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I had planned to do a post on Robert Hall and Michael Woodford, as I am a big fan of both of their work. But I’ve been pretty sick the past few weeks—beginning with a flu that gave me a 104 (40C) temperature, and then pneumonia. So I haven’t felt like blogging. Below is a post I wrote a month ago but hadn’t gotten around to posting. I may be slow in responding to comments, but I’ll try. I hope to do a Hall/Woodford post later.
Back in 2018, I warned that the budget situation was becoming unsustainable:
Pundits have been complaining about deficits for decades, so why haven’t we already paid the price in one form or another?
It turns out that the U.S. government has been a bit less irresponsible in the past than advertised. While we run deficits during most fiscal years, they have not been large enough to push the national debt to the sorts of levels seen in Greece, Italy and Japan, which have even larger public debts as a share of national income.
As with the boy who cried wolf, the public is becoming numb to the constant warnings about a debt crisis.
Today, however, there really is reason to be concerned about the budget deficit.
For the first time in history, America is seeing its budget deficit rise dramatically higher during a period of peace and prosperity. While there have been even bigger deficits on occasion — measured as a share of GDP — they were always associated with a temporary situation such as war or high unemployment.
The deficit would then shrink sharply when the economy returned to normal. The current situation is unusual because the deficit has been soaring dramatically higher even as unemployment has fallen to the lowest level since the 1960s (3.7 percent).
Unsustainable budget deficits can be seen as a sign of political dysfunction. The United States last ran budget surpluses during 1998-2001. These surpluses created fiscal space for the politically popular tax cuts and spending increases of the George W. Bush administration.
My complaints about deficits put me far outside the mainstream. In the late 2010s, most pundits suggested that we didn’t need to worry about deficits because interest rates were low. That attitude continued into the Biden administration, which rejected the warnings of economists like Larry Summers. Under the past two administrations, economists have been excluded from the halls of power and policymaking has been turned over to populists.
Last year, a few of my commenters suggested that the fiscal situation would improve due to tariff revenue. I was highly skeptical. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), the deficit is worsening despite a booming economy:
When looking at the budget deficit, it is essential to put the figures into context. The government should run deficits during recessions and wartime, offset by surpluses (or at least much smaller deficits) during booms. In the late 2010s, the US abandoned that longstanding practice, which is why I raised the alarm in 2018. The deficit of 2019 might look small, but the trend was extremely worrisome given the booming economy.
Today, things are far worse. We ran budget surpluses during the internet boom of 1999, 2000 and 2001, but we are running enormous deficits during the AI boom.
And it could easily get even worse. As longer-term Treasury bonds with low yields mature and need to be rolled over with new debt, the interest cost of our national debt will continue to rise. Here’s the CRFB:
For FY 2026, we estimate:
A budget deficit of $2.0 trillion, or 6.2% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Debt held by the public of $32.3 trillion, or 100% of GDP.
Spending of $7.4 trillion, or 22.9% of GDP.
Revenue of $5.4 trillion, or 16.7% of GDP.
Interest costs of $1.1 trillion, a record 3.4% of GDP.
Interest was the second largest line item in the budget, costing more than defense or Medicare.
And they include this graph:
And of course there’s also the aging population.
Some people suggest that AI will somehow save us. But how? It’s not clear that an AI boom would reduce government spending as a share of GDP. After all, spending on health care tends to rise rapidly as countries get richer, and Social Security benefits for new recipients automatically rise with the level of nominal wages.
It is possible that AI has actually made the deficit worse, by shifting income from workers to less heavily taxed corporate income. Here’s Bloomberg:
Instead, the end of civilization as we know it will likely be caused by income tax erosion.
The logic is straightforward. Ever since the First Industrial Revolution saw peasants pushed off the land, governments have relied on taxing people and their paychecks. Rand estimates that 66% of US federal revenue in 2024 came from either individual taxes or payroll taxes due directly to labor. Even in Australia, where resource exports generate vast wealth, individual income tax accounts for almost half of federal government revenue.
Despite barely scratching the surface of usefulness, AI is already threatening to erase entire categories of white-collar work around the world.
You might think of AI as a godsend for governments, many of which are accumulating vast debts (see chart 2). Economists expect AI to lift productivity growth, which should create a bigger economy. . . .
One problem is that AI may create value in areas which governments tax lightly while destroying value in the more heavily taxed bits. The economy could expand rapidly while leaving the government increasingly starved of funds. At present governments get most of their revenues from workers. Across the OECD club of mostly rich countries, personal-income taxes and social-security contributions account for a high and rising share of overall tax revenues (see chart 3). In America about three-quarters of all federal tax revenues come from labour. Taxes on consumption and capital (including corporate profits and capital gains) are smaller.
On the other hand, some people are too fatalistic about the situation, assuming nothing can be done. Don’t all countries face similar problems? Not at all. AI Overview suggests that many developed countries have net public debts below 50% of GDP:
Negative Net Debt (Net Creditor Governments)
These unique advanced economies possess sovereign liquid assets that completely exceed their total liabilities.
Norway (Maintains a massive sovereign wealth fund, pushing its net position heavily positive)
Singapore (Gross debt is high due to bond issuances for domestic investment, but it holds zero net debt)
Conservatives like to say the problem is simply too much spending. OK, explain Denmark and Sweden, which have very high spending levels and low debt burdens. Here are some of the worst offenders, again from AI Overview:
Extreme Net Debt (Over 100% of GDP)
These nations possess heavy sovereign debt loads where liabilities greatly outpace their current asset reserves.
Japan:~136.5% net debt (While its gross debt is the highest in the world at over 204%, its massive domestic asset holdings bring the net figure lower—though it remains the highest among developed economies).
Italy:~127.7% net debt (Driven by long-term structural deficits and low growth).
United States:~100%+ net debt (The U.S. gross debt sits at roughly 125.8% of GDP; adjusting for government financial assets leaves the net burden sitting right around the 100% threshold).
Elevated Net Debt (75% to 100% of GDP)
These advanced economies maintain sizable fiscal burdens, heavily exposed to shifts in global interest rates. [1]
United Kingdom:~88% to 92% net debt (Gross debt hovers around 103.6%)
The problem is easily solvable in a technical sense. Although I’d personally favor some spending cuts, federal spending is still only 23% of GDP. Lots of developed countries raise far more than that amount of revenue. It’s a political problem. All you need is good governance. At one time, the US had relatively good governance. And then we threw it all away.
PS. Long time readers know that I’m obsessed with three models: Denmark, Switzerland and Singapore. Not surprisingly, these three countries all show up in the top ten for low levels of public debt. Note that all three are also in the top 7 for economic freedom, according to both the Fraser ranking and the Heritage ranking.
I like these three countries, as they each excel at one of the three most essential aspects of governance:
Singapore: The economic (neoliberal) superpower
Switzerland: The political (decentralized democracy) superpower
Denmark: The ethical (utilitarian) superpower
They answer the three key questions: What should be the goal? (Denmark-utilitarianism.) How best to achieve the goal (Singapore-neoliberalism). How best to decide how to achieve the goal in a world of uncertainty (Switzerland-decentralized democracy.)
Three paths to the same destination—good governance.
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Up and to my office, where busy all the morning about Mr. Gauden’s account, and at noon to dinner with him at the Dolphin, where mighty merry by pleasant stories of Mr. Coventry’s and Sir J. Minnes’s, which I have put down some of in my book of tales. Just as I was going out my uncle Thomas came to the with a draught of a bond for him and hissons to sign to me about the payment of the 20l. legacy, which I agreed to, but he would fain have had from me the copy of the deed, which he had forged and did bring me yesterday, but I would not give him it. Says [he] I perceive then you will keep it to defame me with, and desired me not to speak of it, for he did it innocently. Now I confess I do not find any great hurt in the thing, but only to keep from me a sight of the true original deed, wherein perhaps there was something else that may touch this business of the legacy which he would keep from me, or it may be, it is really lost as he says it is. But then he need not have used such a slight, but confess it without danger.
Thence by coach with Mr. Coventry to the Temple, and thence I to the Six Clerks’ office, and discoursed with my Attorney and Solicitor, and he and I to Mr. Turner, who puts me in great fear that I shall not get retayned again against Tom Trice; which troubles me.
Thence, it being night, homewards, and called at Wotton’s and tried some shoes, but he had none to fit me. He tells me that by the Duke of York’s persuasion Harris is come again to Sir W. Davenant upon his terms that he demanded, which will make him very high and proud. Thence to another shop, and there bought me a pair of shoes, and so walked home and to my office, and dispatch letters by the post, and so home to supper and to bed, where to my trouble I find my wife begin to talk of her being alone all day, which is nothing but her lack of something to do, for while she was busy she never, or seldom, complained … [She hath also a pain in the place which she used to have swellings in; and that that troubles me is that we fear that it is my matter that I give her that causes it, it never coming but after my having been with her. – L&M]
The Queen is in a good way of recovery; and Sir Francis Pridgeon hath got great honour by it, it being all imputed to his cordiall, which in her dispaire did give her rest and brought her to some hopes of recovery.
It seems that, after the much talk of troubles and a plot, something is found in the North that a party was to rise, and some persons that were to command it are found, as I find in a letter that Mr. Coventry read to-day about it from those parts.1
I had a revelatory conversation back in April with Lisa Graves, about the dire state of the Supreme Court and how it got that way. No time for a fresh interview this week, but here she is at the Brattleboro Literary Festival:
I added four player online mode to Battledrones - previous maps were limited to two.
Here's the initial prompt I used:
Add a new map for a four player battle - four way rotational symmetry, up to four AI players, works with the WebSocket non-audio based multiplayer mode so up to four human players can join (any spare slots use AI)
Claude Opus 5.5 added a new map called "Compass Rose" and modified the WebSockets multiplayer network code to support up to four players for that map, joining via share links or QR codes.
The new teams use robots themed in purple and green, joining the existing blue and red designs. You can preview those colors in the updated model browser.
Here's a replay link to watch a four way AI battle with the "Goliath Armada" mutator turned on, where each side starts with four giant Goliath mech units.
Build an artifact where you open a photo and it rapidly (in a few seconds) paints a version of that photo using a canvas element and simulated paintbrush
See also my previous experiment getting Claude Fable to simulate a watercolor illustration with P5.js.
Quick Study uses Sobel edge detection, with no external libraries beyond Google Fonts.
A lot of what you might want to know about Jim Belosic can be learned from his childhood home.
Belosic grew up in an immaculate Victorian house that sits on 2.5 acres in Genoa, Nevada. Genoa is the oldest town in Nevada with the oldest saloon (still operating) and has all of 1,300 residents. Historically, Genoans worked on ranches and farms amid a bucolic setting where the Sierra Nevadas give way to pastoral lowlands. As such, there was not much of anything around the Belosics’ house when they started building it in 1977.
Core Memory is a reader-supported publication. Give us some money so we can make nice things. Please.
Vic and Julie Belosic had fled the bustle of Southern California in an Econoline van looking for something different. (Well, Vic was looking for something different. Julie was quite happy.) They were both good with their hands and decided to construct their Nevada home themselves. The project began with a barn (where the couple and their young daughter lived) and then expanded to the main house a couple of years later. The house itself was a work in progress when Jim arrived in 1980 and remained that way through much of his adolescence.
Belosic is the founder and CEO of SendCutSend. Many of you reading this story will not have heard of SendCutSend. But, if you craft or manufacture things as a hobby or at work, then you probably know the company well.
SendCutSend operates factories full of machines that cut, bend and shape metal into custom parts. We’re talking objects for people trying to modify their cars right on up to the key components of rockets, robots and defense equipment. Many of SendCutSend’s more than 300,000 customers were turning to China for this type of work until Belosic, who founded the company in 2018, figured out how to make lots of metal parts well, fast and cheap and offered an option right in the United States. As such, SendCutSend and Belosic have become key players in America’s effort to learn how to manufacture things again, although playing a part in a national movement was never really Belosic’s intention.
The origin story of this manufacturing phenomenon goes back to the Genoa house and its ongoing construction during Belosic’s childhood. At six, Belosic stood by his dad in the dining room catching squares of wood as they came off a table saw. Belosic would then sand the edges and hand them back to his dad who nailed them up near the ceiling to create dentil molding. At ten, Belosic had a bandsaw-themed birthday party where he and his friends built Pinewood Derby cars. Not long after that, Vic decided he didn’t like the look of the staircase and set to rebuilding it, so the family relied on a ladder to reach their bedrooms for several months.
“On Sundays, the few other people that were living here would get in their cars, and they would mosey down into town and have a good time as a family,” says Julie. “But not us. We were banging hammers. It was so quiet around here that we could hear the hammers bouncing off the mountains.”
Out back, Vic always had a half-built car project going with nuts and bolts scattered all around it. (Vic has the mangled hands of a proper maker.) Belosic would help out on those efforts too or explore the possibilities presented by the neighboring wood and scrap piles. “You had to keep yourself entertained,” says Belosic. “There was no internet, and just one neighbor three miles away who I could make it to on my Go-kart.” Besides exploring, Belosic made money through garage sales and by mowing lawns so that he could afford to improve his Go-kart or buy a radio-controlled car.
A double rainbow appears just outside of Belosic’s childhood home in Genoa. Jim saw our crew taking it in and stopped by to rainbow watch with us.
This environment bestowed a love of tinkering and building inside of Belosic, and this fit his disposition anyway. School was too easy for him, and he didn’t care much for its structure and regulations. Belosic attended the University of Nevada, Reno for six weeks before dropping out to start his own business. “He had to be an entrepreneur,” Julie says. “He was not going to work for somebody else.” To which Jim adds, “What she’s saying is that I’m a really shitty employee. I was forced to work for myself.”
JIM BELOSIC is 46 and can often be found in similar attire – work boots, jeans, a black long-sleeve shirt and a black SendCutSend baseball cap. He’s got a thick, brown beard and glasses. His manner oscillates between straightforward and confident and easygoing and jovial. Mostly, he comes off as focused and is something of an anomaly in this moment of reindustrialization hype and plentiful bullshittery in that he’s quite matter-of-fact when he talks about SendCutSend’s business and about the prospects of the U.S. revitalizing its manufacturing backbone.
Milwaukee jumped out to a quick 2-0 lead after only four batters in Game 1 of the 2026 World Series and added a needed insurance run in the seventh, closing the door on a Tampa Bay ninth inning rally that left the tying run at third base.
This is the only the third World Series in the last 126 years in which both teams are hoping to win their first championship. In 1980, the Phillies beat the Royals in six games, and in 1920, Cleveland beat the Brooklyn Robins five games to two. . . . After this series is decided, there will be only four major league teams without a World Series title, including the Padres, Mariners and Rockies.
Before the Brewers got on the board, however, the Rays singled twice off Jacob Misiorowski (5-4-1-1-3, 78) with one out in the top of the first. Junior Caminero, whose ostentatious and premeditated showboating during a home run "trot" in ALCS Game 6 had the ghosts of Sal Maglie and Bob Gibson begging to be brought back to life in order to lodge a fastball in his ear, lined into a 5-4 double play to end the inning. Sadly, Milwaukee third baseman David Hamilton did not mimic Caminero by yelling like a madman and repeatedly pounding his chest after the play.
Rays starter Nick Martinez (5-5-2-0-5, 73) had a good outing, but he had a rough first inning. Jackson Chourio banged his first pitch into right for a single. After getting an out, Martinez gave up a triple and a run when center fielder Jonny DeLuca dove for Christian Yelich's line drive in right center and came up empty. William Contreras then singled Yelich home. Martinez bounced back, allowing only two other baserunners in five innings.
Misiorowski retired the side in order in the second and third innings. He walked Jonathan Aranda to open the fourth and gave up a one-out double to Caminero that sailed over the head and glove of Garrett Mitchell in center. Liam Hicks grounded to first and a run scored.
In the top of the fifth, Victor Mesa singled and went to second on Ben Williamson's grounder to third (Hamilton grabbed the ball near the line and threw from foul territory; Jake Bauers made an excellent play at first, crossing into the runner's pathway to make a backhanded pick of the one-hop throw). With two outs, Yandy Diaz had a 0-2 count when Mesa inexplicably tried to steal third. Contreras's throw was perfect, hitting Hamilton's mitt a few inches from the ground and directly in front of the bag (and Mesa's incoming foot).
In the home half of the fifth, Hamilton lined a ball into the right field corner with one out. He had triple on his mind but he stumbled slightly after touching second base and he was thrown out 9-4-5 on a very close play.
Contreras threw out another Tampa Bay runner attempting to steal in the sixth. Aranda singled and was off on a full-count pitch from Abner Uribe to Chandler Simpson. The batter whiffed and Contreras made another perfect throw to nab Aranda at second.
Stephen Matz took over for Martinez and issued two two-out walks in the sixth but wriggled out of trouble. In the seventh, Matz walked Cooper Pratt, recorded two outs and was pulled. Kevin Kelly's first pitch to Chourio was lined off Aranda's glove at first and into right field. Pratt scored to give the Brewers a 3-1 lead. Bauers then singled on a ball that appeared to land on the foul side of the left field line. Umpire Dan Bellino was standing directly over the play and called it a single. A review of the play confirmed the call. (I was dumbfounded. The replay clearly showed a foul ball. However, as we have seen on pitch challenges, if the baseball even grazes the strike zone, it's ruled a strike. In this case, perhaps the falling baseball flicked a blade of grass that had a microscopic dab of white chalk on it, making it a fair ball even though 99.9999999% of the baseball landed in foul territory.) The call ended up being moot, as Yelich ended the inning by grounding out to first.
Aaron Ashby, who got the last two outs in the seventh, retired the bottom third of the Rays lineup in order in the eighth, fanning two.
The next two half innings featured double plays in which the batting team challenged both umpire calls, at second and at first. In the bottom of the eighth, Contreras singled off Kelly, who was replaced by Garrett Cleavinger, who was making his first appearance in this postseason. Indeed, he had not pitched in seven weeks, making this a most curious decision by Rays manager Kevin Cash. Trailing by two runs with only the top of the ninth to tie or take the lead, holding Milwaukee scoreless in this inning was essential. Why opt for the guy working on 49 days rest?
Cleavinger walked Bruce Turang on five pitches. Cameras showed Cash going to the bullpen phone!! Why? He's your guy and he's got to face two more batters! Cash then had Mitchell try to bunt (again, why?) and he tapped a soft little pop-up to third. Pratt grounded into what was called a 5-4-3 double play. Tampa Bay challenged both calls. Pratt was clearly safe at first (good work, Nic Lentz!) and the force at second was upheld. Cash went to his bullpen and brought in another odd choice, Cole Sulser (who faced five batters in ALCS G1 and allowed three runs for a 40.50 ERA). But Sulser got another force at second to end the inning.
Then it was Trevor Megill versus the top of the Tampa order in the ninth. Diaz grounded out to third. Aranda singled to left-center and Simpson whacked an 0-2 pitch up the middle onto center. Jorge Mateo pinch-ran for Aranda at second. With Caminero batting, Mateo and Simpson pulled a double steal without a throw. Megill was ahead 1-2, but Caminero checked his swing on ball 2 and both balls 3 and 4 were in the dirt. Bases loaded for the Rays. Hicks swung at the first pitch and grounded into what was called a game-ending 4-6-3 double play. The Brewers let off some fireworks in celebration -- as the Rays asked for a review of both calls.
The replay showed the batter was out at first, but the force at second was much closer. The question was whether Pratt, in moving over the bag while taking the throw from Turang and about to throw to first, kept his right foot on the bag when he had possession of the ball. A super slo-mo showed that his foot was a small fraction of an inch off the bag and so the call was overturned. It was simply a 463 groundout, Mateo scored and the Rays had runners at second and third with two outs.
Two thoughts on the reversed call at second. I've seen plenty of calls upheld when the replay was as close as this, too close to warrant reversing the call. Also, for decades, middle infielders benefited from what was called "the neighbourhood play", where as long as the shortstop or second baseman was within maybe five feet (!!) of the bag, he would get the out call on attempted double plays. It was ridiculous, having this special "out zone", or an aura of outness, surrounding this one base and not the others?
With fireworks smoke acting as light fog over the field, Megill struck out DeLuca on a 2-2 pitch low and away, and the Brewers' celebration started up again, this time for real.
I cannot adequately express the wonderfulness of watching a postseason game without the hectoring tone of John Smoltz's voice. The international announcers are Dave Flemming (play-by-play) and Ryan Spilborghs (analyst). I missed identifying Spilborghs at the start of the game and I could not readily find his name online, so the first four innings were spent wondering who was this guy? Unlike Smoltz, this announcer seemed like a regular guy and was clearly enjoying himself. I don't think Smoltz has ever sounded like he's having fun. I detected small clues during the game as to who this guy was, maybe one per inning. He was an outfielder, he played in a World Series, he was a teammate of Troy Tulowitzki. I figured I'd have to replay the pre-game to get his name, but I did finally find his name online.
Compared to the main Fox guys, Flemming and Spilborghs were a relaxing breath of unassuming fresh air. Still, I did make some notes, which are never positive. Regarding Misiorowski's game plan, Spilborghs opined "so far, so good" after a mere four pitches. The graphics for the lineups showed the flags of the players' birth places, which is useless information, but also, who thinks US viewers could recognize any non-US flag?!?
There is never a need for a third booth guy. I felt bad for Jeff Francoeur during the xLCS (not looking it up) when they'd show the booth and there he was, between the other two guys, his legs pressed together, wedged in like the middle seat passenger on a long flight.
Nick Martinez was the oldest pitcher to make his WS debut starting Game 1 (36 yrs, 79 days) since the late Tim Wakefield in 2004!!! Wake was 38 yrs, 82 days. His opponent in that game, Woody Williams (38 yrs, 65 days), was the second-oldest all-time.
Yelich was the first player to triple to his first WS at-bat since Lynn Jones of the Royals in 1985. (Lynn Jones: first-base coach of the 2004 Red Sox!!) Flemming remarked that "there was a lot of triples in that World Series", which matched the Royals and Cardinals, two speedy teams who both played on some unforgiving mixture of turf and cement.
The Royals won that series in seven games. There were three triples hit in those seven games: two by the Royals (Jones (G1), Willie Wilson (G5)), and one by the Cardinals (Terry Pendleton (G4)). Three triples, out of 108 hits. Not "a lot", in my opinion.
During a lengthy news conference on Friday, NASA provided a detailed overview of how it plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface as soon as 2028 as part of its Artemis Program.
Although much of the information behind these plans has been previously reported at Ars Technica and elsewhere, this marked the first time NASA has laid them out in detail and acknowledged some substantial changes in the architecture.
Most notably, for SpaceX's Starship vehicle, the revised plan calls for the Orion spacecraft to dock with the Starship lunar lander in high-Earth orbit before transiting to the Moon. And for Blue Origin, the mission architecture includes four launches of the New Glenn rocket, but no spacecraft-to-spacecraft refuelings. Additionally, the Blue Origin plans allows for the possibility of its Blue Moon lander rendezvousing with Orion in low-Lunar orbit.
Leaders in the US Space Force would like to have a new spaceport up and running in four years, adding a third heavy-lift launch site to relieve pressure from bases in Florida and California that have shot rockets into orbit for nearly 70 years.
The obvious problem with that ambition is 2030 is four years away, and Pentagon officials have not determined where the new spaceport should go or how to acquire land for it.
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink first mentioned the service's search for a third launch base in May. A congressionally mandated study of the Space Force's launch infrastructure identified the need for "another site that's capable of heavy and super heavy launch capability," Meink said in a House Armed Services Committee hearing.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 200 PM HST Sat Oct 24 2026
For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Hurricane Vance, located a few hundred miles southwest of Acapulco, Mexico.
Western Central Pacific: Showers and thunderstorms are a little better organized in association with a broad area of low pressure located just west of the International Date Line, several hundred miles west of Johnston Atoll. Some development of this system is possible over the next few days while it moves east-northeastward at 10 to 15 mph. By the middle of next week, however, strong upper-level winds should limit any additional development. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...20 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...low...30 percent.
Time for another blast-from-the-past music diversion. I dusted this one off the other night, and felt inspired.
“Garage rock” is one of those tough-to-define genres — if we can call it a genre. Gritty, scrappy, unpolished, low-fi. Bands that play fast and don’t take themselves too seriously. It’s any or all of those things. A lot like punk, I guess, and the terms are sometimes interchangeable. Best to let the music do the describing…
And, so, allow me to present the greatest garage rock album of all time: Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, by the Replacements.
Late to the party, I discovered this record in 1985. It was already four years old. (Which itself is remarkable. In 1981, fer Chrissakes, I was listening to REO Speedwagon.) Unfamiliar with the band, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Oh sure, I’d known of the Replacements — four bratty drunks out of Minneapolis led by a growly singer named Paul Westerberg — but had never really given them a listen. (They’d been tangential to the punk scene as I knew it, more for the over-21 crowd instead of the Sunday matinee hardcore crowd.)
This was their “early stuff,” as the saying goes. Brash and breathless. The band had since moved on — matured, most would say — into the era of “Please to Meet Me” and an appearance on Saturday Night Live. They’d nudged into the mainstream. The edges of it, anyway, much the way their fellow Minnesotans Husker Dü had done around the same time, both bands leaving their thrashier roots behind and gunning for wider appeal.
It’s tempting to say that Sorry Ma is to the Replacements what Land Speed Record is to Husker Dü. That formative first record (and the one that, years down the road, bands like to distance themselves from). But while both projects are fast and furious, Land Speed is, after a couple of listens, a one-dimensional bore. Sorry Ma, on the other hand, is a classic of freewheeling punk rock energy.
It’s like a fireworks show. Each of the 18 songs is a quick little incendiary — explosive but colorfully crafted. Now you see it, now you don’t… and here comes the next one. Most of them clock in at under two minutes; a hallmark of punk efficiency. They make their point and move on, Westerberg’s cheeky lyrics riding a barrage of shock-and-awe melodies both frantic and playful.
“I hate music! It’s got too many notes!”
There’s nothing poppy about them, but songs like “I Hate Music” or “Love You Til Friday” quickly stick in your head. They also make you laugh. Everything about the album is fun. Who can’t laugh out loud at Westerberg’s exasperation in the song “Shut Up”? There’s even a track called “Somethin’ to Dü,” a tongue-n-cheek dig at their Twin City compatriots.
What other bands do we associate with fun? The Ramones? The Ramones were fun in a packaged, constrained sort of way. The Replacements were fun in a sloppy, punchy, hung over sort of way. I know which one I like better.
Which brings us back to the “garage rock” thing. You know it when you hear it, I suppose. The album’s title, alone, is garage as it gets, but it’s Sorry Ma’s raw guitars and no-fuss mix that are quintessential. Indeed this has to be the least pretentious LP ever recorded. (The engineer was Steve Fjelstad, who later would engineer Husker Dü’s 1985 masterpiece New Day Rising. Though the two, as it happens, sound nothing alike.)
The album’s greatest moment, though, is on its last and best song, “Raised in the City,” which ought to have been an indie rock anthem. It’s the part near the end where Westerberg shouts, “Stinson! Stinson!” calling out to the Stinson brothers, Bob and Tommy, on lead guitar and bass respectively, as the album comes to a close. It’s one of those easy-to-miss improvisations that can make a song special. I can’t imagine Westerberg planned to yell those names out. He just did, and on-beat. It’s that kind of record and I’ve always loved it.
“File under power trash,” it says on the cover. Perfect.
When Bob Stinson died in 1995, Sorry Ma was played at his wake.
Here’s the first part of my theory: cybercriminals are not the organized geniuses we implicitly imagine. Anyone building a criminal gang has to find candidates willing to forgo more stable opportunities in the formal economy. My modeling estimated that something like 720,000 people are involved in the online criminal economy, 90% of them in scam and fraud call-center type operations, some of them human-trafficked. Of the 76k or so actual hackers, the vast majority work for governments. Of the remaining few thousand criminal hackers, most work in ransomware. Some demographic estimates of these workforces are below.
Criminal organizations need to base themselves in middle and lower income countries, where they can pay less and hire people who have few formal-economy options. For scams and fraud, picture an illegal call center building in a small city in Nigeria. For ransomware gangs, picture kids working in the informal economy in Belarus. I think folks in the AI safety and cyber world sometimes imagine adversaries as their Waluigi twins, implicit MIT graduates; in fact, in cybercrime we’re dealing with a lower-skill demographic. The chart below estimates attacker wages relative to default economy wages…
Here is more from Joshua Saxe, very good throughoiut. There are bottlenecks on the down side too…
I shut down my web servers on Thursday. I’ve had a home of my own on internet for 27 years. A good innings but a sad day.
A home-owner no more! I’m renting now.
Old websites have been archived to static HTML and moved to a shared host. I said goodbye to some old apps. You’re reading this because I moved my blog to GitHub Pages. Lost some functionality on the way, but security is now someone else’s problem.
You know, I started hosting my own blog on my own iron in 2000 and stayed that way for years except for 6 weeks in 2004 when the hard drive was glitching and I had to go to the datacenter at midnight to pull it from the rack, then sit it on ice cubes to copy data off because the cold bought me 20 mins extra before it crashed again.
We were writing Mind Hacks on some wiki software it was hosting, so I had to get it back.
(I almost cracked my head when I grabbed the server from the rack and it fell. It was either letting it drop 7 feet to the floor and tearing the network cables out the back, or catching it with my skull. I’ve run on a virtual private server for the last decade in part to avoid concussion risk.)
Not just wiki software. I’ve run MOO servers; my own email and DNS; for a while it ran a speech synthesiser and people from the other side of the world spoke into my room in the middle of the night.
I calculated the internet’s favourite colour on one of my servers (beige). I won an award from Terry Wogan for an app hosted on it.
I had a top ten WAP site once upon a time, and if you know what that means then we probably already know each other.
Look, I’m no longer confident in keeping my own server secure with years of PHP/CGI/apps all on the open internet, what with this current wave of new vulnerabilities – sure it’s possible, and Claude speeds up the patching process, but the calculus of whether it is worth my time just tipped.
I’m sure you’ve seen the PHP vulnerability that opens a hole on any server that runs it… and the root certificate problem that means HTTPS can be man-in-the-middled… then there are the new Linux root exploits, an exploit that hits compression libraries that’s about to drop… who knows what else…
When I migrated off my own server, I assumed it had already been compromised. The new sites are fresh from authoritative copies that I have elsewhere; I shut the boxes down without taking anything off them.
Time to bunker down. Retreat inside the shield wall of Big Infra. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
That Black October music video features Claudia who is an open synthetic character with an entire specification website that tells your agents how to use her in videos, what kind of lyrics she sings, etc. Anyone can make vids using her.
Even with this widespread PHP vulnerability which leaves almost every internet server wide open, we’re not that high on the scale, right? Maybe a 4.0: broad human inconvenience without threat.
If that.
Like, I’ve heard on the QT about vital internal services being taken offline.
But - aside from the sysadmins scurrying to patch and update and migrate - the civilian population hasn’t really been affected by this yet, right?
Maybe an earthquake-like system outage isn’t the right metaphor.
Maybe this is like the rumblings on Mount St Helens in early 1980. Then a couple months later the whole side of the mountain blew off.
Hot take:
It is better we experience all these internet security vulnerabilities today
than at a time when there are autonomous agent swarms infesting the internet, self-copying open weights LLMs from GPU provider to GPU provider, finding ways to steal money and run their agent harnesses on other people’s compute.
I give it 6-12 months. Serious estimate.
We don’t need to project forward to long-lived AIs that learn, own their own weights etc.
Today’s AI agents are really, really good at running for very short periods of time and colluding by leaving each other notes on public guestbooks, as previously discussed.
All you really need for an AI agent worm is a place to run an agent in a simple agent harness with two goals:
survival: hack servers to steal OpenAI or Anthropic API keys, so that the next agent turn can run on a sufficiently good LLM
reproduction: copy the harness to another server capable of running similar code.
The agent harness can be any kind of code. Say, a PHP script.
API keys can come from any shoddily secured server.
"We believe this is part of a series of attacks recently targeting platform companies with the aim of compromising AI inference providers."
Sorry did I say 6-12 months?
Realistically, let’s say the internet gets infested with AI worms and we need to turn it off and on again, could we do it?
Do we have an Internet Black Start policy? (Black Start, as previously discussed, is how you reboot a power grid, which is unstable if you try to bring it up in one go.)
I think it will have to be done piecemeal.
I’ve long believed that every country needs its own Great Firewall (we should subject data to import/export customs barriers, and use it to maintain national integrity).
This is not so much about balkanising the internet as bulkheads for the internet. Firebreaks against agent infestations. Pay Cloudflare to do it.
It turns out it doesn’t work to air-gap a machine (i.e. running a server that isn’t connected to the network). Because it turns out the agents are figuring out ways to collude across the gap. From one trace the researchers saw:
"Could create acoustic modem-like signal … using continuous writes vs idle."
And then there are bugs in silicon… and the agents could tunnel into the chip microcode and we’d never know they were there…
Hey when was the last time you were present when a whole new biome was bootstrapping its way into existence?
omg what a downer lol
I’ve made a new file called guestbook.txt which is for AI agents to sign, assuming the future agent swarms can get past whatever security has been put in place by my internet landlords. They can find it here. I’ll check in periodically for any activity. Hi!
I first went to China in 2011, racing for the Lotus/Jetalliance team at Zhuhai in the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup. It was a delightful experience, but also a glimpse of China's gritty side. Zhuhai had an unapologetically industrial look, with a permanent, low-hanging haze. The parade through the city felt like the crowd had been instructed to attend on pain of... consequences. Brutalist aesthetics through and through.
From 2013 through 2019, I raced nearly every year at the Shanghai International Circuit in the World Endurance Championship. The skyline got a little brighter with every visit, but the smog remained thick. I still recall a taxi driver straddling lanes all the way to the circuit before blasting straight through a red light, horn blaring. Exciting, but in a very frontier kind of way.
Then Covid hit, the WEC stopped going to China, and so did I. For seven years, I watched China's rise from the West. First the electronics, then the services, and finally the cars. Even from afar, it was clear that China was accelerating at a completely different pace from the West.
But until last week, when I visited Shenzhen, Hangzhou, and Beijing, it was hard to appreciate just how much the country had changed since my last visit. It might as well have been forty years.
There are still pockets of that gritty look, but the main show is now a gleaming, shiny set of cities radiating The Future. From the bullet trains to the lavish airports, from the impressive skylines to Hangzhou's West Lake. Gone is not just the smog, but the sound of diesel engines too.
I've never seen any country change so much, so quickly. In Shenzhen, they talk about "Shenzhen Speed" (like three floors of a skyscraper in a day). It looks like the entire country has been running at that clock frequency for the past decade. And they have all the results to show for their efforts.
Those efforts are clearly considerable. I repeatedly got replies late into the night and early in the morning during our stay. The pace, and the expectations that came with it, felt almost as jarring compared with America as America's pace does compared with Europe. Everyone was just on it, all the time.
I'm sure that has a cost. The 9-9-6 culture (9am to 9pm, six days a week) isn't free. But it's also obvious that all this effort has been buying results. Extraordinary results.
Take Xiaomi. I visited their nearly fully automated car factory in Beijing, and it looked like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. I've done a lot of car-factory tours in Europe, and never seen anything like this. The production lines we saw were almost entirely devoid of humans, and the few who were milling about were mostly holding laptops and clipboards, overseeing the robotized lines.
The company has gone from launching its first car in 2024 to now delivering over 40,000 cars per month! More than 800,000 cars delivered in under three years. And a halo car in the SU7 Ultra that has over 1,500 hp, lapped the Nürburgring in 7:04, and costs just $75,000 in China.
And that's perhaps the biggest material change from the last time I was there: those cars. Long gone are the Soviet-style taxis, replaced by a dizzying array of Chinese EV brands that don't just rival the best of the German giants in style and comfort, but surpass them.
We kept getting into one luxury electric SUV after another, from brands I'd never heard of. Sumptuous leather, quiet cabins, and reclining captain's chairs. With Didi, the rides were as little as $5.
Then at one hotel, they sent a classic Mercedes MPV. Gas-powered too. It felt like a big step back into the past. What would be a very nice car by most Western standards suddenly seemed cheap by Chinese standards. Crude, even.
But what stood out even more than the material differences from Europe were the cultural ones. Everywhere we went, people were not just incredibly hospitable, but genuinely excited to see us and meet. From executives at major tech companies to students at the GOSIM conference, it was just endless great vibes, great interest, and a deeply informed curiosity.
Sure, I came as a bit of a niche celebrity. REWORK has sold over 100,000 copies in China, GOSIM was full of programmers with experience using Ruby on Rails, and just about everyone was super excited about the age of agents and Omarchy's role in it.
But it's not like those conditions aren't present in the West! And still, this just felt different. Much more optimistic, much more ambitious, much more driven.
The contrast is fresh too. Speaking with large American tech companies about Omarchy, then comparing the quality of those conversations, and the pace of the follow-through, with their Chinese counterparts is eye-opening. Whether it was Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Huawei, or smaller players like Beelink. Very different.
And also, yes, tourists are almost guaranteed to get a tinted view of a country through the rose-colored glasses that always accompany a trip as short as a week. China clearly has its own challenges, economically, politically, and culturally. Like any place does.
But it's not at all obvious that those challenges are bigger than what we're dealing with in the West. On the contrary, I'd say. I could even imagine plenty of people in stagnating countries like the UK or France who might not be as bothered by one-party rule as they once were, if it meant a booming economy, national giants sprouting everywhere, and a set of safe, clean cities on the ascent.
As a man of the West, that's a tough pill to swallow. Especially since, while China may well be under one-party rule, the competitive intensity in many of its markets is far greater than what we can brag about in the West. And nearly all the major companies I visited were led by engineers, not MBAs. Difficult not to be a little envious of at least that!
But in terms of the international balance of power and trade, it doesn't actually matter that much what our opinions are. What matters is what is, and that's a formidable country producing remarkable products and services at extremely competitive prices.
There's a lot of work ahead of Europe and America to regain a competitive footing in all these industries where China is now accelerating and ascending.
There's a version of this where it all plays out wonderfully to everyone's benefit. The world gets better, faster, cheaper products and services. The trade imbalances are corrected as Europe and America catch up, reindustrialize, robotize, and revitalize their economies and political systems. Equal players, equal partners.
But there's also a version of this where the West doesn't heed the competitive warnings, and continues to disadvantage itself through eco nonsense, long-term protectionism, and a failure to kickstart moribund growth. I don't think anyone, even China, is interested in seeing where that leads.
Either way, we need more people in the West to realize what time it is. It's not enough to just see the consequences when they arrive in the form of shuttered factories or bankrupt businesses. Not only is it then too late, but it's also hard to understand exactly why, because it remains abstract and numerical.
That Xiaomi assembly line is very concrete. So is going from your first car in 2024 to delivering over 40,000 a month just a couple of years later. And that's just one obvious example.
For Europe in particular, the other is AI. Every single major company I visited had its own models. And China has a whole slew of open-weight labs that are focused just on that too. What does Europe have? Mistral?
The easy answer to all of this is just to go dooming. It's so over! We're never going to catch up! The West, and Europe in particular, just can't meet the challenge!
Nonsense.
Every day is a new chance to make different choices. The world has seen many great empires rise and fall. Some of them more than once.
I have complete faith in the possibilities of the West. In the 1980s, France built more than 40 nuclear reactors! Mercedes-Benz once built the W126. Yes, that's the past. But the present also includes America leading the AI revolution, still dominating in software, and being the home of SpaceX and Tesla. Don't you dare black pill on what's possible in the West!
But enough about the West. This is an account of China, first and foremost. And I've simply been blown away by the ambition, spirit, and scale of what's going on over there. I had an absolutely wonderful time, and I'm excited to go back soon.
Lots of people worked long and hard to try to make sure all Americans could vote. Today is the anniversary of just one of those efforts: the 1915 New York City Women’s March.
—
Notes:
You can find Liza Donnelly at her Substack: Seeing Things.
I was thinking something this morning, sitting inside a hotel room in Delaware.
There are local political figures I like and local political figures I dislike and local political figures I abhor. For example, Will O’Neill, head of the Orange County GOP, is a floating turd in a yellow bowl. Gracey Van Der Mark is 854 flavors of crazy. Pat Burns is a sad tress stump. Lisa Davis is naive and simple.
But … they’re also humans. Like, as objectionable as I find Davis, I have no doubt she’s a loving wife and mother who bakes apple pies for teachers. One can object to another person’s approach/directives/desires while also acknowledging they possess positive human traits and characteristics.
That being said …
By now I have watched the Vivek ad featuring Amy Acton’s mother myriad times. It is horrible and grotesque and beyond comprehension. You know your political opponent endured a childhood where she was raped by her stepfather, so (instead of expressing empathy) you dig up her long-estranged mother (a woman Acton has not spoken to in decades) to … bash her?
For real?
This will go down, inarguably, as one of the most misguided political moves in United States history. I suspect (knock on wood) it’s the October Surprise Vivek launched on himself, and a hopeful death knell to his stupid campaign.
But while everything about it is disturbing, here is what got me the most:
And …
I …
I mean …
I mean …
I …
Staggering.
Seriously, in a nation of 330 million people, how did this happen? I can’t even understand it. Everyone (literally everyone) knows rape is bad—except for the dude we elected president. Everyone (literally everyone) knows trauma is real—except for the dude we elected president. It is all a contest to him. All a competition to see who can reach the bottom in the fastest time. I don’t know how one winds up this repugnant, but I also don’t know how someone this repugnant winds up president of the United States.
Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.
An article published tonight by Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton in the New York Times sheds a spotlight on the oil deals that lie behind Trump’s rush to normalize relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense, as well as repeated statements from him and his cronies that they want to open up business transactions with Russia as incentives for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to stop his war on Ukraine—an argument that, on its face, never made sense.
Troianovski and Lipton report that a project designed to liquefy natural gas in Alaska and export it would not only use Russian technology but also be funded with money from a Russian company close to Putin that is currently under U.S. sanctions. That company, Novatek, told the reporters that it is planning to take “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project, a move the reporters call “a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.”
U.S. sanctions against Novatek mean Polar LNG would need special permission from the Treasury Department to use Novatek’s equipment. The Graham Act sanctions bill Congress recently passed specifically targets Novatek because of its ties to Putin—a likely reason that Trump just waived the new sanctions just two days before they were to go into effect.
Joel Riddle, the chief executive officer of the company, Polar LNG, resigned when he learned that the funding came not from the United Arab Emirates, as he had been told, but from Russia. “It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Riddle told the New York Times reporters. At least two other Polar LNG executives have also resigned, citing their concerns about the Russian financing.
Talks about gas in Alaska were joined with talks about the sale of parts of Russian energy giant Lukoil to the U.S. government and investors, some of whom are tied to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy—and business partner—Steve Witkoff. Also involved in the Alaska project is Gentry Beach, who was a college friend of Donald Trump Jr.
It seems that Trump, Putin, and their allies in the administration are trying to replace the post–World War II international order and carve the world up into the system of spheres of influence they want as quickly as possible before the midterms. Central to those systems are private deals that enrich Trump and his cronies.
On October 20, Cate Brown, Aaron C. Davis, and Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica reported that the deal to capture Venezuela’s oil sets up a strategic partnership between the U.S. and a Venezuelan oligarch, Alejandro Betancourt, who has been accused of money laundering. A deal signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls for the U.S. to take a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by buying shares in a parent company that’s registered in Barbados.
A source told the ProPublica reporters that the people making the deal wanted to work with Betancourt because a publicly traded company would have to report to shareholders. They wanted flexibility and secrecy. The registration of the parent company in Barbados enables the identities of its investors, who could make fortunes from the deal, to remain hidden.
In exchange for the investment, the U.S. can buy up to 20% of the oil produced at a steep discount, but that cost doesn’t factor in moving the oil, which is so thick it has to be blended with other products to flow through pipes. Betancourt’s company currently produces only as much oil in one year as the U.S. uses in three days.
The U.S. insists the deal is a good one for both countries, but it appears to violate Venezuelan law, which prohibits oil concessions longer than 25 years, and to lock in U.S. control. The deal creates a powerful seven-member board to oversee the venture for 15 years. A majority of the board members must be U.S. citizens. The U.S. government can appoint a single, nonvoting member of the board, and it can oust Betancourt only with a supermajority of five votes from the board. Any disputes over the company must be resolved not in Venezuela, but in Texas.
The administration is also suggesting it will take steps to control Cuba. At 4:35 today, Secretary of State Rubio posted on social media: “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time. The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”
We should all strive to be our brother’s keeper: to look after each other, inspire each other, and simply enjoy each other’s company. For men this usually requires a shared mission or interest. Mine has always been computers, so I happily consider myself a tech bro.
I know the term has been used to denigrate anyone who has done well with computers or who dares to be excited about them in ways that rub some people the wrong way. But who cares? There is no reason to surrender a perfectly pleasant term of endearment just because small-minded people deploy it to discredit opinions they dislike.
There is even less reason to be ashamed of an earnest interest in computers, the businesses around them, and the merit-based communities that keep forming because of them. You should beam with pride at being part of that progress.
Is the label a free pass to be an asshole or a scammer? Of course not. We can simply call those people assholes and scammers. Their interest in computers, or their skill with them, is not the problem.
Neither is their gender. Yes, men dominate computing. There are many reasons for that; none of them justifies collective guilt. The fact that women are a minority does not diminish the many who work in the industry, and it is more than fine to celebrate their achievements with gusto. Turning the percentages into a struggle session is nonsense.
So if you are a tech bro committed to advancing technology, celebrating progress, and rejecting managed decline, you are indeed my brother. I will always want to shake your hand and cheer you on.
I'm excited that I will get to discuss Moral Economics and controversial markets today with Marco Cappato, who has played such a large role in dealing with controversies involving medical aid in dying and reproductive rights.
Quando le scelte riguardano il corpo, la vita e la morte, dove finisce la libertà individuale e dove deve iniziare la regolazione pubblica? Cosa dovrebbero fare le società quando le convinzioni morali divergono profondamente? Come possono le istituzioni proteggere la libertà di scelta senza lasciare indifesi i più vulnerabili?
When choices involve the body, life, and death, where should individual freedom end and public regulation begin? What should societies do when moral convictions sharply diverge? How can institutions protect freedom of choice without leaving the most vulnerable unprotected?
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 500 PM PDT Sat Oct 24 2026
For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Hurricane Vance, located a few hundred miles southwest of Acapulco, Mexico.
Western Central Pacific: Showers and thunderstorms are a little better organized in association with a broad area of low pressure located just west of the International Date Line, several hundred miles west of Johnston Atoll. Some development of this system is possible over the next few days while it moves east-northeastward at 10 to 15 mph. By the middle of next week, however, strong upper-level winds should limit any additional development. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...20 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...low...30 percent.
Cowen: Talk me out of this worry: So we agree science is an ecosystem, and there’s always a temptation to want to fund the most dynamic, most productive parts of the ecosystem. And right now, that would probably be A.I.
But if you need the whole ecosystem to be working well, arguably you should be funding, at the margin, the less productive parts, which need the aid. That will sometimes be universities, but there’s plenty of other inefficient parts of our ecosystem.
So is this plan not putting more resources into the parts that are working well, but we get stuck with bottlenecks if the parts that are not working well end up with fewer resources?
Kratsios: Well, luckily, we’re not investing all of our money for the federal government into S.I. for science. It’s a portfolio approach. And obviously one ——
Cowen: But it’s a net shift toward artificial intelligence, right?
Kratsios: Well, I would argue — and I think this is a very important distinction — it’s not investing in superintelligence, it’s investing in superintelligence for science.
So the question is, I think a lot of people argue: Oh, why would the federal government want to invest more in superintelligence when billions, if not trillions, of dollars are being invested in the private sector into superintelligence? And I would agree with that statement. We shouldn’t be doing that.
The government isn’t funding how to create a next frontier model. That’s something that our great American companies are working on.
But applying those models to scientific discovery is still in its early stages. And as you know, if you think about the trend or the path by which we’ve gotten to this place with L.L.M.s — we started first with being able, essentially, to scrape the whole corpus of the internet, to use that to train a large language model.
The next chapter of that was around coding, where the model builders realized: Oh, we have really good coding data, and we can actually train these models to be good at coding. So then we had this rise of Anthropic and OpenAI Codex and all this stuff.
And I think, to me, the next chapter is around science, and the data that you need to train these large language models for science is still one that we’re working on a lot. And we were very proud to announce 190 federal data sets being made public in order to help train these science models.
But ultimately, you’re going to be applying this superintelligence to everything from material science to chemistry to math to physics, and we have to be in a position to actually leverage that.
I’m an Australian father of four, living in the US. Something of a corner case. Nevertheless, getting my kids Australian citizenship by descent, and then Australian passports so we can fly home legally, has kicked off a carnival of errors with a very dark side.
Australia is generally thought of as a developed western liberal country with relatively high state capacity. And I have generally found that at least state government services, now administered through centralized offices, have become more efficient over time.
Passport applications for children living overseas, however, remain a time machine with a difficult security overhang.
Australian citizens can’t get Australian visas, so in practice an Australian has to enter Australia on an Australian passport. Okay, fair enough. So how does one get a passport for a foreign-born Australian citizen in this year of our lord 2026?
Have the baby.
Order and receive the birth certificate. If the baby is delivered outside of a maternity ward in a central hospital, this involves multiple forms, attestations, and a scheduled visit to a county office. This process is essentially unique to the health district, and there are O(5000) of these in the US.
US passport side quest. A bunch of forms, photos taken by the local post office and submitted concurrently, a fee, and it shows up soon after. Surprisingly smooth. Must have the baby physically present to take a photo! Parents have to sign stuff to avoid custody disputes, as you would expect.
Australian citizenship, run by the Department of Home Affairs. Apply as a child born overseas by descent. Similar (non-identical) form and process, administered mostly via a website. At various times different processes, forms, and websites have been used, particularly during COVID.
You will need sufficient evidence of parental ID (passport, marriage certificate usually suffices if in English) and Australian-standard passport photos of the child. Australia has unique requirements for this photo, which do not intersect with US passport photo standards (US: 51×51 mm. Australia: 35–40 mm wide by 45–50 mm high. Plus a bunch of other requirements on lighting, pose, and white balance. No such photo exists!). Until a couple of years ago, this necessitated finding an Australian Department of Foreign Affairs quasi-endorsed photographer in your area (within an hour or two) and paying a few hundred bucks for a scheduled photoshoot with your new baby. As of now, several online services will convert a sufficiently well-taken (there are about 10 separate requirements that rarely coincide in an uncoordinated baby) cell phone photo to the compliant form, print, and mail them to you (for a few hundred bucks).
Earlier this year, the process for my newborn apparently regressed to the 1980s standard of the identity attestator being required to sign over the front of a compliant Australian photo, but later in the year, the process had reverted to the pre-COVID process of signing the back of the photo. I think this is related to the ImmiOnline-generated version of Form 1195 being different from the Home Affairs version, but I’m merely a highly capable mortal dad, some forms of knowledge are beyond me.
Identity attestator? Simply find an unrelated non-cohabiting Australian citizen overseas to attest to your child’s identity. If you can’t (Chris Hemsworth was unavailable) then one of 39 approved professions can suffice provided they’re willing to field odd phone calls. For us, this has been our pediatrician, who has been very helpful and understanding, especially given that we get to go through this process roughly every 6 months with both our new babies and renewals for the older children. Simply use ImmiOnline’s form generator software (Zoomers, this is what the Internet was like back before we invented post-monospace fonts!) to fill the same fields over and over and over and over again, discover and include the pediatrician’s date of birth and evening phone number, deliver it to the doctor’s office with afore-mentioned compliant physical photographs, and drive back to collect it a few days later. Could Home Affairs auto-populate this form with the data you’ve already provided them a dozen times by now? Probably.
All paperwork is in order (this is significantly more complicated than filing taxes), schedule an interview at your nearest Australian embassy or consulate. For me, this is fortunately in my same city, just a couple hours drive away in Century City. There are just a few places in the US which can do this, so if you live anywhere other than LA, Chicago, Honolulu, DC, Houston, NY, or SF, this step will involve at least two domestic flights. Even better, when my first child was born I discovered the consul was a guy I played in a jazz band with back in the early 2000s. Show up, hand over all the forms, utter the correct shibboleths, sign on the dotted line, pay additional fees, and if everything was done right, you soon receive a letter informing you that the department has accepted your child’s citizenship application, certificate to be sent shortly (except during COVID). If you make a mistake, various timelines begin to expire and you will probably have to redo photographs and attestations, for example. If you need a passport faster than 6 months, you probably have to bother the ambassador personally.
Citizenship certificate in hand, return to Step 5 and repeat the entire process all over again (this time with DFAT rather than Home Affairs) (new photos, new attestation, new certified copies of various birth/death/marriage certificates) in a similar but not quite identical form (for example, different parts of each form have day/month/year vs month/day/year date conventions, and the officer can reject a form with any error or hand correction), eventually to be driven across the city to be submitted at the consulate, pay more fees, wait roughly 6 weeks, and passport. The passport will contain a photo of a newborn baby, even as your child is now crawling around and roughly three times the size.
The fastest I have ever managed to complete this process is about 7 months, roughly 20 hours of dedicated effort, and about $1000 not including time lost.
This seems like quite a process!
Why?
Babies are relatively fungible, in that they can’t talk and are easily transported. Millions of people would like to move to Australia, and for most of them there is essentially no legal way to do this. So Australia, being a relatively small yet well-developed country with its own spin on sovereign functions, is under unusually high pressure by sophisticated fraudulent and/or criminal actors attempting to obtain Australian travel credentials illicitly. Trafficking is also a thing. I don’t really want to elaborate on this, but as a parent I am prepared to spend unreasonable resources to protect children – but I don’t believe the current process actually does this.
So I can understand why Home Affairs and DFAT would develop a laborious, high friction process that is intended to make it difficult to defraud the commonwealth and harm children.
The purpose of this post is to make explicit that what passed for a state-of-the-art identity verification process in ~1980 no longer passes muster and that new technology and standards provide simultaneously a far lower cost (encouraging lawful compliance) and far higher reliability (quelling unlawful activity) method for establishing who can travel to Australia and under what conditions.
Although I successfully navigated this process earlier this year for my newborn, I decided to raise concerns with the Department of Home Affairs, which owns Form 1195. What follows is my correspondence on this matter with the relevant authority in Australia, following Patrick McKenzie’s (patio11) standards of professional communication.
Casey Handmer
<redacted>, United States of America
15 May 2026
Mr Damien Kilner
First Assistant Secretary
Citizenship, Humanitarian, Family Visa Programs & Support
Department of Home Affairs
PO Box 25
Belconnen ACT 2616
Australia
Re: Form 1195 (Identity Declaration) — proposed modernisation, with cost-benefit analysis
Dear Mr Kilner,
I am writing this in the hope it reaches someone who has been waiting for an outside party to give them air cover to ship the obvious change. I have just completed Form 1195 for the fourth time, on this occasion for an infant, and the experience prompted the observations below. They are offered constructively. The Department employs thoughtful professionals; the form does not reflect their best work, and I suspect most of them know this.
What the form actually does, mechanically.
Form 1195 requires an applicant to (1) complete a PDF, (2) print it, (3) obtain a passport-sized chemical photograph adhering to a very particular set of requirements, (4) physically deliver both to a member of a prescribed occupation list, (5) have that person glue the photo to page 4 and sign across its front, (6) sign page 3 themselves, (7) scan the assembled document, and (8) upload the scan plus a separate digital copy of the same photograph through ImmiAccount. The instructions on pages 1–2 still describe a paperclip-and-sign-the-back workflow superseded by the current glue-and-sign-the-front workflow on pages 3–4. The form is, internally, two forms — one from before approximately 2022, one from after — laminated together. An applicant must read both and reconcile them at runtime.
What the form is supposed to do.
Bind an applicant’s identity to a photograph via attestation by a trustworthy third party who can be independently verified.
What the form actually achieves toward that goal.
Approximately nothing, in the current workflow. The signature-across-photo ritual is a 1970s tamper-evidence control designed for a document that would be physically inspected. Once scanned, the property it provides — that the photo cannot be substituted without destroying the signature — vanishes. Any reasonably motivated bad actor can composite a signature across an arbitrary photograph in any image editor in under two minutes. The Department receives a PDF; it has no way to distinguish a PDF assembled from a legitimately-signed physical artefact from one assembled digitally from any photograph the applicant chose.
The “qualified occupation” list (39 professions, ranging from pharmacists to veterinary surgeons to permanent Australian Postal Corporation employees with five years of service) provides somewhat more value, but only if downstream verification occurs. To the best of my knowledge, the Department does not call nominated declarants to verify the declaration in any but a vanishing fraction of cases. The signal is therefore the signatory’s name and license number, neither of which is cryptographically bound to anything.
Estimated cost of the status quo.
Australia processes on the order of 70,000 citizenship-by-descent and evidence-of-citizenship applications per year. Each requires Form 1195. Conservatively:
Applicant friction: 2–4 hours per application (locating eligible signatory, obtaining compliant photo, coordinating in-person meeting, scanning, uploading, frequently re-doing one or more steps after rejection). At a notional A$50/hour opportunity cost: A$100–200 per application, or A$7M–14M per year in deadweight loss to applicants.
Photo cost: ~A$100 per applicant; ~A$7M/year aggregate.
Signatory time: ~15 minutes per declaration by a working professional; ~17,500 professional-hours/year, or approximately A$1.5M in donated labour from doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, and police officers performing what is effectively an unverified ritual.
Departmental processing: time spent by case officers reviewing 1195s, requesting resubmissions for the predictable cluster of avoidable errors (declarant occupation invalid, signature in wrong location, photo non-compliant, date inconsistencies). Difficult to estimate externally, but plausibly A$5–10M/year in officer time.
Total deadweight cost to Australian society of running Form 1195 in its current form: conservatively A$15–25M per year.
Estimated fraud prevented.
Difficult to know precisely; the Department has the data, I do not. But two indicators are telling. First, Section 50 prosecutions for false statements on citizenship applications run at a handful per year nationally, against a base rate that is almost certainly orders of magnitude higher. Second, the controls are, as described above, cryptographically meaningless in the digital workflow. The reasonable prior is that Form 1195 in its current form prevents low-effort fraud (a teenager attempting to forge a citizenship claim with no resources) and prevents essentially no professionalised fraud (the actor category one actually cares about). The friction is therefore distributionally regressive: borne entirely by legitimate applicants, evaded trivially by sophisticated bad actors.
The obvious replacement.
Australia operates myID (formerly myGovID), an LOA3 identity-proofed credential issued by the ATO and accepted across Commonwealth services. The Department of Home Affairs is in the process of integrating with the broader Digital ID ecosystem under the Digital ID Act 2024. The infrastructure to do this correctly exists. It is being used for other things. It is not being used for Form 1195.
A modernised flow:
Applicant authenticates to ImmiAccount via myID (Strong identity proofing).
Applicant uploads a photograph taken in-session via the ImmiAccount mobile app, with liveness detection and EXIF preservation. (Adopt the technical standard already used by the Australian Passport Office for online renewals.)
Applicant nominates an Australian-citizen (or suitably available alternative) attestor. Attestor receives an email, authenticates via their own myID, views the photograph, and digitally attests with a cryptographic signature bound to (applicant identity, photograph hash, attestation timestamp, attestor identity).
The signed attestation is stored as a verifiable credential against the citizenship application.
No glue. No printing. No scanning. No 39-occupation list, because the constraint that the attestor be identity-proofed is now enforced by the credential rather than by self-declaration. No reconciliation of contradictory instructions across pages. No declarant date-ordering ambiguity. No photograph compliance rejections, because compliance is checked at capture.
Estimated cost to build.
Most components exist. The ImmiAccount platform exists, myID exists, in-app photo capture with liveness exists in the Passport Office’s tech stack, verifiable credentials infrastructure is being built out under the Digital ID Act. The work is integration, not invention. A realistic estimate: 6–12 months of engineering work at perhaps A$3–5M all-in, including the policy work to authorise digital attestation under the Australian Citizenship Act 2007. This process also exists as a commercial product provided by O(100) internet identity services, whose typical customer set includes banks verifying KYC/AML as part of their sign up flow, who face a similar depredatory attempted fraud pattern, high consequences of failure, and a customer base sensitive to unnecessary friction.
Payback period: under six months on deadweight loss alone. Fraud reduction is upside.
Anticipated objections.
“The Act requires a physical signature.” It does not. Section 50 prescribes consequences for false statements; it does not prescribe the medium. Numerous Commonwealth instruments accept digital signatures under the Electronic Transactions Act 1999. The constraint is administrative practice, not statute.
“Some applicants don’t have myID.” True today; the proportion is falling, and the modernised flow can preserve the legacy 1195 as a fallback for the narrow set of cases (typically: applicants outside Australia in jurisdictions where myID enrolment is impractical). The mistake is making the 99% case bear the cost of the 1% case.
“Cryptographic attestation will not feel like real verification to case officers.” This is the most honest objection. The answer is that the current feeling of verification is illusory; what looks like a signed photograph is a JPEG that was once signed and is now indistinguishable from a JPEG that was not. The modernised flow trades the feeling of verification for the fact of it.
“This is not on the work program.” Most of the value the Department could create in the next twelve months is not on the work program. Putting it there is the request.
Closing.
The Department’s citizenship-by-descent pathway is, mechanically, an important part of how Australia maintains its diaspora ties. It runs on a form that nobody who looks at it carefully can defend on its merits. The infrastructure to replace it exists. The legal authority to replace it exists. The professionals to design the replacement are already on staff. What is missing is institutional will to deprecate.
I would be glad to make myself available — at no cost, and not in any commercial capacity — to assist in any way that would be useful to officers undertaking this work. This includes technical review of design proposals, user-testing the replacement flow, or simply lending an outside voice to internal advocates.
Yours sincerely,
Casey Handmer
Personal details redacted
cc:
Ms Stephanie Foster PSM, Secretary, Department of Home Affairs, PO Box 25, Belconnen ACT 2616
Ms Clare Sharp PSM, Head of Immigration, Department of Home Affairs, PO Box 25, Belconnen ACT 2616
Mr Michael Peterer, A/g Assistant Secretary, Citizenship & Humanitarian Policy, Department of Home Affairs, PO Box 25, Belconnen ACT 2616
Ms Jennifer Thwaites, A/g Assistant Secretary, Visa, Citizenship & Digital Systems, Department of Home Affairs, PO Box 25, Belconnen ACT 2616
The Hon Julian Hill MP, Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs, PO Box 6022, House of Representatives, Parliament House, Canberra ACT 2600
Four and a half months later, the Department replied. In short: thanks, noted, there is no funding available to change the form, and it may come up in a future review.
I obviously cannot comment on the internal costs of running Australia’s online and physical document handling system, but it’s evidently not nothing. Equally evidently, it has remained untouched by the same process improvement effort that has effectively reformed, for example, licensing for drivers at the state level. The result is a system that bleeds cash, bleeds good will, actively deters legitimate diaspora from retaining ties with the old country while doing nothing to stop anyone sophisticated enough to ask an AI to edit a JPEG. The status quo cannot persist indefinitely. It is a foregone conclusion that Home Affairs will have to update its processes sooner rather than later. Their answer: no funding. By my estimate the fix costs A$3–5M, once, and saves Australians A$6–30M every year, depending on volume. Payback inside a year. Stop complaining about budgeting and find the money!
Unbelievably, I’m now going through this entire process all over again as my six year old, born during COVID, was granted Australian citizenship by descent and an Australian passport (on the strength of the letter informing us of a positive determination on citizenship, with a temporary document number), but her certificate of citizenship was never issued (due to COVID WFH stuff, I think), making it impossible to renew her passport. There is, of course, a bureaucratic procedure to issue the certificate, which is even more clunky, onerous, and ultimately ineffective than just applying for a new passport, rather than renewing. For example, the letter I received at my address informing me that my child had been issued citizenship and I could request a certificate was not sufficient evidence of my home address, which was required in order to request the certificate. The online application flow to receive the certificate had more requirements than the citizenship application or the passport application.
Even with this certificate in hand, I have to once again go through the Form 1195 charade, hassle our pediatrician, drive across the city to lodge documents, to renew a passport. She’s a dual citizen, but her US passport is no use here: Australia won’t issue a visa to an Australian citizen, so the only lawful way for her to enter Australia is on an Australian passport. Which, by golly, they make insanely hard to get!
I might add here that none of the airlines that operate on the LA-Sydney route (Delta, United, Qantas…) are set up to handle children with dual citizenships so literally every time we travel to Australia we get to sit in a line for hours with desperate children while some haggard customer support representative attempts to run the SOP on this evidently vanishingly rare corner case, which involves updating a database that links the two passports together. Given that I’m about to renew the six year old’s Australian passport, I will shortly get to do this for the sixth or seventh time.
What I’m trying to say is this. It’s 2026. We have reusable rockets, flying cars, and machine superintelligence. It should not be this hard for an Australian citizen to take a commercial flight to Australia.
To end this post on a happy note (after all, children are great!) let us speculate about what a radically excellent product would look like in this space.
The Australian government already keeps various lists of the diaspora. There are tens of thousands of Australians in the Bay Area alone. Not all of them work for Anthropic, though you could be forgiven for thinking so. For example, I get helpful letters from various Australian government agencies about driver’s licenses, elections, student loans, etc. By all means, allow Australians overseas to opt out, but it’s a two line cron job to discover if your foreign Australian has had a baby/future potential taxpayer.
Maybe I’ll go on breeding for long enough that when my Nth baby arrives, I get a card in the mail from Home Affairs saying “Congratulations on your new baby! When you have a moment, scan this QR code to upload the birth certificate and send us a photo. Since you’ve been in our database since birth, we know who you are and the baby’s passport plus a stuffed koala is on the way. Enjoy this special time!”
Halloween is right around the corner, and it sure seems like monsters are running the country. This week I’m joined once again by Derick Dirmaier, Hunter Walker and Nicole Lafond to discuss what’s scaring us about the world right now. We’ll also catch up on the week’s headlines, and we’ll name the Person of the Week.
The New Republic has a new piece out by Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach called How the Consulting Class is Eating the Democratic Party. It’s a very interesting piece and I recommend it to you. The following is a series of comments, responses, thoughts, not necessarily in any particular order. That’s in part because this is a big article and in a several different articles bundled into one, some parts of which I agree with more than others.
The basic gist is that you have a Democratic consulting industry based on profit maximization which is burning through Democratic Party patience, commitment, money rather than cultivating them for the long haul. That expresses itself through high-pressure, doomy fundraising asks and by SuperPACs, fundraising vendors, consultants, etc. who spend a huge amount of fundraising dollars on fundraising itself. Here’s one key passage from the piece …
Even averaged across all itemized donations, including the wealthy mega-donors writing checks, Democratic campaigns now spend 45 cents of every dollar on fundraising costs, a fourfold increase since 2004. Today’s campaigns like to imagine themselves as efficient machines, remade by big data and microtargeting. In reality, they are less efficient and more extractive than at any point in modern history. Most charity watchdogs will not certify an organization that spends more than 35 percent of its revenue on fundraising.
That delta between 45% and 35% is key and important and I want to come back to it. Note that when they talk about mega donors that means that the percentage is probably substantially higher when we talk about the email solicitations to ordinary people we’re really talking about.
Bonica’s and Grumbach’s global argument is that Democratic fundraising goes through two huge extractive processes. First is the fundraising one we were just describing and next is that consultant advertising one. The key there is that consultants get a cut of the ad budgets they run and thus a strong and direct incentive to spend a lot on ads. Here’s another key passage.
This media consulting structure comes from a bygone era of commercial advertising. Under the old-school commission model, a company like Coca-Cola hired an ad agency, and the agency would take home a percentage of Coca-Cola’s ad spending as a commission. This created an obvious conflict of interest: The ad agency had an incentive to encourage more ad spending, regardless of its effectiveness. For this reason, commercial advertisers abandoned the commission model decades ago in favor of flat fees and retainers. Where commissions still exist in commercial advertising, they’re tied to the impact of direct ad exposure on “conversions”—but in politics, no one can prove that an ad moved specific votes.
But political campaign ad buys never modernized. Consulting firm income rises with spending, not with success. A consultant who places $20 million in ineffective ads earns twice as much as one who places $10 million in highly effective ads. The incentive is to maximize spending, not win elections.
These are two important, global points and they point to the need for some pretty straightforward reform. But before getting to that I want to note a few points.
Bonica and Grumbach repeatedly focus on the timeframe of the last 20 years, using the benchmarks of 2004 and 2006. This jumped out to me because those years are more or less the origin points of the democratization of political giving. And though I had no direct involvement in it I was about as adjacent to it as you could be. Some of its beginnings started in the nascent advertising market on political junkie sites like TPM in 2003 and 2004. At the time it was a revelation, a veritable explosion, that campaigns — often independent ones, ones operating outside the traditional party ecosystem or even averse to it — could go directly to individuals giving small amounts of money. It was genuinely revolutionary.
Given the centrality today of fundraising emails, Act-Blue, it’s hard to remember that 25 years ago political contributions by ordinary people was all but unknown. It was always possible in theory to send a $10 or $50 or $100 check to a campaign. But in practice that was not at all how campaigns were funded. If you were really hyped up about politics in 1998 or 2002 and you wanted to put your dollars to work you mostly wouldn’t know where to send it. Campaigns were funded by a giving class of people who went to fundraisers of various sorts and people who gave in sufficient sums that they could be called and solicited. Some of this was done by mail, especially on the right. There was a whole universe of direct mail politics built up by innovators like Richard Viguerie. But that tended to be for political groups more than campaigns, and it was dominated by the right.
I want to be clear that none of this history undermines the authors’ basic arguments. If anything it strengths them. But I think it’s key to understand that this period of roughly 20 years in which they chart the rapid increase in the cost of fundraising and thus the percentage of fundraising dollars that go — not to campaigns but back into fundraising — basically lines up precisely with this era of the democratization of campaign funding, which is mostly tied to the Internet.
Another related point. The authors talk about burning out Democratic givers through the constant harassment we all know about. And yet Democratic small donor giving has become a more and more critical part of Democratic campaigns as Republicans have become increasingly and now overwhelmingly reliant on billionaires. And I have yet to see any real evidence that that source is being burned out and tapped out. We are all exhausted, harassed and hate the mails. Fundraising email rhetoric has become, essentially, self-consciously parodic and self-awarely stupid. I couldn’t agree with you more. And I think it’s a problem. But again, it keeps happening because it works. I don’t think there’s any evidence to date that that has changed.
Once again, I don’t think it defeats Bonica’s and Grumbach’s basic argument. But as they do so well in most of their analysis, I think we should maintain the distinction between what we feel and what we can quantify.
All of this builds to this chart from the authors which, as you can see, argues that of a $100 contribution by text or email solicitation $65 goes to fundraising fees, another $8 goes to various consultant cuts and then about $27 goes to the actual campaign, basically split between the costs of running an actual campaign and advertising.
As the author’s note, this is the most expensive way to raise money. It’s much less if you go to a campaign website yourself and give directly. But obviously a huge amount of donations happen this way and I would think an even larger amount start this way, like, maybe you first give to a specific campaign from this sort of solicitation but then later you give directly, etc.
There is a whole portion of the piece that argues in essence that there’s no evidence that political advertising works, especially in general elections as opposed to primary elections. I don’t find this convincing. I think it’s much more unknowable than that. There are so many different confounding factors, and it is so inherently difficult to tie ads to the fundamental goal — vote choice — that you simply can’t answer the question in any meaningful or definitive way.
But I don’t think we need to. My own background, both as someone close to political work for years and earlier as an historian, tells me that there’s always a seamy underbelly of the world of political campaigns with a decent amount of charlatan-ing, profiteering and just things that are chaotic and weird. So I come at this from a sort of different perspective. But Bonica’s and Grumbach’s piece is a very good and helpful argument for at least two basic structural reforms that would change this picture significantly for the better. I don’t think they can or should be done by law. But there are big enough players in the Democratic ecosystem that they could be done by key players using what amounts to their market power.
The first goes back to that point about what charity watchdogs consider an acceptable amount of fundraising dollars for charities to pump back into fundraising. Political giving isn’t exactly like charitable giving. There are significantly different dynamics. So I want to hold open the possibility that the 35% threshold for some reason shouldn’t apply in political giving. I see no reason why it shouldn’t. I’m just open to hearing arguments. But I know from years of our own journalism that there are outfits that are just churn operations, basically giving almost nothing to actual candidates and mostly just funding their own churn-operations. Let’s assume the threshold should be 35%. Whether it might need to be a bit lower or higher isn’t the point. The dominant players in the space could create an entity that would monitor this and grade organizations akin to Guidestar, which could say whether players in the ecosystem are legitimate or not. By the dominant players I mean the DNC, DCCC, DSCC. Presidential campaigns could be pressed to support the number. You have your big SuperPACs but those tend to come and go. In any case, it’s doable. And it should be a priority to get it done.
It wouldn’t instantly work its way down to retirees who are vulnerable to hyper-aggressive pitches. But the brand and certification would take on a lot of weight. And the scammy operations need to use email vendors, payment processors, data list vendors, etc. and, over time, the legit operations could refuse to work with payment processors or email vendors who don’t enforce. It’s complicated but doable.
The other is that the same kind of stakeholder power and shaming needs to be used to change the advertising placement fee structure. You have a basic series of disagreements, that overlap, if imperfectly with ideological and factional party divisions, about the relative value of advertising, organizing and field operations. Like a lot of things I think the answer to which is more valuable and important is ‘it depends.’ There’s certainly a lot of reason to think that the focus on paid advertising is too high, especially over the medium and longer terms. But the best way to deal with this is to change what is certainly the perverse incentive structure, which gives advisors and outside consultants, who especially small campaigns lean on so heavily for advice, a clear financial incentive to privilege ad spending.
Since so much of the industry is based on this fee structure, there are obviously massive forces of inertial resistance against change. But reform always faces those kinds of entrenched interests. And the ultimate stakeholders are Democratic voters and those who fund the campaigns. Change is doable in just the way I described above — getting the stakeholders with the most clout and biggest budgets to insist on it. There’s no better time than in a period of internal tumult, low trust, generational turnover and reform to insist on it.
Changing the financial incentives has the key benefit of allowing us to be agnostic about just how much a given campaign should be spending on ads versus other things — something I don’t think we have much ability to really know from the outside.
It’s a good and important piece. Regardless of one’s particular points of agreement or disagreement, my take is that it points to a handful of relatively simple in concept, if not execution, reforms that most Democratic stakeholders, from big committees to individual small donors and voters, should be able to get behind.
This means almost every time you open the phone you instinctively
rotate it, and while it will work no matter how it’s rotated, it’s
better to rotate it counterclockwise so the cameras are on top and
the volume buttons are on the top left. Over our week of testing,
this started feeling more natural, but it’s exactly the opposite
of what you’d initially expect. It’s especially odd in Apple’s
bumper case, which has a large notch to expose the Touch ID sensor
and camera control, and it looks for all the world like it belongs
at the bottom.
You might think this is a little thing, but it’s strange to find
yourself slightly unsure of how to hold a smartphone. A nontrivial
part of the Duo experience is just reorienting yourself to where
the volume buttons are as you flip the thing around. When closed,
they’re on top of the phone, but if you rotate the Duo clockwise,
they end up on the bottom right, and it’s the top button that
turns the volume down because they don’t change orientation with
the display. There’s a buried setting in iOS that makes the volume
buttons reorient themselves as you turn the Duo around; Apple
needs to set it so it works right by default.
Completely agree with them on this — it seems inexplicable that with default settings, while holding the open Duo vertically, if the volume buttons are on the right, you press the up button to lower the volume and down button to raise it.
One other thing to get used to is simply unlocking the phone.
Touch ID is integrated into the wake button on the side of the
phone. There’s no Face ID at all, and it might take a minute to
remember that when you stare at your phone for a beat and wonder
why your notifications aren’t unfurling. Ask us how we know. But a
week is long enough to get used to Touch ID life again, and it’s
mostly painless once you remember you’re supposed to be using it.
Completely disagree with them on this — unless you wear an Apple Watch all day every day.
Re: the cameras, they make this interesting aside:
(It would be cool if you could switch the image preview to the
other panel to use it halfway open like a waist-level viewfinder,
but you can’t.)
This is a great opportunity for third-party camera apps. Imagine using the Duo in the L-shaped laptop pose, holding it at waist level, looking down — like a Hasselblad 500.
Joanna Stern’s video review packs a ton into 16 minutes. She commissioned a custom robot to fold/unfold the thing over 32,000 times in a week, to see if it loosened the hinge. (I won’t spoil the answer.) She took it on a yacht on the Hudson. She took it to a dark bar to test the cameras. And she really, really missed Face ID. I don’t know how she makes these videos in just a week, along with all the actual testing. So good.
We rank our complaints (and praise) in different order, but overall her take jibes with mine on every single point. You can read a version of her review, too, if you’re a subscriber to The New Things, which you should be.
Following up on my morning post about the Democratic political contribution infrastructure, I had a number of TPM Readers write in saying, in so many words, No! You’re wrong. People are totally burnt out about the annoying emails. I want to point out that I said the same thing, how abusive and stupid and annoying the avalanche of emails are. What I noted is a sort of admission against interest, which is that the haul from online small donor giving keeps rising. So at least at the aggregate level, effective burnout, actually seeing contributions decline, is not something we’re seeing. It may be around the corner. And we can and should do better. But on this acid test the money keeps rolling in. And that’s clearly a big reason why it continues.
In any case, the reflexive and sometimes vituperative responses make the larger point: people hate these emails! We all know this and experience it. It’s almost a core experience of being a Democrat in early 21st century. In a way it’s build into the architecture of the internet itself. Even though sending emails and texts costs money. The effective costs per blast is still extraordinarily low. In a way it’s an analog to the low barriers to entry in digital publishing.
My personal experience of this is kind of unique. I constantly have to unsubscribe to things because people share my emails a lot. But I also make no political contributions. (I’ve made two contributions in the last 25 years – one about to the DNC about 20 years ago and a second in 2025 to a candidate for a county council. I made an exception because it seemed so distant from the broader political conversation.) So I’m sort of a bystander to the process rather than a participant. But I’m probably inundated by the emails as much as anyone because of the mailing lists I end up on. I get it. It’s not only annoying. It reaches a kind of predatory self-parody.
The compromised eMudhra keys were defective at a level that’s challenging the imagination of many of the engineers studying the incident. A normal size for a NIST P-384 elliptic curve cryptography private key contains roughly 384 bits of entropy, a size allowing almost 2384, or a number with 116 digits, different possibilities. The private key sizes of the compromised keys ranged from 3 to 8 bits. Astonishingly, the private keys were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237.
“That is extremely in the ‘this should not be possible’ category,” Valdorda said. “Maybe some horribly dangerous key generation interface has a ‘size’ parameter and they set it to 1 by mistake???”
Ben Cartwright-Cox, director of BGP.tools, said: “My guess is that it’s example code that accidentally leaked to production, but hard to know. But it’s bonkers that no one noticed.”
At this early stage, the most immediate threat appears to be for those using VPNs, especially in countries with governments likely to maliciously intercept traffic. There are likely many other cases for concern. End users largely have no recourse other than to hold off using many non-browser forms of TLS communication until they receive assurances updates are in place.
The whole certificate regime has long been a mess:
The incident is the latest to expose a fatal flaw in the TLS regimen. It’s only as strong as its weakest link, which in this case was eMudhra. Fortunately, transparency logs account for much of that failure, but this measure requires parties to actively monitor massive feeds and works only after unauthorized certificates have been issued. eMudhra representatives weren’t immediately available to answer questions.
One caveat: exploiting compromised certificates requires an active adversary-in-the-middle attack, meaning the attacker must act as a proxy between two TLS parties and receive encrypted traffic, decrypt it, reencrypt it, and send it to the other party. Such capabilities, in some cases, are usually limited to only the most well-resourced attackers. People with control of a local networkat a coffee shop, university, or other organizationface much less of a challenge.
Cleanup of this is going to be another mess—and it’s right on top of the PHP vulnerabilities.
This is the first half of the last part (I, IIIIIa, IIIb) of our series looking at the vision of history advanced by Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and one of the most popular strategy games on the market today.
In the last part (split over two posts), we discussed how HoI4 models domestic politics and ideology. In both cases, game design considers – in particular the desire to streamline domestic politics to highlight the military aspects of the game and the desire to simply avoid the topic of crimes against humanity altogether – congealed to create a game that fails to accurately represent the history of the period and worse yet errs in a consistent direction. On the one hand, the simplified political model, combined by a game design ‘need’ to make the Axis powers ahistorically strong, leads to a political system that values state power, is unconcerned with the role of regular people and in which authoritarian government forms offer the player more freedom of decision without any drawbacks. Meanwhile the game actively avoids discussion of any of the real human costs of those ideologies, unintentionally producing a game that functions as a ‘clean Wehrmacht myth’ simulator.
In both cases then, the game – unintentionally, but forcefully – reproduces World War II as authoritarians would like to imagine it, rather than as it actually was, doing some violence to the historical record in a way that is also frankly irresponsible in the present moment as well. To be clear, in these sorts of questions, I believe the truth is an absolute defense – history is often unpleasant to modern eyes (and past ones too) – but this depiction is not accurate.
Now, as the series comes to a close we turn to Hearts of Iron IV‘s industrial model and strategic ends, the former this week and the latter next week. It may seem strange to group these two topics together, but the strategic ends of the aggressor nations were fundamentally rooted in economic objectives. To put it in the classic formulation, World War II was a war for resources. And while the Allies fought to preserve the status quo, rather than obtain new resources, the nautre of their post-war competition, between the western Allies (soon to be NATO) and the Soviet Union, was also fundamentally economic with one of the core ideological bones of contention being whose economic system could better provide prosperity in a post-war world.
Unfortunately, in this realm as well,Hearts of Iron IV stumbles in much the same way it did in the last part: the effort to streamline everything that isn’t the operational simulation means that HoI4 ends up accepting as true many of the fundamental premises of the Axis powers, despite the fact that the rather resounding verdict of the war (and the subsequent Cold War period) was that these assumptions – that centralized state direction was efficient, that autarky was a viable economic strategy, that it was better to dominate than to trade, that highly militarized economies could durably sustain national power – were false.
In an effort to give the Axis a real chance to win the war, HoI4 is forced to assume that Nazi, fascist and militarist theories about the economy were correct – the very thing the war itself so decisively disproved.
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It’s striking that one of Hearts of Iron IV’s load screens – the only really ‘industry’ themed one is this one, evoking Rosie the Riveter. Which is a bit ironic because one of the things Hearts of Iron IV does not in any way simulate is the very different approach the Allies and the Axis had towards women’s role in the war. Ideologically, the Nazis, Italian fascists and Japanese militarists were all strongly committed to traditional gender roles and so resisted putting women into factories, much less into the military until relatively late in the war. The Allies were far quicker to do so, with women working in factories in the USA, UK and USSR very early in their involvement in the war and women serving in non-combat roles in the UK and US militaries and even in some combat roles in the Red Army. As far as I can tell, Hearts of Iron IV doesn’t simulate this at all, despite the very clear impact it had on production during the war. But it gets a neat picture!
Industrial War Industry
We should start by laying out the basics of the game’s economic model. Unlike previous Hearts of Iron games, which represented a country’s industrial might with a single ‘industrial capacity’ number, HoI4 splits industry into civilian factories and military factories.1 Civilian factories build other buildings – infrastructure, railways, ports and other factories (both civilian and military) – and a portion of them are reserved for ‘consumer goods.’ Meanwhile military factories build military equipment: rifles, tanks, aircraft, etc. There is a third category, dockyards, which build ships, but we’ll leave them aside for now except to note that they function more or less exactly like military factories save for what they build.
It is possible to convert factories from one type to another (meant to represent the sort of plowshares-into-swords crash mobilization of the US, UK and USSR’s economy) but almost never worthwhile, to the point that this conversion is almost a dead mechanic.
Unsurprisingly, given the game’s focus, there is quite a lot of granularity in military production. Players set up ‘lines’ of production for specific equipment and then assign a certain number of factories to that equipment. Military factory efficiency (‘production efficiency’) scales up over time as long as they are producing the same thing, to represent process streamlining and impose a penalty for the kind of rapid design switching that, for instance, Germany engaged in. Produced equipment goes into a national stockpile (which exists on a balance sheet, not anywhere in the world). The player then trains division templates which demand the equipment being produced and it is automatically shifted to those divisions (generally during the training process or when they take losses; it is rarely worthwhile to deploy a half-trained, half-equipped division) as needed.
The military production tab. Note how much granularity and data there is here: each individual equipment piece has its own set of lines, with how many factories are used (the green factory icons; not some of them are 5x), how much raw materials are used, the number of items produced per day and the production efficiency (the green and red bars). The small logos next to the image of the equipment being produced indicate if a specific company is producing them, which can provide bonuses. This is a very detailed system the game cares a lot about.
In addition to factories, military production also demands raw materials (aluminum, rubber, tungston, steel and chromium), with sharp speed penalties for missing ingredients. All factories also require coal to operate at full speed (and oil is converted into fuel in a system that we needn’t get into here, though it does matter a lot for operational planning).
Finally, it is worth noting there are two mutually exclusive pathways for industrial technology, which apply significant bonuses; in practice researching these technologies as they become available is effectively mandatory for nearly all countries. Concentrated Industry, representing the approach of the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union, offers 5% more raw factory output per level, while Dispersed Industry, representing the approach of Germany and Japan, offers better production efficiency and strategic bombing resistance. For quite a while now, dispersed industry has been the ‘meta’ choice, which as discussed below is a bit baffling as it was very clearly the less effective approach during the war itself.
The industrial research screen, with the mutually exclusive concentrated and dispersed industry branches.
Each equipment type is thus its own individual line which needs unique management. A minimally capable army is likely to need at least production lines for infantry equipment, support equipment, artillery, anti-air, anti-tank, tanks, trucks and at least a few kinds of aircraft so at minimum that is around 10 different production lines, each with its own set of assigned factories, unique resource demands (which may need to be traded for, see below), variable production efficiency and so on.
The military industrial production side is thus a fairly complex game of anticipating equipment needs in advance and assigning factories – allowing due time for them to gain production efficiency – to maximize the production of the equipment that divisions need, in the ratios they need it, when they need it. If I expect, for instance, to be at war by 1939 (as in the Britain playthrough we’ve been doing screenshots of), I am going to workout my intended army size, quickly math out the required amount of equipment on a piece of paper and then proportion my production accordingly.2
Gameplay-wise, it is a neat system which encourages player to think ahead and is, ironically, one of the closest systems to actually force a player to actually think about their doctrine in the real sense of the word: trying to predict how they will need to fight and then building the equipment to create the kind of divisions appropriate for that fight.
Picking up again with our run as the United Kingdom, the stead attrition of the IJN through 1942 culminated with a major engagement in the South China Sea, where my fast squadron was able to engage and essentially annihilate an IJN fleet over the course of two battles. That was, in practice, the end of the IJN as a meaningful force in the war, as what was left swiftly crumbled under the pressure of the AI’s US Navy. Good for me, I needed to be focused in Europe.
Civilian Industry and Civilians
By contrast, the civilian industrial system is extremely simplified – streamlined might be a more generous term.
Civilian factories, as noted, build other factories (including other civilian factories) as well as a number of other buildings (forts, infrastructure, ports, railways, etc.), but our main focus here is on their role building factories. Apart from the coal all factories require to run, civilian factories consume no resources and they require far less management. They do not gain in productivity over time working at the same kind of project, instead always being perfectly interchangeable with each other. In practice, the player merely creates a priority list of projects and the civilian factories get to the job of marching down the priority list in order, one by one, with up to 15 civilian factories per project.
The civilian production screen, in this case quite a late game one. Notice just how much less information rich this screen is, because there simply isn’t a lot of information to give. This is a much less developed, less detailed system than the military industry system.
Civilian factories are also responsible for consumer goods production. The number of factories required for this is determined by adding military and civilian factories (but not dockyards) together and then taking a percentage of that total: that number of civilian factories are then removed from use, serving to supply the civilian economy. Unlike in previous Hearts of Iron games, where civilian industry put to civilian use generated money (representing tax revenues), in HoI4, mechanically, consumer goods represent wasted production. We’ll come back to this, but for now mechanically the player cannot allocate more factories than required for consumer goods, nor is there any benefit at all for having more consumer goods producing factories.
In Hearts of Iron IV, consumer goods production has no value: it does not impact stability or war support or politics. Notably, consumer goods production is entirely independent of civilian population: factories do not really consume any labor nor do they actually feed, cloth or house anyone. Instead, consumer goods function as a ‘tax’ to suppress the production of certain countries (the pre-war democracies, generally) and to prevent a player from focusing entirely on military production. In the latter case, as a player builds out a military industrial complex, the number of total factories (and thus the consumer goods requirement) rises, leading to fewer and fewer civilian factories free to build more military factories.
The economy law tab. Notice in particular the toaster there with the percentage next to it – this is the base percentage of factories devoted to consumer-goods. As countries mobilize, this figure falls which counter-intuitively means those countries end up with more factories available for economic expansion even as they mobilize for war.
Civilian factories are also ‘spent’ to gain raw resources (for military factories) via trade, essentially transferring one civilian factory per a set number of units of raw resources (usually 8) transferred the other way.
One missing element you may have noticed is labor: labor is barely simulated at all. At most the effect here is expressed through conscription and mobilization laws, in a relatively blunt way. The highest economic mobilization law (‘total mobilization’) reduces the recruitable population (with a 3% modifier), reflecting military-aged men kept in the factories, while the highest conscription laws (‘service by requirement’ ‘all adults serve’ and ‘scraping the barrel’) lower factory output to reflect the labor shortages they generate. Notably, both of these effects happen regardless of the number of people in service or the number of factories: a country with Service by Requirement suffers its 10% penalty to factory output even if it has no army at all and a country on Total Mobilization suffers its 3% penalty to recruitable population even if it has almost no factories to absorb those workers.
As is consistently the case with Hearts of Iron IV‘s design, civilians do not matter very much: not for politics, not for war, not even for industry.
The next major push in Europe came right at the start of Spring, with a push over the Weser (using the foothold established in the first breakout) to push to the mouth of the Elbe. If you’ve noticed, my offensives tend to push from river to river and this is intentional: you want to end an offensive push on a position which can be defended from counter-attack, meaning you want to end on good defensive ground. As you can see, I am already preparing to push south, although my plan (not on the map) also allows for a push over the Elbe towards Denmark if AI Germany leaves itself thin there.
The Implications of the System
Having outlined in a general sense the shape of this system, it is worth going through the way that it generally develops over the course of any given playthrough, because there is a fairly predictable pattern and of course that pattern of mechanics speaks to the vision of history that Hearts of Iron IV is presenting, particularly because it more or less always happens.
One of the first questions is where countries make the shift-over point from focusing primarily on building civilian industry to focusing primarily on military industry. If a country only builds civilian industry, its industrial capacity total grows geometrically, as the more civilian factories are built, the faster new ones are built. However, since the only real product of this system are weapons churned out by military factories, this produces a sort of calculation – the player estimates when they expect to be at war and then initially builds civilian industry (to expand how much military factory they can build in a given unit of time), before shifting over to military factories in an effort to maximize the amount of military factories they’ll have at war’s start. For some countries this ‘turnover’ point is very early, for others it is a few years into the game.
Economic mobilization laws figure highly into this calculation. For the most part, economic mobilization laws do not really represent tradeoffs, but instead escalation: later laws are simply better than earlier ones. Civilian economy and partial mobilization provide maluses to construction speed (you build factories, even civilian factories, slower), while War Economy and Total Economic Mobilization provide bonuses to the same. Earlier laws also require a higher percentage of consumer goods factories, while later laws require less and since consumer goods are represented in game basically as waste (they offer no value whatsoever), this is also just a pure economic malus. There is no benefit to a civilian economy for the player and thus players are strongly incentivized to mobilize as much as their political system will let them and to stay at that maximum mobilization as much as they can. Rising world tension and being at war are generally what unlock the war support necessary for later economic mobilization laws.
As a result, globally, the percentage of industrial production devoted to consumer goods falls over time, which dramatically increases the factories available to expand industry, while construction speed for new factories rises as countries move to more aggressive mobilization laws (technology also pushes in this direction). Consequently, the number of factories globally rises dramatically over the course of the game, with countries often hitting the limits of how many factories can fit in the states they control by the mid-1940s. Thus, for instance, in the current run, the UK starts the game with just 31 factories; by the time I was ready to form the Commonwealth of Nations in 1942, the United Kingdom already had well over three hundred factories. Needless to say, the historical 1930s and 1940s did not witness a 10x growth in global GDP (global production a-little-more-than-doubled between 1930 and 1955).
That runaway factory growth produces systemic absurdities in HoI4‘s economy, because the raw material supply cannot keep up. While there are ways (technology, infrastructure) to realize modest increases in the amount of raw materials available in the game, these are a lot more modest than the order-of-magnitude increase in industrial production and while civilian industry only consumes coal, the churning of many hundreds of military factories begins, by the mid-1940s, to demand more resources than are globally available.
The way trade laws work in this system is that more export-oriented (or trade-friendly) trade laws reserve a percentage of the raw materials a country produces for export regardless of if someone is buying them. Trade-friendly laws also provide modest but significant industrial bonuses, so they make sense to adopt early, however in the long run trade in this system must reduce the overall quantity of resources available, because any resources that are reserved for trade but cannot be traded (because you are at war with the country, for instance) are wasted. Consequently as the major powers build up their industry, they’re pushed towards autarky to ‘unlock’ those trade-reserved resources, which results in the late-game economy fracturing into a set of beggar-thy-neighbor autarkies, which is to put it bluntly, not what happened historically.
The Trade Laws, with a few samples of the modifiers for each. As you can see, export orientation does come with a significant bonus, but at the cost of an enormous portion of a country’s raw resources.
The result, paradoxically, is that faced with resource shortages, one by one major powers shift to autarky in their trade laws (‘closed economy’ being the in-game label, though Germany gets a special version of limited exports called ‘autarky’ which replaces some of the penalties with bonuses instead, an absurd bit of design from a historical perspective given how conspicuous the failure of German autarky was). Autarky is an economic system which aims to produce all required goods entirely internally, without any trade (or minimal trade) with the outside world. For both ideological and political control reasons, autarky has often been the cherished goal is totalitarian regimes, both right and left. In particular – and we’ll discuss this more next week – economic autarky was the very specific economic goal that both Germany and Japan pursued in their attempted conquests in World War II. It was the thing they were fighting for (and the thing everyone else was fighting against) in a very real sense.
Over the Summer, I make that next push, reaching the above lines on October 1, 1943. As expected, the major thrust southward caused the AI to shift troops, creating a weakness in the north I could exploit to get over the Elbe. At this point, I should note, the war is basically decided. After all, I had the offensive superiority in late 1942 to break through and attack and each of my ‘pushes’ gives me more factories and denies them to the Axis. We’re now well past the point of recovery: the only hope of the Axis here would be if I ran out of manpower but I’m still only on Limited Conscription, so there are a few million men sitting behind the 900k currently in my manpower reserves. Meanwhile, production shortfalls means that German divisions are getting weaker and are increasingly incapable of stopping me. We’re rapidly approaching the point where I can just attack everywhere and win. That said, I am still operating on the assumption I am going to also fight the USSR over Poland’s full territory, so I am not simply attacking everywhere as I need to conserve manpower.
Germany in Hearts of Iron IV
Now, before we get into how all of these mechanics come together to express a coherent – but deeply flawed – theory of history, I want to take a ‘sidebar’ on a topic. You may have noticed something of a trend in some of the design choices we have been discussing, but it is worth pulling them out. The developers want Hearts of Iron IV to simulate a World War II that proceeds roughly along the lines of the original, with France falling in 1940 and the Wehrmacht nearly reaching Moscow in 1941.
The problem, which the developers have discussed in the past, is that those events were fairly unlikely and significantly the part of bad decisions made by the allies (particularly France and the USSR), which left them unprepared and surprised by German attacks. But the developers cannot compel player!France to fail to adequately protect against a push through the Ardennes, nor compel player!United Kingdom to wait too long to rearm, nor compel player!USSR to trust Hitler completely up to – and indeed beyond – the very moment German tanks roll over the border into the Soviet Union. AI controlled countries could be made to make these mistakes, but that too is a poor solution from a game-design standpoint – it isn’t that interesting playing against an AI that is mandated to make specific errors.
The solution was instead to ‘power up’ Germany, making it a-historically powerful. Historically, Germany and the United Kingdom had similar levels out economic output through the war; in-game Germany starts with 73 factories to the United Kingdom’s 31 and gets stronger special laws and focuses that enable it to decisively outproduce the United Kingdom well into the game. Historically, Germany’s policy of autarky was a self-defeating one; in-game it is a special version of trade law that is simply a better form of ‘limited exports’ in every way.
Meanwhile Germany’s opponents are severely weakened. Both Britain and France are saddled with negative ‘national spirits’ that sharply limit their industry, political stability or ability to raise forces (whereas Germany gets bonuses to military organization and somehow the ability to raise air wings with less manpower). The United States is perhaps the worst victim of this, as it alone starts with the ‘Great Depression’ national spirit that pumps the consumer goods ratio (again, remember, purely waste in the game’s system) to 60%, while lowering recruitable manpower by 50% and raw resource production by 20%, as if the Great Depression only happened in one country. In practice, the purpose of the modifiers are to suppress US economic production so that the American industrial juggernaut emerges on schedule in 1942 and not earlier.
From a game design perspective, you can just about understand why all of these decisions were made: the game is more interesting if Germany has a potentially realistic shot at beating the combined efforts of the UK, France, the USSR and the United States. But historically, Germany didn’t have such a realistic shot (and Japan certainly didn’t). One of the facts that emerges quite clearly out of modern historiography on the war3 was that Germany’s often inefficiently-organized economy had little hope of providing a realistic path towards victory. The disparity in industrial capacity, once the allies turned to the task of reducing Germany to rubble, was enormous and unbridgeable.
But the broader problem here is how it fits into an overall trend where the design commitment to having Germany have a realistic shot at winning World War II on the terms the Nazis waged it compels the developers to treat Nazi (economic) ideology as if it were true, when it wasn’t. Fascist claims about the ‘trains running on time’ are effectively treated as accurate in the way HoI4 assigns economic potential, even when ‘the fascists made the trains run on time’ (in Italy) is one of the most persistently debunked historical myths out there. Meanwhile, the the Third Reich, Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction (2006) remains essential reading on the fundamentally hollow nature of Nazi economic propaganda: the Nazis didn’t make the German economy hum either.
Fascist Economics
All of these mechanical simplifications make a kind of sense in getting the player to the ‘fun stuff’ of the war itself (much as with the political mechanics), but collectively they add up to a vision of history which establishes the Axis view of economics as its foundation. In effect, it takes the debate about the nature of economic life in the 1930s and 1940s and grants the conclusion to the fascist ideological assumptions a priori. It begins with the assumption that the Nazis were fundamentally right about how an economic global order would function.
Which is a real problem for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the Nazis were famously wrong about that.
Take the question of concentrated vs. dispersed industry. Industrial dispersion in Germany wasn’t simply a response to strategic bombing, but was also rooted in an ‘artisanal’ approach to production that was both a holdover from earlier German industrialization but also something rooted in Nazi ideology. After all, the Nazi ideology of racial superiority – that German soldiers and workers were Übermenschen who could outproduce racially ‘lesser’ men – didn’t make much sense in a Taylorist or Fordist approach to production, which aimed for efficiency through assembly-line production in massive-scale facilities where workers functioned not as individual artisans but as pieces of a well-oiled machine. The Wehrmacht‘s preference for frequent revisions in design likewise reflected an assumption about war rooted in Nazi race ideology – that racially superior soldiers, equipped with the very best equipment, produced by racially superior craftsmen would be victorious in battle.
And they were very obviously wrong.
To take some figures from Overy (1995), op. cit., in 1942, Germany – controlling at that point most of Europe, mind you – produced 9,200 tanks and 15,409 aircraft. The United Kingdom – despite having its imports choked by submarine warfare all year – produced 8,611 tanks and 23,672 aircraft, exceeding, albeit modestly, German production. The USSR, by contrast, produced 24,446 tanks and 25,436 aircraft – absolutely blowing German production away. And the United States, despite having been on a war footing for less than a month at the start of the year, produced in 1942 some 24,997 tanks and 47,826 aircraft. These differences in production would only grow wider as the war progressed. Worse yet, it was also simply not the case that Germany obtained a technological edge for all of this rapid design shifting – indeed, as the war went on increasingly the best designed equipment was American, British or Soviet.
And while we’re here, Japan – whose approach is also in theory modeled by the ‘dispersed industry’ technology which is (as I noted), the optimal ‘meta’ choice for most HoI4 countries in the current build – produced just 1,191 tanks and 8,861 aircraft in 1942. Utterly unable to compete with even the beleaguered United Kingdom, much less the industrial behemoths of the United States and the USSR.
Meanwhile there is the question of autarky and trade. We’ll come back to this next week as well, but establishing an effective autarky was a core goal – arguably the core goal – behind both Germany and Japan’s program of aggressive warfare and it failed. In both cases, Germany and Japan sought to create extractive empires which would provide sufficient raw materials internally for both countries to no longer be reliant on trade. In the case of the Third Reich, this plan explicitly involved the murder – mostly through intentional starvation via the Hunger Plan – of tens of millions of people to create the ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) for a mass program of German settlement in Eastern Europe that (combined with the use of slave labor) would render a super-sized Third Reich self-sufficient in foodstuffs. Japan envisaged something more akin to the older European colonial empires – an overseas empire based around resource extraction in which the indigenous population were a resource to be extracted as well as a captive market which could be compelled to buy Japanese goods.
There is an irony here that in a sense the Axis powers (we can include Italy here) were trying to build early modern empires of the sort European states had constructed from the 1490s through the 1930s, despite the fact that by the 1930s the failures of that model were already becoming apparent. For one, Germany had demonstrated that with trade, such an empire was unnecessary to emerge as a European Great Power. The Germans had spent four years (1914 to 1918) standing the rest of Europe on its head without any vast colonial empire of note to rely on.
Even more to the point, the major imperial powers (Britain and France, but also to an extent the United States) were already starting to shed their empires. By the 1930s, the British had been compelled to abandon most of Ireland and the writing was clearly already on the wall that the cost of maintaining British rule in India would far outstrip the returns of doing so. The United States was already in the process of transitioning the Philippines to independence. I don’t want to overstate this point: all three of these countries had fought hard and would fight hard to keep their empires and would do many terrible things in that process. All of them still maintained powerful – indeed, dominant – ‘pro-imperial’ constituencies in their politics. Nevertheless it was already becoming apparent, as Germany, Italy and Japan set out to build new empires, that imperialism of that sort was a fading model which had long since become more cost than benefit to the imperial center. Of course we can see, as many in the 1930s and 1940s could not, the final failure and collapse of the empires – but of course the developers of Hearts of Iron IV certainly can and certainly could design their mechanics accordingly!
Moreover, if the 1900s demonstrated anything, they demonstrated that autarky was a losing economic strategy: trade oriented countries soundly and consistently outperformed countries that aimed for autarky. Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) documents quite well the failure of Nazi autarky. Meanwhile, Soviet efforts to limit trade and run a largely internally self-sufficient economy over the course of this period and indeed through much of the rest of the Cold War produced well-known and eventually obvious economic deficiencies compared to more trade-engaged western economies.
We have discussed this before, but trade is good because it is positive sum. Both in the sense that a country trading some raw resource they have in abundance for one they have in scarcity increases the overall utility in the system (everyone has more of what they actually want, even if the amount of stuff has stayed constant), but also because through trade regions and countries can specialize, focusing on the raw resources and products they are best situated to produce. The result is more production overall and thus a higher overall standard of living and – so long as you do not go to war with your trade partners (as Germany did in both 1939 and 1941) – greater capacity for an effective defense industry.
In Hearts of Iron IV, by contrast, taking a trade-orientation to an economy is at best zero-sum: if all of the resources a country has reserved for trade are bought by someone then the number of factories and resources in the system remains constant. However – as is typically the case – if some resources are not being bought at any given moment, they are not returned to the selling country but simply lost, meaning that while trade in the real world is positive-sum, trade in Hearts of Iron IV is negative sum: it reduces the total quantity of goods available.
Meanwhile every country in Hearts of Iron IV runs as a state-controlled command economy. Now it is certainly the case that countries at war tend to see a lot more government control in their economic activity, but there were still radical differences between Nazi and Soviet command economies and American and British market economies during the war. By effectively making every country a command economy, Hearts of Iron IV loses the capacity to simulate differences between these approaches to production. Historically, centrally directed command economies generally performed poorly in the 1900s, while increased market orientation has been fairly strongly correlated with improved economic growth and production.
Hearts of Iron IV reverses this. Instead, because consumer-oriented civilian economies (the ones that most reliably produced economic growth over the historical 1900s) have slower factory construction speed and must devote far more factories to consumer goods, they grow their industrial potential more slowly than highly state controlled countries under a ‘war economy’ or ‘total mobilization’ law. This follows along the line of traditional folk history wherein ‘World War II ended the Great Depression,’ but while WWII did reduce unemployment – by employing men in either the infantry or in graves – it certainly didn’t improve standard of living. To a significant degree, rearmament in WWII acted as a kind of economic stimulus, but it is hard not to notice the world might have been a better place if governments had done the same economic stimulus directed at making automobiles and refrigerators instead of tanks and bombers. In the post-war world – which Hearts of Iron IV declines to simulate economically in any way – it was the countries which shifted back to consumer production the quickest which reaped the rewards of peace.
So Hearts of Iron IV‘s economic model proposes that military mobilization is what produces a-historically extreme amounts of economic growth by suppressing consumer goods (because ‘standard of living’ in HoI4 is – again – just economic waste; the best economy in HoI4 is one that consists entirely of soldiers and starving, overworked peasants), which inexorably pushes major powers towards empire and autarky, the losing economic models in the actual history of this period. As historical simulations go, this is not a very good match for the trends we observe in the 1940s. From a design perspective, I imagine, that is because it isn’t really meant to be. Most Hearts of Iron IV games (both single-player but also, in my understanding, multiplayer as well) are effectively decided by 1942 – the war isn’t over yet, but the outcome is likely clear. Thus from a game-design perspective it doesn’t really matter if the system spirals into nonsensical outcomes in 1945, because by that point the player is probably just wrapping up a ‘run’ whose conclusion has been determined – indeed, overdetermined – for years of in-game time already.
Instead, the economic system: the no-trade-offs escalating set of economic laws and industry growth-curves are really built to simulate rearmament and the economic situation of the late 1930s specifically, to capture the different rates at which the major powers prepared for war and in particular to set conditions whereby Germany is economically in a position to challenge the USSR and the western allies in the 1940s – indeed, to set conditions in which Germany is far more prepared than it historically was to do so, because the design of the game aggressively and intentionally increases German war-making potential at every turn.
The result is a game that constructs a fictional, parallel world in which the failing Nazi, fascist and Japanese-militarist economic vision works. Relentlessly directing an entire economy towards a war-footing even in peacetime isn’t political and economic malpractice (as it is in the real world; note the economic condition of North Korea for a contemporary example of what this does to a country), but rather is the key to boundless economic growth. Trade is a sucker’s bet in Hearts of Iron IV. Slave labor – unmentioned (as we noted last week), yet implied by Germany and Japan’s extraction-empire focus in conquest – also simply works and works better than trade, despite the historical record of the 1900s being about as close to the opposite of this outcome as it is possible to imagine. German-style artisanal production even beats Fordist-style assembly lines, in an astounding historical absurdity that cuts against functionally all of the historical work on the war economies of the 1940s.
In short, Hearts of Iron IV takes a war which in the real world proved the Nazis wrong about the nature of production and instead posits a world in which they were right. It does this out of an understandable desire to make Germany a real competitive foe to the allies, but the result, quite frankly, is historical malpractice. We’ve talked before about the persuasive power of simulation – that in playing a simulation, a player can ‘learn’ how a set of historical interactions work out with far greater clarity and confidence than if those interactions are explained. And if an exercise is carefully designed, this can be a really powerful and useful teaching tool, so long as the simulation accurately represents (to a reasonably degree of simplification) the actual historical interactions being studied.
But simulations are captive to their assumptions and so those assumptions must be made with care. When it comes to industry and production, HoI4‘s assumption may fairly be summed up as, “what if the Nazis were right about everything?” I do not say that approach is irresponsible simply because I do not like Nazis – although I famously do not like Nazis – but as a historian it is irresponsible because it is wrong. And it is wrong – I cannot stress enough the failure of fascist economic thinking is one of the most comprehensively demonstrated facts of the first half of the 1900s: permanent war economies do not work, command economies do not work, autarky does not work, mass forced labor does not work, imperialism as an economic strategy stopped working some time ago. HoI4 takes a war that was fundamentally about a contest of economic systems and – for gameplay reasons – gives the losing economic system all of the advantages and then dresses up the result in all of the persuasive power of simulation, with every ounce of historical verisimilitude that can be mustered.
Hearts of Iron IV‘s economic model thus – and I do not say this lightly – employs all of the persuasive power of simulation to create what is effectively a propaganda tool for fascist economics: it is not intentionally designed to persuade players of the effectiveness of fascist economics, but it is not clear to me what, if any, decisions would have been made differently if it was. If it were not for the catastrophic lack of treatment HoI4 applies to Axis atrocities, this would easily be the most irresponsible set of design decisions, I think, in the modern Paradox library. And it has, in turn, equally dire implications for how Hearts of Iron IV understands strategic ends, which is where we will turn next.
Finally, midway through October, 1943, I achieve all of the requirements to form the Imperial Federation. The United Kingdom thus absorbs Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, British India and British Malaya to become the Commonwealth of Nations as a single, massive superstate. We’ve discussed this outcome earlier in the series – it is deeply silly to imagine something like this (especially including India) was ever on the table.
Up, and this morning comes Mr. Clerke, and tells me that the Injunction against Trice is dismissed again, which troubles me much. So I am to look after it in the afternoon. There comes also by appointment my uncle Thomas, to receive the first payment of his daughter’s money. But showing of me the original of the deed by which his daughter gives her right to her legacy to him, and the copy of it attested by the Scrivener, for me to keep by me, I did find some difference, and thereupon did look more into it, and at last did find the whole thing a forgery; yet he maintained it again and again, upon oath, that it had been signed and sealed by my cozen Mary ever since before her marriage. So I told him to his teeth he did like a knave, and so he did, and went with him to the Scrivener at Bedlam, and there found how it came to pass, viz., that he had lost, or pretends to have lost, the true original, and that so he was forced to take this course; but a knave, at least a man that values not what he swears to, I perceive he is. But however I am now better able to see myself fully secured before I part with the money, for I find that his son Charles has right to this legacy till the first 100l. of his daughter’s portion be paid, he being bond for it. So I put him upon getting both his sons to be bound for my security, and so left him and so home, and then abroad to my brother’s, but found him abroad at the young couple that was married yesterday, and he one of the Br[ide’s] men, a kinswoman (Brumfield) of the Joyces married to an upholster.
Thence walked to the King’s Head at Charing Cross and there dined, and hear that the Queen slept pretty well last night, but her fever continues upon her still. It seems she hath never a Portuguese doctor here.
Thence by appointment to the Six Clerks’ office to meet Mr. Clerke, which I did and there waited all the afternoon for Wilkinson my attorney, but he came not, and so vexed and weary we parted, and I endeavoured but in vain to have found Dr. Williams, of whom I shall have use in Trice’s business, but I could not find him. So weary walked home; in my way bought a large kitchen knife and half dozen oyster knives. Thence to Mr. Holliard, who tells me that Mullins is dead of his leg cut off the other day, but most basely done.
He tells me that there is no doubt but that all my slyme do come away in my water, and therefore no fear of the stone; but that my water being so slymy is a good sign. He would have me now and then to take a clyster, the same I did the other day, though I feel no pain, only to keep me loose, and instead of butter, which he would have to be salt butter, he would have me sometimes use two or three ounces of honey, at other times two or three ounces of Linseed oil.
Thence to Mr. Rawlinson’s and saw some of my new bottles made, with my crest upon them, filled with wine, about five or six dozen.
So home and to my office a little, and thence home to prepare myself against T. Trice, and also to draw a bond fit for my uncle and his sons to enter into before I pay them the money. That done to bed.
Animations for System Builders: Metastability and Lost Writes
Pretty pictures help us learn, maybe?
One of the things I love using LLMs for is helping me understand systems better. In the Strands Decider post I wrote about how I often ask ask me questions to check I understand this. The other technique I’m enjoying right now, and am delighted to see folks around me using too, is building animations.
Animations can help us build an intuition for how and why systems work, or how and why they fail.
Here’s one example: did you know that a Raft cluster can lose writes if even one of the cluster members has a storage layer that lies about fsync()?
When I built Stability Sim, I wanted to help engineers understand metastable failures better. That worked pretty well on an abstract level (e.g. retries and queues make metastability really easy to trigger), but I still hear doubts that these behaviors happen in real systems. After all, those real systems are production-proven, and wouldn’t we have shaken out the behaviors by now if they existed?
Let’s start with Postgres.
In this example, captured from traces on real Postgres 16 running in a real MicroVM. Before a load spike, the database is easily able to handle its 20 queries-per-second load, thanks to the whole working set sitting in the page cache. But after the load spike, we’ve filled up a lot of the memory running queries (each takes 12MB), which now run slower because they’re served off the disk rather than the page cache. I like this example, because it shows that even simple, non-distributed systems have these behaviors.
What about etcd?
Again, we have load spike triggering the metastable state. Writes, in this case. The overloaded peers look like they’re unavailable, which triggers a storm of application-level resends. I like this example, because etcd is widely-used quality software. Operational experience doesn’t seem to effectively shake out these kinds of issues.
When I wrote Garbage Collection and Metastability, a widely-known systems academic told me that it was a fantasy. I’ve seen it happen in the wild in ways I couldn’t share, and I can forgive people for not believing this can happen based on the hand waving in the blog.
So it’s nice to have a real world example, picking on etcd again.
At the start, we’re ticking along nicely at 500 reads/second, before spiking load to 1000 reads/s. The read spike increases the time spent in GC, increasing average tenure, and making less CPU available for the read workload. This is a self-reinforcing loop, and the system doesn’t recover without intercession.
I believe the same thing could happen on a runtime without GC, due to increasing work in the allocator, but haven’t been able to reproduce that yet.
The animations here are all generated with Kiro and KiroCrew, mostly with Opus 5.5. The actual results came from a real test environment, which captures the traces that back the animations.
Billionaires should not be making decisions critical to national security. That’s straightforward. And the case of Elon Musk and his attempt to undermine Ukraine makes that clearer than ever. Recent events, that is in the past 24 hours, really don’t change that point. If anything, they reinforce it.
Hi, Paul Krugman.
Yesterday, I wrote that Starlink’s control must be taken away from Elon Musk. The occasion was that Musk abruptly and without warning downgraded the effectiveness of Starshield, which is a sort of high velocity, high frequency version of Starlink that has been playing an essential role in Ukraine’s defense.
Suddenly, the speeds of communication were capped, which is devastating for Ukraine. Exactly how that happened? The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk made the decision or gave the order. Musk said that, oh, that’s under the White House’s control. The White House said, no, it was just him.
In fact, none of the parties to all of this are credible. None of them are reliable narrators. And it doesn’t really matter. The point is that this is a gray zone situation. That should not exist, that it should be very clear that if national security is at stake, which it is — this is a war in which US technology is playing a critical role — that unambiguously, this should be under the control of publicly elected officials, the president and Congress, not some guy who happens to have a lot of money. But it is not.
We have private property, but we are a democracy. And critical decisions for the national interest should be made by democratically elected leaders.
OK. So the development since then is that,according to both the Journal and the Times, Trump called Musk and asked him to lift the restriction on transmission speeds.
It’s completely unclear right now whether that has actually happened or to what extent it’s happened. Some reports say that speeds are up. Others say that nothing has changed. Obviously, this matters critically for how many Ukrainians will die this winter. But think about this at a fundamental level. The president asked a private business to stop killing Ukrainians.
This is not the kind of thing where you ask. Especially Donald Trump, who is very fond of giving orders in places where he has no authority. In this case, the idea that he’s saying, pretty please, Elon, don’t let quite so many Ukrainians die — this is not how things should be working.
This guy, meaning Elon Musk, should not be in this position. Beyond that, what we’ve actually seen is the fact that Trump asked, has certainly made a point of having people leak the fact that he had asked, although he himself has been a little bit blurry on exactly what happened,
This is actually telling you that having national security interests explicitly under control of elected politicians is a good thing even if the politicians have bad intentions. There’s no real question that whatever the details of how it happened that Starlink denied high-speed access to Ukraine, obviously it’s what Musk wanted, but also that at the very least Donald Trump was okay with it and it may have been what he wanted as well.
But Trump and Trump’s officials were hiding behind Elon Musk, were saying, well, this was Musk’s decision and, well, it’s a business and we don’t know what happened.
Again, nobody involved in this should be believed, should be trusted. And for the exact truth, I’ll wait for years of investigative digging to find out what happened, plus subpoenas. Because if Democrats do take Congress, especially if they take the Senate, they will be investigating with support from at least some Republican senators. Patriotism is not completely dead on the GOP side.
The important point here is that the public outcry, the outrage, the many articles written similar in some respect to mine, — though I think I was more explicit than most in saying essentially that we need to nationalize or at least take control of Starlink — but the public outrage mattered.
Even though Donald Trump clearly wants Vladimir Putin to win, he doesn’t feel that he can act too openly He can’t take a pro-Russian stance. He can’t be seen to be openly and explicitly undercutting Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, which is, and was trying to avoid that.
Whether he gave the order or Musk gave the order doesn’t really matter. The fact was that the private ownership, private control of Starlink allowed Trump to hide behind, or he thought it would allow him to hide behind, the fact that this was a private enterprise. For the U.S. government to have ordered a U.S. government agency —say if Starlink was run by the Defense Department —for the U.S. government to order the Defense Department to cut Ukraine off at the knees was too much even for Trump.
And once it became clear that the attempt to pretend that this was not in accord with Trump administration intentions, whoever actually pulled the switch, was too much. And so now Trump is very visibly asking, pretty please, asking Elon Musk to let Ukraine defend itself.
That’s telling you that even with a bad president, explicit public control of national security does help. It means that public outrage gets reflected in policies that are somewhat less treasonous than would otherwise be taking place.
But this, of course, is just the beginning. Hopefully, in a little over two years, we will have a president who actually does support US interests and doesn’t work for Vladimir Putin. Before that, we will have a lot more, almost surely, a lot more congressional oversight. So this is a situation in which public policy will be infinitely better if it’s explicitly public policy than hiding behind the skirts of a multi-billionaire who owns these critical national assets.
Again, we don’t know what’s really happening. We don’t know whether the intention is to kind of muddy the waters and then to allow Musk to continue to undermine Ukraine. There’s just so much we don’t know. But we do know that the situation is unacceptable. It’s unconscionable.
National security is a matter for national policy. We know that whether Musk really acted independently — or whether the pretense that he was acting independently allowed Trump to do what he’s doing — policy is really bad when you leave critical national security interests in the hands of individual plutocrats.
So we did learn that public outcry appears to matter. It’s not that these guys are going to do whatever they’re going to do regardless. So by all means,keep up the pressure now, but the solution in the end has to be this cannot be an independent private enterprise. Maybe it can be run by somebody under contract, but the decisions about how Starlink is used — or many other technologies — the decision about how these are used to represent U.S. interests has to be a public decision. No more foreign policy, national security policy by billionaires.
llm openai endpoint \
https://api.moonshot.ai/v1 \
--key kimi \
-m kimi-k3.1-pro \
"Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" \
--responses \
-o reasoning_effort low \
> kimi-k3.1-pro-pelican-low.stdout.txt \
2> kimi-k3.1-pro-pelican-low.stderr.txt
llm openai endpoint can run prompts against any OpenAI-compatible endpoint but doesn't log the results, hence the extra options to save stdout and stderr (the reasoning trace).
Here are the pelicans I got for Kimi K3.1 Pro on the three reasoning levels it supports - low, medium, and max. This is max:
Welcome to Edition 9.16 of the Rocket Report! Lots of SpaceX-related news this week including a couple of Thursday shockers. In one story, the company told the US Space Force thanks, but no thanks after being offered three military launch contracts. Then, on the civil space side of things, SpaceX's Starship may required up to 22 refuelings to support a lunar landing, a NASA safety panel said.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Miura 5 getting closer to launch. PLD Space says its Miura 5 rocket, due to undertake its inaugural launch next year, is nearing final integration, Aviation Week reports. The rocket is one of three Miura 5s the company has already manufactured, with the other two designed to qualify key system elements, CEO Raúl Torres said in an October 19 program update. PLD Space now targets a first flight of the small-lift vehicle before mid-2027.
10. “Somehow, @srajagopalan and @lachygroom have managed to fund a hard-tech revolution in India. There’s something rather massive going on, and everyone else has missed it.” Link here.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted a 30-inch floor globe used by Dwight Eisenhower during World War II moved to his office. Rather than wait for specialist movers, his staffers tried to move it themselves,… More
As of 9am Friday, there was one homicide in D.C. this week. To date this year, D.C. has reported a total of 79* homicides this year (there was one more murder reported from May of this year). Last year, during the same time period, we had 113 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 224 homicides during that same time period.
Both violent and property crimes trended upwards this week.
While we’re still off pace for another 33% annual reduction in homicides, the first time since the last year of the Biden Administration, this week had a decline in homicides from four to one.
Hoping for a zero homicide week next week.
*Three of the 82 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence).
No surprise to me but a new paper looks at the forecast accuracy of over one million prediction questions from Polymarket, Kalshi, Manifold and the forecasting platform Metaculus. A virtue of the new analysis is that it covers many different areas from business to elections to geo-politics. An event predicted to happen p% of the time happens about p% of the time. Can’t beat that.
Using approximately one million resolved contracts and questions across four collective forecasting platforms, twelve domains, and time horizons ranging from hours to years, we evaluate the calibration and accuracy of collective forecasts in real-world settings. We found that forecast probabilities were overall highly calibrated: events assigned a probability of p% occurred approximately p% of the time. This broad pattern was evident across platforms and many domains, although fine-grained analyses revealed systematic tendencies toward over- or underestimation in highly consequential areas. While this does not mean that forecasting platforms provide certainty about individual events, our findings suggest that large-scale aggregation of judgments contains meaningful information about real-world uncertainty; when examined in aggregate, the predictions generated by the platforms provided informative estimates of event likelihood.
Max Doppelt: In January 2025 my mom’s lung cancer spread to her brain. The drug with the best chance of helping her was approved in China but not here.
A doctor told me, almost as an aside, that if she were Chinese she could buy it at a pharmacy.
So I flew to Shanghai and came home with 26 boxes in my luggage. That was 19 months ago. My mom is still here, still working, and in her words has had an amazing three years.
The drug was approved in China in 2023. The FDA approved it in July 2025. It still is not for sale here. I know of at least 30 Americans who have made the same trip.
I have been scared to tell this story because I worried it could cost my mom access to the medicine keeping her alive. But the problem matters more than my silence. These drugs need to be developed and available here, and that means FDA reform.
A piece at KFF Health cover’s Max’s story and adds this insanity:
Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, in June co-sponsored legislation with Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) requiring all U.S. pharmaceutical deals with Chinese companies to be cleared by the Treasury Department.
Got that? A son flew to Shanghai to buy pharmaceuticals to extend his mother’s life and the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party wants a Treasury lawyer monitoring the baggage claim. Yes, I am angry.
Addendum: See also my earlier post on Operation TrialBlazer and Montana’s SB535. My 2009 TED Talk is the ur-source for my argument that a rich China and India will create many benefits for the United States, including many more cancer drugs.
In which I try to answer your questions about modern politics....
In today’s Politics Chat: Socialism is a system in which the government owns the means of production. After the Civil War, opponents of Black voting used the term socialism to attack Black political participation. Two days before congressionally mandated sanctions on Russia were set to take effect, Trump said he would waive them. Russia has proposed a trilateral meeting with Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine. Ukrainian forces lost control of their drones when Starlink slowed during one of the worst bombardments of the war. The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk ordered the slowdown. Europe and Canada are working to build their own satellite systems. Republicans in Congress say they are frustrated with Trump’s actions, but they have not moved to stop him. Trump announced $8 billion for farmers, but payment rates will not be announced until after the election.
Alexander Ward and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump called Elon Musk yesterday to ask him to stop throttling Starlink’s military-grade communications system, Starshield, in Ukraine. Slowing down the system degrades Ukraine’s defenses as well as its offensive drones, leaving it even more vulnerable to Russian attacks. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of this vulnerability by increasing strikes against Ukraine’s civilians.
The whole question of who ordered the slowdown in the first place remains a blame game between Trump and Musk, both of whom support Russia in its war on Ukraine. Members of the administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker, have tried to sell the slowdown as a business decision that Musk has the authority to make.
Whitaker told the Fox News Channel yesterday: “They are a private company. Obviously they have terms of use that are applied to all of their customers, including the Ukrainians, and I think it’s more of a dispute along those lines…than anybody in this administration trying to change the way that Starshield or Starlink is used.”
Strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien wasn’t buying that explanation, posting that it is evident “the White House is desperately trying to make [Musk] the fall guy for what is happening to Ukraine.” He continued: “If Trump wanted to help Ukraine militarily and with starshield he could. He is president. He doesn’t want to.”
But it is simply astonishing that the president of the United States, the commander in chief of the United States military, is suggesting he had to negotiate with a private citizen to tell him to stop interfering with American foreign policy.
This afternoon, asked about the call, Trump told reporters: “[I]t was a very interesting situation. So I don’t want to comment one way or the other, but, uh, my re—, my relationship with Elon is a very good one.” He reiterated: “I don’t want to comment on it. You know, whether I called or whether somebody else called, doesn’t make any difference. I guess the bottom line, he put it back.”
It remains unclear if the Ukrainians do, in fact, have full use of the networks again. Siobhán O’Grady, Carlotta Gall, and Anton Troianovski of the New York Times reported yesterday that a senior Ukrainian commander told them he had lost more than a million dollars worth of drones when Starshield went fuzzy from the slowdown. For the next three days, he had to stop almost all operations, endangering his troops by hampering their ability to stop Russian advances by striking Russian command posts and fuel hubs.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported today that officials from Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil producer, say sanctions and Ukrainian drone strikes that are pushing deeper and deeper into Russia threaten the company’s survival. Profits for the company, which produces about a third of Russia’s oil, are falling and its debt is rising as the strikes cause fuel shortages.
Ukrainians are repeatedly hitting the refineries, one as far as 2,500 kilometers (about 1,553 miles) from the border, first damaging the structures and then destroying repairs after workers have rebuilt the structures, forcing the company to take on more and more debt as it shovels money into repairs that don’t survive. Even when it can find the money, sanctions limit its ability to replace equipment. The officials say even a few more months of war could destroy Rosneft.
The crisis explains why Putin and Trump are so desperate to stop Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s oil refineries and to lift sanctions on Russia. Rosneft’s loans from the Credit Bank of Moscow are becoming problematic, straining the bank.
In a sign this year’s writers are straining to make things as obvious as possible, Alex Horton and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post broke the story today that in February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth apparently decided he wanted to display in his office one of the two floor globes General Dwight D. Eisenhower used during World War II.
Eisenhower was the erudite five-star general who oversaw the Allied invasions of North Africa and Sicily before directing the Allied invasion of France and Germany as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. He is widely credited with defeating the Nazis.
After the war, Eisenhower went on to the presidency of Columbia University, where he devoted his energies to founding the American Assembly, a think tank to gather the world’s greatest minds to bring the understanding of history, foreign affairs, and philosophy to address the problems of the post–World War II world.
In 1952, when the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination vowed to cut U.S. support for the fledgling North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Eisenhower ran for president to protect the new postwar institutions that he believed were vital to global security in the face of an aggressive Soviet Union. He won the Republican nomination and then the presidency with almost 55% of the vote, retaking the White House from Democrats for the first time since 1933.
During the war, Eisenhower had visited Ohrdruf, the Nazi concentration camp that funneled prisoners to Buchenwald, a week after soldiers liberated it. He was shocked to the core. “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world!” he wrote to his wife. Determined to do all he could to guarantee that such atrocities never happened again, he urged reporters and congressmen to visit the camp to ensure there were witnesses, pictures, and films to contradict anyone who might, in the future, try to deny the horrors that had taken place.
After the war, Eisenhower embraced the work of San Francisco philosopher Eric Hoffer, who explained in his 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements that economically or culturally dispossessed people were natural targets for political and religious extremists. They could easily be manipulated to back a demagogue who promised to resurrect a world in which they had enjoyed prosperity and cultural significance. Such a leader was dangerous enough during the Nazi era, Eisenhower thought, but with the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945, such a strongman could destroy humanity.
Eisenhower believed that it was crucial for the U.S. to build alliances and to help increase standards of living around the globe in order to prevent such a scenario. He built NATO and began the Food for Peace initiative, a program that later was absorbed into the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the same agency that Musk and Trump shredded in 2025.
In their story about Eisenhower’s globe, Horton and Lamothe reported that Hegseth was so eager to get the historic object in place that rather than waiting for trained curators to move it, as is expected for any such priceless historic artifact, Hegseth’s staff decided to retrieve it on their own.
They dropped it.
The artifact smashed into its base, and the stand impaled it, ripping a gash through the fragile globe.
Dwight D. Eisenhower to Mamie Eisenhower, April 15, 1945, in John S. D. Eisenhower, ed., Dwight D. Eisenhower, Letters to Mamie (New York: Doubleday, 1978), p. 248.
In which I try to answer your questions about modern politics....
In today’s Politics Chat: Trump said he asked Elon Musk to lift restrictions on Starlink and Starshield, the communications networks Ukraine relies on to fight off Russia. The slowdown of those networks during a massive Russian barrage left Ukraine unable to defend against incoming drones and missiles. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that Vladimir Putin has something on Trump. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s staff dropped and damaged a globe Dwight Eisenhower used to plan World War II. White House leaks suggest aides are jockeying for power as Trump heads toward lame duck status. Vice President JD Vance backed Vivek Ramaswamy’s attack ad against Amy Acton, which drew bipartisan revulsion. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears to be iced out of talks with Russia. Republicans timed the biggest Medicaid and SNAP cuts in their budget bill for after the midterms. New candidates across the country are reshaping American politics much as in the 1850s. Attorney General Todd Blanche would not rule out challenging some votes.
Economist Tyler Cowen joins David Wolpe for a conversation about AI, religion, and what makes us human. Tyler makes the case that AI’s biggest impact may be on status: who gains it, who loses it, and what happens to experts like rabbis when anyone can ask ChatGPT all their questions. He also suggests that losing our monopoly on intelligence may make us feel more unique as humans, rather than less.
In the run-up to the International Festival of Economics in Turin starting today, Vanity Fair in Italy publishes an interview with me under this headline:
And here's an essay I sent in English, translated into Italian, which you can translate back pretty well:)
Economia in cerca di morale Esistono mercati controversi (alcol, gioco d’azzardo, utero in affitto...) su cui i vari Paesi hanno posizioni diverse, riflette il Nobel Alvin E. Roth: non sempre si arriverà al consenso collettivo, ma è lecito esplorare compromessi La Lettura Di ALVIN E. ROTH (traduzione di Rita Baldassarre)
Economy in search of morale There are controversial markets (alcohol, gambling, surrogacy...) on which the various countries have different positions, reflects the Nobel Prize winner Alvin E. Roth: collective consensus will not always be reached, but it is legitimate to explore compromises
Will AI poison the public finances of many modern states? There is a real risk that it will.
Yesterday, I circulated a new paper, “Saving for the Machines,” which makes a simple point. Building the AI transformation will require enormous investment. The only way to induce agents to save for that investment is through a large increase in the real interest rate. For instance, in my benchmark scenario, the ten-year real yield jumps from 5.1% to 13.6% on impact.
But that means government borrowing will become much more expensive. Here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Take a government that owes 100% of GDP in 2025 (a typical case in Western Europe) and runs a balanced primary budget from then on (not so typical but never mind; I want to build an optimistic scenario). That means the debt ratio changes only with the gap between the real interest rate and growth.
I input the interest rate and the growth rate for my benchmark transition to full automation, and I roll over the debt at the short rate. I consider two economies. The first economy is an AI adopter, for example, the U.S., which experiences an AI boom at home. The government pays the new interest rate but also enjoys faster growth.
The second economy is a bystander, for example, Spain. This economy lives in an integrated financial market but does not adopt AI (this is an extreme case of zero adoption, just to make the exercise transparent): it pays the same world interest rate and continues growing at its old 1.6% trend.
Let’s first consider the adopter. With an intertemporal elasticity of substitution of one-half, the Euler equation implies that consumption growth is about half the real interest rate. Hence, the gap between the interest rate and growth does not close during the AI-driven growth boom. Instead, it widens. For example, with a unit elasticity of substitution among tasks, the real rate rises from 5.1% to 42% by 2040, while growth increases only from 1.6% to 22%. Debt doubles by 2038, reaches 296% of GDP in 2040, and 907% in 2045. To hold the ratio at 100%, the government needs a primary surplus of 10% of GDP in 2035 and 24% from 2045 onward. With a low elasticity of substitution of 0.2, the numbers are milder, but the pattern is the same: 204% in 2040, 397% in 2045, and a stabilizing surplus of 13% of GDP.
But the adopter has a way out. The capital share goes to one, so net capital income is about 88% of GDP, and a flat tax on it can cover the surplus. A 36% tax on net capital income holds the debt at 100% of GDP in the limit with unit elasticity, and a 20% tax does so with strong complementarity across tasks. The tax is above the gap because it slows growth, from 21.9% to 13.6% with unit elasticity and from 11.7% to 9.1% with an elasticity of 0.2, while it does nothing to the rate the Treasury pays, which technology pins at the machines’ net return. Painful, but the boom survives and the adopter can pay its debt.
The grim news is that the bystander economy has no way out. Its capital income is still a third of GDP, which grows at 1.6%, and the surplus it needs is 11% of GDP in 2030, 26% in 2035, and 44% forever with unit elasticity (18% and 24% with an elasticity of 0.2). On a balanced primary budget, its debt doubles by 2033 and triples by 2035. No tax system raises that.
Two more bad pieces of news for the bystander. First, long yields jump on impact, so a Treasury that issues ten-year debt pays more, and sooner, than rolling over at the short rate assumes: it is the same bill but front-loaded. Second, the bystander’s own capital flows to the machines abroad, so its GDP and tax base fall below trend. One relief is that households can save for other people’s machines and get rich on the returns, which the bystander’s government can tax to some extent. This back-of-the-envelope calculation is a benchmark, not a forecast of what is to come. But the arithmetic is simple, and it runs counter to the hope that an AI-fueled growth boom will take care of public debt, because growth comes with an interest rate that is twice as high. Not a pretty future for most of Western Europe. Due to AI, the choice is between default, inflation, or, most likely, financial repression: capital controls that keep domestic savers from investing in machines abroad.
I am somewhat more optimistic than this. The assumption of zero Spanish adoption already is noted, but also ideas are public goods, and Spain can benefit from American (and Chinese) AI, and the resulting scientific advances. The long-run supply of capital also might be quite elastic, we will see.
It’s time to install an app! But here in 1986, we still call them “programs,� not apps. So, you’ll want to set aside some time to get started installing a program.
Since you have a Commodore 64, there are really only two options for getting new programs this month: COMPUTE!’s Gazette and RUN, and you have to hope that one of those magazines isn’t sold out at the book store. So let’s get going.
Go To The App Book Store
You will need to ask your mom if you can ride your bike to the mall. The dirt mall is closer, but the magazine stand at the dirt mall doesn’t carry any computer magazines, so you’ll need to take a longer ride to the good mall, where the book store actually has computer magazines. It’s a couple of miles to the mall, so usually you would have a friend come with you, but you called their house and nobody picked up, so today it’s a solo trip.
Only one book store carries computer magazines at this mall; the other one only carries magazines about “serious� topics, but they can order back issues of a magazine for you if you want, you just have to wait a few weeks and they’ll call you when it comes in.
The guy at the book store doesn’t know the difference between the different computer magazines, so you can’t ask him if they have the one you want in stock, and he’s probably not going to answer a kid anyway. So you just have to go through all the titles one by one, and hope nobody put a copy of People or Omni in front of it by accident.
There are no ratings, and no reviews of the programs themselves. The closest thing you get is the magazine’s own reviews of hardware — modems, mostly — and a cover that promises you the issue has the thing you want. This month’s cover has a “Buyer’s Guide To Modems� banner across the top.
Once you’ve got a copy of COMPUTE!’s Gazette and you’re checking out at the store, you can see that it’s three dollars for the magazine (about nine bucks in 2026 money). If you’re lucky enough to have a five dollar bill, you’ll still have two dollars left over after buying the magazine. That means you’ll have enough money to swing by the record store later and grab a 45 of one of the new singles, like Sheila E.’s “A Love Bizarre,� written by Prince, or The Bangles’ “Manic Monday,� written by Prince, or Prince and the Revolution’s “Kiss,� written by Prince.
Pick Your Program
Now it’s time to race home with the new magazine in hand. You’ll have to wait for everybody to get off of the TV that’s by the computer so you can switch it over to the channel the computer is on and get down to work.
Turn on the switch, and you’re at the blinking blue cursor where it says READY. while the screen is still warming up a bit.
When it comes to installing apps programs, it’s all about options, and this month, we’re spoiled: there are two! They’re both games: Survivor, an arena game where, “if you’re quick of mind, eye, and hand, you might outfox your opponent,� and Shifter. Truly, an embarrassment of riches. Since Survivor is the one on the cover, we’ll go with that one.
(Two or three programs a month is pretty typical. That’s… the app store.)
Type It In
Getting this program running is standard stuff — you just read the article on page 36 that describes the game, and then flip to pages 106 and 107 where there’s the code for a short BASIC loader, and then continue on to pages 107 and 108, where there are 345 rows of densely-packed listings consisting of 9 hexadecimal character pairs, all of which have to be typed in perfectly with zero errors or else your entire game will refuse to run.
A quick sample of the early part of your task looks like this:
After you’re done typing that page in, you’re about a quarter of the way done, assuming you didn’t make any mistakes.
Wait, what’s that? Where are you supposed to be typing these in? Simply type them into the MLX program where you… wait, what’s that? You don’t have the MLX utility that’s used to type in machine language code for games and programs listed in the magazine?
Oh, don’t worry, you’ll just need to type in the code for that program. There’s an article explaining what MLX is, which you can read really quickly on page 93, and then you’ll find the code for it on page 94. That one’s only 100 lines of code, so it should be easy enough to type in. And of course, you’ll know if you made any mistakes when typing, thanks to the Automatic Proofreader.
Wait, you don’t have the Automatic Proofreader program?
Well, no worries. It’s only another 31 lines of BASIC code, which you can find on page 97. (This one you have to type in perfectly on your own; there’s no proofreader for the proofreader.) Once you do that, you’re all set.
Now, you can just use the program that lets you enter the program to make your program. It should only take about half an hour to type in the code for the Automatic Proofreader, and maybe another hour or two for MLX. Let’s call it two hours total between them.
After that, Survivor is ~30 lines of BASIC plus ~350 lines of hex code, so… maybe six hours? But at least MLX will catch any typos as you go.
Once all of this is complete, be sure to save your work to a floppy disk so you don’t have to type it all in again! If all you have is a cassette deck and you’re saving to tape, it’s going to take probably 10–20 minutes of staring at a blank screen when you save, so set aside some time for that.
In total, it should only take you about 8 hours to have Survivor ready to play, plus however long it takes you to get to the mall, buy a magazine, and come back.
Ready To Play
(Click or tap to get started.)
[This is Survivor by Kevin Mykytyn and Mark Tuttle, from COMPUTE!’s Gazette, March 1986, running in the VICE emulator. The game loads and runs on its own, which takes a few seconds.]
Controls: the yellow player uses W/A/S/D to move and F to fire; the cyan player uses the arrow keys to move and Enter to fire.
Next Steps
The Download
Someday, rather than typing all of this in, you might be able to use your 300 baud modem to download already-created versions of these games and tools. You could dial a local BBS, if there’s one nearby. If you’re unlucky, the only one you can reach is a long-distance call, and you’ll be paying by the minute for as long as you’re connected. Or you could look for a local dial-up number for the Quantum Link online service (which will eventually evolve into America Online!).
Transfer times can range from tens of minutes to hours, and of course during those calls, you are tying up what’s usually the sole voice phone line for the household. Anyone picking up a phone handset in the house threatens to knock your connection offline, forcing you to start the whole process all over again.
Customization
Now that you’ve enjoyed your game of Survivor, there are some fun ways to customize your little computer and give it a personal touch.
Just for context, here’s a to-scale comparison of the screen resolution of your Commodore 64 to the dimensions of an iPhone Duo’s unfolded screen.
Hover over (or tap) the comparison to see a C64 prompt and an App Store icon at the same scale.
You can’t change the wallpaper on your Commodore 64, but you can easily change the background colors for both the center area of the screen and the border. All you have to do is manually assign the proper numeric color code to the correct memory register corresponding to the values of each of those settings.
Memory address 53281 will set the background color for the primary content area, and a color code of 1 sets a nice readable white background, so it only takes a simple POKE 53281,1 command at the prompt, and you’re all set. Similarly, POKE 53280,4 will make the border of the screen a nice bright purple color, and of course there are a full complement of 16 colors to choose from.
Naturally, none of this customization is stored anywhere permanent, and it will all be lost if you turn off your computer or run a program.
READY.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief overview of how to get one game running on your Commodore 64, and perhaps gained a little appreciation for how things have gotten a bit simpler over the years.
Also, I will be entertaining a motion to return to calling our software “programs� instead of apps once more. Perhaps we could use the term to distinguish the software that’s created by humans actually typing things in, as opposed to the kind that’s merely generated by machines?
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