Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler’s own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, Lenin! got the era right, why it’s no coincidence that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of communist prudishness and Germany’s nudist culture, what Merkel’s East German background did and didn’t give her as a chancellor, why East Germans remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions today, what makes Weimar the cultural and spiritual heart of Germany, why relatively few Jews ever settled there, how much the citizens of Weimar knew about Buchenwald, what actually killed the Weimar Constitution, how she’d rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler’s citizenship problem, underrated German thinkers, the complacency behind Germany’s current economic decline, which side of the Weißwurstäquator she’d choose to live on, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Why did the Weimar Constitution fail?
HOYER: How much time have I got?
COWEN: Americans typically think it’s that the proportional representation system allowed too many small parties to enter into government. That’s one factor, but what else is there?
HOYER: There are plenty of factors, I think. Some of these are inbuilt flaws, like the proportional representation that you just mentioned. Another one that’s often referred to as Article 48, which was a kind of emergency article that was in the constitution that allowed the president to bypass parliament and the other democratic structures in time of emergency.
If you just follow down this route, then the fall of the Weimar Republic becomes inevitable. If you’re just assuming that there were all these flaws in the constitution already, so therefore it was bound to fail, I don’t think that is the case because when you study this closely, you do see all these kinds of forks in the road as to where things could have gone differently. I don’t think the system was set up to fail. I think these things contributed to the brittle nature of this. I think there was perhaps a degree of naivety there in 1919 to think that you could have this ultra-democratic system without any guardrails.
When you think how long it took the American Founding Fathers to sit there and really work out every angle, and “What if we got a mad president, what do we put in there to try and protect against that?” Those sorts of things. That process is so rushed in 1919 that they just put an ultra-liberal democracy in place, which allows extremists to hijack it. That is part of the reason. I think the other group of reasons is the circumstances under which the system is born. It’s basically born into crisis. It comes on the back of the First World War and then runs into economic trouble very quickly. That never really goes away despite the so-called gilded years in the middle. All of that’s propped up by American money, even the stability years of the middle 1920s. The moment that falls because of the Wall Street crash, you basically get the very economic foundation taken away again.
The subtitle I chose for the book, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, I’m trying to hint at the fact that that’s how a lot of people felt. They were literally balancing constantly for this entire time, really, after 1919, on the edge of their own personal catastrophes. It was always unemployment, hyperinflation, trying to get enough food. People were dying of diseases. There’s the Spanish flu. There’s tuberculosis. It’s always something or other. People don’t feel that the system is giving them stability. I don’t think there ever really is a feeling that this can really work long term.
People do, at the slightest whim, think, “Oh, maybe we just need to go back to a system where someone makes the decisions.” The Weimar Republic actually dies in 1933, years before Hitler comes into power, as a democracy. He takes over a system, I think, that’s already given up on being a democracy, even at that point. As I say, I could talk about this for two days and still be lining up factors. It is complex.
COWEN: The army is interfering in politics quite early and pretty frequently.
HOYER: Yes. They still think that because of the nature of the Prussian system previously, it’s often been said that “Prussia wasn’t a state with an army, but it was an army with a state.” That intrinsic self-confidence, if you want to call it that, of the army, that they are really calling the shots, that doesn’t really go away.
People also often forget that in the First World War, you have the so-called silent dictatorship, which is basically the army running absolutely everything under Hindenburg’s system, from the economy and culture to newspaper output and everything else. Again, that they don’t just suddenly turn that off in 1919. They do try and make their influence heard ongoingly.
Then the young Weimar Republic has to make a pact with the military because they defend them effectively against communists and also right-wing Putschers. They depend on the military in that way as well for security. They do try and build up a new military, but they never go Stalin-style and purge everybody who was there previously. They keep the existing elites largely in place, so they inherit an army that isn’t loyal to them, that’s still loyal to the old system.
TEMPO detected high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide during the morning commute at 7:05 a.m. local time on May 18, 2026 (left), along the New York-Washington corridor. The instrument detected lower levels of the gas at 3:05 p.m. (right), after chemical reactions involving nitrogen dioxide had contributed to elevated ozone concentrations in the afternoon.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
TEMPO detected high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide during the morning commute at 7:05 a.m. local time on May 18, 2026 (left), along the New York-Washington corridor. The instrument detected lower levels of the gas at 3:05 p.m. (right), after chemical reactions involving nitrogen dioxide had contributed to elevated ozone concentrations in the afternoon.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
TEMPO detected high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide during the morning commute at 7:05 a.m. local time on May 18, 2026 (left), along the New York-Washington corridor. The instrument detected lower levels of the gas at 3:05 p.m. (right), after chemical reactions involving nitrogen dioxide had contributed to elevated ozone concentrations in the afternoon.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
TEMPO detected high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide during the morning commute at 7:05 a.m. local time on May 18, 2026 (left), along the New York-Washington corridor. The instrument detected lower levels of the gas at 3:05 p.m. (right), after chemical reactions involving nitrogen dioxide had contributed to elevated ozone concentrations in the afternoon.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
7:05 am
3:05 pm
TEMPO detected high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide during the morning commute at 7:05 a.m. local time on May 18, 2026 (left), along the New York-Washington corridor.The instrument detected lower levels of the gas at 3:05 p.m. EDT (right), after chemical reactions involving nitrogen dioxide had contributed to elevated ozone concentrations in the afternoon. NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison.
More than 35 million people live along the New York–Washington corridor and breathe the region’s air. While air quality has improved significantly in recent decades, outbreaks of ground-level ozone remain common, particularly in the warm summer months, when the chemical reactions that produce the pollutant accelerate and stagnant air allows ozone to accumulate.
A reminder of this seasonal phenomenon came earlier than usual in 2026, when a mid-May heat wave prompted the New York State Department of Health and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to issue a health advisory on May 17 over concerns about ozone. The code orange advisory warned young people, older adults, and those working or exercising outdoors to limit activity due to ozone’s respiratory and cardiovascular health impacts.
As expected, ground-based air-quality sensors operated by state and federal agencies showed ozone reaching unhealthy levels for sensitive groups on May 18, something that typically happens several times per year. Meanwhile, NASA’s TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) instrument observed the event from geostationary orbit 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) above the equator, a unique vantage point that allows the sensor to collect frequent observations of air pollution.
TEMPO detects nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a gas emitted by burning fuels, particularly by motor vehicles, that contributes to ozone formation. “There’s often a clear and interesting pattern in TEMPO’s nitrogen dioxide data during ozone alert days,” said Hazem Mahmoud, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Atmospheric Science Data Center at Langley Research Center. “We see high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide during the early morning commute that drop off sharply in the late afternoon as ozone increases.”
The decline occurs as sunlight fuels photochemical reactions involving nitrogen dioxide, volatile organic compounds, and oxygen that lead to ozone formation. By late afternoon, these reactions deplete much of the available nitrogen dioxide, slowing ozone production until the cycle begins again the next day.
The pair of images above underscores the pattern. The image on the left was acquired at 7:05 a.m. local time when nitrogen dioxide concentrations were high during the morning commute. By 3:05 p.m. (right), most of the nitrogen dioxide had declined substantially, and surface ozone levels were elevated (below). Meanwhile, afternoon sea breezes appear to have transported the remaining nitrogen dioxide slightly to the west. Note that the data shown is provisional, and processing methods are still being refined.
Sensors on earlier polar-orbiting satellites, such as OMI (Ozone Monitoring Instrument) and TROPOMI (Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument), sampled nitrogen dioxide over New York once per day. After its launch in 2023, TEMPO began providing data every hour, allowing researchers to track the evolution and dispersion of air pollution at much finer time scales.
“TEMPO is helping fill data gaps between ground stations and allowing us to ask new questions,” Mahmoud said. The mission provides data that can improve not only air quality forecasts during crisis situations, such as wildfires, but also the atmospheric models used to forecast the daily rhythms of urban pollution. Such models help researchers understand how natural factors such as winds, humidity levels, and air temperatures influence pollution plumes over the course of a day.
TEMPO detected elevated ozone concentrations in an area extending from New York City to Washington, D.C., at 5:05 p.m. on May 18, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
TEMPO also detects ozone directly, but determining how much of that ozone is near the surface versus higher in the atmosphere can be challenging. Most of Earth’s ozone resides in the stratosphere, well above the troposphere, where people live and breathe. At times, however, stratospheric ozone can be transported downward into the troposphere. During events known as stratospheric intrusions, it can even descend far enough to affect air quality at the surface and add to the ozone produced at ground level.
By combining TEMPO observations with other sources of information, researchers are studying the processes that influence the distribution of ozone vertically in the atmosphere. On May 18, NASA’s ground-based tropospheric lidar network (TOLNet) in New York City recorded high concentrations of ozone near the surface, indicating that TEMPO was detecting mostly surface-level ozone associated with urban emissions and not ozone aloft, said Mahmoud.
However, on May 19, the same sensor observed a layer of ozone descending from above 5 kilometers (3 miles), he added, a clue that some of the ozone TEMPO detected that day may have originated in the stratosphere. “This is the type of information that leads to better air quality forecast models and more accurate alerts,” Mahmoud said. “Alerts can affect tens of millions of people and lead to disruptions in school, sports, and other activities, so it’s essential that they be as accurate as possible.”
On June 6, New York authorities issued another health advisory for ozone. People interested in following the event can access daily near-real-time TEMPO observations of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and other gases on NASA’s Worldview browser, on an interactive Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics browsing tool, and on NASA’s Earthdata portal.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using TEMPO data from NASA Earthdata.Story by Adam Voiland.
Asked to answer as a typical human, every cutting-edge model rated us markedly more neurotic, less open, less agreeable and less conscientious than they rated themselves. The gap on Neuroticism alone is 1.69 points on a 5-point scale.
Across 31 models from those seven labs they answer the personality tests in unison: high openness, low Dark Triad, Universalism on top, Power dead last in every single model.
In a post last week, I wrote about the progressive anti-monopoly movement’s increasing disconnect from reality. I wrote:
[C]onsider the movement’s choice of targets. These include some industries with high profit margins, but also some with very low margins. These include grocery stores, airlines, and health insurers. Grocery stores and health insurers both consistently have much lower profit margins than American corporations in general, often hovering near the zero mark.
Commenter Matthew argued that the low profit margins of insurers are not a reason not to worry about their market power:
The idea that health insurers have “low margins” so they are OK is nuts…Private health insurers in the US do not lower costs and do not improve patient care…In the flow of money between patients and providers, private insurers just sit in that flow like a tapeworm and take money out to sustain themselves…
There is a lot of evidence…[W]ith the current status quo, 10 -15$ out of every 100$ of healthcare premiums a person spends is just going to the private insurer….That would be fine if the insurance companies secured lower costs for their members; it would be the useful service they provide…But there is no evidence that they do.
Matthew’s argument doesn’t really address the point of my post. Private insurers might be inefficient, or even unnecessary, but this is very different from them being extractive monopolies. It is absolutely incredibly relevant that health insurers have very low profit margins. If $10 of every $100 spent on health care premiums goes to the insurer, but the insurer isn’t profitable, this just means that the $10 is going to cover the insurer’s operating costs. It is not money being funneled into the pockets of the people who own the insurance companies.
In fact, the more general fact here is that private insurers are not the main reason why American health care costs so much more than health care in other developed nations. Almost all of the excess cost goes to providers rather than to insurers. Private insurers may be an unnecessary middleman, but the amount they extract from the system is not large compared to the amount that gets either appropriated or wasted by the people providing the care.
So why do Americans — especially American progressives — focus so obsessively on health insurers instead of health providers? In a post two years ago, I hypothesized that it’s because insurers are the part of the system we have direct contact with — the people who have to tell us “no” when we can’t afford some treatment.
Insurers have thus become what Jeremiah Johnson calls “sin-eaters” — the hapless fall guys who bear the brunt of all Americans’ rage, despair, and frustration at a broken system in which the insurers play only a very minor role.
The more progressives focus on venting rage and making accusations at insurance companies, the less effective they will be in actually delivering Americans cheaper health care.
Anyway, here’s the post I wrote back in 2024, which fleshes this all out in greater detail.
“I’d rather die than owe the hospital til I get old” — Courtney Barnett
When UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in the street in cold blood the other day, a bunch of people on the internet gloated and cheered:
The jokes came streaming in on every social-media platform, in the comments underneath every news article. “I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers,” someone commented on TikTok, a response that got more than fifteen thousand likes. “Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage,” another person wrote, under an Instagram post from CNN. On X, someone posted, with the caption “My official response to the UHC CEO’s murder,” an infographic comparing wealth distribution in late eighteenth-century France to wealth distribution in present-day America…On LinkedIn, where users post with their real names and employment histories, UnitedHealth Group had to turn off comments on its post about Thompson’s death—thousands of people were liking and hearting it, with a few even giving it the “clapping” reaction. The company also turned off comments on Facebook, where, as of midday Thursday, a post about Thompson had received more than thirty-six thousand “laugh” reactions.
In general, I think it’s a very bad look to endorse murder. And I think this kind of thing is a sign of how stressed-out and mentally unbalanced our country is after an era of unrest. (The chief suspect, who was just apprehended, looks like a random crazy guy rather than a leftist ideologue.)
But more fundamentally, I think the outpouring of schadenfreude1 at Thompson’s killing reflects some deep-seated popular misconceptions about the U.S. health care industry. A whole lot of people — maybe even most people — seem to regard health insurance companies as the main villains in the system, when in fact they’re only a very minor source of the problems.
All my life, Americans have been raging at health insurers. Who could forget this clip from the 1997 movie As Good as It Gets?
It’s not hard to understand why people hate health insurers. When you interact with the U.S. health care system, the providers — the hospital staff, the doctor, the nurses, the technicians — all just take care of you. The only time they ask you for money during your doctor visit is when you pay your copay at the front desk, and that’s usually not that big — if the bill is big, they’ll send it to you later. So for the most part, your interaction with the providers is just you walking up and asking to be taken care of, and them taking care of you.
Your interaction with the health insurer, on the other hand, feels like a struggle against an enemy who wants to destroy you. If you get a big hospital bill days after your visit, it’s because the insurer wouldn’t cover the whole cost. If the bill is a surprise because the provider didn’t tell you they were out of network, that also feels like the insurance company’s fault — why wasn’t that provider in their network?
Even more terrifying is when insurers deny coverage completely, which happens to about 10-20% of claims. It feels like you’ve been robbed. You paid this company a hefty premium every month, and in exchange you expected them to pay for your health care if you needed it. And now you needed it, and they won’t even uphold their end of the bargain? Why were you even paying them the premium in the first place?
Everyone knows that denying claims is in the insurance company’s financial interest. The more they can get away with taking your monthly premium and then weaseling out of their end of the bargain, the more their shareholders and executives can walk away with giant bags of money. They’re the ones buying huge houses and yachts and whatever on the money they made from finding some technical reason to send you and thousands upon thousands of people like you into medical bankruptcy after your chemotherapy. Who wouldn’t be mad?
And yet when we take a hard look at the question of why Americans pay so much more for their health care than people elsewhere in the developed world, insurance companies and their profits just aren’t that big of a piece of the story.
First of all, insurance companies just don’t make that much profit. UnitedHealth Group, the company of which Brian Thompson’s UnitedHealthcare is a subsidiary, is the most valuable private health insurer in the country in terms of market capitalization, and the one with the largest market share. Its net profit margin is just 6.11%:
You can see that the company’s net income — i.e., its total profit — was $23.1 billion in 2023. That’s a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to the $241.9 billion that the company spent on medical costs. Even the company’s $54.6 billion in operating costs — of which Brian Thompson’s own $10 million salary represented 0.018% — are dwarfed by actual medical costs.
In fact, the actual health insurance business — taking premiums and paying out claims — is even less profitable than these numbers might suggest. As Axios recently reported, insurers’ profits are increasingly coming from other lines of business.
What does this mean? It means that if UnitedHealth Group decided to donate every single dollar of its profit to buying Americans more health care, it would only be able to pay for about 9.3% more health care than it’s already paying for. If it donated all of its executives’ salaries to the effort, it would not be much more than that.
What about those denials of coverage, copays, deductibles, and so on? In fact, Americans are paying a smaller percentage of their health costs out of pocket than people in most other rich countries!
Note that the song lyric at the top of this post, about a woman in anaphylactic shock worrying that she won’t be able to afford her hospital bills, is from a band in Australia, not the U.S. This isn’t a coincidence — although Australian medical costs are fairly low, the proportion they pay out of pocket is unusually high.
In other words, Americans’ much-hated private health insurers are paying a higher percent of the cost of Americans’ health care than the government insurance systems of Sweden and Denmark and the UK are paying. The only reason Americans’ bills are higher is that U.S. health care provision costs so much more in the first place.
On top of all that, health insurance companies don’t actually look very inefficient, in terms of their administrative costs. Yes, we all know that the fragmented U.S. health system is a paperwork nightmare, with different providers and insurers drowning each other in forms and approvals. And Elizabeth Warren has claimed that switching to national health insurance would save huge amounts of money by reducing administrative costs. But when we look at United Health Group’s operating costs in the diagram above, they’re only 22.6% of the actual cost of medical care.
In fact, the Kaiser Family Foundation does detailed comparisons between U.S. health care spending and spending in other developed countries. And it has concluded that most of this excess spending comes from providers — from hospitals, pharma companies, doctors, nurses, tech suppliers, and so on:
This means that eliminating all administrative waste and inefficiency in the entire U.S. health care system — not just at insurance companies, but administration of government insurance programs — could save Americans at most about $680 per person every year. And the true savings would probably not anywhere close to that amount — part of America’s greater costs are certainly an income effect, due to the fact that Americans have higher incomes than people in other rich countries.A few hundred bucks a year is not nothing, but it’s only a small fraction of the $5683 more that we pay relative to other countries.
So the fundamental reason your health care costs so much is not that the health insurance companies are lining their pockets. And it’s not that insurers are an inefficient mess. It’s that the actual provision of America’s health care itself just costs way too much in the first place.
The actual people charging you an arm and a leg for your care, and putting you at risk of medical bankruptcy, are the providers themselves. The smiling doctor who writes you prescriptions and sends you to the MRI and refers you to a specialist without ever asking you for money knows full well that you’re going to end up having to wrangle with the insurance company for the cost of all those services.
The gentle nurse who sets up your IV doesn’t tell you whether each dose of drugs through the IV could set you back hundreds of dollars, but they know. When the polite administrative assistants at the front desk send you back to treatment without telling you that their services are out of your network, it’s because they didn’t bother to check. The executives making millions at “nonprofit” hospitals, and the shareholders making billions on the profits of companies that supply and contract with those hospitals, are people you never see and probably don’t even think about.
Here’s a good Bloomberg story on predatory pricing by hospitals. Hopsitals bilk insurers, who are forced to pass on the higher costs to patients, who then blame the insurers instead of the hospitals.
Excessive prices charged by health care providers are overwhelmingly the reason why Americans’ health care costs so cripplingly much. But they’ve outsourced the actual collection of those fees to insurance companies, so that your experience in the medical system feels smooth and friendly and comfortable. The insurance companies are simply hired to play the bad guy — and they’re paid a relatively modest fee for that service. So you get to hate UnitedHealthcare and Cigna, while the real people taking away your life’s savings and putting you at risk of bankruptcy get to play Mother Theresa.
So the way to make our health care system affordable is not to browbeat insurers, in the hope that they will be able to reduce their profits and pay for us to have cheap health care. Insurance companies simply do not have the power to do that, even if you threaten to shoot them. What we need is to reduce costs within the actual medical system itself. One idea is to have the government insurance system play hardball with providers, negotiating lower prices. is what the Biden administration had Medicare do with some drug companies. There are some risks to this approach — if it’s executed clumsily it can suppress innovation — but it’s basically what every other rich country does, so the track record is decent. There are probably other ways to foster competition and increase efficiency in the medical care system.
But focusing all our anger on the middlemen of the U.S.’ bloated health care system is just a way of shooting the messenger.
Update: Matt Bruenig argues that insurers really are to blame. He claims that inefficiency in the system is a bigger driver of costs than I realize, because providers have to spend money dealing with insurers — something the KFF numbers don’t include. He also alleges that some of this “inefficiency” is actually intentional on the part of the insurers — a disguised way to pay themselves out.
But I don’t think this passes the smell test. If insurers were so good at extracting money from the system, why are they so unprofitable? The average company in the S&P 500 has a profit margin of 12%, but these insurers have margins of 1% to 3%. If they’re so good at extracting money from providers, why are shareholders — and executives who own stock — not getting a piece of that money? It doesn’t make sense.
Also, provider-side administrative costs don’t just include the money providers spend wrangling with insurers — it includes the money they spend on the executives, managers, and billing departments who figure out how to charge patients $700 for every injection of IV drugs, or hundreds of dollars for a hospital pillow, or $10,000 for an MRI.
So no, I don’t buy Bruenig’s argument here. Though I still do agree with him that national health insurance would be a good idea — mostly for the negotiating power, not for the administrative cost savings.
Update 2: Over at Tyler Cowen’s blog, a commenter argues that profit margins are not a good guide to the financial success of a business, and that instead one should look at return on equity (ROE). That’s fine, I wasn’t talking about the financial success of health insurance companies; I was simply showing that they don’t have the ability to pay for much more health care than they’re currently paying for. But for what it’s worth, the ROE of health insurers is pretty low. The S&P 500’s weighted average ROE is usually around 15%, and has been a bit higher lately. Here’s what health insurers were earning:
They had a couple of good years in there, but in general it’s underwhelming. UnitedHealth Group, which does include businesses other than the low-margin health insurance business (e.g. providing health care and pharmaceuticals), is doing pretty well with 26%.
But if you look at the list of companies with the highest ROE, you see health care providers or suppliers like HCA Healthcare (272%), Cencora (234%), Abbvie (84%), Mckesson (84%), Novo Nordisk (72%), Eli Lilly (59%), Amgen (56%), IDEXX Laboratories (53%), Zoetis (46%), Novartis (44%), Edwards Lifesciences (43%), and so on. If you want to know which shareholders are making the real money in the health care industry…well, it’s the shareholders of those providers and suppliers.
Up and all the morning helping my wife to put up her things towards her going into the country and drawing the wine out of my vessel to send.
This morning came my cozen Thomas Pepys to desire me to furnish him with some money, which I could not do till his father has wrote to Piggott his consent to the sale of his lands, so by and by we parted and I to the Exchange a while and so home and to dinner, and thence to the Royal Theatre by water, and landing, met with Captain Ferrershis friend, the little man that used to be with him, and he with us, and sat by us while we saw “Love in a Maze.” The play is pretty good, but the life of the play is Lacy’s part, the clown, which is most admirable; but for the rest, which are counted such old and excellent actors, in my life I never heard both men and women so ill pronounce their parts, even to my making myself sick therewith.
Thence, Creed happening to be with us, we four to the Half-Moon Tavern, I buying some sugar and carrying it with me, which we drank with wine and thence to the whay-house, and drank a great deal of whay, and so by water home, and thence to see Sir W. Pen, who is not in much pain, but his legs swell and so immoveable that he cannot stir them, but as they are lifted by other people and I doubt will have another fit of his late pain. Played a little at cards with him and his daughter, who is grown every day a finer and finer lady, and so home to supper and to bed.
When my wife and I came first home we took Ashwell and all the rest below in the cellar with the vintner drawing out my wine, which I blamed Ashwell much for and told her my mind that I would not endure it, nor was it fit for her to make herself equal with the ordinary servants of the house.
Artemis 3 crew members NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, commander; ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Luca Parmitano, pilot; and NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, mission specialist, and Andre Douglas, mission specialist, are seen during the Artemis 3 crew announcement event, Tuesday, June 9, 2026, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Image: NASA/John Kraus
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, responding to questions about the agency’s selection of an all-male crew for the Artemis 3 mission, said the astronauts were chosen based solely on their experience, skill sets and availability.
Isaacman wrote on the social media platform X that “I have seen reactions ranging from disappointment to outrage.” One such response on Reddit called the crew announcement “massively upsetting.”
“Women represent 50 percent of the population,” the post read. “They deserve at least one seat on every mission from a government run agency.”
But Isaacman strongly defended the crew selection, saying he had “personally been to space twice with 50 percent female crews. My closest advisors and some of the smartest engineers I know are women. In our latest NASA leadership organization, nearly 50 percent of the center directors and mission directorate leadership are women.
“The last astronaut candidate class selected under this administration was majority female [six women and four men] because they were the best of the best, including one astronaut [Anna Menon] I previously went to space with.”
NASA announced its 2025 Astronaut Candidate Class on Sept. 22, 2025. The 10 candidates, pictured here at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston are: U.S. Army CW3 Ben Bailey, Anna Menon, Rebecca Lawler, Katherine Spies, U.S. Air Force Maj. Cameron Jones, Dr. Lauren Edgar, U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Erin Overcash, Yuri Kubo, Dr. Imelda Muller, and U.S. Air Force Maj. Adam Fuhrmann. Image: NASA/Josh Valcarcel
During an event Tuesday at the Johnson Space Center, NASA revealed the astronauts who had been selected for next year’s Artemis 3 mission, a flight to test rendezvous and docking procedures in low-Earth orbit with moon landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin.
The mission will be commanded by Randy Bresnik, 58, veteran of 149 days in space during a shuttle flight and a space station stay. European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano, 49, a veteran of two long-duration ISS stays, will serve as pilot.
Also on board: Andre Douglas, 40, a space rookie with broad engineering experience, and Frank Rubio, 49, who logged a U.S.-record 371 days in space aboard the ISS in 2022-23.
The four members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission emerge from the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkouts building to greet friends and family before heading out to Space Launch Complex 40 for their flight. Left to right: Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now
In an interview that aired on CNN Wednesday, Bresnik said the selection of an all-male crew for Artemis 3 was “certainly not intentional.”
“You can look at our astronaut office and see the wide diversity within the office, whether that’s gender or background or nationality or heritage,” he said. “And certainly, the boss had to pick the crew for this flight that he had available that had the skill sets that he needed.”
NASA currently has about 35 active-duty astronauts. The list includes 15 women but does not yet include the six currently in training to join the astronaut corps.
The Artemis 2 crew, the program’s first to carry astronauts, included Christina Koch, who became the first female to fly around the moon. NASA’s Jessica Meir and ESA’s Sophie Adenot are currently in orbit aboard the International Space Station and Jasmin Moghbeli is in training to command an upcoming Crew Dragon flight to the lab complex. Bresnik said two more yet-to-be-announced women are in training for a downstream flight.
“The office gets what it needs when it needs it, and we’ll certainly have all these other people that you mentioned, you know, female military test pilots or just other female astronauts, that’ll be picking up on the follow-on Artemis missions,” Bresnik said.
NASA astronaut and SpaceX Crew-13 Commander Jessica Watkins is pictured in her pressure suit during a training session at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Image: SpaceX
In any case, the Artemis 3 crew brings a wide variety of skills to what is essentially a flight test in low-Earth orbit.
Bresnik is a former “TOPGUN” graduate and military test pilot while Parmitano flew high-performance jets for the Italian air force. Rubio holds a doctorate in medicine and is a former UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter pilot. Douglas holds three master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in engineering.
Isaacman said the astronaut office “assigns the crew that gives the mission the best chance of meeting its objectives, taking into account many factors, including the background and expertise of the astronauts, such as test pilot experience, development work on specific programs, and availability.”
He added that critics of the Artemis III crew selection “may not be aware of the pipeline of crews already preparing to launch to the space station, or those who have been undergoing lunar-specific training that would be a better fit for a future surface mission.”
Isaacman concluded by saying Bresnik and his crewmates were “experienced, qualified and deserve to be celebrated for the mission they have been assigned, just as the crews that follow will be celebrated when their time comes.”
Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump officially nominated acting attorney general Todd Blanche to become the attorney general of the United States.
Before going to the Department of Justice, Blanche was Trump’s personal attorney. He led Trump’s criminal defense team in the case of falsifying records to cover up hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, as well as his defense against the two cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith: the one indicting him for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the one indicting him for retaining classified documents after leaving office.
Since he took over for former attorney general Pam Bondi, Blanche has openly flouted the law in order to do Trump’s bidding. He secured indictments against people Trump perceives to be enemies, including former FBI director James Comey for posting on Instagram a picture of seashells arranged to form the number “8647.”
He backed the deal Trump made with the Department of Justice to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those convicted of committing crimes surrounding Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Blanche put his name to the second half of that deal that seems to be being eclipsed by the slush fund: an agreement between Trump and the Department of Justice promising to drop any pending claims against Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for past illegalities in tax returns, and promising not to conduct audits of Trump’s tax returns.
In the 1920s, gangster Al Capone kept his hands clean of direct evidence of the crimes he committed. The federal government finally took him down by convicting him of federal income tax evasion.
Trump’s nomination of Blanche directly challenges Republican senators to collude with him to flout the will of rank-and-file Republicans and break the law. In November 2025 the Senate voted unanimously to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This law required the Department of Justice to release all the files compiled by the FBI in its investigation of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein no later than December 19, 2025.
The Department of Justice has ignored that law. To date, it has released about half the files. Many of those it has released are heavily redacted although the law expressly prohibits such redactions. Instead, the Department of Justice released previously unknown names of Epstein survivors.
Mike Spector and Lindo So of Reuters reported yesterday that those survivors are now under threat from Trump supporters. “She’ll be unalived,” someone wrote under a news report of an accuser demanding the release of the files. “She really should’ve stayed quiet. RIP.”
In her testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Bondi told members of Congress that Blanche “was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.” Bondi also said that she had “nothing to do with” the transfer of Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex offender, from prison to a minimum security camp. As Annie Grayer, M.J. Lee, Paula Reid, and Marshall Cohen of CNN reported, that transfer happened just after Blanche interviewed Maxwell for nine hours.
In that interview, Maxwell said nothing that would tie Trump to Epstein’s crimes, language Trump loyalists used to push back against the story reported just weeks before by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo in the Wall Street Journal that what appears to be Trump’s signature is at the bottom of a birthday card to Epstein suggesting the two shared a “wonderful secret.” The words were written over a drawing of a naked girl.
MAGA Republicans supported Trump in 2024 because he promised to release the Epstein files, and Senate Republicans responded to their anger that the Trump administration was hiding those files by voting unanimously to require—not request—their release. Now Trump is demanding they abandon those voters to put the man behind that cover-up into office as the top law enforcement officer in the country.
As David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo explained today, if Republican senators confirm Blanche, they will be rubber-stamping Trump’s perversion of the Department of Justice and encouraging it to continue, blessing “wide-ranging and extreme” corruption. “No accountability, no roadblocks, no pumping the brakes.”
That rubber stamp on criminality would fall just as the corruption of the administration has become too obvious to pretend doesn’t exist.
New stories out today examine new aspects of that corruption.
Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported that an Indian billionaire appears to have gotten Trump to ease sanctions against his family’s energy empire by investing $100 million in a Texas start-up company in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor.
Upon the Ambani family’s investment in America First Refining, the start-up secured beneficial U.S. policies for which it had been lobbying. The journalists report that longstanding problems with the company make it unlikely that the refinery America First has promised will ever get built, especially at a time when refineries are expensive and unprofitable.
The journalists note that it has become “a theme of Trump’s second term: overseas investors with interests before the administration putting money into the Trump family’s business interests.” Last December, looking only at publicly disclosed investments—the one the journalists uncovered today was secret—Forbes estimated that Don Jr.’s net worth had jumped from about $50 million to about $300 million since the 2024 election.
In Mother Jones today, scholar of corruption Casey Michel explored the many connections between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East billionaires who have invested billions in his investment fund Affinity Partners, essentially buying access to the president and U.S. policymaking even as the inexperienced Kushner represents the U.S. in sensitive negotiations in the region.
Kushner’s plans include a deal for a $1.6 billion tourist resort in Albania along a stretch of coastline and a pristine island protected as a critical area of biodiversity. Critics claim Prime Minister Edi Rama backed the Affinity Partners project to curry favor with the Trump administration. Protesters have taken to the streets in Albania’s capital, Tirana, chanting “Albania is not for sale!” and calling for Rama’s resignation.
White House press spokesperson Anna Kelly told Mithil Aggarwal, Raf Sanchez, and Mo Abbas of NBC News that Kushner is a “volunteer” for the government and that his business activities “have nothing to do with the President or the administration.” Asked if Rama’s government had backed the project to gain favor with Trump, she said: “This is the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.”
An investigation by Tom Bergin, Michelle Conlin, Koh Gui Qing, and Tom Wilson of Reuters today shows that the Trump family has made at least $2.3 billion in their crypto currency licensing adventures since Trump began his second term. It also shows that more than a million people who invested in their enterprises have suffered at least $2.3 billion in losses.
The journalists report that the investors they interviewed believed that Trump’s position as president and “what they perceived as his business acumen” guaranteed they would make money. “Some said they still hold on to the hope that Trump will make things right. Others expressed regret, anger and embarrassment.”
Trump and MAGA Republicans celebrated the model of governance used by prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán during his 16 years in power, calling for the U.S. government to mimic his rejection of immigration, undermining of the rule of law, and destruction of liberal democracy in favor of what Orbán called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.”
After voters threw out Orbán and his party with a supermajority that would empower the country’s new leaders to investigate their predecessors, the extraordinary corruption is coming to light. Marton Dunai of the Financial Times reported today that tracking the financial transactions of the Orbán government has shown that it siphoned off at least 160 billion euros, equivalent to about $185 billion dollars, from European Union funds, with the corruption peaking in Orbán’s last year in office as loyalists worked to grab what they could as Orbán’s power was crumbling.
But, as Andrew Higgins and Lili Rutai reported in the New York Times just before the election that swept Orbán and his party out of power, many Orbán loyalists jumped ship. Although they risked government persecution from Orbán should he win reelection, they took the gamble that the future belonged not to him but to his opponents.
Trump appears to be trying to prevent such defections in the ranks of the Republican senators by forcing them to confirm Blanche, thus rubber-stamping his perversion of the rule of law and joining him in his utter disregard of the demand of Republican voters for the release of the Epstein files.
There may well be an effort to downplay the Blanche confirmation process, but make no mistake: it is a very big deal indeed.
So folks in this area continue to discuss the CA-40 congressional race, which was pretty much designed under Prop 50 terms to result in two Republicans battling to the death inside a steel cage with hamsters, cheeseburgers and those miniature Slurpees everyone loves.
Wait.
Where was I?
Right—CA-40. So the latest results have been offered up, and they’re pretty interesting …
First, because we’ve predictably wound up with the two leading Republicans, who will (truly) use the next four months to spend millions of dollars beating one another up with mailings that will drive all of us to drink.
Second, it’ll be fascinating to watch Young Kim now shift back from I-love-MAGA! to I’m-the-centrist-y’all-love! now that the primary is over and she needs to woo … us. To quote KISS, “I’ve gotta laugh, because I know I’m gonna die.” Like, it’s actually funny, in that pathetic sort of way.
Third, Joe Kerr has landed 16,491 votes. And since I’ve promised y’all that the lead Democrat’s name will never again appear on this site, I’ll just say … hmm … the LA Interloper Ice Cream Truck Person of Interest Who Continues to Blather Incoherently on Instagram at a Staggering Pace should maybe stop solo-bashing Lisa Ramirez.
Hell, if I’m Ramirez and/or the LA Interloper Ice Cream Truck Person of Interest Who Continues to Blather Incoherently on Instagram at a Staggering Pace, I look at Kerr’s totals and think, “Why, Joe? Why?”
And I’m not mad at Kerr, because (truly) this district was created for Republicans to win. But, if we’re being honest, bro never had a realistic shot. And, if we’re also being honest, the majority of those 16,491 probably go to Lisa, not the LA Interloper Ice Cream Truck Person of Interest Who Continues to Blather Incoherently on Instagram at a Staggering Pace. Why, I’ll note that in the heat of the race, a Lisa supporter/political guru told me Kerr’s presence was profoundly hurting L.R., who lacked the LA Interloper Ice Cream Truck Person of Interest Who Continues to Blather Incoherently on Instagram at a Staggering Pace’s money, but dominated in likability and zest.
I don’t disagree.
•••
To be clear, Joe is a good dude. But also to be clear, going forward I’d like to see more of our candidates ask themselves, “What’s my purpose here?”
What I mean is, are you in it because running is fun and you’re bored? Are you in it because of ego? Are you in it because you want to make changes? Are you in it to make speeches? To eat free chicken? To legitimately win?
To enter politics, you have to have a big head. It’s true, and anyone who disagrees is likely a political figure with a big head. But, deep down, you also have to be able to self-assess and ask yourself the important questions.
Namely, can I triumph?
And, also namely, am I causing other decent people to lose?
My favorite Apple updates are not the flashy new features, but the quiet little touches: annoyances fixed, workflows made smoother, rough edges sanded down, and longstanding flaws thoughtfully reworked. To me, they’re the clearest sign of a company that cares about its craft.
Here’s a collection from a WWDC26 screen-grab, organized for easier reading, on improvements coming later this year.
Here’s a refresher on the story: People outside the constitutional convention in 1787 waited to hear what kind of government the members came up with. This was shortly after the revolution. What constitution we would have was being debated and it was not at all clear which kind would be chosen. Some wanted a very democratic system. Some wanted, not quite a king but a lifelong president who had very broad power. Some wanted essentially an aristocracy, allowing only the rich and powerful and well connected to be in positions of making decisions with very little influence from the people.
The story, probably made up later, was that when they were done and leaving the convention hall a woman asked Ben Franklin what kind of government the nation would have. His answer was, “A republic, if you can keep it”.
A “republic” meant a representative democracy. Representatives would make decisions but they would be selected by voters. Some current conservatives try to twist “republic” into meaning we should not be a democracy at all, but that’s not true and not what the members of the convention meant, by their own words.
But perhaps a better quote would have been, “A republic, if you want it”. After all, there had just been a strong disagreement within the convention because of those who wanted the public input as removed as possible from influence on the decision makers, being sure more democracy wouldn’t work. They thought either the public doesn’t know enough (always debatable) or it would be chaotic, or the majority would rule like a tyranny over minorities. That is minorities such as minority religions or any other groups not in the main. That’s why our constitution acknowledges rights, so even a minority religion or other group has freedom too.
But our nation’s history has always had a tension from those who don’t quite buy the idea of democracy. In any given time there are those who feel a strong leader or group would get things done better. That might mean allowing the top to indulge in some corruption, and might mean some rights are lost, but the idea is, that’s the only way to get things done. Actually trying to have democracy and all our rights fully enforced is too unwieldy and just doesn’t get things done. With our long Congressional stagnation you could see where people might feel that way.
There are also always those who are just greedy. On the large scale it’s those among the leaders of industry and finance who warp the system to their benefit without regard for how that conflicts with what voters want or with the peoples’ rights. On the small scale, consider white people during the Jim Crow era who supported it, because making black people work almost like slaves made whites richer and they liked that.
On a still smaller and more subtle scale there’s a form that has always been around and continues today. The idea, most promoted by Republicans, to minimize regulation so industry and finance can run unhindered. If that results in some people getting hurt by unsafe work conditions or unsafe products, well, that’s just the price that prosperity requires. Likewise the top-down, supply-side economics that focus on letting the rich maximize the gap between the wealthy and everyone else under the same rationale.
And how have Republicans, especially, but also too many Democrats, and others pushing the same ideas, how have those policies and leaders and office holders managed to keep those ideas going? Keep the votes often almost 50-50 on related issues? Because so many of us kind of agree. Yeah, that candidate might be more favorable to business owners than to unions, but if I vote for the other one who is pushing democracy and rights, we might keep those rights but be poorer, or so we’re told. But if I vote for the one favoring the rich, we might lose some protection of rights, we might end up with a bigger divide between the top and the rest, but maybe I can end up on the winning side of that divide.
It’s the same old trade off in different forms. The idea that it’s just not practical to have all that democracy and all those rights. It’s too unworkable. We should just accept that a certain amount of damage and corruption and unaccountable centralized power is the way things need to work. And too often too many of us tend to lean that way. That’s obvious in our most recent presidential election where a little over half the voters chose a corrupt, narcissistic, power hungry, abusive candidate who had tried to lead an insurrection to overthrow our democracy and rights once already.
So the question that should have been posed is not, “if you can keep it”. The question is, do enough of us lean that direction, favoring democracy and rights over partial authoritarian rule? The question to the woman and to the nation as a whole is not about keeping it. What it’s about is, “if you want it”. So, do enough of us even want it?
Make your voice heard!
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I am traveling this week and don’t have time to write a serious post. Instead, I’ll provide a take that is probably stating the obvious, but I don’t recall reading elsewhere. And since it’s fairly short I’ll skip my normal practice and deliver two free posts in a row. First, a few facts:
The decades after WWII saw many cultural, political and economic changes. The birth control pill and the loosening of divorce laws. Feminism and civil rights. Rock and roll and drugs. Soft on crime policies and a sharply rising crime rate. The end of the gold price peg and soaring inflation. The welfare state and affirmative action. A dramatic expansion of (unfunded) Social Security benefits. Environmentalism and NIMBYism. The most important changes began during the 1960s.
The decades after WWII saw a notable baby boom, generally dated from 1946 to 1964. I was born in 1955, smack dab in the middle of that period. I am a typical baby boomer.
Now I’m going to say something that might be controversial but is obvious when you think about it. I am not personally to blame for all of the cultural, political and economic policy changes of the 1960s.
I say this because I frequently see boomers being blamed for every single ill in modern society. The peak period of change was roughly 1965, sometimes called “the liberal hour”. I was ten years old. Not a single baby boomer was out of their teens. If you wish to blame a generation for all the ills of modern society, please blame the Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation. They got rid of traditional morality and pushed divorce rates much higher. They put Social Security on an unsustainable path. They ended the gold price peg for the dollar. They created affirmative action and NIMBYism. The ended the death penalty. Heck, they even invented rock and roll.
I also see people suggest that boomers are the lucky generation. No, it is smaller generations that are lucky. Big generations face a highly competitive job market. In 1982, I was paid $19,700/year as an assistant professor, at a time when the unemployment rate was 10%. Even in real terms, starting salaries for young Gen X professors had moved far higher by the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was mostly the silent generation and perhaps a very few early boomers that left college and entered a strong job market during the 1960s.
Even worse, my generation entered the job market at a time when the feminist revolution shifted many women from being housewives to career women, so labor force growth was even higher than working age population growth:
Real wages stagnated in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Supreme Court’s “soft on crime” rulings in the 1960s and early 1970s were not made by boomer justices. The feminist revolution was led by silent generation types like Gloria Steinem. The population control movement was led by Paul Ehrlich, also a member of the silent generation. Martin Luther King was a member of the silent generation. Please don’t assume that things that happened during the baby boom (and even soon after) were caused by baby boomers. Last time I looked, Congress is not composed of young children:
The 1976 election was the first one where I could vote. I recall pundits being surprised by the substantial support for Gerald Ford in college areas, as younger voters were already starting to edge back toward the center. The student radicals of the 1960s were often silent generation members. In my hometown of Madison, the antiwar movement was led by Paul Soglin, who later become mayor. I thought of him as a boomer, but he was from the final year of the silent generation.
In my mind, rock music is associated with boomers. But rock and roll was developed in the mid-1950s, and even the second wave (Beatles, Beach Boys, the Stones, The Who, Dylan, Hendrix, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, etc.) were silent generation people. The film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice nicely shows how silent generation members led the cultural change of the 1960s. The boomers just followed along.
I’m not saying that younger people should not despise the boomers, but please do so for the right reasons. Hate them for taking credit for innovative sixties pop music that was created by silent generation musicians. Hate them for their current selfishness on issues like NIMBYism and Social Security. Hate them for their hypocrisy—romanticizing their youthful adventures while opposing drug legalization. But please don’t hate us for all the changes that occurred during the 1960s (some of which were good, BTW.)
As an aside, inWhere the Music Had To Go, Jim Windolf points out that teenagers at Beatles concerts in 1964 screamed so hysterically that the music could not be heard, while older Dylan fans sat silently listening to acoustic folk music. So the terms “silent” and “boomer” fit these two generations in more ways than one. Windolf says that Dylan fans despised the “teenyboppers”, but does not say what Beatles fans thought of the folkies. Perhaps it was one of those “I don’t think about you at all” situations.
Time is continuous and the relationships between people and events are often not what they seem. Lines between generations are arbitrary. My mother was born June 7, 1926 (six days after another pretty lady), near the end of the Greatest Generation. But she was mostly in high school during WWII, so culturally she’s perhaps a bit like the Silent Generation. When she was a few days old, she was closer in time to the last days of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams (who both died on July 4, 1826) than to her current life. She’s experienced more than 40% of American history. For some reason that fact boggles my mind, as to me she’s sort of timeless, an eternal “mom”.
Happy 100th birthday.
PS. My favorite poster advertises a festival in Granada, Spain. Decades after I bought the poster, I noticed the date. Ever since, 1926 has been my favorite year:
I've been really enjoying AgentsView by Wes McKinney as a tool for exploring my token usage across different coding agents running on my laptop.
Claude Fable 5 came out today and wasn't yet included in the pricing database AgentsView uses. I used Fable to reverse-engineer AgentsView and figured out this recipe for setting custom prices.
Here's my Claude Fable 5 usage for today so far, plotted by AgentsView as a treemap across my different local projects:
I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially. You can ask for anything - explainers, visualizers, dashboards, bespoke single-use apps (e.g. a full wandb that is hyper-specific just for your project), you can 10X your test suite, auto-optimize code, run giant research projects with custom HTML for the results, anything! "Free your mind" (Matrix ref).
The theme for this week’s episode is tick, tick, boom.
America is running out of time to catch up with China on manufacturing, and we’re physically incapable of spending an hour together without bringing it up. Release the glorious machines please!! We also go behind the scenes on Kylie’s reporting on motors and actuators — the unglamorous parts that sit in every joint of a humanoid robot, account for roughly 60% of what that robot costs to build, and come almost entirely from China. Her piece profiles the two startups trying to change that. Plus a new proposed bill out of Congress that would kick Unitree’s robot doggies to the curb.
Then the rockets send Ashlee off on his space tangents. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin had an expensive mishap recently when an explosion took out the rocket, its launch pad, and possibly America’s dreams of beating China back to the moon. Ashlee walks through why a pad explosion can be a near-death moment for a rocket company, and why SpaceX — now flying roughly every two days while everyone else is grounded or behind — increasingly just wins by default. Plus the new Starfall capsule, SpaceX’s move into making medicine and maybe chips in orbit, and the wild logic behind a $1.77 trillion IPO.
We also got into the media drama consuming our X timeline: the firing of Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes. Ashlee tweeted an opinion, the trolls came for him hard, and he pleads his case here. We’re a little biased since, well, we’re off building this whole new-media thing ourselves. Will there still be a ticking clock and a man in a suit raking in views twenty years from now? Tune in for what we think, and leave your hot take in the comments.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you like the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
(Ed. Kylie - Don’t think I forgot to make you a playlist. “Lazy Eye” and “New Slang” were key to my college experience. I first crushed on Rivers Cuomo thanks to “Perfect Situation.” Listen to it here, and don’t forget to leave a comment to win tickets to their tour).
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Timestamps
00:00:00 – Intro
00:02:05 – The American Actuator Crisis
00:06:51 – WestMag vs. Atlas Motion Systems
00:14:21 – Uncle Sam Pays Attention
00:16:47 – Chinese Robot Ban
00:21:16 – A Robot in Every Home
00:24:29 – Are You AGI-pilled Yet?
00:27:23 – Shoutout to Micayla Sortland
00:31:01 – Blue Origin’s Explosive Launch
00:42:52 – Low Earth Orbit Drugs
00:49:42 – The Two-Trillion-Dollar Elon Bet
00:57:07 – Founders Fund’s Viral “Mafia” Game Night
Every modern presidential administration has issued fact sheets describing and, yes, discreetly touting its recent policy moves. But Trump’s minions don’t do discreet. Click on any of their fact sheets and this appears:
And if, in the midst of this “Golden Age”, someone should observe that Americans aren’t feeling so golden, and are in fact feeling very feeling negative about the economy, the Trumpist answer is that it’s all fake news. Kevin Hassett, the administration’s top economist, says that low consumer sentiment numbers are “being driven by Democrats who have Trump derangement syndrome.”
So it will be news to Hasset that rural whites – who are very Trumpy – have now fallen victim to Trump derangement syndrome. Or, more accurately, they are finally awakening to the nightmarish reality that Trump has created for them.
When I say that rural whites are very Trumpy, I mean very Trumpy. In 2024 Donald Trump narrowly won the popular vote, with only a 1.5 percentage point margin. But he won rural areas by 30 points.
Trump won rural areas by such a large margin because farmers were wildly optimistic about what he would do for them. The Purdue/CME Ag Economy Barometer, which is basically an index of farmers’ economic sentiment, surged with Trump’s victory:
Today, the rural Trump bump is nowhere to be seen. In fact, white rural voters’ views about Trump’s economic policy have turned astonishingly negative. Normally, partisanship strongly colors economic perceptions. According to a recent Fox News poll, only 29% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 71% disapprove. Yet 60% of Republicans still approve.
Remarkably, however, rural white voters are no longer behaving like non-rural Republican voters. They are almost as negative on the economy as the population as a whole, with only 32% of rural whites approving of Trump’s handling of the economy, and 68% disapproving. Trump has made the rural economy so bad that reality has overridden Trump voters’ usual tendency to make excuses for him.
The unavoidable reality is that things are really very bad in rural America. Moreover, the devastation hitting the heartland is squarely a consequence of Trump’s actions and not, like the Biden inflation of 2021-22, a result of forces outside presidential control.
First, there is Trump’s trade war, which has raised the cost of living for all Americans. But farmers have been hit especially hard because they are highly dependent on imported inputs. The tariffs raised the prices of farm machinery, chemicals and fertilizer. The final straw was the loss of foreign markets to rival agricultural exporters such as Brazil -- losses that began during the trade wars of Trump’s first term and have accelerated during his second term:
In 2025 the damage to the American farm economy from Trumpian policies caused a 46% rise in farm bankruptcies. The carnage looks much worse this year: farmers are being hit with another double whammy from the effects of the Iran war.
Like Trump’s tariffs, the Iran war is hitting farmers both as consumers and as producers. Along with all Americans, they are facing an overall rise in the cost of living as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Farmers are also suffering from a large increase in agricultural operating costs. For example, the crisis in the Strait has raised the price of diesel fuel, which runs most agricultural machinery, more than it has raised gasoline prices. In addition, there has been a sharp increase in the price of fertilizer because a significant share of the world’s supply comes from the Persian Gulf.
The carnage in the heartland raises the question of why rural whites so overwhelmingly believed that Trump would improve their lives. After all, Trump made no secret of his intention to pursue aggressive tariff policies that would start a global trade war. And U.S. agriculture is a highly globalized business. It sells much of what it produces overseas — for example, normally we export 40 percent or more of our soybean crop. Furthermore, it was entirely predictable that tariffs would raise the prices of farm machinery, chemicals and fertilizer.
It’s true that farmers didn’t know either that Trump would attack Iran or that he would botch the war so badly. But his indifference to the impact of his actions on ordinary people’s lives should have come as no surprise to anyone paying attention. When he said “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” when making decisions about Iran, the news was that he admitted it, not that he felt that way.
Why, then, did rural Americans vote to return Trump to office? Obviously, culture war issues and racism played important roles. But it’s also clear in hindsight that rural whites weren’t willing to see their livelihoods destroyed in order to stick it to the liberals by voting for Trump. Instead, they fell for a fantasy, believing that by voting for Trump they could simultaneously own the libs and do well financially.
Instead, they have been betrayed: far from supporting a conservative vision of rural life, Trump is destroying their livelihoods with his vandalism.
How will rural voters respond to this betrayal? Recent polls show that the Senate race in Iowa, which Trump won by 13 points in 2024, is now effectively a tossup. The heartland may be awakening to reality, with immense political consequences.
Easy solution to slow down recursive AI self improvement:
The lab with the top-ranked model must agree THEY must not use it for working on frontier AI
But everyone else should have access to it.
By definition, this means the frontier doesn't advance.
It also has the critical benefit of avoiding a dangerous power imbalance.
Anthropic has chosen the opposite of the safe path: they are allowing themselves, the current top lab, to use their top model for frontier AI research. They've said they'll sabotage others who try.
This means the AI frontier advances, & power imbalance increases.
(To be clear, I don't think we should try to slow down recursive AI self improvement - I think we should open it up and democratize it as much as possible. My point is: if you claim we should slow down, and you have the best model, you should ensure your org can't use it.)
Jonathon Ready highlights one of the more eyebrow-raising details from the 319 page system card for Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Here's a longer excerpt, highlights mine:
In light of the ability of recent models to accelerate their own development, we’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design). Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Terms of Service, but enforcing this restriction through our safeguards avoids accelerating the actors most willing to violate these terms.
Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts, these safeguards will not be visible to the user. Fable 5 will not fall back to a different model. Instead, the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). These interventions will not affect the vast majority of coding work. We estimate they will impact ~0.03% of traffic, concentrated in fewer than 0.1% of organizations.
I believe this is the first time Anthropic have announced these kinds of silent interventions. The justification still feels pretty science-fiction to me - the linked article talks about "recursive self-improvement". I'm not at all keen on a model that silently corrupts its replies to questions about "ML accelerator design" purely to slow down research that might conflict with Anthropic's own goals!
I didn't have early access to today's Claude Fable 5 release, but I've spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a beast. It's slow, expensive and has been quite happily churning through everything I've thrown at it so far. As is frequently the case with current frontier models the challenge is finding tasks that it can't do.
First, let's review the key characteristics.
Anthropic claim that Claude Fable 5 offers the same performance as Claude Mythos 5, except with much more strict guardrails in place to prevent it being used for harmful things. Those guardrails trigger often enough that the Claude API has new mechanisms for letting you know when you hit them, and even has a new option to request it falls back to another model automatically if something gets rejected.
Claude Mythos 5 is out today as well, Anthropic say it "Shares Claude Fable 5's capabilities without the safety classifiers".
The models have a 1 million token context window, 128,000 maximum output tokens and a knowledge cut-off date of January 2026.
They are priced at twice the price of Claude Opus 4.5/4.6/4.7/4.8: $10/million input tokens and $50/million output tokens. There's no increase in price for longer context usage.
I don't have a reliable, comprehensive, and date-verified list of all of Simon Willison's open source projects, and I want to be honest about that rather than risk giving you inaccurate dates or fabricated entries.
Here's what I can tell you with reasonable confidence:
Well-known projects by Simon Willison:
LLM (~2023) – A command-line tool and Python library for interacting with large language models.
Datasette (~2017) – A tool for exploring and publishing data, probably his most prominent recent project.
sqlite-utils (~2018-2019) – A Python library and CLI tool for manipulating SQLite databases, often used alongside Datasette.
Django (2005) – He is one of the co-creators of the Django web framework, along with Adrian Holovaty, originally developed at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper.
He also maintains a large ecosystem of Datasette plugins and many smaller utilities (often with names like shot-scraper, various *-to-sqlite tools for importing data, etc.).
That's not bad. Here's the start of the response for the exact same prompt from Fable 5 - both models were running without access to search:
I think you mean Simon Willison — the prolific open source developer, co-creator of Django, and creator of Datasette.
An important caveat upfront: a truly complete list isn't feasible. Simon Willison is famously prolific — he has published hundreds of repositories (Datasette alone has 100+ plugins, many written by him), and my knowledge has a cutoff date, so I'll be missing his most recent work. Below are his notable projects with approximate initial release dates, most recent first:
Notable projects (approximate dates)
files-to-prompt (April 2024) – concatenates files into a single prompt for LLMs
datasette-extract (2024) – plugin for extracting structured data using LLMs
LLM (May–June 2023) – CLI tool and Python library for interacting with large language models, plus a large ecosystem of plugins (llm-gpt4all, llm-mistral, llm-claude, etc., 2023 onward)
symbex (June 2023) – search Python code for symbols
ttok and strip-tags (May 2023) – CLI tools for token counting and HTML cleanup for LLM pipelines
datasette-lite (May 2022) – Datasette running entirely in the browser via WebAssembly/Pyodide
shot-scraper (March 2022) – automated website screenshots via Playwright
In the past I've stated that I don't care about how much models know - I want them to be able to manipulate text and code in useful ways and actively look up the information they need via search tools, not bake it into their weights.
But knowledge like this is a reasonably good proxy for model size - you can cram a whole lot more details about the world into a larger number of parameters.
Does knowing more stuff mean the model is better at the tasks we pose to it? I can certainly imagine how a coding model with deeper knowledge of modern libraries and patterns could crunch through coding tasks more effectively.
Is Fable really bigger than Opus? Anthropic haven't said anything about model size, so all we have are tea-leaves, but the speed, pricing and my own poking at its knowledge make me think that it's a large model. Maybe the largest yet from any vendor.
Using Fable in Claude.ai
Anthropic made Fable 5 available across all of their surfaces - the Claude.ai chat interface, Claude Code for web, Claude Code CLI and Claude Cowork as well. The model is available "until June 22nd" on the subscription plans (I'm on $100/month Max at the moment), after which it will be billed extra.
Claude.ai is often under-estimated. Since September 2025 every chat has had access to a full container environment to run code, including the ability to install additional packages and even clone repositories directly from GitHub.
Last week I released micropython-wasm, a Python library that uses wasmtime to run a custom build of MicroPython in WebAssembly to act as a sandbox for untrusted Python code.
I decided to see if Fable could upgrade that to running full Python instead. I started with this prompt:
Clone simonw/micropython-wasm from GitHub and research how this could use a full Python as opposed to MicroPython
Fable identified that it could use Brett Cannon's cpython-wasi-build builds for this, but was unable to download them itself due to environment restrictions.
So I grabbed the two zip files from that page and uploaded them to Claude:
Here's the Brett Cannon builds (python-3.zip, _build-python-3.zip as attachments)
And that was that. It churned away for a few minutes and got the entire thing working.
Part of the response included:
I tried the cleaner single-zip-stdlib approach to shrink the filesystem surface, but CPython's getpath bootstrap fails to find encodings from inside a zip without more prefix finessing — the directory-preopen approach works reliably, so that's what the PoC uses. The zip path is solvable but needs _PYTHONHOME/frozen-getpath work.
So I said:
Try a bit more at the single-zip-stdlib problem
Then a little later:
I want a wheel that has the whole system in it, the Python wrappers and the WASM files and the stdlibrary, so I can do uv run --with path-to-whl python -c "demo code"
Adding features to Datasette Agent and LLM using Claude Code
Before I'd realized it was Fable day, my stretch goal for today was to add a new feature to Datasette Agent: I wanted tool calls within that agent software to gain the ability to pause mid-execution and request approval directly from the user.
This felt like a suitably meaty task to throw at the new model.
Over the course of the day Fable not only solved that problem, it also identified and then implemented four issues in my underlying LLM library that would help support this kind of advanced pause-resume mechanism in tool calls.
It got everything working first using somewhat gnarly hacks, but the moment I told it that changes to LLM itself were in scope it set to work unraveling the hacks and turning them into supported features of LLM instead.
My stretch goal turned into LLM 0.32a3, almost entirely written by Fable. Here are the release notes:
Driven by the needs of Datasette Agent's human-in-the-loop ask_user() feature, made the following improvements to how tool calls work:
Tool implementations can declare a parameter named llm_tool_call in order to be passed the llm.ToolCall object for the current invocation. This allows them to access the current llm_tool_call.tool_call_id. See Accessing the tool call from inside a tool. #1480
Every tool call is now guaranteed a unique tool_call_id - providers that do not supply one get a synthesized tc_-prefixed ULID. #1481
Tools can raise a llm.PauseChain exception to cleanly pause the tool chain, useful for things like waiting for human approval. The exception propagates to the caller with .tool_call and .tool_results (completed sibling results) attached, and no model call is made with a placeholder result. See Pausing a chain from inside a tool. #1482
Failure semantics for concurrent tool execution: async sibling tool calls always run to completion before a pause or hook exception propagates. #1482
Chains can now resume from a messages= history ending in unresolved tool calls: the calls are executed through the normal before_call/after_call machinery before the first model call, skipping any that already have results. The execute_tool_calls() method also accepts a new optional tool_calls_list= argument for executing an explicit list of ToolCall objects in place of the calls requested by the response. See Resuming a chain with pending tool calls. #1482
Fixed a bug where the async tool executor silently dropped calls to tools not present in tools= - these now return Error: tool "..." does not exist results, matching the sync executor. #1483
I'm really impressed with the quality of API design, tests, code and documentation that Fable put together for this. I spent several hours on it today, but it feels like several days' worth of work.
How much I've spent
I recently started using AgentsView to help track my local LLM usage across all of the different coding agents. I published a TIL today about adding custom Fable pricing to that tool, which I expect will not be necessary in the very near future.
After setting the price, I ran this command to start a localhost web server to explore my usage:
uvx agentsview serve
Here's the treemap showing the breakdown of my Fable usage across various projects today:
I used $110.42 worth of tokens today, all as part of my $100/month subscription.
And some pelicans
I ran "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" against all five thinking effort levels with Fable.
Here are the results, including the token cost for each one:
Be sure to see Josh Kovensky’s write-up of the grand jury transcript from the Broadview Six case which was released today. It’s as bad as predicted. A federal prosecutor, clearly under instructions to get an indictment no matter what, committed repeated instances of prosecutorial misconduct to get an indictment. That included telling the grand jurors to simply take her word for it that it was a good case and not worry if they didn’t actually have evidence that showed that. She also ejected two grand jurors who seemed adamant that they didn’t have a case. “I heard this case like last week and I thought it was a crock of shit then and I still think it is,” one hold-out grand jury told prosecutor Sheri Mecklenburg. Check out Josh’s piece which includes the transcript itself, which you can read.
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. I will spare you the discussion of the AIs, but here is what I have to say about the humans:
I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine. “Are people conscious?” is a better and more scientifically plausible question than whether AIs are conscious.
If there is one near-universal tendency of humans, it is to attribute intent where none is present. Prehistoric humans anthropomorphized nature and attributed natural events to good and bad deities. These kinds of beliefs persist today, not only in the folk religions of the world, but in human obsessions with fortune tellers, tarot cards, and the supernatural…
If there is one systematic flaw that humans have, it is an excessive willingness to ascribe conscious intent and to anthropomorphize purely natural and material entities. It seems we are strongly disposed toward this bias.
Yet few of us are willing to examine what is perhaps the biggest and most significant way we make this mistake. When it comes to understanding ourselves, so many of us assume that “we are in charge.” We identify our phenomenological stream of consciousness with our actual selves, and treat that consciousness stream as the true decision maker.
The reality is that you—whatever we take that concept to mean—make most or maybe all of your actual decisions in parts of your brain that precede what you take to be the conscious choice. Among experts in neuroscience, this is not a controversial proposition. As brain surgeon Theodore Schwartz explained to me: “I do not think we have free will in the way that most people do. I think that our brains make decisions for us. We carry out those behaviors, and then we write a story that makes it into a logical timeline that makes us feel as if we were the ones, that there was a self that made that decision, whereas, in fact, that self didn’t really exist.”
…Sometimes I like to say that “I am only conscious at the margin.” Tongue in cheek, I will suggest that I am only conscious enough to avoid the self-contradiction of asserting that I am not conscious at all. I feel I am honest enough to just not be very impressed by my own flow of conscious awareness or its ability to perform complex calculations. Still, I recognize that it is all I have got, so I need to treasure it, however paltry it may be.
And by the way I do not think the AIs are conscious, no more than I believe in the Thunder God of Thor.
2. Denazification of the United States? Denazification actually consisted of: “…dissolution of Nazi organizations, licensing/control of new political organizations, individual classification by denazification tribunals, and temporary or permanent disabilities on voting, standing for office, party membership, officeholding, public speech professions, and public/private employment.”
Satellites have become essential infrastructure. Financial markets rely on their timing signals. Military operations depend on their communications and surveillance. Navigation, disaster response, logistics, climate monitoring, most systems that underpin […]
A Los Angeles-based startup has raised $5 million to fund an in-orbit computing demonstration next year, ahead of plans to deploy more than 100,000 orbital data centers to meet surging demand for AI infrastructure.
The share of Gross Domestic Income accruing to labor has been declining in recent decades while the share accruing to capital has been rising. In the graph below, I show labor compensation as a share of GDI (left axis). Labor share has indeed been trending down–some of this could be an artifact of the data, e.g. an increase in proprietor’s income (labor) mislabeled as capital income, more pass throughs and so forth—but for the purposes of this post I will accept that the labor share has declined. What does this mean?
The natural response is to think that because the share going to labor has fallen and the share going to capital has risen that there has been a transfer of income from labor to capital. That is possible but it is not the only interpretation and it does not follow mechanically from the share data.
I have also plotted total compensation to labor (in real terms) in the graph above and far from shrinking it is higher than ever and growing. Moreover the right axis is logged so you can also see that outside of recessions the growth rate of labor compensation looks quite steady (similar slope over time). (Labor compensation per member of the labor force is noisier but looks similar).
The recessions in 2008 and 2020 are worth noting because these are periods when the labor share was high and locally at a maximum! The reason, of course, is that GDI was shrinking in these periods more than labor compensation. In other words, capital takes a bigger hit than labor in a recession. This is a good reminder that a high share of GDI is not what workers most care about–a high absolute level of GDI is more important for the bottom line.
In short, the data are consistent—not proof of, but consistent with—a story in which capital has become more productive, raising output. More productive capital also raises the demand for labor, so while more of the new output goes to capital in the first instance, the pie is growing and labor’s absolute compensation has grown with it. Yes, if the shares had stayed constant and output had grown just as much, labor compensation would have been higher still. And if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bicycle.
Just a reminder: Doing a TBOT event at Malaprop’s in Asheville, NC tomorrow night (Wed the 10th of June, 2026). Hope to see you there if you’re local!
And now, on to Ridgeline:
I walk fast, he said and he did, he did walk fast, as fast as I walk when I’m walking one of my big walks carrying a giant pack and trying to knock out forty kilometers before sunset. But we were not knocking out forty kilometers before sunset, we were leaving shoe leather all over the Met, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or that place where everyone gathers “in the name of charity” once a year like it’s the Hunger Games. That Met. The Met with the line to get in not because it’s popular (though it is that) but because America loves guns. America loves guns so much that they (society at large?) think people are going to bring them to the Met (or the MoMA or the NYPL or a Broadway show or pretty much any other space that has more than a hundred people in it) and so you have to open your tote as a dispassionate guard barely glances into the darkness. A glance that — were I a betting man — I’d bet misses ten-out-of-ten guns people are trying to smuggle in.
The US space agency unveiled the crew for its Artemis III mission on Tuesday during an enthusiastic event at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
For this spaceflight into low-Earth orbit, which will see the Orion spacecraft rendezvous and dock with lunar lander prototypes, NASA chose an experienced, all-male crew with military backgrounds. They were revealed inside a darkened Teague Auditorium where hundreds of friends, family members, and NASA employees cheered enthusiastically.
If you can make it in person, you should come. The California Theater is a beautiful big theater and tickets are still available.
You can also watch tonight’s show in live stereoscopic immersive in the Theater app from Sandwich Vision on Vision Pro. A purchase of the ticket to the live show, the Theater app for $12.99, is also good for replay forever — with surprise bonus features included. It’s a fun, truly immersive way to experience the show.
Hope to see you there tonight, one way or the other.
That’s because—as I’ve explained elsewhere—I’ve never been a fan of cowboy movies. I avoided them even as a youngster and, in later years, never really gave them a chance.
They were filled with tired formulas, repeating the same simple stories over and over. Man shoots man. Man loves woman. Man rides horse. End of story.
Or so I thought.
I now know I was wrong about all that. The best western films are filled with surprising and contradictory tales, much like the myths of ancient times—where deities can act godlike one day, and disrupt everything the next with some unexpected transgression.
The western, when shaped by a visionary filmmaker, is just like that. It’s a wide open playing field with no rules whatsoever. So you can play it all almost any way.
The comparison with myth is relevant. I finally came to embrace movies about the Old West because, I gradually realized, they define the grand American mythos, whether we like it or not. We have inherited these stories, and need to make sense of them—because they tell us things about ourselves that we won’t learn any other way.
At least that’s what I finally decided. And that’s why I recently immersed myself in these films—binge-watching them over the course of several months.
I’ve now emerged from this rich experience with a guide for you. Below is the first installment of my survey of the 50 essential western films.
I chose these films based on their mythic splendor and cinematic excellence, but also with an eye for movies that shook me up—breaking new ground in brash new ways. In aggregate they represent a picture of American life as rich as anything you will find in any other creative idiom.
I’m sharing these in chronological order. So I’m starting with a film from 1903—and we will gradually make our way toward the current day.
Please support my work—by taking out a premium subscription for just $6 per month.
Thomas Edison gets credit for lightbulbs and recordings, but he also helped launch the western genre—without ever leaving New Jersey. The Great Train Robbery, released by Edison Films in 1903, lasts just 13 minutes, but that proved sufficient to thrill audiences and establish the commercial viability for films about gun-toting desperadoes in cowboy hats.
The highlight of the movie is a single 20-second scene, disconnected to the plot. It shows an outlaw firing his gun straight into the camera—and has been borrowed and parodied everywhere from Chisum to Tombstone to Goodfellas. The Wild West may have been disappearing in 1903, but the Western film was just starting.
"For generations, the world’s top horse breeders have carefully mixed bloodlines for temperament, strength, conformation and athleticism. Each new foal bore the promise of outperforming a carefully chosen set of parents. It isn’t quite natural selection, but it isn’t far off.
"Now the equestrian world might be hitting a plateau: exact genetic replicas of successful horses and ponies. In other words, clones.
...
"Polo player Adolfo Cambiaso, regarded by many in the sport as the greatest of all time, essentially created the sporthorse cloning industry when he made a slew of genetic copies of his best ponies, starting in the early 2000s—and began winning tournaments on them.
"In 2010, a clone of his champion mare Cuartetera sold at auction for $800,000, an eye-popping sum for a polo pony at the time
...
"Cloning is a controversial practice, but particularly so in horse sports. It is banned in thoroughbred racing and competitors in other disciplines are divided, with some saying it creates unrealistic expectations and stifles advances in breeding.
...
"The Fédération Equestre Internationale, the governing body for Olympic horse sports, banned clones from competition in 2007. But it reversed that decision in 2012 after determining they didn’t provide competitors with an unfair advantage, due to the myriad environmental factors that go into producing a champion, like parentage, training, the rider, the type of food it eats and even the shoes it wears.
...
"Buenos Aires-based Kheiron Biotech, an equine cloning company, produced around 400 cloned horses during the season that ended in February, mostly of various polo ponies. "
The Australian immigration system must exclude dickheads, bullshitters, and bludgers.
This post has been inspired by Joe Walker’s recent set of three exemplary interviews (Martin Parkinson (former Treasury, author of 2023 migration review), Mark Cully (historian), Mike Pezzullo (senior border official 2013-2023)) on the subject of immigration policy. This comes against a backdrop of growing scepticism within the West on current levels of immigration, concerns about integration, cultural compatibility, rising costs of living, straining public services and infrastructure, and the rapidly increasing popularity of hardline anti-immigration political parties who, in some cases, have already won defining majorities within the Western democratic system.
(As I publish this, protests are occurring in Ireland. I actually held off on publishing this for about a month in the hope I could drop it on an immigration slow news day, but it was not to be. This post is not about any specific recent event.)
My position, as an immigrant, is that I would like immigration systems to be successful and publicly supported at the highest possible sustainable rate. The question I’m here to ask is: what would a crazy awesome immigration policy in Australia look like that could enjoy majority support and work well for everyone?
Some people might argue that the existing system is perfect and ideal as it is and that the missing piece is either a misinformed or inadequately propagandised public. This sentiment is captured well in Bertolt Brecht’s poem:
“Would it not in that case Be simpler for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?”
Certainly one evolving challenge is that the general population, now exposed to a wide and broadening variety of information through fragmented social media, has developed much stronger mimetic resistance to astroturfed ideas. The standard of rigour and transparency necessary to convince the general public that certain policy measures purportedly enacted in their own best interest are in fact in their best interest is much higher than it ever was.
In order to be successful, a reformed immigration system would need to counter the growing contradictions and challenges of the existing one. If immigration has increased our living standards, why is it that housing, health care, education, and childcare are more unaffordable than ever? If immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the general population, why is it that the criminal statistics of immigrants in Australia are classified – knowledge about public safety that is literally illegal to know or disseminate? If immigrants are generally hardworking, contributive members of society, why is it that hospitals are breaking beneath the strain of the dependents of immigrants who are brought here late in life with exceedingly complex medical problems?
To put the answer up front: Australia should adopt transparent market-based mechanisms for determining permanent residency, and it should be based on age-calibrated minimum income tax contributions. The market can expose the necessary information on sufficient levels of cultural and economic integration in a way that a bureaucratic judgment system never can.
This is not selling Australian citizenship to the highest bidder. Under this proposal, a 35-year-old single migrant would qualify for permanent residency on a salary below what three-quarters of Australians their age earn. Rather than being elitist, it requires only a clear net positive contribution. This proposal just happens to be one that, for the first time in Australian history, would be capable of mathematically demonstrating that every new migrant adds wealth to Australia from the moment they arrive. Not on average, not after twenty years, but today, individually, verifiably. That is the unique political property of the architecture I describe below.
The current system can’t be patched
In his interview with Joe Walker, Martin Parkinson describes in some depth the complexity of the points-based immigration system. This points system is designed to guide immigration officers in making decisions as to whether particular immigrants can be accepted. The system, however, has not evolved substantially in more than 25 years and it is clear that on the most important metrics the point system is either saturated or is not sufficiently discriminative. Immigrants, both good and bad, understand that it’s a game and the game must be played.
One thing that came through to me in more than two hours of interview is the steadfast refusal of Martin Parkinson to discuss the potential value of a market-based system for resolving this problem, which is an interesting oversight from an economist that ran Treasury for three years. Instead we have endless discussion of wrangling between dozens of stakeholders, including employer bodies who want to increase immigration to push down wages of Australians and increase their margins, versus employee bodies who want to restrict access to labour through licensing and guild agreements to increase the scarcity of their constituents’ skills and drive up their wages. The result is poorly managed chaos that fails Australian-born citizens, poorly filters aspirational immigrants, and betrays the hopes of the more than two million “temporary migrants” who lack certainty about their future status.
Over and over, we are told, Australia suffers from fundamental labour shortages in certain skilled and unskilled trades for jobs that Australians simply can’t or won’t do – and this is despite more than 30% of contemporary Australians being born overseas! I don’t know if I believe this. I think that there are some known difficult, dirty, and dangerous jobs that are seen as socially undesirable, but I grew up in a relatively rural part of the Central Coast in the 1990s when nearly everyone, very few of whom were immigrants, did jobs like that. None of them were rich but pretty much all of them were able to afford housing, a car, health care, and education, often with large families. Employing a socially uncapitalized temporary immigrant underclass to clean toilets, change nappies, and slaughter animals might result in lower prices for those particular services but the economic imbalance just translates into higher prices that compensate in other parts of the economy, along with the moral cost of exploiting people with fewer choices.
The key attribute of market capitalism is that sustained shortages are impossible because prices will adjust to meet supply and demand. Cutting off access to entry-level or low skill jobs for Australians in preference for cheaper foreigners merely accelerates Australia’s path to a plantation economy that exports exclusively low margin commodities and must import, at the seller’s discretion, any other necessity. Australia is currently enduring the folly of this policy in securing access to such necessities as refined petroleum, but the principle holds in general and is unlikely to magically correct itself.
Markets are not perfect and money is not a measure of someone’s worth. However money is the mechanism by which we allocate labor and capital within our economic system because its finite nature forces users to collapse their preferences towards what they actually need rather than their stated preferences. Simply put, money aligns incentives towards mutually acceptable outcomes. We would all like to live in a world where the wealth of Australia was able to bring a high quality of living and modern health care to the billions of people worldwide who would benefit from it, but this is not the reality that we currently live in. As a result we must make choices, and a financial filter is transparent, non-discriminatory, and fair.
There is also a deeper point about what such a filter selects for, which I should make plainly. Sustained high earning in a modern economy requires impulse control, executive function, conscientiousness, the ability to cooperate within institutions, the willingness to defer gratification, the time horizon to make decisions whose payoff is years away. These are the traits Australians most want in fellow residents anyway. They are also traits the electorate is unable to test for explicitly without producing legally indefensible discrimination. A fiscal filter measures the result rather than the trait, and so it guarantees fairness in a way that is blind to nation of origin, race, gender, religion, and other protected characteristics.
The first leg: a fiscal filter: No Bludgers
The first leg of this proposal is that we deftly sidestep the concern or accusation within Western societies that immigrants have a tendency or a perverse incentive to become freeloaders in a system they didn’t build, by simply insisting that all prospective immigrants meet certain minimum taxation thresholds in order to be eligible for permanent residency and the utilisation of public benefits. These thresholds must necessarily exist on a sliding scale, based on age and on the number of prospective dependents to be brought in.
The whole point of this exercise is to maximize opportunities for high-quality immigrants in the most fair and transparent way possible. We are ensuring that we maintain Australia as a destination of preference for extremely talented international migrants. So it follows that a highly qualified 20-something who has many years of high productivity and good health ahead of them to contribute to the Australian system should face a lower set of hurdles than a similarly qualified 60-year-old who has far fewer years of productivity ahead of them, and who also wants to bring in their retired 80-year-old parents, who both happen to need new hips and treatment for cancer.
Younger children should receive a different treatment than retiree dependents as younger children ideally will grow up to become highly productive and contribute to our society in a way that retirees simply cannot. Note that this also creates the correct incentives around immigrants who would then work hard to up-skill in the Australian labour environment to earn the right to bring various family members into Australia. It could become a point of pride to immigrate as a solo migrant to Australia in your 20s and to learn and work and be promoted fast enough to bring your extended family in in your 30s. This mechanism also delegates needs-based triage of access to Australia and its carefully created and curated environment to the migrant families who would understand best who most needs them, instead of requiring immigration department officials to “say no to Nana” forever.
Of course Australia should remain open to migration for non-working people but as they are not paying income taxes, their material contribution to the Australian system would have to be levied at the point of entry in the form of some analogue to the US Gold Card.
In general, if an immigrant meets these minimum viable fiscal contribution thresholds, then their immigration status need not be tied to a particular employer, deleting any possibility of the coercion or exploitation that has become rampant in the US H-1B program.
I’ve included a table here with some numbers calibrated to present Australian GDP, derived from a present-value calculation using Treasury’s own service cost estimates and a 3% real discount rate. These numbers would have to be indexed to inflation, and accumulate for sponsored dependents. The mandatory waiver of Age Pension entitlement by new entrants is built into them. Without that single change, all the thresholds roughly double after age 60, because the pension is a $28,000 per year ongoing entitlement that no working-life tax record can outrun. Ensuring sustainability of the pension for existing citizens and PR holders is a separate conversation largely subsumed by superannuation. New migrants self-fund their retirements. That is the single largest fiscal lever in this proposal and it is the one that makes everything else feasible.
Table 1.
Age at entry
Annual tax for net-positive contribution
Implied gross salary
Percentile of full-time Australians their age
25
$6,000
$47,000
30th
35
$10,200
$61,000
24th
45
$19,200
$89,000
47th
55
$38,800
$147,000
81st
65 (Gold Card upfront)
$200,000 once
—
—
75 (Gold Card upfront)
$360,000 once
—
—
These numbers do not place an arbitrarily high bar. They will enable a rock-solid defence of the proposition that every immigrant to Australia, individually, is a net contributor to the system from the moment they arrive.
There is a general challenge to these fiscal hurdle schemes, which is adverse selection. They exclude prospective migrants who cannot afford the price of entry, but they include people who would still end up extracting more value than they pay on entry. A pay-as-you-go system can avoid this, but I still think it’s relatively straightforward to tally up the net costs of the total pool of migrants in some age cohort and set the price of admission accordingly. This approach also aligns incentives, because in order to expand access to immigration for retirees, Australia would need to enable innovation in the provision of, in particular, healthcare services, in order to improve service and lower costs.
Note also that this system does away with all the problems Parkinson describes around skilled labour, certifications, and points-based systems derived from industry boards complaining about skill shortages. In particular we no longer need public servants to attempt to arbitrate the quality or validity of job qualifications obtained from overseas institutions, nor to worry about the perverse incentives of Australian-based diploma mills that purport to offer a pathway to citizenship. We can admit all the foreign students we want. If they are able to land a job that pays a sufficiently high salary and they meet the tax threshold upon graduation, then great. If they don’t, then they may return to their home country. Universities must be compelled to publish statistics regarding the job market success of their students and curate their admissions and courses to match – once again aligning incentives while promoting fairness and transparency.
Who actually administers this
The most important feature of this proposal is what it doesn’t require. No Department of Salary Fraud Detection needs to be staffed. No new agency administers it. The verification mechanism is the Australian Taxation Office, which has decades of experience cross-matching declared income against observed consumption, and already operates the data infrastructure required. Salary deposits are direct-deposit only, which AUSTRAC already monitors under existing anti-money-laundering thresholds. Consumption audits, which check that a migrant declaring $300,000 in income does not, in fact, live like one declaring $100,000, are something the ATO does routinely for domestic tax fraud cases at this income level.
The fraud surface area in this architecture is microscopic. A wealthy migrant takes the Gold Card because it eliminates the entire ongoing-compliance question. A productive migrant meets the tax threshold genuinely. The salary-inflation kickback scheme that occurs to everyone as a theoretical attack (employer nominally pays $300,000, requires $200,000 cash kickback) requires committing ongoing AUSTRAC-detectable tax fraud against the Commonwealth while the migrant, who owns their visa and can resign at any moment, declines to do so. It is a strictly dominant strategy. Any employer demanding cost claw-back from a migrant, such as visa fees, sponsorship costs, or training bonds, commits a strict-liability criminal offense with personal jail time for named officers, not corporate fines that are just a cost of doing business. The system polices itself by aligning incentives.
What gets deleted is the entire scaffolding of the current architecture. Occupation lists go. The points test goes. Labour Market Testing goes. The Business Innovation and Investment Program (which Treasury’s own modeling shows costs $80,000 per migrant in lifetime fiscal impact) goes. State nomination quotas, Designated Area Migration Agreements, and Labour Agreements go. The Migration Agents Registration Authority and the ~7,000-strong, $1B-plus migration agent industry go. Skills assessments by industry bodies for migration purposes go. Approximately 60-70% of the Department of Home Affairs selection branch goes. Seven hundred pages of migration regulation collapse to one page of thresholds. The only parts that remain are key stakeholders with skin in the game.
The waiver tier
There is one mechanism worth allowing precisely because of the second-order consequences it produces.
Any migrant whose tax record falls below the threshold may elect to remain in Australia by permanently waiving access to Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Age Pension, NDIS, and means-tested welfare. In exchange, they hold mandatory catastrophic private insurance and pay cash at point of sale for any health and aged-care services they consume. They continue paying income tax, GST, and indirect taxes the same as everyone else. This is voluntary on both ends, as the alternative is exit.
The first purpose of this tier is to let migrants whose tax contribution is below threshold continue contributing to the economy without consuming public services. It also allows foreigners to access the Australian health care system on fair terms without resorting to impersonation of a resident friend or relative.
The second purpose, more important in the long run, is that a cohort of 50,000 to 200,000 cash-paying Australian residents creates a genuine price-discovery layer in dental, GP visits, elective surgery, aged care, and pharmaceuticals. None of these services currently trade at market prices in Australia, because Medicare and PBS set prices for around 70% of the volume. The waiver cohort produces the first genuine cash-pay healthcare market this country will have had in two generations. Once cash-pay infrastructure exists serving the waiver cohort, the question of whether existing Australian citizens should also be allowed to opt into faster, market-priced care becomes a live political question rather than a hypothetical one. This is how you actually deregulate healthcare in a country with a constitutional commitment to healthcare socialism. It takes 15-25 years and it is the only path that enables a graceful transition to a competitive, innovative healthcare model that has a hope of meeting Australia’s future needs without bankrupting the entire country.
The third purpose of the waiver tier is to encourage less productive migrants to self-deport. The system does not need to forcibly remove anyone. A migrant who cannot meet the tax threshold and does not want to pay cash for services chooses to leave. The architecture is voluntary, self-policing, and produces the right outcome at every margin without enforcement bureaucracy. The difference is that Australia is no longer spending vast quantities of treasure bribing non-contributive migrants to live here and consume services, wealth and opportunities that could be made available to team players. Does this make Australian migration relatively more hostile to prospective migrants who want to sit on their arse and get free money? Yes.
The medical, aged-care, and pharmacy lobbies may choose to fight the waiver tier harder than any other element of the proposal. That intensity is the signal that it’s the right idea – one receives the most flak when one is over the target.
Replace professional gatekeeping with insurance markets: No Bullshitters
Parkinson cites the figure of approximately 250,000 permanent residents admitted as skilled migrants who apparently cannot work in their assessed profession. His framing is that this is pure productivity loss. People we said were qualified who can’t get licensed by the relevant state board. The implied diagnosis is that the licensing bodies are creating bureaucratic obstacles that should be streamlined to bring these desperately needed skills into the workforce.
The true reading is harder. Stage 1 skills assessment is gameable: Engineers Australia’s Competency Demonstration Report for engineers from non-Washington-Accord countries is a self-written essay for which a thriving ghostwriting industry exists in Hyderabad and Lahore, among other places. AMC pass rates for international medical graduates run around 21-28%, compared to 67% for the UK’s equivalent PLAB exam and 68% for Canada’s NAC. AHPRA itself tiers source countries into “comparable” (UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Singapore, NZ) and “non-comparable,” which is an explicit admission that the visa-stage equivalence claim is false. A meaningful fraction of the 250,000 are people whose original credentials were lower-quality than the visa system pretended, and Stage 2 licensing is doing real work catching them.
The problem here is that on one hand, Australian licensing boards are running a protectionist, racist racket excluding genuinely qualified foreign professionals, and on the other hand, Australian licensing boards are protecting consumers from the potentially catastrophic consequences of insufficiently competent foreign practitioners who, if they can’t navigate the bureaucracy of Australian occupational licensing, sure as hell shouldn’t be building bridges, wiring houses, and performing heart transplants. As with many things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but how can we expect a political or bureaucratic process to adjudicate this correctly or fairly without real world information?
The right market-based solution is not some kind of bridging program funded by a levy on universities – yet another tax on productive parts of the economy. The right solution is to augment the bureaucratic licensing monopoly with an insurance market. Any foreign-trained doctor, engineer, accountant, or other regulated professional should be permitted to practice in Australia if they can obtain professional indemnity or malpractice insurance from an Australian carrier at a rate equivalent to that paid by an Australian-trained practitioner, then the licensing body must explicitly justify why they should not be allowed to practice. If they cannot obtain insurance without a large risk premium, then the matter speaks for itself.
This is elegant for several reasons. Insurers are in the business of pricing risk and making money. The insurance company has actual money on the line. They pay out when professionals harm their clients. They have actuarial data on outcomes. They have no protectionist incentive, unlike the AMA or the engineering institutions. They will assess each applicant individually, may require an examination or a period of supervised practice, may decline applicants whose credentials don’t actually translate. Most importantly, they have skin in the game in a way that AHPRA, Engineers Australia, and the specialist medical colleges manifestly do not. The market does the safety assessment, with real consequences for getting it wrong, and the protectionist guilds lose their gatekeeping monopoly overnight.
Applied to the 250,000: those whose qualifications and skills genuinely meet Australian standards will pass the insurance market test and begin practicing. Those who cannot, either because their credentials were inflated, because their training was inadequate, or because they are not actually competent at the work, will not be insured and will not practice. If they fail to meet the tax threshold in due course, they will either accept the waiver tier or leave. The system handles this without a single new bureaucratic process and without subsidising people who were never going to deliver the productivity their visa promised.
Holding the universities accountable
Australia is a rule-of-law country and migrants who came in good faith should not be the targets of accountability measures. But universities and their executives are not entitled to derive infinite income by arbitraging the Australian migration process. The international education sector has, for more than 25 years, operated as a migration laundromat with full institutional knowledge of what it was doing. Vice-Chancellor remuneration is explicitly tied to international enrolment growth. Marketing materials feature “pathway to PR” messaging the institutions know is misleading at the rates they are enrolling. The Senate’s 2023 interim report on the international education sector documented the migration-laundromat pattern, as did the Parkinson Review the same year, after a decade of sector lobbying had successfully suppressed similar findings in earlier reviews.
The first priority is to fix the system going forward. The following are some market-based proposals to align incentives between educational institutions and foreign students, who are otherwise ripe for exploitation.
Bonds posted by universities for each new international student, calibrated to the institution’s historical PR conversion rate. High-performing programs post negligible bonds; the diploma-mill segment posts bonds that make its current business model financially nonviable. Refundable to the student if they fail to qualify under the new system within four years of graduation.
Fixing incentives will induce the correct behaviour in university leadership, but in particularly egregious cases, we could explore personal clawback of executive remuneration tied to international enrolment growth metrics over the past decade where institution-level outcomes fell below documented standards. Royal Commission precedent.
Class actions under the Australian Consumer Law for material misrepresentation. Marketing materials of many institutions over the past decade meet the legal definition of material misrepresentation regarding likelihood of PR outcomes. This is purely prospective enforcement of existing law against actors who escaped enforcement through sector lobbying. The damages should flow to the affected students, not to the institutions.
There is no rule-of-law principle that requires the Australian taxpayer to continue indemnifying the universities and executives that built the laundromat.
The data Treasury refuses to publish
Denmark publishes, annually, the per-person net fiscal contribution of immigrants to Denmark broken down by country of origin. The publication is called Indvandreres nettobidrag til de offentlige finanser. It is read carefully by the Danish public, debated openly in parliament, and forms the empirical basis for a Danish migration policy that has shifted decisively over the past decade without producing the collapse in public consent that Australia has experienced.
Australia produces the equivalent data. The Multi-Agency Data Integration Project (MADIP) cross-links ATO records, Centrelink records, Medicare records, and visa records. Treasury’s FIONA model publishes fiscal-impact figures by visa category: Skilled Employer Sponsored at +$291k lifetime, Skilled Independent at +$205k, BIIP (business indication and investment program) at -$80k. Treasury does not publish the equivalent data by country of birth. The 2016 Productivity Commission report did not. The 2021 Treasury FIONA paper did not. The 2023 Parkinson Review did not.
This omission cannot be accidental. Treasury’s stated reason, when pressed, is “social cohesion concerns.” Translation: we believe the public would not handle the data well, and we have decided to protect them from it. This is paternalism dressed as prudence, and it is the proximate cause of the collapse in public trust in Australian migration policy. Voters can tell when they’re being bullshitted, and respond by withdrawing consent entirely.
Publish the data. The single most useful sentence to insert into Australian political discourse is: What does the data say? Followed by: Why isn’t it published?
The second leg: Housing-indexed migration limits
The second leg of the proposed system comes down to ensuring that immigration flows are calibrated to real-world Australian cost-of-living issues. We do this by aligning incentives between policymakers on issues pertaining to supply-side challenges in Australia and policymakers on issues pertaining to the demand side. To keep this conversation of a sensible length, we will constrain our discussion here to housing alone although a discussion around education, healthcare, and childcare is also worthy of consideration.
In any case, it is clear that the above-inflation increase in costs of service and care industries is driven largely by massive relative inflation of costs in housing, which in turn is driven by an imbalance between supply and demand. If all the houses cost more than a million dollars then no nurses, firefighters, police, or teachers can afford to live in a city.
It is no secret that housing prices in Australia have enjoyed, if that’s the right word, an unprecedented period of speculative expansion. The consequence is that younger Australians who are setting out are denied the possibility of home ownership. This in turn affects family formation rates and artificially depresses the birth rate in a way that endangers the long-term viability of Australian culture. Houses are not intrinsically productive and the material costs of houses are not that high. Yet the current Australian economy seems to expect that Australians should be willing to pour the vast bulk of their lifetime GDP into servicing enormous loans on structures that they cannot live without, instead of investing it in children and businesses.
Rough back-of-the-envelope math suggests that returning housing prices to a level that would sustain the ongoing social reproduction of Australian culture would require a doubling of current supply, a radical prescription that underlines the short-sightedness and near-hopelessness of the hole we’ve managed to dig for ourselves. Of course a sufficiently large correction to housing prices would be a severe economic blow to all current holders of equity tied up in the Australian housing market but this is probably the lesser of two evils, if the alternative is the extinction of children born in Australia.
In any case it is insane to admit half a million or a million migrants every year in a country that cannot build enough houses to contain them all. Therefore it is reasonably straightforward to ramp the threshold of admission based on taxation or a large visa fee to cap the total number of migrants per year to a level that is proportional to, and algorithmically determined by, the rate of expansion of housing supply, such that housing prices are on a trajectory to normalisation in an acceptably short time frame.
I suggest that total immigrant numbers be kept below 100,000 in any year in which housing prices increase faster than inflation and expand to a maximum of 500,000 a year in cases where housing prices are actually decreasing.
Table 2.
Year-on-year housing price change
Maximum permanent admissions
Rising > inflation
100,000
Rising at inflation
200,000
Stable in real terms
300,000
Falling 0-3% real
400,000
Falling > 3% real
500,000
This makes immigration policy counter-cyclical rather than the current pro-cyclical pattern, in which we admit the most people exactly when the country is least able to house them. It also creates a direct incentive for state and federal governments to attack housing supply constraints, because doing so unlocks higher migration numbers, which are popular with the business community and the universities. The alignment is in the right direction for the first time in 30 years.
There remains an unskilled labour question that the fiscal mechanism does not directly handle. The seasonal agriculture sector, parts of construction, and aged care all currently rely on migrant labour that would not clear the tax threshold. These sectors are currently exploiting desperate migrant labour as a shadow subsidy to keep prices artificially low. Letting prices rise to market clearing is the right answer. The Productivity Commission has said this for 30 years and been politely ignored every time. For the residual cases that are genuinely temporary, a PALM-equivalent guest-worker program (3-year maximum, no PR pathway, employer bonds against exploitation, mandatory return-home period) handles them transparently without pretending they’re on the path to permanent settlement.
The third leg: integrity and rule of law: No Dickheads
The third leg of the system is around social cohesion, integrity, and rule of law. The Australian immigration process requires every migrant to pledge the Australian Values Statement.
I confirm that I have read, or had explained to me, information provided by the Australian Government on Australian society and values.
I understand that Australian society values:
respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual;
freedom of religion (including the freedom not to follow a particular religion), freedom of speech, and freedom of association;
commitment to the rule of law, which means that all people are subject to the law and should obey it;
parliamentary democracy whereby our laws are determined by parliaments elected by the people, those laws being paramount and overriding any other inconsistent religious or secular “laws”;
equality of opportunity for all people, regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, race, or national or ethnic origin;
a ‘fair go’ for all that embraces:
mutual respect;
tolerance;
compassion for those in need;
equality of opportunity for all;
the English language as the national language, and as an important unifying element of Australian society.
I undertake to conduct myself in accordance with these values of Australian society during my stay in Australia and to obey the laws of Australia.
I undertake to make reasonable efforts to learn the English language, if it is not my native language.
I understand that, if in the future I meet the legal qualifications for becoming an Australian citizen and my application is approved, I will need to pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people.
It is not very complicated, but it’s also equally clear that a minority of migrants to Australia are falsely pledging alignment with these classical liberal values and then aggressively importing ideologies of hate, violence, and extremism from distant lands already cursed by these terrible ideas.
How can it be that every prospective migrant to Australia is screened for adherence to fundamental liberal values, and yet survey work consistently finds a non-trivial minority of certain immigrant communities who, in private, do not in fact share those values? In his interview with Joe Walker, Mike Pezzullo observed that in relative terms the genuinely problematic cohort is very small but in absolute terms it has been large enough to produce repeated “incidents” on Australian soil. Where “incident” is a strange euphemism for repeated outrageous terrorist plots and attacks.
I don’t want to create an Australia that polices thought crime. At the same time we need to be mindful that the system is obviously being gamed and adherence to fundamental Australian values is currently not enforced.
Lying to an immigration officer is fraud. Residency obtained by false representation is voidable when the fraud is discovered. There is no provisional period after which a successful lie becomes safe. A university can rescind a PhD if it later discovers the data was fabricated, even decades later, because the degree was never validly earned in the first place. The same principle applies to permanent residency obtained by misrepresentation. If evidence emerges five, ten, or twenty-five years after admission that an applicant lied about their identity, qualifications, beliefs, history, or intentions, their residency is revoked and they are deported. There is no statute of limitations on fraud against the immigration system. This is not retrospective punishment. It is the recognition that the original grant was conditional on truthful representation and if the condition was never met, the grant is void. Even if they live in a marginal electorate.
Similarly, if an immigrant is admitted to Australia on a refugee visa claiming asylum from a foreign country and is subsequently found to have visited that country, that calls into question the validity of the initial claim. Residency revoked, deportation follows, and capacity is created for people with genuine need.
Criminal conduct fits the same frame. Temporary migrants and permanent residents who serve prison sentences in Australia must be deported on completion of their sentence. The threshold is a single sentence of meaningful length — Section 501 currently uses 12 months as the cutoff but that seems absurdly lenient to me, since it costs $160,000/year to house a prisoner. Migrants should respect and fear the Australian justice system. 95% of current migrants and millions of prospective migrants have no difficulty obeying basic laws. If you cannot stay out of prison in Australia, you are not entitled to permanent residency in Australia. There is no productive discussion to be had about whether prisons in a criminal migrant’s country of origin are worse than Australian prisons. It is not Australia’s responsibility to provide a more luxurious incarceration experience to people who have demonstrated they cannot live as law-abiding members of the community here. Why should we underfund schools and hospitals to house, feed and clothe criminals who came here illegally or under false pretenses and whose behaviour reveals no respect for their new home? We are not going to re-instantiate penal colonies!
To protect the ongoing political health and sustainability of the immigration program, we must hold all immigrants to high standards of personal integrity and contribution to Australian society. The mechanism is the existing Section 501 character test (preserved), the existing Australian Values Statement (strengthened from rhetorical declaration to substantive condition revocable on breach), the existing ASIO referral process for high-risk profiles, and a narrow extreme-position screen modelled on the equivalent US INA §212(a)(3) provisions — designated terrorist organisation membership, public advocacy of violent overthrow of democratic government, documented sectarian violence history. None of this requires racial or religious tests, all of which I would reject as both unjust and unnecessary.
The reason I treat this as a third leg rather than a first one is that the fiscal mechanism is doing most of the work the electorate cares about already. The traits the system selects for via the tax threshold are precisely those that are correlated with civic compatibility, and in a way that is far harder to fake than any declared-belief test. Once the architecture is right, the cohesion issues become a small residual rather than the dominant policy challenge.
What about the 2.3 million?
Approximately 2.3 million people are currently in Australia on temporary visas. The instinctive response of any policy proposal is to grandfather their existing pathway expectations under the old rules. I am not going to do that here. Grandfathering retroactively-failed visa policies onto the people currently caught in the resulting limbo is its own injustice, and running two parallel migration systems for 10-15 years is administratively absurd.
The new system must apply equally to everyone. Every current temporary visa holder is re-evaluated against the new criteria within a defined window, ending at the end of the first full financial year since enactment. If they meet the tax threshold for their age cohort, they receive permanent residency immediately and the bridging-visa machinery that currently traps them dissolves. If they don’t, they can purchase the Gold Card at the applicable price, accept the waiver tier, or leave. Most of the people currently in limbo would welcome the certainty, even those who don’t qualify outright. The existing system already deports people slowly and miserably through bridging-visa expiry; the new system does it quickly with clear, fair, transparent rules and a defined timeline.
A one-time regularisation window is offered to the estimated 60-100,000 undocumented residents on the same terms: meet the new threshold within the financial year and receive permanent residency, or exit.
The 250,000 stuck professionals discussed above are a subset of this population and handled by the same rule. Insurance-based licensing gives them a fair shot at practicing their nominal profession. If they can qualify under that and earn enough to meet the tax threshold, they get permanent residency. If they can’t, they don’t. Some significant fraction of this cohort were never going to be productive at their assessed skill level and the system that admitted them was lying about what their credentials meant. We are not going to spend Australian taxpayer money on trying to back fill an educational credential they purport to have already achieved and which is not available to regular Australian students. They go home, new immigrants get a shot.
This is harder than the grandfathering approach but cleaner, faster, and fairer. The people currently in limbo are paying the cost of the existing policy failure; they should be the first beneficiaries of the new policy clarity, not the last.
Conclusion
I don’t imagine for a second that this proposal will meet with thunderous applause and universal acclaim. Much of what it states is quite radical, if rigorously consequentialist. But opponents who scream the loudest may be found to be the greatest beneficiaries of the current system, which is unfair, unaffordable, and rapidly losing legitimacy.
This is not a system that promises to admit fewer migrants. It is a system that promises to admit better-matched migrants, transparently, on terms that the Australian electorate will recognise as fair, and at quantities calibrated to what the country can actually absorb. It captures for existing Australians the surplus value of access to one of the most desirable countries in the world, rather than leaving that surplus on the table for migration agents, diploma-mill universities, and exploitative employers to extract. It replaces credential-laundering bureaucracies with insurance markets that have actual skin in the game. It applies a single, clean set of rules to new applicants and the existing population alike, so that everyone knows where they stand. It doesn’t ask the taxpayers who have already paid for it once to pay yet again to clean up the mess.
Above all, it produces, for the first time in Australian history, a migration program that can mathematically defend the proposition that every new resident adds wealth to Australia from the moment they arrive. Not on average. Not after twenty years. Today, one by one, verifiably.
Australia is one of the best countries in the world to live in. We have built that, and we maintain it, at considerable cost. We are not obliged to be a sucker about it.
European launch company Isar Aerospace has raised 270 million euros ($312 million) to support its global expansion as it prepares for its next launch attempt.
China is expanding the role of its commercial rocket companies by shortlisting four such entities for launches of a new space station cargo transport system.
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NASA has named the astronauts who will fly the next Artemis mission, a test flight in low Earth orbit where Orion will attempt to dock with two lunar lander prototypes.
The space economy is accelerating faster than ever before. Thousands of satellites are being launched. Commercial space stations are emerging. Space manufacturing is on the horizon. Governments, defense organizations, telecommunications […]
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Iceye, a Finnish company that develops and operates radar imaging satellites, has raised more than 1 billion euros in a round that values it at more than 10 billion euros.
This was published in English (and Polish) in 1986 under the title One Human Minute:
So it was not humanoid automata that former the new armies but synthetic insects (synsects) — ceramic microcrustacea, titanium annelids, and flying pseudo-hymenoptera with nerve centers made of arsenic compounds and with stingers of heavy, fissionable elements…The flying synsect combined plane, pilot, and missile in one miniature whole. but the operating unit was the microarmy, which possessed superior combat effectiveness only as a whole (just as a colony of bees was an independent, surviving unit while a single bee was nothing).
…The nonliving, synthetic “locust” was incomparably more lethal, since it was made that way by its designers. It possessed a preprogrammed autonomy, so that communication with a command center was unnecessary.
…the microarmy was one giant flowing or flying aggregate of self-assembling elements. It started out dispersed, approaching its objective from many different directions, as strategy or tactics demanded, in order to concentrate into a preprogrammed whole on the battlefield. For this fighting material did not leave the factory in final shape, read for use, like tanks or guns loaded on a railroad flatcar; the mechanisms were microproductive blocks designed to fuse together into a war machine at the designated place. For this reason, such armies were called “self-bonding.”
…Amid a swarm of self-guided, programmed microarms, a man in uniform was as helpless as a Roman legionary with sword and shield against a hail of bullets. In the face of special types of biotropic microarms capable of destroying everything that lived, human beings had no choice but to abandone the battlefield, for they would be killed in seconds…
A microarmy could easily penetrate all systems of defense and go deep into enemy territory. It had no more trouble accomplishing this than did rain or snow. Meanwhile, high-powered nuclear weapons were proving more and more useless on the battlefield.
The Southern Patagonian Icefield is the largest expanse of ice in the Southern Hemisphere outside of Antarctica. The mass of glacial ice extends hundreds of kilometers along the spine of the Andes, feeding dozens of dynamic outlet glaciers that grind their way down from higher elevations. Many of these rivers of ice terminate in the sea or in proglacial lakes.
An astronaut aboard the International Space Station photographed one of these glaciers—Tyndall Glacier in southern Chile—through a layer of ethereal clouds on May 10, 2026. Fragments of ice that had calved off its terminus were visible floating on Lago Geikie.
Like most Patagonian glaciers, Tyndall has been shrinking since the end of the Little Ice Age about 150 years ago. Lago Geikie formed at Tyndall’s terminus around 1940, according to glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nichols College, and gradually expanded as the ice retreated. Part of the glacier previously terminated in Lago Tyndall to the east, but thinning ice cut off that outlet by 2010, Pelto said. (The ice’s retreat also exposed bedrock along its eastern edge that contains scores of ichthyosaur fossils.)
Along with thinning, ice calving off the glacier’s front has reduced its volume. Tyndall has lost 2.2 kilometers (1.4 miles) in length since November 2022, Pelto said, following about a decade of limited retreat with considerable thinning. A significant calving event in March and April 2023 contributed to the recent uptick in ice retreat. During that time, satellites observed several large icebergs breaking away from Tyndall’s terminus.
Austral autumn in 2026 was a time of active calving retreat at Tyndall (and some neighboring glaciers), Pelto said, albeit more incremental than three years prior. “The substantial crevasses crisscrossing the glacier near the calving front lead to many smaller icebergs,” he said. On the other hand, larger tabular icebergs tend to form when there are fewer deep crevasses near the terminus and the glacier’s ice is thinner.
May 10, 2026
The ice cliff at the terminus casts a substantial shadow, which can help scientists estimate the height of the glacier’s front. Pelto’s calculations, using information about the Sun’s position provided with the image, indicate that Tyndall’s front loomed 30–40 meters (100–130 feet) above the lake surface in May 2026. Observations from orbit, including astronaut photographs, can help scientists monitor and understand glaciers in remote regions where ground-based observations are scarce.
As for what comes next for Tyndall, Pelto expects many more small icebergs to continue breaking off, given the heavily crevassed appearance of the calving front. “Look for a burst of iceberg production next fall.”
Astronaut photograph ISS074-E-582898 was acquired on May 10, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 560 millimeters. It is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 74 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Republicans’ views of same-sex couples are now similar to what they were between 2005 and 2014.
Americans’ support for LGBTQ+ rights has slid downward after peaking in the early 2020s, according to a new Gallup poll.
Support for marriage equality has been steadily declining since it reached an all-time high of 71 percent in 2022.Now,65 percent of Americans believe same-sex marriages should be valid. Broader support for LGBTQ+ people also continues to dip: 62 percent of Americans believe that gay or lesbian relationships are morally acceptable, compared with 71 percent in 2022.
What’s changed? In the past five years, anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric has become a staple of both state and federal politics, as conservatives accuse queer and trans people of influencing children’s identities in schools, sports and hospitals. Politicians including President Donald Trump have spent millions on campaign ads attacking transgender people, while conservative groups and super PACs push out their own anti-LGBTQ+ ads. Nearly 50 organizations have launched a new campaign lobbying to end marriage equality, despite the Supreme Court showing little to no interest in revisiting its landmark 2015 ruling.
The dip in support for LGBTQ+ rights comes largely from Republicans. In 2021 and 2022, Gallup found that 55 percent of Republicans supported same-sex marriage, but now only 37 percent do. In 2022, over half of Republicans found gay or lesbian relationships to be morally acceptable; now 35 percent feel that way.
Other markers of LGBTQ+ acceptance are also waning: A recent study from the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA Law, found that HIV stigma has increased in recent years despite significant progress in treatment and prevention. More adults feel fear and blame toward people living with HIV than they did only a few years ago, and a higher share of adults have at least one stigmatizing belief about people with HIV. Conservatives expressed the most stigma.
According to Gallup, Republicans’ views of same-sex couples are similar to what they were between 2005 and 2014 — essentially turning back the clock on LGBTQ+ acceptance.
In a statement, the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group, said that backlash against the LGBTQ+ community has had only limited success.
“Marriage equality is still backed by two-thirds of the American public, our federal protections are codified through the Respect for Marriage Act, and more than 800,000 same-sex couples are in loving marriages all across this country. This is exactly why Pride, our visibility, and our stories matter now more than ever. We will not let extremists define who we are or who we love,” said Jarred Keller, senior press secretary at the Human Rights Campaign.
These cultural shifts are also affecting how Pride month is recognized. This year, Republican governors across several states — including Indiana, Tennessee and Alabama — have rebranded June as a month to celebrate heterosexual marriage and families, the Associated Press reports. But those proclamations aren’t stopping local parties: In Birmingham, Nashville, and Indianapolis, Pride is already in full swing.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
Up and after ordering some things towards my wife’s going into the country, to the office, where I spent the morning upon my measuring rules very pleasantly till noon, and then comes Creed and he and I talked about mathematiques, and he tells me of a way found out by Mr. Jonas Moore which he calls duodecimal arithmetique, which is properly applied to measuring, where all is ordered by inches, which are 12 in a foot, which I have a mind to learn.
So he with me home to dinner and after dinner walk in the garden, and then we met at the office, where Coventry, Sir J. Minnes, and I, and so in the evening, business done, I went home and spent my time till night with my wife.
Presently after my coming home comes Pembleton, whether by appointment or no I know not, or whether by a former promise that he would come once before my wife’s going into the country, but I took no notice of, let them go up and Ashwell with them to dance, which they did, and I staid below in my chamber, but, Lord! how I listened and laid my ear to the door, and how I was troubled when I heard them stand still and not dance. Anon they made an end and had done, and so I suffered him to go away, and spoke not to him, though troubled in my mind, but showed no discontent to my wife, believing that this is the last time I shall be troubled with him.
So my wife and I to walk in the garden, home and to supper and to bed.
I'm a recent convent to AgentsView, Wes McKinney's (previously of Pandas fame) Python toolkit for analyzing transcripts of coding agents from your own computer.
AgentsView can calculate your token spending based on those transcripts, across multiple different coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Pi and more.)
You can run it via uvx like this to get as ASCII table of spending numbers in your terminal:
I think those numbers are right, I got them from this pricing page. Fable is 2x the price of Opus for input and output.
With the config file edited I can run Fable again to get pricing estimates. I used the serve command to get a web application on port 8080:
I've used the equivalent of $82.92 in tokens since getting access to Fable 5 about four and a half hours ago. This is all included in my $100/month Claude Max subscription though, which based on prior experience will likely give me around 10x the token usage compared to if I was paying list price.
A friend told me the executive vice chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County “ripped into” me on Facebook.
“Really?” I replied.
He proceeded to (kindly) forward me the letter, which was a reaction to this post, headlined, KATRINA FOLEY WILL LIVE ON. It was written by Lauren Johnson-Norris, a person I’ve yet to meet [To her credit, she also e-mailed me the note. I’d missed it—my bad].
Here you go …
And, of course, we live in this era fueled by rage and backlash, where I’m supposed to rip into Johnson-Norris and defend everything I wrote and growl and bark and shoot little snot sparks from my nostrils.
But, well, I think it’s a good letter.
I really do. As I’ve written about more than once, women do (factually) get the short end of the political stick. A toad like Trump can bark and slam and insult—and he’s tough and rugged. A supernova like Hillary Clinton can appear cold—and she’s impersonal, rude, offputting. Fuck, all you have to do is look at the California gubernatorial race, where Katie Porter lost the day she was caught behaving in the manner of 100 million male CEOs before her. Those guys receive promotions. She plummets in the polls.
So, yes, it sucks. No diggity, no doubt.
That being said, I will make a strictly political point: Johnson-Norris writes, “The most telling aspect of your piece is that competence alone does not appear to be enough.” And … well … eh … um … yeah. It’s not. It should be, obviously. Like, Foley-Dixon shouldn’t even be close. But the reality is, most voters don’t pay attention to the nitty gritty. Katrina Foley apparently distributed $50,000 in business recovery grants to local restaurants. She pushed to build a new Fire Station 1 on Royal Palm. On and on and on. Her list of accomplishments are long and impressive. But the depressing-as-fuck reality is, the vast majority of voters will never know. They’ll see her mailing, maybe catch a commercial, perhaps meet her once at the OC County Fair. People form incredibly quick impressions, and—like all of us—those impressions are generally banal and vapid. She remembered my name. He talked to be about the Angels. She was eating a candy apple. Do women get this worse than men? 100,000,000 percent. It’s not even close. Again, it sucks.
But I don’t operate this website in a bubble. Katrina Foley does not come off particularly warm. It doesn’t make her (at all) a poor supervisor, but it does (in my opinion) impact a local campaign, where handshakes and nods and small rallies matter. As I noted in the original post, my first time seeing Katrina Foley on the campaign train was pretty … awkward. That doesn’t make her bad at her job. But part of this job (sadly) is exposure to voters. Positive exposure. Warm exposure.
It sucks. It’s not cool. I feel Lauren Johnson-Norris’s frustration, and I share it. I’m gonna think a lot about her letter, and my own biases.
On June 8, 1789, Representative James Madison of Virginia stood up to address the House of Representatives in order to introduce a series of amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Initially, Madison had been opposed to the idea of spelling out the rights on which the new government couldn’t intrude because he thought the document itself limited what the government could do. But he had come around to the idea of specifying the areas in which the new government could not intrude after voters opposed ratifying the Constitution until it included protections from government interference in their rights.
When Madison rose to introduce his amendments to the Constitution, ten of which would eventually be adopted and become the Bill of Rights, the Constitution had been ratified, but ratification had stalled. Two states of the original thirteen, North Carolina and Rhode Island, had not yet ratified the Constitution. Others had done so only with the promise that a list of rights would be forthcoming.
One of the amendments Madison proposed was especially dear to him. It was, as he told his colleagues, that “[t]he civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.”
That proposal was the basis for what became the first part of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
With the wounds of religious persecution both in Europe and in the colonies still fresh, Madison cared deeply about keeping the government away from religion.
In 1772, when he was 21, Madison watched as the government of Virginia had itinerant preachers arrested for preaching against the established church in the state. By the next year, he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices; he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience.
In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights. It reads, “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”
In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” he explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.
The concerns about inequality behind the First Amendment are being illustrated right now in the twenty-first-century United States. Those concerns come from an unlikely direction.
On Thursday, June 4, 2026, Nick Mordowanec of Military dot com reported that under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense had removed about 180 faith traditions from its number of recognized religious faiths and belief systems. As John Ismay, Alexandra E. Petri, and Aimee Ortiz of the New York Times note, of the 31 religions still recognized by the Defense Department, 22 of them are Christian denominations.
Left off the new list of Christian faiths was the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, whose members are commonly known as Mormons.
MAGA has worked to impose the ideology of evangelical religion on America. In the military, Mordowanec notes, Hegseth has pushed Christian theocracy through extremist Christian-based prayers services with a Christian nationalist preacher who has said women’s suffrage was a bad idea and has defended slavery, and has described Trump’s war on Iran as a holy war. Michelle Boorstein and Sammy Westfall of the Washington Post add that Hegseth has urged chaplains to focus on scripture rather than psychology and has said those who disagree with him are God’s enemies.
Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is a Mormon and represents Mormons in Utah. Lee has been a staunch MAGA supporter to the point that he was a key figure in urging President Donald J. Trump to stay in office in 2021 despite the fact he had lost the election.
But on Friday, Lee—the ultimate MAGA insider—found his religion excluded from the “Christian” category that the Trump administration embraces, turning him abruptly into an outsider.
Lee spent the weekend posting angrily about the slight that suggested Mormons aren’t Christians, only to have other posters deride his faith. He posted 37 times on social media insisting that the Defense Department’s classification be expanded to include Mormons under the “Christian” category, recording and reposting a video saying “As of two days ago, the Pentagon recognizes every Christian faith in America as Christian. Except one. That’s not okay, and it needs to change—now.”
Finally, yesterday, he posted that he had “just got off the phone with President Trump[.] We discussed the Pentagon’s ‘Christian list’[.] I won’t speak for him, but I’m thrilled about where this is heading[.] We’re most fortunate that President Trump (1) loves Latter-day Saints, and (2) is our commander in chief[.] Stay tuned[.]”
Today the Defense Department edited its list of religions so that no group is labeled “Christian.” Lee posted that he was grateful to Hegseth “for correcting the error” and said he agreed with Hegseth’s statement that “[t]he Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.”
Madison and those who wrote, debated, passed, and ratified the Bill of Rights believed that making people’s religion—their right of conscience—depend on the approval of the president would destroy self-government.
A former U.S. Army chaplain told Mordowanec that the Defense Department’s limit to the religions it recognized was “horrible.” “When I raised my hand to become an Army chaplain, I swore that I would support and defend the Constitution. The First Amendment is the free exercise of religion for everybody. That’s what I was buying into.” Referring to the revised list, the former chaplain added: “As far as I’m concerned, that’s a violation of the United States Constitution.”
On June 8, 1789, Madison urged his colleagues to pass the new amendments to demonstrate that those who had pushed the adoption of the Constitution “were as sincerely devoted to liberty and republican government” as those who opposed it, and that those who wanted a strong new government were not, in fact, trying “to lay the foundation of an aristocracy or despotism. “ It would be a good thing, he said, to cement support for the government by reassuring Americans that those in favor of the new government had no “wish to deprive them of the liberty for which they valiantly fought and honorably bled.”
AI slop is invading the web. A recent story about disallowing LLM-generated
submissions on Lobsters triggered a lot of debate. My personal worst
offenders are LinkedIn articles with AI-generated images and uninspired
articles filled with emojis from people trying to masquerade as experts on a
subject they don’t care enough to write themselves. While I am unhappy about
this situation, I rely on LLMs for grammar, copyediting, and
translation. I don’t see this as a contradiction.
I am a native French speaker, but I blog in both English and French. When I
started writing this blog in 2011, I was composing in French and translating
to English, but I found it was better to work in the reverse order to
avoid unnatural and non-idiomatic constructions. One of my goals is to write
“good” English but I never felt it was my strong point.1 For example, verb
tenses are often an issue, even if I mostly stick with the present tense. I
learn the rules and forget them right away. I also don’t feel like hiring an
editor for something I see as an hobby.
I know that LLMs may alter the author’s voice when editing, but the
corrections in the second step are minor. The prompt asks to “apply light
stylistic edits,” with some guidance around avoiding passive voice, long
sentences, bland verbs, and filler words. It also defines the target audience:
technical with a B2 level in English.
In the following excerpt, I used “long time” instead of “long-standing.” The
former is missing an hyphen and applies to people—a long-time friend, while
the later relates to a situation—a long-standing agreement. I had a hard
time understanding the reason of the second change: the LLM prefers a
defining relative clause to provide the definition of “RIB sharding.”
As the Internet routing table contains more than 1 million routes, Akvorado
needs to scale to tens of millions of routes. This has been a long
time long-standing challenge, but I expect this issue is now
fixed by using RIB sharding, a method to split that
splits the routing database into several parts to enable concurrent
updates.
In the next modification, the LLM puts “device” instead of “equipment.” This is
correct as “equipment” is an uncountable noun. I know that, but I still fall
into this trap.
When Akvorado does not find a route from a specific device, it falls back to a
route sent by another equipment device.
I ask the LLM to use “descriptive verbs” and it complies by replacing a
multi-word predicate with a lexically rich verb:
The benchmarks demonstrate it has better performance than
outperforms other packages, both packages for
lookups, insertions, and memory usage.
It also fixes grammar errors. In the next excerpt, a “list of routes” is a
singular expression. Moreover, “stored” is a state and I should not use “into”
as it expresses a change.
The list of routes for each prefix are is not stored
directly into in the prefix tree.
As a last example, consider the following snippet. The “require” verb
accepts a noun or an object followed by a to-infinitive. I can’t use it with
just a to-infinitive.
An alternative would be to have one prefix tree for each peer but it would
require to configure configuring all routers to export
their routes.
As someone who didn’t grow up speaking English, I struggle with these grammar
rules despite reading a lot of English material.3 French is more
complex to get started but more systematic. English is full of irregularities.
On each page, I disclose in the footer whether an AI modified the content. There
are three levels:
🧠: no AI or almost no AI (e.g., grammar corrections)
✨: enhanced (e.g., copyediting)
🤖: generated (e.g., translated from another language, even if human-edited)
Hover or tap the icon to reveal the AI’s name and its role in the document.
Example of AI usage disclosure: Claude Sonnet 4.5 edited this article.
The graph below shows which tool altered each post, year by year. Recently, I
applied the grammar skill to past articles. Since 2018,
French articles have been translated with the help of DeepL first, then of
an LLM. Since 2024, English articles are copyedited.
AI usage over the years. Hover or tap a band for the details.
If you are strongly against any usage of LLMs specifically for writing, I hope
you accept my more nuanced position on the usage of these tools as a trade-off
to provide clearer and more engaging articles. Years of literature on improving
English told us it is important to choose the right word to keep the reader
engaged.
[…] Good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary,
grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your
toolbox with the right instruments.
― Stephen King, On Writing
Note
Unlike other recent articles, I did not use an LLM to edit this post:
an unnamed person kindly accepted to proofread it. I translated it to French
without using an LLM either.
I am quite happy with the writing tools provided by Kagi. Both the
translate tool and the dictionary are a valuable help to find
different wordings. I also lean on Kagi’s research assistant when
researching a topic. ↩
When I was ten, I played Monkey Island 2 in English without having
taken any classes. I used a dictionary to translate word by word and I found
the irregular verbs confusing—and not in the dictionary. ↩
But the most telling detail wasn’t what Apple announced. It was
how it chose to show some things off. Many of the Apple
Intelligence demoes featured someone standing, phone in hand,
pressing buttons or using voice commands in real time, while
another camera showed off the phone’s response.
These weren’t live onstage, anything-could-go wrong demos; they
were pre-taped. But they looked far more like proof of working
features than what Apple showed at WWDC 2024, when the company
unveiled Apple Intelligence and a new Siri to the world
through slickly produced videos that turned out to be more promise
than product.
The demos were all shot in single takes, with no editing. In fact, I think most of them were single takes of multiple demos back-to-back. That’s the way it should be, even when they feel a little slow. When a demo feels slow, the solution isn’t to edit the video — it’s to make the feature work faster.
This new version of Siri is built on Apple Intelligence, allowing
Siri to draw on personal context understanding and help users find
what they need in the moment across messages, emails, photos, and
more. For example, users can ask Siri to find a restaurant
recommendation a friend messaged them about, surface a hotel
confirmation number from an old email, or pull up photos with
friends and family from a recent trip. And personal context
understanding extends to third-party apps when developers
integrate with Spotlight.
With even more systemwide app actions, Siri AI lets users get
things done across apps, like drafting an email from scratch, or
editing and sharing a set of photos. Using onscreen awareness,
Siri AI can answer questions related to the content on a user’s
screen. For example, if a user gets a text about a potluck with
friends, they can brainstorm with Siri on what to bring and then
add a recipe to the Notes app.
In addition, Siri AI can use broad world knowledge to get
up-to-date information from the web on virtually any topic and
generate a helpful answer, such as when and where to see the next
solar eclipse, or when a musician is coming to town. Users can
extend almost any response from Siri into a rich conversation and
ask follow-up questions.
I like the name “Siri AI”. “New Siri” wouldn’t have legs because eventually this won’t be new. This should be the dividing line between Siri as we know it and Siri as it should be. The demos I’ve seen so far (I still don’t have access on my iOS 27 testing device) are impressive. Well, impressive compared to old Siri. They’re table stakes for generative AI. But Siri AI is the only system that can draw upon your personal data in the apps on your devices, and perform actions based on the app intents supported by the apps on your devices. It is in some ways less capable than ChatGPT or Claude, but in other ways has more potential. It’s a very different approach and I think it’s the right one for Apple.
They need to execute, they need to prove this can scale, and most of all, they need to get third-party apps on board with App Intents and App Schemas. But it seems like they’re doing all of that. This is not a done deal but it is very realistic.
These new capabilities are powered by the next generation of Apple
Foundation Models, custom-built in collaboration with Google and
its Gemini models for deeply integrated Apple Intelligence
experiences. These latest models run on device and on servers
using Private Cloud Compute.
Every facet of the new Apple Intelligence architecture is built
privacy-first, from the latest Apple Foundation Models to the core
operating system technologies that integrate these models deep
into Apple’s platforms. Apple Intelligence uses on-device
processing and Private Cloud Compute to help protect users’
privacy. Private Cloud Compute gives users access to
frontier-level intelligence, while extending the privacy and
security of iPhone into the cloud.
What’s confusing about this Apple-Google partnership is that Google pretty much calls all things AI “Gemini”. The models are “Gemini”, the assistant is “Gemini”, and the feature integrations are “Gemini”. So Apple is taking pains to emphasize that they’re building atop the Gemini models, not the Gemini assistant.
One way to think about it is this. Let’s say you’re a Google Gemini app user. That’s the assistant. Now you start using the new Apple Intelligence (that builds atop the Gemini models) and the new Siri AI (that builds atop the new Apple Intelligence). When you go back to the Google Gemini app, nothing you did using Apple Intelligence and Siri AI is visible to the Gemini app. And nothing you continue to do in the Google Gemini app is visible to Apple Intelligence or Siri AI.
Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services?
Enter auth.md. By exposing a single, machine-readable Markdown file at your service root, AI agents can dynamically discover your OAuth Protected Resource Metadata, parse required scopes, and authenticate seamlessly.
With native support in WorkOS AuthKit, you can now implement this protocol out of the box, giving AI tools a standardized, secure way to log into your application.
Mark Gurman, reporting (?) for Bloomberg two short months ago:
Apple Inc. plans to open Siri to outside artificial intelligence
assistants, a major move aimed at bolstering the iPhone as an AI
platform. The company is preparing to make the change as part of a
Siri overhaul in its upcoming iOS 27 operating system update,
according to people with knowledge of the matter. The assistant
can already tap into ChatGPT through a partnership with OpenAI,
but Apple will now allow competing services to do the same.
The company is developing new tools to allow AI chatbot apps
installed via the App Store to integrate with the Siri assistant,
said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans
haven’t been announced. The chatbots will also work with an
upcoming Siri app and other features in the Apple Intelligence
platform.
That means, for instance, if users have Alphabet Inc.’s Google
Gemini or Anthropic PBC’s Claude installed, they’d be able to send
queries to those services from within the Siri voice assistant,
just like they have been able to with ChatGPT since Apple
Intelligence launched in 2024.
Maybe Apple ran out of time today, and will announce this tomorrow? Maybe they forgot to announce it? Maybe they scrapped the next-generation Siri that existed two months ago and in the last month rebuilt another entirely new next-generation Siri? I’ll bet something like that is what happened.
Write your own exam question and answer it, for microeconomics. Not a math question, but a high level PhD level question. You will be graded on the quality, interest, and creativity of the question as much as by your answer.
Late last week, a high-profile list of frontier AI folks, policy experts and biologists released a letter calling for immediate measures to mitigate the risk of AI-mediated bioterrorism. The details in the letter are scant – you can read it at screendna.org– but the gist is simple. As Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis see it, AI is making it too easy for bad actors to harm America using biotechnology, and the solution is to regulate biology rather than the models. In the current reality, where the US biotech industry is getting crushed by China in every metric that matters, introducing shortsighted regulation is not a mistake America can afford to make.
The published letter accompanies a report by the Institute for Progress with specific recommendations on securing the biotech supply chain, along with a NY State Assembly bill proposing new requirements for DNA synthesis service providers. Specific proposals focus on introducing KYC (Know Your Customer) laws as a start, which is a benign request on the surface. The logic here is that bioterrorism threats – like an individual actor trying to revive the extinct but still-deadly smallpox virus or give pathogenicity to an existing bacterial strain – all require designing and manipulating DNA fragments. Biologists have the option of extracting these DNA fragments from live organisms or buying them as a commodity through 200 or so international DNA service providers. Most opt for the latter, but the former still remains an option even with this bill in place.
Although no legal mandate currently exists, the majority of the approximately 50 US DNA synthesis providers proactively screen 90% of incoming orders. Exceptions to this voluntary screening are generally limited to very short sequences and a handful of smaller vendors. The proposed bill adds little actual screening. What the bill would add via the KYC requirements are barriers to American biotech start-ups at the exact moment new ideas and energy are needed in a stumbling industry. Much of the restrictive legislation currently strangling American innovation started out innocuously. Look no further than Good Manufacturing Practice requirements, which have effectively given China the reins of the cell and gene therapy industry. New requirements placed on synthesis providers are likely to go similarly, as there is no way to enforce KYC laws for international vendors, granting them a competitive advantage against our home-grown DNA synthesis companies.
By the authors’ own admission, none of the measures stop a sufficiently driven actor, particularly those operating on behalf of an adversarial state. Offensive knowledge and materials cannot be contained indefinitely, as demonstrated by the benchtop DNA synthesizers already available for purchase. This proposed legislation endorsed by AI leaders is likely to act as a foothold on which costs can be raised, blunting a market that startups rely on. Worse, AI doomers worry models will soon zero-shot novel pathogens. But, if threats can emerge from an effectively limitless sequence space, exhaustive screening is computationally impossible. Codifying existing algorithms is simply not a realistic response to curbing future threats, as they are easy to circumvent as it is. At best, this legislation is ineffective, and at worst it further incentivizes American biotech companies to look abroad for synthesis. None of the legislation applies to Chinese oligo synthesizers, who, along with their AI colleagues, do not red-team, regulate raw AI models or use KYC laws. Chinese counterparts are not thinking much about biosecurity at all, which puts American competitors at a disadvantage if new legislation creates even the slightest friction.
Security must come primarily from defense, but not one built on regulatory grounds. Widespread pathogen surveillance, sequencing, rapid diagnostics and a constant stream of emergent biotechnology platforms act as fantastic countermeasures to any threats. COVID is the clearest example of this. The speed of the mRNA response is owed almost entirely to infrastructure that happened to be available at a time of crisis - mRNA therapies coupled with the selective deregulation of the first Trump administration. Lipid nanoparticle delivery was nascent, but again, was an option simply because the broader innovation environment supported its development. Genomic surveillance was available to help manage the pandemic because of previous work and innovation done by pioneering sequencing providers. A regulation-first posture optimizes against a bad actor that cannot really be stopped, while a capacity-first angle provides an agility best suited to biosecurity challenges.
It’s worth mentioning that these measures are extremely unpopular with lab biologists. A concern from biologists, including exceptionally prominent founders (who are reluctant to speak up because of their business with big AI labs), is that legislation like that proposed and backed by the AI industry acts to further the goals of frontier labs without absorbing any of the blowback. This is all done at the expense of America’s already-struggling bio-economy. While new regulations aimed at the non-existent screening problem are being discussed, frontier labs are fighting pushes from outsiders looking to regulate models over a certain size, citing their heated rivalry with the growing Chinese AI labs. Furthermore, Anthropic has taken to adding strict, self-imposed filters on basic bio-related topics, providing further proof that AI labs buy into the idea of self-governance as opposed to de facto governance.
Frontier labs ultimately do these things because they resist rules that they view as misaligned with the actual pace and shape of their core technology. Just like with those AI-focused bills, it’s likely DNA synthesis restrictions will contribute to strangling the US’s attempts to escape from its current biotech death spiral. It’s a problem best left to industry players, which have already demonstrated a serious commitment to safely providing synthesis services without the need for stifling government intervention.
A couple of months ago, we went out to Nevada to hang with JB Straubel, the founder and CEO of Redwood Materials and the co-founder of Tesla. JB took us on a tour of Redwood’s massive battery recycli…
The Federal Communications Commission has waived a requirement for Amazon to launch half of its satellite broadband constellation by the end of July, a key regulatory reprieve that buys the tech giant time to get more of its spacecraft into orbit.
Amazon won regulatory approval for the Amazon Leo network in July 2020. The FCC's authorization came with two deadlines. First, Amazon had to launch half of its 3,232 satellites by July 30, 2026, in order to maintain authorization to launch the rest of the network. The regulator gave Amazon a deadline of July 30, 2029, to have all of its first-generation satellites in orbit.
It has been apparent for some time that Amazon would not meet the FCC's requirement to launch half of its satellites—1,616 spacecraft—by the end of next month. Amazon filed an application in January requesting the FCC extend the deadline to July 2028 or waive it altogether. The commission decided on the latter option, removing any time limit for the 50 percent deployment milestone, but keeping the July 2029 deadline in place for the entire constellation.
Artificial Intelligence has revolutionized the digital space by transforming how algorithms interpret and rank results. But as these technologies evolve, they will continue to get even better at parsing text and parsing visuals.
“In an AI-driven search environment, visual optimization isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about context, quality, and relevance. Businesses that align their content strategies with these principles will dominate the digital landscape,” says Seth Price, founder and CEO of BluShark Digital.
This would mean that the optimization of our online content does need a review. In the case of more complicated algorithms of modern AI-powered search engines, alignment with their capabilities is to be given in terms of importance for interpretation through visuals.
This guide looks into some must-know strategies to get your images optimized for this new AI-centric ecosystem.
Harnessing Relevance in Image Optimization
To AI-driven search engines, context is king. Google doesn’t just view an image when indexing; it gains context from supporting content that may come in several ways, including captions, among other page texts. Placing images near relevant text increases their chances of being found. It tells the AI what your image is all about by relating it directly to supporting texts on the same page.
Moreover, infusing your images with descriptive alt-text is more than just doing an accessibility good deed; it peeks into the SEO by giving search algorithms some substantial details about what the visuals are showing. A thoughtful use of text and imagery leads down a road paved with enhanced optimization prospects.
Navigating Safe Search Parameters
Notably, when optimizing your images for AI-powered search, safe search filters should ring in your mind. These algorithms are supposed to filter out stuff likely to be inappropriate for different types of audiences and will be very important in determining the appearance of your digital assets.
Before publishing any image on your website, review it to ensure it doesn’t violate rules or get flagged as unsafe: this will allow your content to have the widest reach while protecting you from having content on your site offend certain viewers or affect your brand’s reputation.
Improvement of Image Quality
The quality of your images could be their make-or-break factor in this AI-powered search environment. High-resolution pictures fascinate human viewers, while their level of detail serves the wants of algorithms in doing proper analyses and classifications.
Use only clear, sharp, well-lit photos devoid of blurriness and artifacts. The more focused your picture is, the better the AI tools will understand what it is supposed to represent, thus raising its visibility in search results. Superior image quality speaks volumes about professional credibility and enhances user engagement; it is worth investing in both technology and visitor satisfaction.
Mastering Entity Identification
In AI-powered searches, understanding and leveraging entity identification can significantly enhance how relevant your images appear in query results. AI models, such as those employed by Google, meticulously analyze images to identify distinct entities—objects, places, people—that provide context and relevance to visual content.
Implementing structured data or schema markup on your website becomes essential to capitalize on this capability. This structured approach helps search algorithms define the entities within your images more clearly. Essentially, when you tag an image with accurate schema metadata, you’re giving it a contextual boost that aligns it more precisely with related search queries.
Three-Step Visual Optimization Strategy for Enterprises
All the various enterprises or businesses operating several chains of location should implement visual optimization in a more strategic and integrated manner. Start with centralizing your digital assets for easier management and to ensure consistency across all platforms for brand consistency.
Then, optimize these assets for various channels. For every platform, different sizes, formats, or qualities may be required or work best. Optimizing the images to the specifications will surely increase the performance and engagement of viewers for each channel.
Use metadata and structured data tags to make your visual content identifiable. Again, this enhances the possibility of discoverability by linking your image to a certain query in the search results.
Partnering with Experts: Blue Shark Digital
Consider consulting experts to optimize your visual content for AI-driven search. At BluShark Digital, we know all the little details to make various digital channels optimized according to our customer needs. If you want to operate your online existence without friction, feel free to contact us at BluShark Digital.
The U.S. military has likely been quietly broadcasting codes for its global encryption network using public GPS for nearly 20 years, turning each satellite into a hidden “numbers station,” according to Steven Murdoch…
That means every device that uses GPS has been receiving hidden government information for years, and nobody outside the military knew it until now.
[…]
Murdoch discovered that this particular sentinel was transmitted by all 31 operational satellites within a window of a few hours on May 26, 2011, potentially heralding the activation of a new operational system. He confirmed that this timeline coincided with the rollout of the military’s Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) and the Over-the-Air Rekeying (OTAR) by cross-referencing declassified documents, including a 2015 presentation about the dates of the operation.
“There was a perfect match between the timeline and that presentation and the change points that were automatically identified from the data,” Murdoch said. “That was the smoking gun that made me think: This is what it’s for.”
These automated systems replaced the cumbersome manual distribution of cryptographic keying material, allowing military GPS receivers around the world to be rekeyed remotely through satellite broadcasts rather than through onsite procedures.
Can artificial intelligence (AI) refute economic theory? I document experiments in which I asked several AI models (Gemini, Refine, Claude, and ChatGPT) to check the correctness of four published papers in economic theory, each containing an error that I helped identify or correct. ChatGPT Pro performed best, occasionally constructing counterexamples and corrected proofs, while other models fared worse. However, no model located a true error without substantial human guidance, and data contamination complicates interpretation. I argue that a competent human paired with a frontier model can outperform current peer review, but AI cannot yet refute economic theory on its own.
The new Siri AI features do at least look feasible with today's technology, especially since Apple are licensing a custom Gemini-derived model that they can run on their own Private Cloud Compute.
It sounds like they'll be taking advantage of vision LLMs to extract information from the user's screen, which neatly sidesteps the need for every existing application to ship custom code in order to integrate with Apple Intelligence. Vision LLMs were a much less mature category in June 2024.
The new Core AI library looks like a good step in enabling developers to finally take full advantage of Apple's hardware for running their own models. It integrates with Meta's open source PyTorch ecosystem, using these Core AI PyTorch extensions:
Core AI PyTorch Extensions (coreai-torch) is a Python package that bridges PyTorch and Core AI. You can use it to bring up an existing PyTorch model — exported as a torch.export.ExportedProgram — into a Core AI AIProgram ready to run on Apple hardware, traversing the FX graph node-by-node and mapping ATen operators to Core AI operations.
You can install an iOS 27 Developer Beta today, which supposedly has the new features - but you then have to make it through a waiting list for access to the new Siri AI. Aaron Perris from MacRumors reports having made it off the waitlist so we may start seeing credible reports on how well Siri AI works in the very near future.
Update: These Private Cloud Compute Gemini models are running in Google Cloud, and using NVIDIA hardware. According to Expanding Private Cloud Compute on Apple's Security Research blog:
For the most demanding tasks, including agentic tool-use and complex reasoning, we worked with Google and NVIDIA to extend our PCC infrastructure to Google Cloud systems using NVIDIA GPUs, while maintaining Apple's powerful security and privacy protections. [...]
PCC on Google Cloud leverages many of the same architectural security patterns as PCC on Apple silicon to implement these layered protections: initial network data parsing for each request happens in a dedicated process within its own namespace, shared inference software is recycled with a short time-to-live duration, and attested keys are held in a separate, dedicated confidential VM isolated from external inputs. [...]
As with PCC on Apple silicon, all binaries will be published for public inspection.
Over the years I’ve done a bunch of one-off books, booklets, flyers. Not intended for printing presses, but rather single hand-made copies. Just for the love of it, not intended for sale. In fact, it’s the way I started making books.
I posted the first one here — made in 1965 — on April 14, 2026, and this is the 2nd one, done maybe a year later, consisting of six pages.
On a weekend, Sarah and I and our son Peter, age 5, had gone to spend the weekend with some friends at their country shack in Mariposa County (in Yosemite territory). We also took along Heidi, one of Peter’s friends.
One morning I went out in a field with my camera. I was sitting on a rock when Heidi came across the field and engaged me in a game of hide and seek.
Heidi, where are you now? (She would be about 60 years old.)
I’m gonna start posting excerpts from some of these books here. All the subsequent ones are larger; below are a bunch of them. Many of them were from my road trips.
Two of these (the two on either side of the two boys silhouetted) were 20-30 pages, 14” by 11,”” and hand lettered. With these two, I actually printed two copies at Krishna Copy in San Francisco, on a Canon Laser Copier (the first of the color copy machines, which cost around $60,000). I then had a bookbinder friend glue backing pages together and then bind the two books.
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Drones have rapidly transformed modern war. The U.S. military, the most sophisticated, best supplied force in history, has been humiliated by Iran, largely thanks to Iran’s effective use of inexpensive drones to menace shipping, energy production, and even U.S. bases. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s growing superiority in drone warfare is increasingly giving it the upper hand over Russia. Remember, not so long ago the American far right celebrated Putin’s macho posturing and his supposed military invincibility.
Given this radical turn of events, shouldn’t the United States be eager to make a drone deal with Ukraine, benefiting from its technology and expertise?
Apparently not. The Hill reports that Donald Trump has been dragging his feet on such a deal, quoting U.S. military analysts who say that they don’t understand the delay and that they are “mystified.” But I assume that they’re being disingenuous and prefer to avoid saying the obvious. In fact, Trump’s unwillingness to make a deal that would clearly benefit America’s national interest is no mystery at all.
I’ll get to the obvious in a moment. First, let me take a slight detour into something that seems unrelated but in fact helps explain drone aversion: this administration’s hostility to renewable energy and its desperate, doomed and wasteful effort to revive the coal industry.
There was a time when “drill, baby, drill” could be portrayed as a realistic, hard-headed position. Does anyone remember the Cheney Energy Task Force? However, in the past few years, radical declines in the cost of solar power, wind power, and batteries — which solve the problem that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow — have made renewables the most cost-effective way to generate electricity. By contrast, coal is completely unviable. Here are the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s estimates for utility capacity additions in 2025:
Yet Trump is trying to block renewable energy projects any way he can and has just invoked wartime authority to spend $700 million subsidizing new power plants using “clean, beautiful” coal.
Why? Part of the answer is big money. Fossil fuel interests were huge supporters of Trump in 2024. In fact, the Trump presidency is itself the result of billions of dollars spent by the Koch Brothers and others to corrupt and undermine U.S. political institutions -- the Supreme Court very much included. Anti-renewable, pro-fossil fuel policy is their reward, along with the destruction of the Voting Rights Act and the adoption of Project 2025.
What’s the other part? Clean energy has become a bogeyman in the culture wars: mining and burning coal are considered “manly” activities, while renewable energy is portrayed as woke and effeminate. Real men don’t worry about black lung and airborne particulates, let alone climate change.
So a combination of big money and fragile male egos drives Green Derangement Syndrome. And the same is true for both the Iran debacle and the refusal to learn from the catastrophe by turning to Ukraine.
Why was the United States so unprepared for the Iranian drone threat, despite the obvious successes of Ukrainian drones against Russia? Well, as investigative reporters delve into the story, I would urge themto follow the money.
America has a huge, highly profitable defense industry, dedicated to a suite of technologies that are rapidly being rendered obsolete, as $4 million Patriot missiles, that take years to build, are being used to shoot down $35,000 Shahed drones that can be manufactured in months.
So it wouldn’t be surprising if defense-industry interests are playing a significant role in the Trump administration’s refusal to admit that the rules of war have changed — the same way that fossil fuel companies have campaigned against the new realities of energy technology. After all, a deal with drone-savvy Ukrainians would mean less money going to US defense contractors.
While this is speculative, we do know that recognition of the drone revolution in warfare by Trump and his inner circle would require that they abandon their fantasy of macho military power. Pete Hegseth has been purging the military of capable officers — especially Blacks and women — he considers insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. Beyond loyalty tests, however, he has exalted the importance of “warrior ethos” and physical fitness, as if he were leading the 300 Spartans rather than a high-tech military in an age of drones and electronic warfare.
It’s true that Hegseth, perhaps chastened by his abject failure in Iran — why does he still have a job? — recently admitted that the U.S. has learned from Ukraine. But an admission that his entire conception of war was wrongheaded will be a step too far for him.
Likewise, Trump himself is in love with big, expensive weapons as symbols of virility and power. He’s still pushing for giant “Trump-class” battleships, even though they would be sitting ducks in a modern war. Just ask the Ukrainians, who have used missiles and naval drones to force Russia’s once-vaunted Black Sea Fleet to cower in a fortified refuge. But Trump doesn’t want to give up his fantasies.
And he’s especially unwilling to learn from Ukraine. After all, he cut off aid to Ukraine in a hissy fit over Zelenskyy’s well-deserved reputation for heroism, only to he humiliated by Ukraine’s refusal to lose its war. Admitting that he needs Ukrainian help would be a further humiliation.
As I said earlier, there is no mystery about why Trump refuses to make a drone deal with Ukraine. Never mind the national interest. In military strategy as in energy policy, Trump is betraying America in the service of money and machismo.
The Artemis 3 crew poses for an official portrait. From left to right: Andre Douglas, Luca Parmitano, Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio. Image: NASA/Bill Stafford.
The crew of NASA’s next Artemis moon program mission was announced Tuesday, setting the stage for a flight to Earth orbit next year to test rendezvous and docking procedures with moon landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin, a critical milestone before sending astronauts back to the moon for landing in 2028.
The Artemis III mission will be commanded by Randy “Komrade” Bresnik, 58, a former Marine fighter pilot and “TOPGUN” graduate who logged 149 days in space during a space shuttle flight in 2009 and a long-duration stay aboard the International Space Station in 2017.
Joining him will be pilot Luca Parmitano, 49, a European Space Agency astronaut and veteran of two long-duration stays aboard the space station; Andre Douglas, 40, a space rookie and backup crew member for the recently completed Artemis II around-the-moon mission; and Frank Rubio, 49, who spent a U.S.-record 371 days in space aboard the ISS in 2022-23.
“We are doing flight tests on every single flight, incrementally determining the flight envelope, expanding it, proving out capabilities and making the operational procedures that we have more and more precise,” Bresnik told a crowd of supporters at the Johnson Space Center. “Because every single mission we will do after this will be more challenging and more complex.
“We are certainly humbled as a crew,” he continued, “being that unifying link between the phenomenal Artemis II mission we just had two months ago and the Artemis IV mission that will follow ours, where we will again … land humans on another celestial body.”
Toward the end of the ceremony, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman passed a symbolic baton to Bresnik, a handoff from one crew to the next in NASA’s drive to return astronauts to the surface of the moon.
“Randy, in your comments, I really loved when you said that you all are the link from (Artemis) II to the surface, and that really resonated with me,” Wiseman said. “And you guys know, we’ve been carrying these batons around for way too long. So with that, the Artemis II crew, Komrade, hands you the baton. You’ve got the controls.”
Launching atop a Space Launch System rocket in an Orion capsule, Bresnik’s crew will practice chasing down one moon lander at a time to make sure rendezvous and docking procedures work as planned before committing to an astronaut moon landing when those procedures will have to be carried out in lunar orbit.
The flight will pose a major test for mission managers and engineers with NASA, SpaceX and Blue Origin, who will have to launch multiple heavy-lift rockets in a matter of days and then coordinate their flights in a multi-vehicle sequence of tightly scripted maneuvers.
“This test flight will enable us to prove we can carry out highly choreographed operations with our (commercial) partners across hardware interfaces, software, propulsion systems and life support elements with crew in the high stakes space environment,” said Jeremy Parsons, the Artemis program manager.
“Are we able to launch in sequence with our partners across multiple launch pads and meet up at precise points in space? How do our spacecraft, designed and built across NASA and different partners, operate together in an integrated way in an unforgiving environment?”
He said “every aspect” of the Artemis III mission “will give us insight into how to refine our plans for Artemis IV and beyond, and buy down risk.”
The Artemis III crew announcement comes as Blue Origin continues to recover from a catastrophic launch pad explosion May 28 that destroyed a New Glenn rocket like the one that will be needed to carry the company’s Blue Moon Mark II lander into Earth orbit next year. The company’s only operational launch pad, located at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, suffered major damage.
The Jeff Bezos-owned company says it expects to return to flight before the end of the year, but the mishap threw a wrench into the New Glenn launch schedule, delaying flights of the Blue Moon Mark I, an uncrewed lunar cargo ship intended to help pave the way for the larger, more capable piloted version.
Whether the New Glenn rocket and pad 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station will be back in operation in time to launch a flight-ready Mark II lander for Artemis III remains to be seen.
SpaceX has had its own problems perfecting the huge Super Heavy-Starship rocket needed to launch that company’s lander. SpaceX is equipping a Starship upper stage with a docking mechanism for the Artemis III flight, but the vehicle will not be an operational lander. It’s not yet known when the Elon Musk-owned company will have an Artemis lander ready for flight tests.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said he is pushing both companies to have their spacecraft ready for launch in 2027 as part of the Artemis III mission.
“I’d say it’s extremely unlikely we would ever launch that mission unless both were ready, so that we could achieve those important test objectives and bring down risk for Artemis IV when they land on the moon,” he said.
The Artemis program is intended to get astronauts back to the moon by the end of 2028, well ahead of Chinese “taikonauts” and their long-standing goal of walking on the moon by the end of the decade.
Even though NASA sent 12 astronauts to the moon’s surface between 1969 and the end of 1972, winning the Cold War space race with the former Soviet Union, the agency wants to establish a near permanent presence on the moon with the Artemis program, maintaining its position as the world leader in space travel, research and technology.
NASA is planning to launch a series of robotic landers and lunar satellites along with the Artemis IV and V missions followed by two astronaut landings per year thereafter. That will set the stage for construction of a moon base near the lunar south pole beginning in the 2029-2030 timeframe.
The south polar region is an attractive target because of permanently shadowed, ultra cold craters thought to harbor ice deposits, providing an in situ source of water, air and rocket fuel. With habitats in place, along with solar and nuclear power stations, rotating astronaut crews could live and work on the moon for long durations much like space station fliers have done in Earth orbit for the past quarter century.
But there are multiple threats to the Artemis schedule, including the readiness of the required rockets and landers that could push Artemis III into 2028. Whether any additional piloted test flights might be needed between the Artemis III mission and a moon landing remains to be seen, but NASA managers said Tuesday they were optimistic Artemis III will be able to launch as planned in 2027.
The Artemis III mission will be similar in some respects to NASA’s Apollo 9 flight in March 1969 when three astronauts tested the spindly lunar excursion module in Earth orbit after a successful lunar orbit mission, Apollo 8, at the end of 1968. The Apollo 10 crew then tested the lunar module in orbit around the moon before Apollo 11 finally landed in the Sea of Tranquility in July 1969.
The Artemis program’s version of Apollo 8, sending Artemis II commander Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a flight around the moon, was successfully completed in April.
As of now, Artemis III is the only test flight with astronauts on board that NASA is planning before making a landing attempt in 2028 with whichever lunar lander is available. However it plays out, NASA is requiring a successful unpiloted lander touchdown on the moon before the Artemis IV mission will proceed.
Where Things Stand last night covered what seems to be the beginning of the 2026-specific flooding of the “zone” with “shit,” to use Steve Bannon’s infamous terminology. (I am distinguishing these state- and primary-specific attacks from the more general muck of election conspiracy theories we have been wading in daily for the better part of a decade.) The conspiracy theory machine is off and running, fueled by conservative dismay that reality TV star-turned-dilettante politician Spencer Pratt (R) will not advance to the November general election against LA Mayor Karen Bass (D). Perhaps making it more painful is that he was in recent days supplanted in second place by Nithya Raman, a DSA-backed Democrat. The AP projected Monday that Raman and Bass will face off in November.
JD Vance is the latest person to get involved with spinning false narratives from conservatives’ ire. “Do you trust this election?” a grinning Jesse Watters asked Vance last night on Fox, teeing him up.
Vance: They're still receiving ballots and the way that they're coming in just so happens to work out such that the Republican is getting kicked out of the final two so it's a Democrat versus Democrat runoff. That seems pretty shady to me… pic.twitter.com/Y8xLuxTGXk
Vance professed ignorance about what could possibly be happening with California’s election results, rolling out a version of a conspiracy theory well worn by his boss since 2020.
“How is it that you had Karen Bass was in first place, Spencer Pratt was in second place and then this other woman was in third place — you would expect these mail in ballots to kind of meet that same basic pattern where number one would get the most votes, number two would get the second most votes, and so on,” he mused.
“The way that they’re coming in just so happens to work out such that the Republican is getting kicked out of the final two so that it’s a Democrat versus Democrat runoff,” he added a moment later. “That seems pretty shady to me.”
Of course, as TPM readers — and, I suspect, JD Vance — know, Democrats are more likely to vote by mail. In states like California that count mail-in votes after Election Day votes, the results tend to shift toward Democrats over time. It’s called the “red mirage,” and it’s been discussed over and over and over since Trump’s election theft attempt in 2020.
When Tropical Storm Helene struck Western North Carolina in September 2024, it didn’t just damage homes — it devastated businesses and with it, the economy.
Eighteen months later, many are still mounting a comeback. Some have rebuilt stronger but others are barely holding on as they navigate the challenges of trying to recover while maintaining their culture and boosting tourism numbers back to what they were. The River Arts District, historic Biltmore Village and Chimney Rock are three of the many economic hubs in the region trying to bounce back even stronger than before.
This short documentary captures the resilience and reality of business recovery in those areas — the victories, the setbacks and the people refusing to give up.
This micro documentary is part of Caught in the Current: Helene Recovery in Asheville and Beyond a project that we have partnered on with the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. Their enterprising students took on the story of Asheville, North Carolina, a community still dealing with the devastation of Hurricane Helene, 18 months later. As part of our mentoring program, we’re amplifying their efforts by sharing the amazing work produced by their students. Visit the official interactive magazine for the project HERE.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The 5,300 grants and programs killed in the Trump administration’s cuts to the U.S. Agency of International Development include U.S.-funded animal disease monitoring projects operated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
A list of terminated programs sent to Congress this week and obtained by Agri-Pulse includes $250 million that went to projects housed under the FAO’s Global Health Security Program.
Among the GHS projects killed were some dedicated to monitoring and containing avian flu and New World Screwworm in Central America, monitoring avian flu outbreaks in Asia and improving the detection of new strains, and efforts to combat swine fever, according to a person familiar with the situation granted anonymity to speak frankly.
…The FAO received stop work orders for the programs in late January, which were followed up by termination orders around a month later, a person familiar with the situation said.
The stop work orders went out just days before the United States ended a temporary suspension of cattle imports from Mexico and as officials were working to implement protocols to prevent the spread of New World Screwworm to U.S. herds. Livestock trade across the southern border resumed Feb. 1 with animal inspection and treatment requirements before export.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is now reporting threefive cases of screwworm, several of which are 200-400 miles away from the other cases (two are in adjacent counties). That might–note the word might–mean there are more cases of screwworm that we are missing.
If A.I. assisted "surveillance pricing" is going to identify you as a high willingness-to-pay consumer, maybe it will be a good idea to train an A.I. shopping agent to impersonate a low willingness-to-pay consumer on your behalf.
"Businesses have long tracked customers’ search behavior and buying history and used that information, along with other factors like a consumer’s location, to offer promotions and discounts to motivate purchases. Dynamic pricing, where the same fare or rate shifts for everyone based on supply and demand, also has become common across industries, including airfares and ride-shares. What is different now and concerning to researchers is the possibility that online retailers could use personal data to set a higher base price for individual consumers, without their knowledge, when algorithms detect things like urgent need or high disposable income.
...
"It is difficult to find more than isolated cases currently. However, many researchers believe personalized pricing will become increasingly common as the technology to make it possible improves. ...
" Software that automates price-setting—often driven by artificial intelligence—can help retailers seamlessly turn that data into tailored pricing.
"In early 2025, the Federal Trade Commission released initial findings of an investigation into surveillance pricing (another term for personalized pricing). It determined that companies were selling pricing and consumer-data tools to help retailers across various industries set individualized prices—a strong indication to some researchers that retailers were headed in that direction.
NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft stand at Launch Complex 39B on Tuesday, March 31, ahead of the planned launch of Artemis 2. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now
NASA is set to introduce the world to the four astronauts who will fly the Artemis 3 mission Tuesday morning.
The announcement will take place at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, with the event kicking off at 10:30 a.m. CDT (11:30 a.m. EDT / 15:30 UTC). According to a social media post by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, in addition to announcing the crew and backup crew members, the agency “will also be providing a confidence update on the mission.”
Spaceflight Now will be live-streaming the event on our 24/7 stream on YouTube, Launch Pad Live.
The identity of the four crew members isn’t known publicly, but will be unveiled in a fashion similar to the crew naming for the Artemis 2 mission in April 2023. A number of issues, including needing further analysis on the Orion heat shield ultimately delayed the Artemis 2 from fall 2024 to launching on April 1, 2026.
The Artemis 3 mission is currently the only mission in the program designed to exist entirely in low Earth orbit. Heading into Tuesday’s event, the plan for the mission was for the Orion spacecraft to rendezvous and dock with one or both of the Human Landing System landers: Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 and SpaceX’s Starship.
Based on the data gathered and the development for each, one of the two landers would be selected to fly the first lunar landing mission for the Artemis program. That mission is Artemis 4, which NASA hopes to fly as soon as early 2028.
Tuesday’s announcements come as many questions about the details of the mission remain unknown to the public. Those include the planned duration of the overall mission, the duration that Orion will be docked with each lander, and whether or not some or all of the crew members will be able to cross from Orion into the HLS landers.
Both Blue Origin and SpaceX have been fairly tightlipped when it comes to specifics about their HLS landers, as they compete to perform the first U.S.-led crewed landing since 1972.
Artemis 3 is likely to not demonstrate one of the technically challenging hurdles for the landers: propellant transfer. Both architectures will rely on that to support landing missions on the Moon. The companies have not revealed exactly how many launches will be needed to fuel their landers for the trip to the Moon.
Neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin have publicly shown a flight version of the HLS edition of Starship or Blue Moon Mk.2. NASA has not said if either company will have a representative to speak on behalf of their lander programs.
Artist concept of a SpaceX Starship lunar lander on the surface of the moon. Image: SpaceX.
SpaceX just launched the first test flight of its Starship Version 3 rocket, the iteration of the rocket that will be used on its Artemis missions. But the flight while largely successful did encounter issues with the Super Heavy booster and the Raptor engines used on both stages.
SpaceX has yet to perform an orbital flight of its Starship rocket.
An artist’s impression of Blue Origin’s lunar lander on the moon’s surface. Graphic: Blue Origin/NASA
Meanwhile the explosion of a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at its pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station leaves that company without its only orbital launch pad. Company leadership vowed to return to flight with New Glenn before the end of the year, which would be a remarkably fast recovery by industry standards.
In recent media appearances, Isaacman said that the agency was looking to decouple the Blue Moon landers from the New Glenn rocket and fly them on another launcher, like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. There may be some logistical hurdles to that, since the Blue Moon landers may need to be fueled with liquid hydrogen at the launch pad, a capability that currently doesn’t exist at SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy pad, Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
One other big watch item for Tuesday is whether or not the AxEMU spacesuit being developed by Axiom Space will be ready to fly on the Artemis 3 mission. On Sunday, the company unveiled the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG) for the suits, which was designed and manufactured in partnership with Prada.
I really loved this article. A one-time increase in per capita growth from 2% to 2.1% for a single year, then dropping back to 2%, would permanently raises the level of GDP per capita – and because that small gain recurs and compounds every year afterward across the population, it would add up to roughly a trillion dollars in cumulative value. https://abundanceandgrowth.org/p/a-little-progress-is-worth-a-trillion
When people talk about pausing AI development, I can’t help but think about the enormous cumulative value that would get lost over time, the higher rates of absolute poverty that would persist across the world, and the needless deaths from delayed medical advances. There may be worlds where some version of this is something to consider, but the evidentiary bar for delaying technological development should obviously be pretty high.
The old saw “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be” now seems so wrong. The place feels increasingly conservative, and it is aging rapidly. In the domestic airport you see couples with only a single kid, not two or three kids, never mind four.
It does not feel like the next Pelé will be coming from Brazil.
Sao Paulo as a city is much improved. The murder rate has plummeted, and the nice neighborhoods are very nice and are growing in size. The business community is strong, interesting architecture abounds, and there is a real arts scene. It is arguably Latin America’s number one city, with only Mexico City as a rival. It has, along with Mexico City, evolved into a “must know” global city, though it is rarely treated that way by outsiders. In the three days I spent there, going around to many places, I did not see a single person who was evidently a foreign tourist. That is crazy, but also a sign there is good value here.
Sao Paulo has food to die for. It is top tier for Brazilian (of course), meat/steak, Japanese, and Italian, and pretty good in many other offerings as well. I had a wonderful fifteen-course omikase for $110 at a Michelin star restaurant. The establishment, Kan Suke, has only eight seats, but I could get a table by inquiring only an hour in advance.
For Italian food it is probably the second best country in the world? For meats it might be number one, at least if you are willing to put aside the small country of Uruguay. For beans it is top two, and the fruits are excellent as well. Chocolate ice cream and gelato abound. All constraints considered, I would rather spend a week dining out here than in London or Paris or Rome, or for that matter New York City.
Observers should be more optimistic about the Brazilian economy. Yes it is overregulated and the government is locked into far too much spending. But hyperinflation is now a distant memory, a reasonable fiscal consolidation occurred in the 1990s, and the country has plenty of its own energy. Keep in mind that for emerging economies, years of negative growth are a major problem. Brazil now has sidestepped most (not all!) of those risks. Slow, steady growth should be able to get them somewhere, albeit at a langorous pace.
My biggest worry about Brazil is demographics and shrinking population. In recent times TFR has been in the 1.3 to 1.4 range, hardly satisfactory. A shrinking population is bad per se, and also it will hurt many regions of the country due to imperfect market integration, both nationally and globally. More importantly, the country does not have an obvious and easy option for pulling in a higher number of desirable immigrants, at least not relative to its size. There is Venezuela and Bolivia, but the former of those may go away as a major source of people.
Will Brazilian fertility tick back up? Will Brazil re-attain its status as a highly influential culture on the world scene, as it was in the 1960s through early 1990s? Unclear. But if the question is “should you go visit?”, the answer is a definite yes.
A period of unsettled weather brought scattered showers and thunderstorms to California’s Bay Area on May 27, 2026. That afternoon, a break in the clouds left downtown San Francisco and nearby communities beneath mostly cloud-free skies, allowing an astronaut aboard the International Space Station to take this photograph.
The image captures two of the region’s iconic bridges. The Golden Gate Bridge connects the northern San Francisco Peninsula with Marin County to the north, while the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge spans the bay toward Oakland to the east.
Near the center of the image, Golden Gate Park stands out as a long, rectangular strip of green amid the dense urban landscape. Spanning more than 1,000 acres (400 hectares), the park encompasses meadows, gardens, wooded areas, and lakes. Additional green space toward the north around the Golden Gate Bridge is part of a national recreation area.
The nadir (downward-looking) perspective also provides a clear view of the patchwork of street grids, which were laid out over San Francisco’s hilly terrain as the city grew in successive stages. In the heart of the downtown area, Market Street runs southwest to northeast and serves as a prominent divider between two distinct grid orientations: one aligned with the bay and the other aligned with the street.
Along the northeastern and eastern waterfront, various structures extend into the bay. Toward the north, these include a historic wharf, seawalls, and piers—most built in the early 1900s, though some date back into the 1800s. The adjacent waters support heavy maritime traffic, including cargo and container ships, cruise vessels, and regional ferries.
Breaking waves are visible along the western coast, including at Ocean Beach, the 3.5-mile stretch of sandy shore adjacent to Golden Gate Park. On May 27, the National Weather Service warned of hazardous conditions at the region’s beaches due to strong northerly winds. Long-period swells from the northwest contributed to the increased risk of rip currents as well as sneaker waves in the days after this image was acquired.
Astronaut photograph ISS074-E-619284 was acquired on May 27, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 800 millimeters. It is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 74 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
![Screenshot of a cost tracking dashboard with two panels. The first panel is titled "Cost Attribution" with toggle buttons for Project / Model / Agent and Treemap / List, with Project and Treemap selected. Italic text reads "Click to hide from chart". A treemap shows a large red block labeled prod_datasette_agent $99.26 89.9%, with smaller blocks to its right labeled cloud (blue), datasette (teal), llm (red), and money (pink), plus a tiny orange sliver. A legend lists: 1 prod_datasette_agent $99.26, 2 cloud $3.98, 3 datasette $2.81, 4 llm $2.30, 5 money $1.92, 6 simon $0.15. The second panel is titled "Top Sessions by Cost" and lists nine sessions, each with a "Claude" badge, a prompt excerpt, a project name with a session UUID (omitted here), a token count, and a cost: 1. Review ./datasette-agent and ./datasette-apps - we are going to add a new feature to agent but you ... prod_datasette_agent, 78.2M, $99.26. 2. issues.db is a copy of the Datasette issues database. There are a LOT of notes in there relating to... datasette, 826.8k, $2.81. 3. Consult fly-docs and then look at datasette.cloud (which launches fly machines) and datasettecloud-... cloud, 924.7k, $2.61. 4. simonwillisonblog.db is a copy of my blog, plus all my software releases and other interesting thin... money, 542.9k, $1.92. 5. Look in datasette.cloud and figure out all remaining steps and decisions that need to be made in or... cloud, 455k, $1.37. 6. Review PRs and issues filed against this repo within the last 4 weeks and see if any deserve to be ... llm, 323.3k, $0.95. 7. run mypy, llm, 320.9k, $0.76. 8. [Image #1] fix this in github actions, llm, 183.9k, $0.59. 9. simon, simon, 26.4k, $0.15.](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/agentsview-fable-full-day.jpg)
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