiety that it might be. But I don’t think that’s set in stone. In any case, for Democrats who need that Senate seat, the question is moot. It’s El-Sayed or Rogers, a zero-sum equation with power going to Trump or the opposition. El-Sayed will have to find a way to bring Stevens supporters over to him. That’s the responsibility you take on when you win, which it seems all but certain he’ll do tomorrow.

I wanted to add a bit of a cautionary note to anyone who thinks that El-Sayed is toast, either because of these polls or because of El-Sayed’s politics generally.

The first is that Rogers lost to Elissa Slotkin in 2024, which turned out to be a pretty rough year for Democrats and in which Trump actually won the state. Just on the merits, Rogers is not a strong candidate or a particularly able one. That’s an important part of the equation. The other is that these general election polls come after a few months of relentlessly negative campaigns against both Democrats but especially against El-Sayed. Outside expenditures attacking El-Sayed, with a lot of it coming from AIPAC, dwarf those attacking Haley. Meanwhile, Rogers is running basically uncontested in the GOP primary. He’s taking zero incoming fire.

You would expect both Democrats to be softened up by that torrent of negative ads while Rogers has yet to face any. The nastiness of the Democratic primary meanwhile has likely pushed a number of each Democrats’ supporters at least into the undecided category in these polls. That’s why reconsolidating Democrats will be so critical for El-Sayed.

What that all amounts to is that there’s at least a credible argument that El-Sayed’s numbers have room to grow while Rogers’ may not.

Polls in Michigan close tomorrow night at 8 p.m. local time.

Daring Fireball

★ OpenAI Responds to Apple’s Lawsuit and Motion for Preliminary Injunction: ‘Apple Is Getting This Wrong’

John Gruber
Updated

OpenAI published an unbylined blog post overnight, responding in public — but not yet in court — to Apple’s new motion for a preliminary injunction. It’s an unusual move to respond to a high-stakes legal filing with a blog post, but OpenAI is an unusual company. A few snippets from their post, and some commentary:

Apple had claimed that they contacted OpenAI in February and that we didn’t respond. They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names — only after we brought this to their attention.

OpenAI is hanging on to the fact that Apple’s outside counsel, Gabriel Gross, sent one email to the wrong address, and quickly emailed an apology. In OpenAI’s phrasing, it sounds like Apple’s attorney sent the entire initial letter of concern to the wrong person, and that’s why OpenAI never responded — because it wasn’t sent to the correct person (OpenAI general counsel Che Chang). That’s not what happened. The initial blockbuster “hey we think you guys are stealing our trade secrets and we want to talk to you about it” letter was sent to Che Chang. And Che Chang never did respond to Apple’s lawyers. That a mistaken email thanking Che Chang for a phone call that never happened (because that email was intended for another OpenAI employee) was also sent is irrelevant. I don’t understand why OpenAI is continuing to focus on this inconsequential mistake. (Apple’s motion for a preliminary injunction includes the full text of the mistaken email and subsequent apology.)

Apple accuses Chang Liu of accessing Apple confidential information after leaving the company, but only now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information (you can read the messages here). Apple now tries to shift the blame to “residual access”, but they also don’t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave. What that means in practice is that former employees who are trying to do the right thing when they leave still have access to Apple files — despite not wanting them or even being aware of them.

OpenAI is seemingly alluding to Apple’s unusual use of iCloud Drive, tied to employees’ personal Apple Account IDs, that I (coincidentally?) wrote about yesterday. Apple’s motion for injunction, however, addresses this very point. From page 3 of the motion:

Mr. Liu resigned on Thursday, January 22, 2026, and provided notice that he would start at OpenAI the following Tuesday. On his last day, he failed to respond to Apple’s attempt to schedule his exit interview or sign his confidentiality reminder.

In the days following his departure, Mr. Liu seemed initially cooperative and aware of his obligations to Apple. He worked with others on his former Apple team to return certain Apple information remaining on his personal iCloud account to Apple.1 He also continued to converse with former co-workers, for example, to answer questions about his earlier work and where certain information was stored. But these interactions and exchanges cannot explain the repeated, unauthorized downloading of voluminous technical files from Apple’s cloud-based storage discussed below, which Mr. Liu performed on multiple occasions from February to April 2026 while employed by OpenAI.

That footnote reads:

1 While Apple seeks discovery into what Apple confidential information Mr. Liu accessed from his personal storage accounts (including iCloud) and devices after his departure, the specific unauthorized downloads referenced in the complaint and at the heart of this motion are not based on iCloud activity, but instead relate to Apple’s third-party cloud storage.

Nowhere in any of Apple’s filings (here’s the Court Listener index page for all the documents filed in the case) does it say who the third-party cloud storage provider is, but I’m almost certain it’s Box, which I know is widely used throughout Apple.

The iMessage transcripts that OpenAI provides at the bottom of their post do not contradict Apple’s claims at all. Apple’s motion states that Liu helped former colleagues find certain documents that were in iCloud; that’s what OpenAI’s transcript shows. But that’s not in dispute. Apple also claims that Liu accessed confidential information, presumably in Box and definitely not in iCloud Drive, on five different occasions, up until 27 April 2026, over three months after he left Apple. These chat transcripts offer no explanation for that. The chat transcripts explain iCloud Drive access that Apple itself says is not in dispute, and do not explain the 37 documents Liu downloaded from the third-party cloud provider (Box?) that Apple says are at the heart of naming him in the lawsuit. Here is Apple’s declaration from digital forensic specialist Daniel Roffman, documenting Liu’s access to confidential files post-employment (albeit with significant redactions).

I do not understand why OpenAI is treating this as a PR problem instead of as a legal problem. Dan Moren, linking to it from Six Colors, is of similar mind, writing:

What kept running through my head while reading this was the old legal chestnut: “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”

Thus far this feels like table-pounding from OpenAI to me. Their blog post does, however, move the ball from “we have no interest” in Apple’s trade secrets to “we don’t have them”, (emphasis added):

Apple also accuses Tang Tan of trying to get and use their trade secrets. However, Tang has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies. Tang served Apple for more than 24 years and was widely known as one of the most innovative leaders at the company. [...]

Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets. We’re much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.

To me, the most interesting response from OpenAI wasn’t their blog post. It was an email released by Apple, as “Exhibit F” to one of their expert declarations submitted to the court last night. OpenAI has retained the renowned law firm Quinn Emanuel as outside counsel, and this exhibit is a long email from Quinn Emanuel attorney Patrick Curran to Apple’s attorneys. From that email, dated Monday July 20, Curran writes:

You also ask that we “revisit” the specific points proposed in your July 15 letter. It appears that you want to move backwards. As noted, we already discussed these during our meet and confer but Apple was unable to respond to basic questions my colleagues raised about these requests. For example, your letter proposes that OpenAI “[p]roduce witnesses to testify at deposition” but Apple was unable to identify who those witnesses would be. Similarly, Apple was unsure when we asked if it was actually proposing that hundreds of OpenAI employees fill out “questionnaires” even if Apple has no basis to allege (and is indeed not alleging) that such employees have any connection to this litigation. The seven sections in your letter are broadly worded and remain vague and general. This is not what a forensic protocol looks like and we’re sure you understand that you will not get this as relief from the court. You first need to (preliminarily) identify the TS you are suing for, and your email states that you “appreciate the need” to do so. Any protocol will be informed by such identification. A forensic protocol cannot be based on general terms like “Apple confidential information”; you need to tell us what you’re looking for, and it sounds like you understand that and are prepared to do so. The efficient way forward is therefore to tackle these issues as part of the negotiation of a proper, detailed forensic protocol. If you instead prefer to move for a PI because OpenAI did not agree off the bat to subject hundreds of employees to “questionnaires” about “Apple confidential information” generally, that is unfortunate — and inconsistent with what I understand both our clients have requested. If you choose this path instead of working with us, we look forward to filing an opposition that sets the record straight.

Apple, obviously, did choose this path (“PI” = preliminary injunction), and I too look forward to OpenAI’s setting the record straight, especially if they do so in plainspoken language like Curran’s in this email. Curran continues:

Finally, although I know OpenAI would like to resolve this amicably, as their counsel I have to tell you what I think you already know — this case lacks merit. You have not articulated any basis to support a preliminary injunction. Your complaint is predicated on a misrepresentation of facts and allegations that are speculative at best. It fails to even remotely identify any trade secrets. You are attacking ordinary business practices (used widely across the industry). You are complaining about situations that you have caused, including through your own procedures and decisions. We stand ready to oppose any preliminary injunction motion and tell the world what really happened here to set the record straight. We made clear we would prefer to quickly and collaboratively address any legitimate concerns that your client has, but that is not well-served by repeated threats.

This email is a far better response than what OpenAI published on their blog.

Daring Fireball

Yours Truly on TBPN Yesterday

John Gruber
Updated

TBPN seems like a show I wouldn’t enjoy guesting on, but I actually enjoy it quite a bit.

 ★ 
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Max Miller Agrees Allegations Are ‘Troubling,’ Admits He’s on T in Strange CNN Interview

Nicole LaFond
Updated

I break down some of the details in tonight’s edition of Where Things Stand here. It’s the third item in tonight’s newsletter, so just wanted to flag it. It was strange.

Here’s a link to the interview in full.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

End of an Age Vibes as the DC GOP Hegemony Begins to Buckle

Josh Marshall
Updated

The 2006 midterm is often viewed today as the ur-wave election. Indeed, it’s part of the only example in recent decades of two successive wave elections, something that just 20 years later seems almost inconceivable. What’s less remembered is that almost to the very end of the cycle it was considered a very uncertain thing whether Democrats would be able to retake control of the House of Representatives, which they hadn’t controlled since the 1994 blowout. In fact, if you looked at the numbers — polls, special elections, etc. — it had been pretty clear what was coming for months. To explain this discrepancy — how official D.C. had missed what was coming — many focused on the Foley Scandal which broke in September 2006. (Mark Foley, a lightly closeted House Republican got in trouble for what we’d now call sexting with underage male pages in the House page program and was forced to resign.)

I’ve always thought this was basically a dodge, for the reasons I explained above. But the scandal did capture a mix of rot and disintegration, a kind of synaptic breakdown in the Capital Hill Republican hegemony that presaged what was to come. And I think we’re seeing something similar with the rapidly expanding scandals involving Republicans Reps. Max Miller of Ohio and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina. In a way, neither case is intrinsically related to the drivers of Donald Trump’s mounting unpopularity. But the two cases capture the culture of impunity that has defined the last 20 months, as well as the increasing disconnect between what is happening in Washington, D.C., where Trump is all powerful, and the rest of the country, where tidal forces are visibly moving against him. They are functioning eerily as a stand-in for everything else and create this mood, this kind of palpable sign of a majority going off the rails.

Of course, a big difference is that there is a simultaneous rebellion against the national leadership of the Democratic Party. Everyone’s been talking about it for months. It has deep roots. But the basic outlines go back to March of last year when Democrats had their first shot for a showdown with Donald Trump, to force him to the table over his unfolding war against the federal government and democratic governance and decided … just not to. From that moment there’s been a howling gulf between Democratic voters and their top elected officials — a basic sense of ‘are we seeing the same thing?’ To a growing number of Democratic voters, their elected leaders, especially in Washington, D.C., have seemed just not up to the challenge of challenging Donald Trump or simply not interested in doing so.

To some degree there is a matter of almost impossible expectations. Trump’s blitzkrieg through the Constitution, the rule of law and the most essential elements of democratic self-government have been so grave it would be almost impossible for a party, for the moment locked out of power in all three branches government, to meet the expectations of those who oppose him. But that is at best only a partial and limited explanation. There’s simply been a persistent mood and signaling of business as usual that has put the present leaders of the party in Washington, D.C. at odds with the great bulk of their voters. And to a great degree the outcome of the midterm elections will depend on how these two simultaneous and related but distinct unfolding rebellions interact.

As I’ve argued, most of this rebellion within the Democratic Party is not really about ideology, if we define that as support for different policies on a conventional left-right spectrum. It’s about fight. But in numerous states it’s been the progressive left signaling a mix of fight and outrage much more clearly than more ideologically conventional Democrats. So lots of those candidates are winning because they’re operating in the fight lane, which is the only lane that most Democratic voters find acceptable today. But the national climate is more volatile and protean than most national commentary seems to allow. And that makes just how this all plays out hard to predict.

Slashdot
Hacker News
The Aviationist
Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 8/4/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

OpenAI’s amazing — but vastly oversold — new model Astra
Superbug confirmed in 23 states: Where is the deadly fungus spreading in 2026?
Leadership Shakeup at CDC’s Ebola Response Team
Growth-density inversion in Escherichia coli reveals superlinear, not sublinear, density dependence
Long COVID symptoms linked to measurable damage in the brain’s dopamine system
How to spot poison ivy and what to do if you accidentally touch it
Can air purifiers prevent flu and COVID-19 in nursing homes? Only if they’re used properly

Other:

The [Republican] Campaign to Force Genital Exams on Girl Athletes
A Normie Democrat Revolt Is Pushing Abdul El-Sayed Toward Victory
The Electoral Effects of Candidate Ideology in the Trump Era
Senior Trump Official Using Government Account To Smear Sitting Federal Judges
Anger Over Data Centers Is Fueling a New Political Movement
Sales Are So Low, California Wineries Are Burning Their Vineyards
Sci-fi authors Scalzi and Stross decry AI’s dystopian impact on their craft
Reviewing the Searchlight Institute’s Healthcare Proposal
The right-wing bubble seals in the GOP with Max Miller
The House vote that split Jewish Democrats and is reshaping alliances
How Netanyahu’s MAGA Evangelical Backers Are Grappling With Backlash Against Him
Republicans FINALLY Have Their Graham Platner Problem
Election forecast: Democrats strongly favored to take House, Senate tilts Democratic
‘We were shovel-ready’: A Minnesota forest hit by DOGE cuts is now ablaze
How to turn off those AI summaries (and other thoughts)
Dr. Fauci’s Private Diary Says He Frequently Consoled MAGA Mouthpiece Katie Miller During Her COVID-Era Pregnancy
UVA cut diversity programs after a Trump deal. Yale hired the firm it used.
In Michigan, AIPAC Is Playing With Fire
Mallory
Dulles Airport does need a reboot, but the two dumbest parts of its $22.5 billion redesign need to get the boot first
On The Trump Train
Unpublished DNC Autopsy Chapter Slams “Self-Enriching” Consultants for 2024 Loss
GOP faces voter wrath, as Iran struggles to negotiate with ‘mentally incapacitated’ Trump
Bizarre Texts, Gifted Guns, 30 Types of Ice Cream: Rep. Faces Censure Following Sexual Harassment Allegations
Park Service Delivers Brutal Verdict on Trump’s “Triumphal Arch”
Bluesky’s new CEO wants a big tent, not a bubble. CEO Toni Schneider on protocols, community, and control.
MAGA Erupts at Trump DHS Chief—and Accidentally Exposes Big MAGA Scam
Capital One says it closed hundreds of Trump’s bank accounts in 2021 ‘for anti-money laundering reasons’
Judge denies request by Elon Musk’s xAI to pause Minnesota nudification ban
‘Own the Narrative’: Leaked Flock Guide Shows How It Teaches Cops to Promote Its Tech

Finance & economics

Investors in Situational Awareness deserved to lose their shirts

The plight of the hedge fund says more about them than about its 24-year-old founder
Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
Los Angeles Angels – MLB Trade Rumors
Marginal Revolution

Estimating the Economic Value of Zoning Reform

Tyler Cowen
Updated

We estimate the economic value of zoning reform in São Paulo, which altered maximum permitted construction along transportation corridors. Developers increased filings for multifamily construction in blocks affected by the reform, leading to more housing supply and lower housing prices in neighborhoods that allow more densification. Our equilibrium model of housing markets estimates an aggregate 1.6 percent increase in housing stock and a 0.4 percent reduction in prices, resulting in large housing wealth transfers from current to future homeowners. The reform produced welfare gains of 0.65 percent of city GDP, mostly due to developer profits and consumer gains from the newly built environment.

That is from the AEA policy journal, by Santosh Anagol, Fernando Ferreira, and Jonah Rexer.

The post Estimating the Economic Value of Zoning Reform appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Letters from an American

August 3, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Just before midnight last night, news broke that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had rescinded the order of May 18, 2026, establishing a $1.776 billion slush fund for those who claimed that the Department of Justice under former president Joe Biden had persecuted them. The fund was widely perceived to be a way to pay off those convicted of crimes related to their attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

What Blanche’s order did not do was to change the terms of the nonprosecution order providing that the Department of Justice would not prosecute Trump, his sons, the Trump Organization, or their associates for crimes related to tax returns filed before May 19, 2026. Last night, Blanche reiterated that the nonprosecution order applies “only retroactively,” but that was always the case.

At stake is at least $100 million it appears Trump owes to the American people from previous tax shenanigans that turned up in audits. It’s possible there are other irregularities, but if so, under this order, we would not know: the order says that the IRS will not audit the tax returns of Trump and his associates before the May 19 date. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “Pretty convenient that Trump gets immunity from IRS audits for the year where he made, by far, the most money of his entire life in shady deals all over the globe.”

And, as legal analyst Barb McQuade noted, even the promise to kill the slush fund is hollow. Last week, the Department of Justice paid $1.2 million to Paul Vaughn, who was convicted in 2024 of violating the FACE Act, which bans “force or threat of force or… physical obstruction” that “intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with… any person… obtaining or providing reproductive health care services.” While Vaughn claimed he was arrested for praying, in fact he blocked the doors of a reproductive health care clinic in Tennessee.

Vaughn’s payoff shows that the Department of Justice will simply give out “individual settlements instead of one designated fund,” McQuade wrote.

Nonetheless, Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, who sit on the Judiciary Committee and were openly opposing Blanche, this morning issued a joint statement saying they will now support Blanche’s nomination for attorney general, allowing the nomination to move out of the Judiciary Committee to the full Senate.

Legal analyst Lisa Rubin noted that “[i]n their statement, Sen[ator]s Cornyn and Tillis refer to this one pager as a ‘binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit, the IRS and the Treasury.’ But this isn’t an order nor does it bind anyone.”

The top-ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, constitutional law professor Jamie Raskin of Maryland, released a statement titled “Blanche’s Empty Promises Do Nothing to Kill [the] Slush Fund, Stop the Flow of Money to Convicted J6 Felons and MAGA Allies, or End Trump Family Super Pardon.” He called for “six patriotic House Republicans” to join with House Democrats to pass a discharge petition that would force a vote on stopping the “unconscionable” deal.

Now the rest of Republican senators have to decide whether Blanche’s fig leaf gives them enough plausible deniability of support for paying off violent Trump supporters and Trump’s IRS immunity to confirm Blanche’s nomination to become the attorney general tomorrow. While the focus has been on Tillis and Cornyn, Semafor’s senior Washington editor Elana Schor told MS NOW on Sunday that other Republican senators were quietly cheering Tillis and Cornyn on. “If the Senate voted on this fund today there would be almost 60 votes to kill it, maybe 70,” she said.

In The Freedom Academy with Asha Rangappa, counterintelligence scholar Rangappa suggests the Republican senators have gone so far down the road of enabling Trump that they will simply rubber-stamp Blanche. If “you’ve confirmed Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Kristi Noem, you’ve funded ICE, you’ve stood by while Trump hollowed out the [intelligence community], fired thousands of people, drained the U.S. Treasury, hijacked the country’s semiquincentennial, trashed the White House lawn for a WWE event, and drained the reflecting pool. Twice…. Is Todd Blanche really going to be THE LINE?” she asks. “Come on.”

Rangappa is probably right that Senate Republicans will vote to confirm Blanche. But the cost of enabling Trump has risen as his job approval ratings have tanked. Only about a third of Americans approve of his job performance, numbers that rival those of President Richard M. Nixon just before he resigned. Confirming Blanche, who clearly works for Trump alone, carries with it the fact that Blanche appears to have been the person most responsible for ignoring the Epstein Files Transparency Act. According to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, Blanche essentially admitted he had violated the law when he failed to address allegations brought by independent journalist Katie Phang, who sued for access to documents she claimed were unlawfully redacted.

The judge is now reviewing those documents to see if the redactions were proper. If not, their exposure after Republican senators have put Blanche in the position of the top law enforcement official in the country would make the senators appear complicit in the Epstein files cover-up. While that issue has fallen out of the headlines since Trump began his war on Iran, it is an issue MAGA Republicans elected Trump to expose and could easily reignite.

And then there is the increasingly erratic behavior of Trump himself. This morning, he posted: “My REAL Polling Numbers, not those made up by the Fake News Media, are the best they have ever been, and why wouldn’t they be with the biggest tax cuts and employment numbers EVER, the biggest outside Investment in America in World history, a totally secure Border, a giant Victory in Venezuela, the Denuclearization of Iran, unparalleled respect and success throughout the World, and much more? Don’t believe the Radical Left’s Fake Poll numbers. They are Crooked and Corrupt, just like the Country Destroying Dumocrats are Crooked and Corrupt. VOTE REPUBLICAN FOR GREATNESS IN AMERICA!”

This version of Trump’s America is as fantastical as his post yesterday of an AI image of himself writing on a map of the U.S. with presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, or of himself dressed as a svelte Elvis the day before.

Indeed, Saturday was quite a day of posting on social media for the president of the United States. In addition to portraying himself as Elvis, he posted a flattering picture of himself with the caption: “President Trump ages in reverse!,” himself as a Continental Army officer, a split portrait with his face as one half and George Washington as the other, and a “Trump 2028” poster.

Trump has given Republican senators little reason to give him cover. He has been openly feuding with Republican senators over things he wants Congress to do for which Republican leadership can’t find enough votes.

Those include the SAVE America Act, which would dramatically rework voting in the U.S. and which Trump seems to think would enable Republicans to win the 2026 midterms. But even if the Republicans nuke the filibuster so they could pass it without any Democratic votes—something they don’t want to do—it’s not clear they have enough votes for a simple majority. To get his way on the SAVE America Act, Trump hamstrung Republicans by refusing to sign a popular housing bill, which had to become law without his signature, hurting Republicans’ ability to claim credit for the measure.

Trump also wants a major supplemental funding bill for the enormously unpopular Iran war, which the Republicans would prefer not to pass before the midterms.

Manu Raju and Sarah Ferris of CNN reported yesterday that Trump is barely communicating with Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) except through the media. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on July 23 that Trump’s “patience is running out” with Thune, and Raju and Ferris note that Senator Lindsey Graham’s death on July 11 hampered communication as the South Carolina Republican was close to both Trump and Thune.

Now the infighting appears to be getting worse. “We need to be talking up the wins, talking about how crazy Democrats are, and instead we are knifing each other,” a Republican senator told the CNN reporters.

The infighting between Trump and Republican senators was muted this weekend compared to the fighting between Trump and cabinet members. After U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro moved to dismiss criminal charges against David Hearn, the U.S. Olympian the Justice Department indicted for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, both Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum took to social media to challenge her.

Trump repeatedly posted on social media that “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro” and posted a video of the reflecting pool in broad daylight, with the workers skimming algae in it and people around it, focusing on what seemed to be a young man briefly kneeling by the pool as “proof” the “material is being cut with a knife or a box cutter, for all to see!” Alayna Treene of CNN reported today that Trump is furious with Pirro and is considering firing her.

Pirro blamed the Interior Department for the mistaken indictment, and Burgum fought back, supporting Trump’s version of events. He posted that the “evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera.” Unlike Pirro, Burgum did not have to defend his statements in a court of law. He did, though, get corrected by community notes, which pointed out that the Department of Justice had stated that damage to the pool came from a “botched contractor installation.”

And the fight between cabinet members paled in comparison with the extraordinary fight playing out between Republican federal lawmakers from Ohio, where Representative Max Miller on Sunday took to social media to post a twenty-minute video he apparently thought would exonerate him from well-supported stories that he abused his baby daughter and wife. The video delivered such eye-poppingly classic examples of abuse that it seemed to prove his guilt rather than his innocence. Documents he posted to accompany the video also supported the stories.

After Miller released the video, his former father-in-law, Senator Bernie Moreno, who had remained silent about the stories, finally made a public statement on social media calling Miller’s behavior “increasingly erratic and dangerous” and saying the representative—who is running for reelection—“needs serious psychological help” and “should not serve in the House of Representatives.”

Miller responded with what seemed to be a reference to stories that MAGA Republican Moreno is gay: “You know this isn’t true and the only reason you are speaking out now is to hide from your own media circus,” Miller wrote. “This is all political.”

—

Notes:

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU10/20241218/117765/HHRG-118-JU10-20241218-SD005.pdf

https://cbs4local.com/news/nation-world/pro-life-protester-targeted-under-biden-gets-settlement-with-trump-justice-department-tennessee-abortion

https://apnews.com/article/senate-blanche-trump-justice-fund-a38decfc7f20e4f73a181914d53111da

The Freedom Academy with Asha Rangappa
Will Todd Blanche Get Confirmed? Ask Stanley Milgram
You’ve probably heard the saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I’d extend that to asking the same question over and over and expecting a different answer. I’m referring here to the question of whether Todd Blanche will be confirmed as Attorney General of the United States. Will he? Won’t he? P…
Read more
11 days ago · 198 likes · 39 comments · Asha Rangappa

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/us/politics/trump-polls-approval-rating.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/25/todd-blanche-conceded-epstein-files-00977481

https://www.ksby.com/judge-reviewing-whether-doj-over-redacted-epstein-documents

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-gop-senate-2677647515/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/02/politics/trump-thune-gop-midterms

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/23/politics/trump-thune-jabs-save-act-hnk

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/politics/jeanine-pirro-removal-reflecting-pool

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/us/politics/domestic-abuse-allegations-ohio-house-race.html

https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/ranking-member-raskin-s-statement-blanche-s-empty-promises-do-nothing-to-kill-slush-fund-stop-the-flow-of-money-to-convicted-j6-felons-and-maga-allies-or-end-trump-family-super-pardon

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/six-defendants-convicted-federal-civil-rights-conspiracy-and-freedom-access-clinic-entrances

https://tennesseelookout.com/briefs/attorneys-for-pardoned-abortion-clinic-protestor-announce-7-figure-settlement-with-doj/

https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/senate-bill/636/text

https://rollcall.com/2026/08/03/max-miller-allegations-republicans-keep-distance/

Trumpstruth:

statuses/40463

statuses/40462

statuses/40449

statuses/40435

statuses/40430

statuses/40422

statuses/40419

statuses/40412

statuses/40412

X:

lawofruby/status/2084319416594931769

SecretaryBurgum/status/2083614772847653242

berniemoreno/status/2083936589424582942

alaynatreene/status/2084347727924642227

Bluesky:

meidastouch.com/post/3ms5m3fslbc2t

barbmcquade.bsky.social/post/3ms6d3mkjhs2m

theweekendmsnow.bsky.social/post/3ms3ziheyx225

sahilkapur.bsky.social/post/3ms6qpww3i223

onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3ms3tarhpj22f

ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3ms6yrglw2c22

jake2404663.bsky.social/post/3ms6zwezyfs2f

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Letters from an American

Manipulating the Judicial Process

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

California
Marginal Revolution

Tuesday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Selecting innovation funding mechanisms.

2. Helen Andrews on race.

3. Famous radio station goes all-automated.

4. On Stefanie Stantcheva.

5. ChinaTalk submission hiring contest.

6. New Hamilton faculty at University of Florida, 21 of them.

7. Battery in your backyard? (WSJ)

8. How Americans are talking to Claude about politics.

The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Spaceflight Now

SpaceX launches 24 Starlink satellites on Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg SFB

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
File photo of a Falcon 9 fueled for launch at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Image: SpaceX.

SpaceX launched its 90th Falcon 9 rocket of the year with a mid-morning flight from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday. It came hours before the company’s first quarterly earnings call as a publicly traded company.

The Starlink 17-53 mission added another 24 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit constellation consisting of more than 10,800 satellites.

Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East occurred at 10:05 a.m. PDT (1:05 p.m. EDT / 1705 UTC). The rocket flew on a south-southwesterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.

SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1063. This will be its 34th flight after launching missions for NASA, ESA, the National Reconnaissance Office and the Space Development Agency, among others.

Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1063 landed on the droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. It was the 215th landing on this vessel and the 644th booster landing to date for SpaceX.

SpaceX will host its first earnings call in company history about 30 minutes after the markets close at 4 p.m. EDT (2000 UTC). The financial update comes as the company is preparing for what may be the first orbital launch of its Starship rocket with the Flight 14 mission on a yet-to-be-announced launch date.

The company is also preparing for marquee missions for NASA with the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope set to fly on a Falcon Heavy rocket no earlier than August 30 and the Crew-13 mission flying on a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than September 12.

Noahpinion

The end of the age of heroes

Noah Smith
Updated
Photo by iSawRed on Unsplash

I had a great-uncle who was a “human calculator”. It’s an odd, rare ability that allows people to multiply large numbers quickly in their heads. I remember using a hand calculator and seeing if my uncle could get it right without a tool faster than I could; more often than not, he could.

Human calculators used to be very valuable as employees, back when calculation was done by hand. Today they’re just a curiosity. Technology came along and superseded that particular human ability, as it has so many others. The story of John Henry being superseded by the steam drill, or Paul Bunyan by the chainsaw, is a metaphor for the march of progress. In some cases, like Garry Kasparov or Lee Sedol losing to computers at chess and Go, the moment really happened.

This week marked another important such moment in the history of man versus machine. OpenAI announced that its new model, Astra, managed to solve ten major outstanding problems in math and theoretical computer science. Here’s a simple explanation of the problems. The general consensus seems to be that these are extremely important, stunning breakthroughs.

This does not mean that computers are now capable of doing every kind of math better than humans can. Some people have argued that AI is good at results where the solution can be found by reading the entire literature and combining existing insights — exactly the kind of thing you might expect a computer to be superhuman at — but still not as good as humans at making truly novel leaps of insight. This may represent a real, general limitation of LLMs’ capabilities — as Tom Zahavy of Google DeepMind put it, it may still be the case that “LLMs can’t jump.”

But the trend line is becoming clearer. The University of Toronto’s Daniel Litt, one of the most prominent skeptics of AI’s potential for frontier math research, recently conceded a major bet about what AI could do:

Litt appears to no longer believe that there is any important type of math that AI won’t soon be able to do, writing: “The models don’t yet seem able to do certain kinds of high quality research, but I also expect this is a matter of (not too much) time.”

Some mathematicians have reacted to this development with despair. Kirwin Hampshire’s post is probably the most evocative and the most well-read:

Ossuary Lost at Sea
The Dark Night of Mathematics
I am going insane. During the last week or so LLMs have produced a number of counterexamples to significant long-standing conjectures. I will not recount these happenings here, there are many places where you can find the details…
Read more
11 days ago · 1148 likes · 361 comments · Kirwin Hampshire

He writes:

I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments. I have been screaming internally for days. It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare…For me, the affective quality of learning mathematics is empathetically tethered to an act of discovery and creation…If The Library of Babel existed, would authors continue to write books?…

Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this, but my aim is to be open: These developments have triggered some deranged thoughts in me. I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself…The story of human discovery and the triumph of the human spirit will soon be excised from this discipline…[T]he process of prompting novel proofs will be as auraless as ordering doordash. Watch as magic and mystery evaporate. Watch as the sun sets on our heroic age…

There is nothing I can do. There may be nothing you can do. I have no prescriptions, policy recommendations, or coherent call to action. I just want to be honest and open about my emotional and spiritual response. I want to feel seen….I need the architects of our new mathematical paradigm to look me in the eye and acknowledge our shared humanity and soul before they deliver the coup de grâce.

Math PhD student Tasmin Chu, meanwhile, urges a more confrontational path, calling on mathematicians to avoid working with AI companies and to aggressively preserve the way that math research is currently done. This seems extremely unlikely (and would fail if it were attempted), but it demonstrates the depth of emotion out there.

Even the mathematicians who don’t share Hampshire’s despair have expressed alarm at the sudden disruption of their profession. The entire way that mathematical research works — training grad students, working on problems, collaborating with colleagues, building theories — is going to have to be overhauled.

I’m not a mathematician; I never have been. I can’t fully understand what mathematicians are going through right now. But I do have a few thoughts on what AI’s supersession of human mathematics research means for our species, so I thought I might as well share those. Some of these ideas are a little vague and half-formed, and for that I apologize in advance.

Heroism has to change

Humans have always valued standout individual achievement — heroism. We pride ourselves on being able to do what no one else could have done, and we heap status and respect on people who make standout achievements. But this was always a little bit of an illusion; most of what we did was always a collective enterprise. Workers work in teams, and those teams rely not just on the resources of their organizations, but on the smooth operation of a whole network of other teams and organizations all over the world. Even the most heroic entrepreneur stands on the shoulders of a vast number of workers; Elon Musk could not build a rocket, nor could Jeff Bezos create Amazon Web Services. And neither SpaceX nor Amazon could have been built in Somalia.

We always bridled at being reminded of this; when Obama told entrepreneurs “You didn’t build that”, he was making the anodyne point that organizations and institutions matter, but people still got very mad. We motivate ourselves with our own sense of heroism, and to be reminded that we’re cogs in a machine greater than ourselves makes life seem a little less meaningful.

The scientific enterprise was also always mostly a collective one. If you look at what almost any scientist does, they’re simply adding a little bit of data to our pool of collective knowledge. Almost all research is incremental stuff — a slightly novel experiment, a little wrinkle in an existing theory — and many published research findings are false, and yet the scientific enterprise collectively gropes its way toward the truth. Even Nobel prize winners are often just managers of huge teams of researchers who never get gold medals or get to give speeches in Stockholm.

In essence, humans were always what we now call edge compute — little devices that reported data back to a central world-mind. Except the world-mind we reported to wasn’t a computer; it was society itself — the network of corporations, governments, universities, and human networks that disseminated human knowledge and coordinated our actions. We started off by learning pieces of what the world-mind already knew (i.e. education). Then we walked around and saw slightly different things, had different experiences, chewed on tiny bits of bigger problems, gathered a little new data, and so on.

We mixed our tiny bits of unique experience with what we learned from the world-mind, and the resulting product was slightly novel because our individual experiences were unique. Then we reported this slightly-novel mix back to the world-mind — with scientific papers, PowerPoint presentations, office conversations, memos, and so on. The world-mind reassimilated our contribution, and learned, and grew a little bit wiser.

But there were a few of us who really did get to be heroes — or at least, a bit more heroic than the rest. Whether because of greater raw ability, or a luckily unique perspective, there were some people who could do things that the entire rest of the world couldn’t do. There are examples from politics and business and art, but there was always something special about the heroes of mathematical theory. Isaac Newton invented calculus and classical mechanics all by himself. Grigori Perelman, sitting in his little room in Russia, solved a famous math problem that had bedeviled the entire profession for decades. Andrew Wiles did something similar a generation earlier.

These advances weren’t done ex nihilo, of course — every great discoverer and inventor stood on the shoulders of proverbial giants. But in mathematical theory there was almost always some nub of hard work, some brilliant leap of genius, that belonged to one person alone. Some part of the excitement of becoming a mathematician surely had to do with the dream of becoming one of those heroes, without whom a great discovery simply couldn’t have been made.

But that heroism was necessary because of an inherent limitation in the way the old world-mind was built. Society is far more complex than any single human, but it requires individual communication in order to transmit ideas. A mathematical theorem has to be expressed in terms that one grad student can learn, or one professor can teach to another. This meant that every idea that got added to the collective ultimately had to be comprehensible by a single human being.1 Which meant that it had to be initially conceived of by a single human being as well. The people who conceived of those almost-impossible-to-conceive ideas were our heroes, and mathematicians were perhaps the most heroic among them.

We normally think of AI as something that replaces a single human worker, but I think that’s the wrong way to think of it. AI is really a new world-mind — a technology that takes the accumulated findings of individual humans (or robots, or other sensors) and integrates them into a general picture of the world. AI uses all of human knowledge as its training data; each time one of us reports a new scientific finding or expresses a new perspective, that adds to AI’s knowledge and understanding of the world. This is what people mean when they say to “write for the AIs”, but in fact every scientist and every businessperson is just writing for the AIs now, whether they intend to or not.

(I actually think of a financial analogy here. Before the crash of 2008, most financial derivatives — the complex CDOs and such that ended up being involved in the crisis — were traded over-the-counter, by people calling up other people and selling them products. After the Dodd-Frank legislation, trading of most derivatives shifted to central clearinghouses. The shift from human organizations to AI as our coordinating superintelligence feels a little like the shift from OTC information exchange to a central clearinghouse.)

But unlike human society, AI doesn’t need heroic human geniuses. Its ability to understand complex ideas is not limited by the ability of a single human brain to apprehend, intuit, or communicate those ideas. The information bottlenecks that our greatest mathematicians were able to slightly widen have now been done away with completely — or will be soon.

That doesn’t mean human scientists and thinkers have become irrelevant. At least for now, AI still requires us to provide the role of edge compute. We go out into the world, discover new facts, mix them with our unique individual experiences to form new perspectives, and communicate all this back to the AI world-mind. For most people — even most scientists — this is basically the same thing they were doing before, except instead of a group of their colleagues at a seminar, they’ll be reporting their findings to AI.

And for lots of scientists, AI’s mathematical prowess is going to open up a new golden age. Math was always one of the hardest parts of science; it’s something our brains aren’t naturally adapted to. Now that constraint is alleviated. Economists don’t have to worry about wracking their brains writing theory sections; they can focus on getting data and understanding empirical results. Przemek Chojecki writes:

From a perspective of science or mathematics (not mathematicians), this is the best time ever. AI will lead us to the new age of mathematical discoveries and boost science progress 100x.

Whether it’s 100x or 1.5x remains to be seen, of course. But the point is that people for whom mathematics is an input to understanding the world, rather than an output, just gained access to an incredibly powerful tool that makes their lives much easier. For most people, math was always a burden, like stamping metal or drilling holes. Now that burden has been alleviated by machines.

At least until systems of robots and sensors eliminate the need for human research labor, most scientists will get to be a little more heroic than before. They’ll be like the characters in Star Trek — exploring the unknown with the aid of unfathomably powerful machines.

But mathematicians, and anyone else whose sense of accomplishment came from being the indispensable solvers of hard theoretical problems, will have to learn to get their sense of self-worth and accomplishment from other sources. Jacob Tsimerman, who just won the Fields Medal and promptly took a job at OpenAI, sums it up:

I do not do mathematics only to find truth. I do it largely because I enjoy it and I am good at it. I also find it beautiful and am grateful I get to spend my days understanding beautiful things. But I enjoy the challenge, the process, resolving confusions, finding strategies, grappling with problems…There are many people whose primary enjoyment of math comes through problem solving in one of its incarnations. If that disappears, that is not a trivial issue and many of them might not want to do it anymore.

So what will mathematicians do in the new AI age?

Mathematicians after the age of heroes

First of all, let me say that I do not think AI will take mathematicians’ jobs. I sometimes say that it will, but this is a joke. Even if AI is able to do 100% of what mathematicians do today, I believe that mathematicians will continue to be employed, as mathematicians, if they want.

The reason is that mathematicians, as a class of people, are actually incredibly cheap. The sum total of all of the salaries of academic mathematicians in the U.S. is maybe $4-5 billion dollars at most. That’s a rounding error on our GDP — it’s about what we spend on bowling alleys, or Halloween candy. And to be brutally honest, only a few of those are actually doing frontier research — most are employed mainly as teachers. On top of that, it’s an open question whether most of the frontier mathematical research being done by the very best mathematicians is actually producing value for money in economic terms — other than some cryptography and the occasional physics application, there isn’t much use for most frontier math.

In other words, we already employ most mathematicians because we think human understanding of math, even without industrial applications, is inherently worthwhile. That isn’t likely to change in the age of AI. Even if AI “discovers” a vast number of new mathematical results, most people won’t care; what will be important is that some human understands what AI has discovered. And yes, our society — which AI will make even richer than it is now — will be willing to pay the pittance it costs to keep human mathematicians employed as professional math-understanders. For the overwhelming majority of people, that situation will feel no different than what prevails today.

This is actually a point a lot of people have been making:

Just because you press a button and make AI solve a problem doesn’t mean you understand the solution, and it doesn’t mean you immediately have an idea of what other problems you’d like solved. Mathematicians have been given an incredible new tool to understand the world — like miners getting hydraulic excavators or powered drills — and since the amount of math out there to be discovered is probably infinite, using that tool will take a lot of work.

For those mathematicians whose sense of wonder and meaning comes primarily from learning new things — who do math to “find truth”, in Jacob Tsimerman’s words — life will only improve. And while that won’t be as heroic of a job as what math research used to be, it’ll still be a prestigious one, because most humans will still be unable to do it. Even if any high school kid can press a button and solve the Riemann Hypothesis, the output will just be gobbeldygook to them.

And mathematicians who enjoy the extreme mental difficulty of math will still get to enjoy it. AI will make any given math problem a lot easier to solve, and it’s generally a lot easier to understand a solution than to find one. But AI will also come up with — and will allow humans to come up with — much harder problems than have been created so far. There will be problems so difficult that even understanding AI’s solutions will be as hard for a human as solving the Jacobian Conjecture without the aid of a machine.

As for people who just intrinsically enjoy the old way of discovering math, this will turn into a hobby, or a sport. Just as there are still sprinters even though humans can’t outrun cars, there will still be mathletes. And just as there are still woodworkers even though machines can probably do a better job, there will still be smart people who try to solve math problems without the aid of AI.

So mathematicians will still be able to get paid to do math. They’ll still be able to learn new things, have fun, and get respect from society. The only thing they’ll really lack is heroism — the knowledge that their own special, rare natural abilities alleviate a key bottleneck to human flourishing.

But that’s not so bad, really. Most people never get the chance to be heroes. Truck drivers don’t. Financial advisers don’t. Executive assistants don’t. They have to find meaning just from being regular people — from taking care of their kids, having friends, having hobbies, joining civic organizations, getting involved in politics, and so on. It’s not such a terrible fate.

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Well, maybe not. Society can handle ideas more complex than a single human can understand, but those ideas have to be able to be broken down into pieces that a single human brain can comprehend.

SpaceNews

Kreios Space to fly VLEO demonstration in NanoAvionics bus

Debra Werner
Updated

SAN FRANCISCO – Spanish startup Kreios Space announced plans Aug. 4 to conduct the first very low Earth orbit (VLEO) demonstration of its air-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) in a Kongsberg […]

The post Kreios Space to fly VLEO demonstration in NanoAvionics bus appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

NASA, SpaceX studying how to prevent future upper stage lunar collisions

Jeff Foust
Updated
F9 launch Firefly ispace

With a Falcon 9 upper stage set to hit the moon this week, SpaceX says it is working with NASA on ways to prevent similar collisions in the future.

The post NASA, SpaceX studying how to prevent future upper stage lunar collisions appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Rubicon ASCENT thruster moves from hot-fire testing to production

Debra Werner
Updated

SAN FRANCISCO – Rubicon Space Systems completed hot-fire testing of its Velox 5-newton ASCENT monopropellant thruster, paving the way for on-orbit operations in 2027. “The program demonstrated performance beyond our […]

The post Rubicon ASCENT thruster moves from hot-fire testing to production appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Military demand shapes market for satellite propulsion

Sandra Erwin
Updated

Startups and established spacecraft manufacturers are investing in engines designed to give small satellites more freedom to change orbit

The post Military demand shapes market for satellite propulsion appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Future of Crew Dragon weighs on commercial spaceflight industry

Jeff Foust
Updated
Ax-4 Crew Dragon

While SpaceX says there is a “significant” amount of life left in its Crew Dragon fleet, the company has hedged on how long it will continue flying the spacecraft.

The post Future of Crew Dragon weighs on commercial spaceflight industry appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

SpaceX’s new Starfall program offers validation and competition for reentry startups

Jeff Foust
Updated
The capsule from Varda Space Industries’ W-6 mission after landing the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia in May. Credit: Southern Launch

Demand for microgravity research and manufacturing is brewing — perhaps literally. When SpaceX launched the first test flight of Starfall, its commercial reentry capsule, on June 23, the company did […]

The post SpaceX’s new Starfall program offers validation and competition for reentry startups appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Rocketdyne reemerges as standalone space company

Sandra Erwin
Updated

AE Industrial private-equity firm takes 60% stake as L3Harris retains a noncontrolling interest

The post Rocketdyne reemerges as standalone space company appeared first on SpaceNews.

Oklahoma Watch
NASA Science

Smoke Streams Across Eastern Washington

Lauren Dauphin
Updated
 
A wide plume of brown-gray smoke stretches across a satellite image spanning Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Canada.
Smoke streams across eastern Washington, visible in this image captured by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra on August 2, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

The start of August 2026 saw ongoing and new wildland fires burning in eastern Washington. West of Chelan, the Little Giant fire continued to produce heavy smoke, while a cluster of smaller fires farther east near Spokane affected tens of thousands of people.

The smoke from these and other fires poured east-northeast across the state and into Idaho, Montana, and several Canadian provinces on the morning of August 2, 2026, when NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image.

At that time, the Little Giant fire had burned more than 38,500 acres (15,600 hectares) and was zero percent contained, according to the fire’s incident management team. After lightning ignited the fire on July 15, gusting winds drove the blaze east to Lake Chelan, with spotting reaching the opposite side of the lake. Smoke from the fire was expected to cause unhealthy to very unhealthy air quality in Chelan to the east and unhealthy conditions in Leavenworth and Wenatchee to the south, according to a smoke outlook issued by the U.S. Interagency Wildland Fire Air Quality Response Program.

Meanwhile, the Spokane Area fires—which include the Old Trails fire, Fairview fire, and Autumn Lane fire—had burned around 5,400 acres (2,200 hectares) since igniting the day before. By the morning of August 3, that number had grown to more than 8,000 acres, according to InciWeb. Preliminary reports indicated more than 600 structures had been destroyed or damaged, and mandatory evacuation orders were in place for parts of Spokane County and Stevens County. Widespread smoke from these and the other fires in the state combined to produce very unhealthy air quality in parts of the two counties.

These fires were part of an active fire season fueled by persistent drought and extreme fire weather. Strong winds, high temperatures, and dry fuels led the National Weather Service to issue Washington’s first-ever “particularly dangerous situation alert” on July 31, a designation typically reserved for the most severe fire conditions.

Drought—declared in the state following a warm winter and low snowpack—left vegetation primed to burn. By the start of August, those conditions had helped fuel more than 1,000 fires that burned about 425,000 acres since the start of the year, the most since 2021, according to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. Of those, 12 large fires remained active, together accounting for more than 200,000 acres burned.

The NASA Disasters Program has been activated to support agencies responding to the fires. The team will be posting maps and data products on its open-access mapping portal as new information becomes available.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

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A wide plume of brown-gray smoke stretches across a satellite image spanning Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Canada.

August 2, 2026

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The post Smoke Streams Across Eastern Washington appeared first on NASA Science.

Market Design

Controversial markets, black markets, and market design (in Brazil)

Al Roth
Updated

 Below is a Youtube video of all the talks given at the 4th International Workshop on Game Theory and Economic Applications at the University of São Paulo last Wednesday.

My talk, whose title was "Controversial markets, black markets, and market design"  is introduced at minute 2:24 (and for some of you the link below should start up there). The talk before mine is by Bob Wilson, and the one after by Paul Milgrom, but the video camera was on all the time, so you have to scroll to get to the actual talks.)

 

My talk begins with some general discussion of how market design and engineering economics are related to game theory. Then I introduce kidney exchange as the talk's main example, and discuss some of the accompanying controversies, including those currently being encountered in Brazil.

Aeon | a world of ideas

Towards an AI for Africa

Fainos Mangena
Updated

A group of men sitting along a wall in a rustic room, engaging in conversation with visible gestures.

Western-developed AI rides roughshod over Ubuntu values of connection and community that animate African ethical life

- by Fainos Mangena

Read on Aeon

Schneier on Security

Some Claude Chats Are Searchable on Google

Bruce Schneier
Updated

And it’s personal information (alternate link):

The exposed data includes an AI-powered therapy app that someone appears to have vibe-coded, notes on meetings, and a dashboard someone made apparently to analyze medical billing data. Exposed chats reportedly include private cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal information like peoples’ addresses.

What seems to be the issue is a user setting about data sharing. Anthropic’s position is that it’s not their problem:

“We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google,” the company said in a statement. “These shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves. When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services.”

Here’s how to fix it.

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Steve Yegge

Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.

— Steve Yegge, The Shape of Things to Come

Tags: steve-yegge, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog

Don't be a meat proxy

Don't be a meat proxy

Niklas Gruhn coins an excellent new term - meat proxy - for people who blindly copy and paste the output of AI systems to their peers.

By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: definitions, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-misuse

Marginal Revolution

The economics of H-1B immigration

Tyler Cowen
Updated

We study the effects of H-1B immigration on U.S. industries that employ H-1B workers and their trading partners. Using a novel cross-industry design and the 1999–2003 expansion of the H-1B visa cap for identification, we find that H-1B exposure raised incomes for natives and pre-existing immigrants, with gains concentrated in non-STEM occupations. Income gains propagate forward through supply chains to downstream industries but not backward to upstream industries, consistent with a productivity shock rather than a labor supply shock. We find no direct effect on patenting, suggesting that productivity gains arise from better task execution rather than patentable invention.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, Ahmet Gulek & Jens Hainmueller.

The post The economics of H-1B immigration appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Marginal Revolution

Emergent Ventures winners, 57th cohort

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Oisin O’Gorman, 15, Dublin, misinformation and fakes.

Karsen Lee Wahal, Stanford, is AI killing the web?, and measuring media slant.

Davy Deng, with Claire Wang (previous winner), whole brain emulation, MIT.

Enej Grmek, 16, Ljubljana, privacy.

Vladimir Shmelev, Ukraine, Ukrainian children for relief trips to Montenegro.

Nik Verma, Chicago, a legal framework for AI agents.

Emirhan Demir and Çınar Yıldırım, Istanbul area, 19, protection against AI agents.

Midhat Doruk, 14, Ankara, longevity, biology, and skin cosmetics.

Burak Yilmaz, 17, Diyarbarkir, Turkey, browser-native authentication.

Lloyd Strickland, London, to publish the remaining Leibniz papers, including on computation.

Abdul Quyum, 15, Perth, organizing information and data.

Catharine Young, podcast on women in science, science communication tranche, Cambridge/DC.

The post Emergent Ventures winners, 57th cohort appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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DCReport.org

Decoding the Numbers: An Introduction to Sports Betting Odds

Our Friends
Updated

Whether you are a fan of football, basketball, or even cricket, you probably noticed that all sports betting options have some numbers attached to them. These can appear confusing at first glance, but once you understand exactly what they represent, they can prove helpful in choosing a convenient bet.

When you place a bet on GGBet online , these numbers can take on various forms, depending on the platform settings. However, at their core, they aim to show the potential of a wager if you play your cards right. Combined with a good strategy, sports betting odds can help you make an informed decision as you compare your options.

What Are Sports Betting Odds?

Sports betting odds are a numerical representation of the probability of a specific outcome in a sports event. They also tell you how much money a bettor is likely to win if their prediction ends up being correct. Generally speaking, the higher the odds, the lower the probability that the team will win. This translates into better payouts for those betting against the odds.

Sportsbooks display these odds after analyzing a variety of factors, including player statistics, injuries, and team performance. They even look at market activity and weather conditions to offer the odds more accuracy. When new data comes to light, the odds adjust automatically to reflect these expectations.

For example, if a soccer team is seen as much stronger than the other, its odds will be lower because it’s more likely to win. The other team (the underdog) will have higher odds because it’s less likely to achieve victory. If it wins against all odds, a successful bet offers a larger payout, reflected by the odds.

Understanding Different Odds Formats

Sports odds relay the same information but may look different depending on where you’re getting the information from. Here’s what bettors can see when accessing a sportsbook:

Decimal Odds

Decimal odds are perhaps the most widely used format, particularly across Europe, Canada, and Australia. International sportsbooks set it up as a standard, and they’re among the easiest to understand for beginners. This decimal number represents the total return for every unit that you wager, including the original stake.

For example, let’s say that you bet $100 at 2.00 odds. A successful wager will return twice that amount, totaling $200 (your original $100 and the $100 profit). The higher the decimal odds go, the bigger the potential profit can be.

Fractional Odds

Fractional odds are more common across Ireland and the UK, showing up as a (you guessed it) fraction. These can be fractions like 1/1, 8/11, or 6/2, showing how much you can win for the money you have wagered. As an example, if the odds are 2/1, then you can win $1 for every dollar you wager in a successful bet. If you put down $20, then the profit would be $40 (including the original $20).

Fractional odds are less intuitive for newcomers because they have slightly more complex calculations. However, if you look at things in hindsight, they display the same information that decimal odds do.

American Odds

Now, American odds are different from both decimal and fractional odds in the sense that they appear as positive or negative numbers. If the number is positive, then it indicates the profit that a successful bet can obtain. As an example, 150+ odds on a successful $100 bet mean the profit could be $150. For the most part, these odds represent the underdog.

The negative odds tell you how much you need to bet if you want to win $100. If the odds show up as -200, then it means you’ll have to put down $200 in bets to make a profit of $100. Negative odds are usually shown on bets for the favorites.

baseball player swinging bat

Photo: Chris Chow via Unsplash

What Can Influence Sports Betting Odds?

Odds tend to be quite stable before an event starts, but they can still change under specific circumstances. Sportsbooks adjust the odds frequently for reasons such as:

  • Injuries:  Star players being taken out of the team reduce a team’s chance of success, increasing the odds.
  • Betting Activities:  If there’s a large influx of bets on one side, bettors sometimes adjust the odds to balance exposure and encourage bets on the other side.
  • Weather Conditions:  Sports such as football, golf, or cricket can be significantly affected by rain, high winds, or extreme temperatures.
  • Team Changes:  Roster switches, coaching decisions, and technical updates can change how sportsbooks view match probabilities, influencing the outcomes.

In-game information, such as increasing team morale, benched stars coming into action, or last-minute team decisions, can influence live betting odds. These, however, change more rapidly when compared to the pre-game odds.

Common Sports Betting Odds Misconceptions

Several myths concerning betting odds can lead to a lot of confusion for beginners. This includes the following:

Myth 1: Low Odds Guarantee a Winner

Favorites can lose at any time. Look at the FIFA World Cup match between Brazil and Norway, where long-term data gave Brazil a 53% chance to win , while Norway had 22%. Still, Erling Haaland managed to score two goals that took Brazil out of the race, making Norway the winner even at high odds.

Myth 2: Higher Odds Offer Better Value

Larger odds have a lower success probability. The monetary value can be higher if the underdog wins, but unless something remarkable happens, there’s a good chance the bet could fail as well.

Myth 3: All Odds Reflect Information, Not Predictions

Indeed, sportsbooks use modern algorithms to go through the data and estimate a probability. That said, while these odds are based on history and available info, they don’t guarantee an outcome.

Sports betting may appear intimidating at first, but once you understand its purpose, it can actually guide you. It’s best to do your own research and compare the prices before you settle on the odds. Combined with responsible gambling, it makes every sports betting strategy enjoyable.

Photo: Emilio Garcia via Unsplash

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The post Decoding the Numbers: An Introduction to Sports Betting Odds appeared first on DCReport.org.

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Matthew Green on Anthropic’s New Cryptanalysis Results

John Gruber
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Matthew Green:

If you’re under the impression that these models are “glorified autocomplete” or that progress is slowing down, I need to urge you: stop thinking that. The models are very intelligent and capable, they are getting better at a fast clip. I can cite measurable and impressive progress over just the past five months on specific types of problem I’ve asked them to look at. If there’s a ceiling out there, I don’t yet see evidence of it. The people who think models are dumb are mostly using Google’s free AI search results, and not interacting with the high-end stuff (which only costs $20, so it’s not out of reach.) And they’re mostly not working in new areas.

On the other hand: if you think that models are super-intelligent or that AGI is already here, you should also stop thinking that. Working with these tools is like swimming in a pond where the ground drops off sharply. One minute you’re wading comfortably and there’s support under your feet. Then suddenly you cross a specific line, and you’re back to swimming on your own. This analogy is my best way to explain what it feels like when the model goes from helpful to clueless.

Green is second-to-none in his ability to explain advanced cryptography in easily understood ways, without dumbing it down.

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