A recent viral tweet, quoted by Elon Musk, points out that bartenders can be fined or even imprisoned if they serve alcohol to patrons who later kill someone while under the influence. Judges, in contrast, enjoy absolute or qualified immunity even when they repeatedly release defendants who go on to kill.
I agree that judges should face stronger incentives to make good decisions, but the obvious problem with penalizing judges who release people who later commit crimes is that judges would then have very little incentive to release anyone—and that too is a bad decision. Steven Landsburg solved this problem in his paper A Modest Proposal to Improve Judicial Incentives, published in my book Entrepreneurial Economics.
Landsburg’s solution is elegant: we must also pay judges a bounty when they release a defendant.
Whether judges would release more or fewer defendants than they do today would depend on the size of the cash bounty, which could be adjusted to reflect the wishes of the legislature. The advantage of my proposal is not its effect on the number of defendants who are granted bail but the effect on which defendants are granted bail. Whether we favor releasing 1 percent or 99 percent, we can agree that those 1 percent or 99 percent should not be chosen randomly. We want judges to focus their full attention on the potential costs of their decisions, and personal liability has a way of concentrating the mind.
One might object that a cash bounty will cost too much, but recall that the bounty is balanced by penalties when a released defendant commits a future crime. The bounties and penalties can be calibrated so that on average the program is budget-neutral. The key is to get the incentives right on the margin.
The structure of this problem is quite general. Ben Golub, for example, writes:
There should be a retrospective reputational penalty imposed on referees who vote no on a paper because the paper is too simple technically — if that paper ends up being important. It’s an almost definitional indicator of bad judgment.
Quite right, but a penalty for rejection needs to be balanced with a bonus for acceptance. Get the marginal incentive right and quality will follow!
A few years back I read Agnès Poirier’s excellent Left Bank about Parisian clever clogs in the 1940s but I came away wishing I understood more about what existentialism was. Plodding through some Sartre and de Beauvior novels didn’t help so I looked for a brief book about it. This title, How to Be an Existentialist, is a bit cringe but as far as I can tell the book does the job well.
Here are my notes, which I’m glad I made because it took me months to get round to finishing reading this. It reminded me that when I was doing my masters, the elective class in Continental Philosophy that I took was the hardest thing I’ve tried to understand. The words so often just slide off my brain.
You have to build your life on an understanding and acceptance of how things really are, otherwise you will always be fooling and deluding yourself as you hanker after impossibilities like complete happiness and total fulfilment. Ironically, existentialism is saying, if you want to be happy, or at least be happier, stop struggling to achieve complete happiness because that way only leads to disappointment.
p.15
Existentialists are nihilists because they recognize that life is ultimately absurd and full of terrible, inescapable truths. They are anti-nihilists because they recognize that life does in fact have a meaning: the meaning each person chooses to give his or her own existence. They recognize that each person is free to create themselves and make something worthwhile of themselves by striving against life’s difficulties.
p.16
In choosing to live, in refusing the ever-present possibility of suicide, a person confers value and significance on a life that has no value or significance in itself. In choosing to live his life rather than end it a person takes on responsibility for his life.
p.18
Mainstream existentialism, then, is anti-idealist, anti-metaphysical and atheistic. It sees mankind as occupying an indifferent universe that is meaningless to the point of absurdity.
Existentialism and consciousness
p.21. “…consciousness is nothing, a nothingness or a non-being…” Not everything is made of matter, atoms, etc. e.g. time, states of mind, numbers. They are not corporeal.
pp.22-23. Of course, consciousness relies on physical activity in the brain, but it isn’t reducible to brain activity. Someone’s desires, thoughts and expectations are aspects of their relationship with the world. “Desire is desire of something, thoughts are thoughts of something, expectation is expectation of something”.
p.24. This is the theory of intentionality, from Edmund Husserl.
The theory of intentionality states that consciousness is intentional, it always intends something, it is always directed towards something, it is always about something.
The theory of intentionality implies that because consciousness is always of or about something and nothing beyond that, any attempt to investigate consciousness always leads immediately to an investigation of whatever consciousness is of or about. Phenomenologists, including existentialists, seek to understand consciousness by investigating the way in which different phenomena, different intentional objects, appear to consciousness.
p.25 Love for someone does not exist as such, but is comprised of happiness when seeing the person, feelings of desire, things said about them, etc. A pen is a collection of appearances to consciousness: the side we can see, its size from where we are, etc.
So, according to Brentano and Husserl and their many phenomenologist followers, things are actually just collections of appearances. Things must be reduced to their appearances in order to be understood correctly.
p.26
In lots of places in his writings Sartre argues that when there is no consciousness present on the scene there is only what he calls undifferentiated being. This undifferentiated being just is, and that is really all that can be said about it. It has no properties, no features, no characteristics. … Sartre argues that undifferentiated being is differentiated and divided up into distinct phenomena by consciousness. Consciousness, he says, is a nothingness or a negation that places particular negations, negativities, lacks and absences into undifferentiated being that, so to speak, carve it up into particular phenomena – this as distinct from that, this as not that, this as external to that, here as not there, then as not now and so on.
p.27
The world we know is a product of the intimate relationship that exists between consciousness and being.
p.28
In itself an acorn lacks nothing, it is simply what it is. In order to understand it as a potential oak tree it must be judged in terms of the oak tree that is presently lacking. The meaning of the acorn is based on the non-being of the oak tree as that which the acorn presently lacks. The acorn itself does not lack the oak tree. The acorn lacks the oak tree only for a consciousness that is capable of projecting forward in time beyond the acorn towards the not-yet-being or non-being of the oak tree. … As a meaningful phenomenon, the acorn is understood as what it is by virtue of what it lacks.
p.29
A person interprets every situation according to his desires, hopes, expectations and intentions. Every situation a person encounters is understood as presently lacking something desired, expected, intended or anticipated. As said, the situation in itself does not lack anything; it lacks something only for the person whose situation it is. What a situation lacks is what I lack. If one of my car tyres is flat it is I, not the car itself, that lacks four good tyres. More to the point, it is my purposes that lack a functioning car.
Consciousness is always predisposed to find something lacking because lack is intrinsic to the very meaning of every situation for any particular consciousness. This is why, according to existentialist philosophers, a consciousness, a person, can never be completely satisfied.
p.30
In general, a person always lacks the future towards which he is constantly heading, the future which gives meaning to his present actions and beyond which he hopes in vain to be fulfilled and at one with himself. … It seems that the endless march of time constantly cheats us of what we are, prevents us from becoming one with ourselves, but really, what we are is this endless march forward in time, creatures that can never become one with themselves.
… This is not a bad thing, it is just the way it is, so you would be wrong to get depressed about it, although many people do.
Temporality
p.32
Consciousness is not just in time like an object getting older with every day that passes, it is, as the existentialists say, essentially temporalized. This means that it is always its past which is no longer and its future which is not yet. It is in constant temporal motion away from its past towards its future, so much so that there is really no such moment as the present. Consciousness does not hop from one present moment to the next. The present for consciousness is only its presence to the world as a being constantly flowing forward in time. Existentialists refer to this constant temporal motion of consciousness as temporal transcendence, temporal surpassing or temporal flight. Consciousness constantly transcends, surpasses and flees what it is - what it was - towards the future at which it aims.
p.33. Past, present and future only have “reality or meaning in terms of the other two”.
As for the present, we have already seen that it is not a fixed moment – there are no fixed moments for consciousness. The present is simply the presence of consciousness to the world as a being that constantly transcends the past towards the future. In other words, consciousness is never in the present, it is only ever present (has presence) as a being endlessly passing on towards the future.
It is consciousness that brings time into the world, consciousness that temporalizes the world.
p.34
As it is in itself apart from anyone being conscious of it, an acorn is in process of becoming an oak. Yet in doing so it is not aiming at becoming an oak. … the young acorn is not down in the good earth saying to itself, ‘Come on then little acorn, big effort, I’ve got to grow into a big tall oak tree just like my gnarled old mom.’ It is not projecting itself towards any future goal and it has no futurizing intention whereby it recognizes itself as something that presently lacks itself as an oak tree. As becoming an oak is not a project for the acorn, and definitely not a conscious project, it is correct to say that the acorn has no future. It has a future only for a consciousness that understands that the acorn is not yet an oak tree but will be an oak tree in future.
p.35
Existentialism claims that it is fundamental to what we are to want to be at one with ourselves, to be what we are instead of having always to strive to be it, to achieve a future state of total completion in which we no longer lack anything. But we never arrive at this godlike state of total smug self-satisfaction because we never arrive at the future.
This is just how things are, and “is the price you pay for existing as a conscious being at all”. Accept “this is how life is and [make] the most of it”.
Being-for-others
p.36
Each of us is what Sartre and his gang call a being-for-itself. Not only are people conscious of the world, they are conscious of themselves as conscious of the world. This self-consciousness or self-reflection is a defining feature of human beings.
p.37
However deluded a person may actually be about himself he feels he knows himself, he is the measure of himself, the judge and jury of his thoughts and actions. He experiences himself as free, as creating himself moment by moment through the things he chooses to do and the paths he chooses to take.
People are seldom if ever truly alone, especially these days with the world population spiralling out of control and everywhere getting so crowded. Each person constantly confronts the existence of other people, not simply as objects in his world, but as subjects who see him and judge him and reduce him to an object in their world. To be an object in the world of the Other, to be for the Other, to be in danger of being belittled by the Other, this is the meaning of being-for-others.
p.39
Even when a person is physically alone, miles from the shops, miles from anywhere and anyone, other people are likely to be in his thoughts. Even if, unlike most of us, he is not particularly paranoid, he may well be plagued by the actual and imagined judgements of others and be unable to stop thinking about what others think of him, of the tactless things he said at the staff meeting or the idiotic things he did at the office party. In his embarrassment he can’t help thinking that the Other has somehow got hold of a part of him, trapped him, got the better of him. The Other makes him into something he feels he is not, something he does not want to recognize or feel responsible for. Against his will, in opposition to his freedom and his joyful transcendence, other people force him to be what he is for them rather than what he is for himself.
p.40
A good deal of most people’s behaviour is directed towards seeking to influence their being-for-others, or even to gain complete control over it. People generally desire to impress and certainly go to great lengths to encourage other people to love, respect or fear them.
p.44
To be fair to existentialist philosophers it should be noted that they do in fact show some appreciation of the capacity people have for being together without conflict in their notion of Mitsein – German for ‘being-with’. The French existentialist philosophers followed the German existentialist philosopher, Heidegger, in using the term ‘Mitsein’ to refer to the phenomenon of being-with-others; to the phenomenon of ‘we’. On those occasions when a we vibe takes over a person is not transcended by other people, nor does he seek to transcend other people. Rather, his ego is transcended by some collective experience or enterprise in which he becomes submerged in an us.
This submergence in an us, however, is often maintained through conflict with a them as opponent or hate object – conflict at the group level. Heidegger’s own experience of the Mitsein was as a member of Hitler’s National Socialist Party. Even so, there are occasions when the us does not require a them in order to be maintained. For example, a group may work together on a task with a common goal that is not primarily the goal of beating or destroying the competition.
Freedom and responsibility
p.45
For existentialist philosophers freedom is not essentially about what people are at liberty to do, about what they are able to do or allowed to do and so on, but about each person’s responsibility for whatever they do or do not do in every circumstance in which they find themselves. … Freedom is not freedom from responsibility, freedom is having to make choices and therefore having to take responsibility.
p.46. Bearing in mind the explanation of consciousness from ‘Temporality‘, above:
Events, which are what they are and can never be other than what they are once they have happened, belong to a past that exists for a consciousness that is the future of that past. The past exists only for a consciousness that transcends it towards the future. Consciousness exists only as a transcendence of the past towards the future. Consciousness is the future of the past, which is to say, it is the future possibilities of the past. As nothing but a being towards the future, as nothing but the future possibilities of what it transcends, consciousness has to be these possibilities. It cannot not be an opening up of possibilities.
p.47
… we are able to be free in a world of mechanical cause and effect events because we constantly escape that mechanical world towards the future. It is in the future at which we aim that we are free.
By choosing among its possibilities, by choosing a course of action, consciousness brings some of its possibilities into actuality and abandons others. The transformation of possibility into actuality is the transformation of what existentialist philosophers call future-past into past-future.
pp.47-8
The fact that consciousness has to be a temporal transcendence in order to exist at all, the fact that it cannot not be an opening up of possibilities, implies that it cannot not be free. It is a necessary feature of human consciousness that it is not free to cease being free. People are necessarily free, or, as Sartre puts it, people are ‘condemned to be free’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 462).
p.48
A person cannot make himself determined by the world, for whenever or however he attempts to do it, he must choose to do it. A person can never not choose because, as Sartre says, ‘Not to choose is, in fact, to choose not to choose’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 503). A person’s freedom does not consist in a complete detachment from all obligations, … it consists in the constant responsibility of having to choose who he is through the actions he chooses to perform in response to the adversity and resistance of his situation. …
It is important to note that existentialist philosophers call the adversity and resistance of things and situations facticity. Facticity is what freedom works to overcome, although freedom always needs facticity in order to be the overcoming of it. … In so far as freedom is very closely linked to what we have been calling transcendence, we can say that transcendence is the transcendence of facticity.
Freedom and disability
p.49
If a disabled person considers his disability the ruination of his life then that is a choice he has made for which he alone is responsible. He is free to choose his disability positively. To strive, for example, to be a successful para-athlete or to spend the time he used to spend playing football writing a book or fundraising.
Possible limits to freedom
pp.51-2
More moderate existentialists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose great contribution to existentialism is a book called Phenomenology of Perception, think that there are sometimes limitations to freedom. … Philosophers who sympathize with Merleau-Ponty’s position list sense of humour, sexual preference, panic reactions and insanity as examples of dispositions and responses that require conscious awareness in order to occur but are not matters of choice.
Freedom and anxiety
p.54
Our freedom [can make] us anxious because there is nothing but our freedom itself to stop us from performing destructive, dangerous, embarrassing or disreputable acts at any moment.
p.55
Sartre distinguishes what can be called freedom-anxiety from fear. He takes the example of a man picking his way carefully along a narrow precipice (Being and Nothingness, pp. 53-56). The man fears he might fall but he also suffers anxiety, which manifests itself as vertigo, because he is free to jump. Sartre says: ‘Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over.’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 53).
3. How Not to Be an Existentialist
Bad faith is not self-deception
p.58
Bad faith cannot be self-deception for the simple reason that self-deception, in the sense of lying to yourself, is impossible. A person can no more succeed in lying to himself than he can get away with cheating while playing himself at chess.
pp.59-62 An example of a woman whose hand is touched by a man and chooses to leave her hand where it is and flirt, rather than pull away or take the man’s hand willingly, “instead choosing herself as a being that would-be beyond the requirement to choose”. “The flirt treats the facticity of her situation, in terms of which her choices of herself should be exercised, as though it has a transcendent power over her body. That is, she treats her facticity as though it is a transcendence.” [I don’t understand]
Waiters, actors and attitudes
pp.62-5. An example of a waiter, walking stiffly, and being too eager and attentive. Some say he’s in bad faith by over acting “his role to convince himself and others that he is not a person but an object, a waiter-thing”. But Cox says he’s not in bad faith because he’s not trying to escape his freedom. He knows what he is doing, consciously impersonating a waiter, being tongue in cheek. “He has become so good that it is like second nature to him.”
The best way to understand Sartre’s Bad Faith is to think about smokers. We’ll do this in two ways: first by emphasizing the smoker that lives in Bad Faith by adhering to his Transcendence and then by considering the smoker that lives in Bad Faith by adhering to his Facticity. Hopefully you’ll glean an answer to a few of your questions through this (I think you might).
First think about the stereotypical person who smokes here or there, that takes a puff ‘only at parties,’ or ‘only when alcohol is served’. This person views themselves as not a smoker since he takes his actions to be occasional, non-habit forming and whatever else. He says to himself, “I’m not a smoker, i’m not buying a pack every week and puffing them back”. While it may be true that this individual lacks the same smoking-frequency as someone more addicted, the facticity that he has established (ie. the concrete facts, or happenings in the world that he is directly responsible for bringing about) says that he is a smoker. There’s evidence through every one of his actions, as they all speak directly to his involvement in the world: He knows that he should put the filter end in his mouth, that he should light the white end, he knows how to draw in smoke and exhale in the appropriate way, he even knows a trick to put out a half-smoked cigarette on the edge of his boot to save for later. Each of these actions, each of these various ways he has involved himself in the world speak to his knowing what smokers do and how they behave, and yet ‘he’s not one of them’. This man lives in Bad Faith because he hides away from the facticity that he has built up and pretends its not his even though it’s all his. He is pure transcendence and lives in Bad Faith because of it.
Next think about the type of person that has smoked for 30+ years and has effectively built an identity around that lifestyle. This person differs from the first in that he doesn’t hide away from his being a smoker but rather fully assumes the role. With that said, this individual has tried many times to quit, but always ultimately says to himself that he can’t, that he’s too ‘far-gone’ and that smoking is ‘who he is’. This man lives in Bad Faith the moment he utters these words because he hides away in his established facticity (that he’s a smoker and nothing more) in denial of the reality that he is an intelligent choosing agent with the free capacity to change his life (transcendence). In this case, the man hides from his freedom to define himself and seeks safety in the identity of the smoker.
Whereas the first case lived in denial of the trail of his involvement in the world, the second case lives in denial of his capacity to have an involvement in the world of his choosing. Both are examples of Bad Faith.
§pp.65-69. A description similar to, but less clear than, the above but with a homosexual (from Sartre) rather than a smoker.
The first example above is someone attempting to be sincere, a form of bad faith.
To declare, “I am what I am,’ is to assert the fallacy that I am a fixed entity while evading the existential truth that I am an ambiguous and indeterminate being who must continually create myself through choice and action. In short, it is to declare myself a facticity when in reality I am the transcendence of my facticity – this is bad faith.
A more devious form of sincerity is using “I am what I am” not to be a thing, what you are, but to distance yourself from what you are by the very act of declaring what you are.
‘I am so lazy’ admits Fred, instantly becoming the one who admits to being lazy rather than the one who is responsible for being lazy. Unlike a person who adopts the simpler form of sincerity, Fred does not aim to be his facticity by denying his transcendence, he aims to be a pure transcendence divorced from his facticity.
How should that first smoker (or the homosexual in Cox’s/Satre’s example) escape bad faith?
Most importantly, he has to accept that he chooses his conduct. He could have chosen to behave differently but he didn’t. He is responsible for his conduct and to be authentic he has to take responsibility for his conduct. He has to accept that it is a part of himself and always will be. He has to own it.
Contingency, nausea and the Existential Alka-Seltzer of bad faith
p.71
Contingency is the state of being contingent, unnecessary, accidental. Whatever is contingent is not necessary, it need not be or be so. Sartre identifies contingency as a fundamental feature of the universe, a basic fact of existence as a whole …
… For Sartre, existence is contingent in the sense of being absurdly superfluous. It is a grotesque cosmic accident that need not exist but does …
Human consciousness is capable of a sickening and terrifying awareness of being submerged in an existence that is absurd, pointless, superfluous and contingent. Sartre calls this sickening and terrifying awareness ‘The Nausea’ – hence the title of his greatest masterpiece.
p.72
Human society … constantly aims to suppress contingency by imposing meanings and purposes on the world. This is achieved largely by naming and categorizing things.
But does naming something, like an unusual insect in the garden, really make it “less weird, less of a strange cosmic accident?” According to existentialist philosophers “things only have meaning and purpose relative to other things”.
p.73 Sartre believed…
…that an occasional or background awareness of contingency is vital if a person is to achieve any degree of authenticity and avoid living a lie. Sartre’s philosophy is characterized by an abiding hatred and distrust of people, usually middle-class (bourgeois) people, who seem totally unaware of life’s contingency; people who once glimpsed life’s contingency and were terrified by it and are now on the run from it. …
The world, they tell themselves in bad faith, is not contingent but created with humankind as its centrepiece. They assume that they have an immortal essence, that their existence is inevitable, that they exist by some divine decree rather than by accident. They believe the moral and social values they subscribe to are objective, absolute and unquestionable. They believe that society is rooted in these absolute values and that the way things are in society constitutes the only possible reality. All they have to do to claim their absolute right to be respected by others and to have the respect of others sustain the illusion of their necessity is to dutifully fulfil the role prescribed to them by society and identify themselves totally with that role. They learn to see themselves only as others see them and avoid thinking about themselves in any kind of philosophical way.
4. How to Be Authentic
p.81 “… authenticity … is the opposite of bad faith. … authenticity is distinct from sincerity. Sincerity is a form of bad faith. … the most blatant feature of inauthenticity is the attempt to evade responsibility.”
Authenticity and getting real
p.82
Inauthenticity is the denial of the fundamental existential truth that we are free and responsible, whereas authenticity … is the acceptance or affirmation of this fundamental existential truth.
Assuming freedom involves a person assuming total responsibility for himself in whatever situation he finds himself. … If he is not imprisoned he can, of course, reject his situation by running away … but this still involves a choice. … every situation is a demand to choose.
Being-in-situation
pp.83-5 From Sartre’s War Diaries p.54:
To be authentic is to realise fully one’s being-in-situation, whatever this situation may happen to be: with a profound awareness that, through the authentic realisation of the being-in-situation, one brings to full existence the situation on the one hand and human reality on the other. This presupposes a patient study of what the situation requires, and then a way of throwing oneself into it and determining oneself to ‘be-for’ this situation.
Don’t pretend to be something – a soldier in the examples given – by saying to yourself that you’re not really a soldier, just a civilian who happens to be in this situation. Throw yourself into it or else leave and face the consequences.
Like the waiter from an example earlier, who plays at the role to the full:
He absorbs himself in his performance so much that he does not reflect on the fact he is performing. He has become his performance and his attitude towards himself involves a suspension of disbelief.
Freedom as a value
pp.85-6.
Authenticity involves a person coming to terms with the fact that he will never be at one with himself, that he will never become a kind of thing that no longer has to choose what it is. Surprisingly though, authenticity does not involve a person abandoning the desire for one-ness, substantiality and foundation.
This would collapse into a project of nihilism. You cannot be nothing, because you have a relationship to the world. [I’m not convinced I’ve summarised this well but, ironically, at this point I am losing the will to live.]
The problem of being authentic
pp.87-8. You can’t be authentic. You are only authentic if you behave authentically. For someone “to think he is authentic is to think he is an authentic-thing, and as we’ve seen, for a person to think he is any kind of thing is bad faith.”
p.92
A quick summary: Authentic existence is a project that has to be continually reassumed. A person is only as authentic as his present act. Even if he has been consistently authentic for a whole week, if he is not authentic right now then he is not authentic. Given the world’s endless temptations to bad faith, the difficulties of resisting regret and imposed inauthenticity, the fact that habit and other people’s expectations shape a person’s life as much as his capacity to choose, it is very difficult for anyone to sustain authenticity for a significant period of time. Most people are probably only capable of achieving authenticity occasionally.
Nevertheless, authenticity is an existentialist ideal worth struggling for.
Authenticity and intelligence
pp.92-3 You need to be intellectually aware of certain truths of the human condition to attempt to be authentic. One can criticise someone for being inauthentic but maybe they’re simply unaware, rather than failing at something. They might believe it’s possible to achieve complete fulfilment.
Against this point of view, it doesn’t take much intelligence to recognise certain truths of the human condition, such as satisfaction being elusive, the immanence of death, etc. So if people don’t see these, maybe it’s actually because they refuse to confront them, not because they’re ignorant.
Authenticity and other people
p.95. If “authenticity involves refusing to live according to the expectations of others” how can you throw yourself into your situation, which involves other people?
p.96. “After World War II showed them how interdependent people are, Sartre and de Beauvoir began to acknowledge that authenticity involves conforming to some extent to the expectations of others.”
Nietzsche on authenticity – regret nothing
[I read it but I am all out of steam at this point.]
Heidegger on authenticity – authentic being-towards-death
p.102.
… what Heidegger recognizes is that people can have an authentic or an inauthentic attitude towards the fact that they are going to die. Heidegger refers to the being of each human being as Dasein, German for ‘being-there’. Dasein refers to a person’s unique spatial and temporal situatedness in the world. Heidegger says, ‘Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility’ (Being and Time, p. 307).
p.103.
Authentic being-towards-death involves a person fully acknowledging in the way he lives his life that his time is finite and his death inevitable. By recognizing that he himself must die, rather than merely recognizing that people die, a person ceases to view himself in bad faith as simply another Other and realizes that he exists as the wholly unique possibility of his own death.
p.104.
It is only when a person fully realizes that he must die and acts in accordance with this realization that he truly begins to exist and live in his own right. In taking responsibility for his own death he takes responsibility for his own life and the way he chooses to live it. To truly realize and affirm mortality is to overcome bad faith.
p.105. “A true existentialist should never live as though he has forever, frittering away his time and putting off indefinitely the things he really wants to do.”
5. Existential Counselling
p.113.
In one sense, existential counselling aims to show people that they do not have to put up with what they are. In another sense, it aims to show them that the very fact of being alive presents us all with certain unavoidable difficulties.
The future of space warfare will be determined by the speed of decision. As satellite constellations proliferate and adversaries field increasingly sophisticated counterspace capabilities, the ability to sense, analyze and act faster than an opponent will dictate who controls the space domain. Artificial intelligence is already improving complex military decision-making. But agentic AI — a […]
Los Altos, California — Antaris™, creator of the AI-powered Antaris Intelligence™ platform that simplifies satellite design, simulation, manufacturing, and operations for ISR and communications satellite missions, today announced the first close […]
China plans to conduct around 140 orbital launches this year, according to a commercial launch executive, marking a sharp acceleration in the country’s launch cadence.
A Chinese commercial company has conducted an on-orbit demonstration of a flexible robotic arm, marking progress toward capabilities for satellite servicing, refueling and debris removal.
We completed the most comprehensive study of how economists and AI experts think AI will affect the U.S. economy. They predict major AI progress—but no dramatic break from economic trends: GDP growth rates similar to today’s and a moderate decline in labor force participation. However, when asked to consider what would happen in a world with extremely rapid progress in AI capabilities by 2030, they predict significant economic impacts by 2050:
• Annualized GDP growth of 3.5% (compared to 2.4% in 2025)
• A labor force participation rate of 55% (roughly 10 million fewer jobs)
• 80% of wealth held by the top 10% (highest since 1939)
Only 5.2% of the variance is between scenarios—attributable to disagreement about AI capabilities themselves…
Here is the full paper, over 200 pages long, I will be reading through it. The list of authors is impressive, with Ezra Karger in the lead, also including Kevin Bryan, Basil Halperin, and many more. For some while this will stand as the best set of estimates we have. Here are the related forecasts of Seb Krier.
A light-brown dust plume with a defined front spreads over northwestern Africa in the late morning.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
By afternoon, the plume has shifted southwest, partly extending over the Atlantic Ocean.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A light-brown dust plume with a defined front spreads over northwestern Africa in the late morning.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
By afternoon, the plume has shifted southwest, partly extending over the Atlantic Ocean.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Morning
Afternoon
March 30, 2026
Saharan dust spreads across northwestern Africa on March 30, 2026, in these images acquired in the morning (left) by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite and in the afternoon (right) by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on NOAA-21.
In early spring 2026, a dry, dust-laden wind known as the harmattan swept across northwestern Africa. Cold temperatures, high winds, and blowing dust prompted officials to issue an alert for several regions of Morocco due to the low visibility and harsh conditions.
Satellites tracked the wall of dust over the course of the day on March 30 as it moved southwest from the Sahara Desert and toward the Atlantic Ocean. The left image, captured by NASA’s Terra satellite, shows the dust at about 10:00 Universal Time (11 a.m. local time in Morocco). The NOAA-21 satellite captured the right image about four hours later.
Meteosat-12, a satellite operated by the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), captured another view of the dust storm. The geostationary weather satellite showed the dust’s movement as it moved closer to the Canary Islands.
According to Spain’s state meteorological agency (AEMET), the harmattan winds blow from the northeast between November and April, often producing dust storms as winds lift dust particles from the Sahara. During the March 30 event, AEMET noted that conditions were right for a harmattan surge, which happens when winds get stronger near the ground with the passing of a cold front. That day, winds converged perpendicular to the High Atlas mountain range before shifting southwest.
Forecasts called for the Saharan dust to ultimately engulf the Canary Islands, triggering what islanders know as calima. The dust episode was expected to worsen air quality and visibility across the islands through April 1. A separate storm earlier in March also sent dust toward the Canaries, along with another plume that dispersed widely across Europe.
Researchers using NASA data have previously reported that the most intense Saharan dust storms occur in the spring, when dust is typically lifted from the sand seas, or ergs, of central North Africa and areas along the Mediterranean coast. In the warmer months, another peak occurs in the central Sahara.
That all sounded wonderful, and that core model and its offshoots dominated financial research for decades. The problem, however, was that it wasn’t true, or at least it wasn’t nearly as true as we had thought and hoped. When financial economists refined the models with more complete specifications, it turned out Beta didn’t predict stock returns much at all. Eugene Fama and Kenneth French delivered one of the final blows to earlier approaches with a 1992 paper that showed Beta didn’t have explanatory power over expected returns at all. Since Fama himself was one of the original architects of CAPM-like reasoning, and French also was a renowned finance economist, these revisions to the model were credible. For all its original promise, marginalism, and the concomitant notion of diminishing marginal utility, no longer seemed to help explain asset returns.
Under one plausible account of intellectual history, you can date the decline of marginalism to that 1992 paper. In the most rigorous, data-oriented, and highest-paying field of economics, namely finance, marginalist constructs had every chance to succeed. In fact, they ran the board for several decades. But over time they failed. In the most prestigious field of economics, marginalism has been in full retreat for over 30 years, and it shows no signs of making a comeback.
We already know that financial practice is dominated by the (non-economist) quants. But how about financial economics research, the parts that are still done by economists? What direction is that work moving in?
I was struck by a 2024 paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics, one of the two leading journals of financial economics (Journal of Finance is the other). The authors are Scott Murray, Yusen Xia, and Houping Xiao, and the title is “Charting by Machines.” The core result is pretty simple, and best expressed in the well-written abstract:
“We test the efficient market hypothesis by using machine learning to forecast stock returns from historical performance. These forecasts strongly predict the cross-section of future stock returns. The predictive power holds in most subperiods and is strong among the largest 500 stocks. The forecasting function has important nonlinearities and interactions, is remarkably stable through time, and captures effects distinct from momentum, reversal and extant technical signals. These findings question the efficient market hypothesis and indicate that technical analysis and charting have merit. We also demonstrate that machine learning models that perform well in optimization continue to perform well out-of-sample.” Murray, Xia, and Xiao (2024, p. 1). Or consider the new paper Borri, Chetverikov, Liu, and Tsyvinski (2024). They propose a new non-linear, single-factor asset pricing model. In the abstract: “Most known finance and macro factors become insignificant controlling for our single-factor.” Yet you won’t find traditional economic variables discussed in this paper, it is all about the math, in particular a representation of the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem.
In other words, the successful approach to predicting returns is giving up on traditional portfolio theory and using the “theory-less” technique of machine learning. Although this is published in the Journal of Financial Economics, in some significant sense it is not economic reasoning at all. It is calculation, combined with expertise in math and computer science. The modeling is not economic modeling in a manner that has ties to marginalism or standard intuitive microeconomic theory. And the work is predicting excess returns in a pretty robust and successful way…
There is a recent working paper which is perhaps more striking yet, by Antoine Didisheim, Shikun (Barry) Ke, Bryan T. Kelly, and Semyon Malamud. They pick up from Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT), a well-established idea from financial economics. APT typically looks for “factors” in the data which predict excess returns, and a traditional APT model might have found five or six such factors. Are “inflation” or perhaps “the term structure of interest rates” useful factors? Well, that can be debated, but if so, those results sound pretty intuitive. But those intuitions seem to be disappearing. In a paper by these authors, they apply machine learning methods to look for more factors. As we know, machine learning is very good at finding non-obvious relationships in the data. The largest model they built has 360,000 (!) factors, and it reduces pricing errors by 54.8 percent relative to the classic six-factor model from Fama and French. Bravo to the authors, but what kinds of intuitions do you think possibly can be supported by those 360,000 factors?
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
For the first time in more than 53 years, NASA is preparing to send humans beyond low Earth orbit. As soon as Wednesday evening, four astronauts will embark on an a more than nine-day mission with the goal of flying around the Moon and back.
The flight is called Artemis 2 and it’s the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft, a key stepping stone for grand plans of a Moon Base and eventually human exploration on Mars. NASA astronaut and mission commander Reid Wiseman leads the quartet, which includes fellow NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
“The vehicle is ready. The system is ready. The crew is ready. And behind this flight stands a campaign: landings, a lunar base, a nuclear propulsion into deep space. That begins, not ends, with what happens on Wednesday,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya on Monday.
“I have complete confidence in this team and the NASA workforce.”
The more than 49-hour-long countdown officially began ticking at 4:44 p.m. EDT (2044 UTC) onMonday. Artemis Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson will give her approval to proceed into fueling the 322-foot-tall Space Launch System rocket at 7:34 a.m. EDT (1134 UTC) on Wednesday.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the Artemis 2 mission beginning about 10 minutes before the poll for fueling takes place. Liftoff is scheduled for 6:24 p.m. EDT (2224 UTC), which is the opening of a two-hour window.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast an 20 percent chance for a weather violation during Wednesday’s launch window. On Tuesday during a news briefing, Launch Weather Officer Mark Burger said there was a low risk for lightning, but noted that they were watching for the potential for interference from cumulus clouds and strong ground winds.
“The optimistic side of me says that means 80 percent chance of ‘go’ here. Again, isolated showers wandering around, but again, a lot of real estate between those showers, in all likelihood,” Burger said. “We should be able to find some clear air to launch Artemis 2.”
Regarding weather along the rocket’s ascent corridor, he said that conditions heading into the planned launch window are “very much ‘go’,” stating that the risk probability was 9 percent total, which he said was “very good.”
If all goes smoothly with the multi-hour fueling process, the four crew members will begin donning their flight suits — formally called Orion Crew Survival System (OCSS) suits — about 5.5 hours before liftoff. After departing the suit-up room, they will spend a few final minutes, face-to-face with their families, before taking a 30-minute car ride out to the launch pad.
Once they arrive at Launch Complex 39B, a small team called the closeout crew will help them into their Orion spacecraft, which the astronauts named ‘Integrity.’ Onboard is all they need and more to survive and work aboard the the spaceship that they’ll call home for more than a week.
Orion has a habitable volume of 330 ft³ (9.34 m³), which NASA said is analogous to the combination of two small minivans.
After the crew is safely onboard, the side hatches to the crew module and the launch abort system will be closed and sealed sequentially. The closeout crew, which includes one of the backup astronauts for this mission, will then finish stowing their tools and clear the pad less than an hour before flight.
After achieving liftoff, the twin five-segment solid rocket boosters will separate from the rocket’s core stage a little more than two minutes into flight. The SLS rocket’s upper stage — called the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage — will separate from the core stage in the eighth minute of the mission.
20 minutes post-liftoff, the four, 23-foot-long (7 m) solar arrays on the European Service Module (located beneath the crew module) will deploy and begin to provide power to Orion’s four main batteries.
The ICPS will perform its first big burn, which is called a perigee raise maneuver, 49 minutes after liftoff, putting Orion into an elliptical orbit at 1,381 x 115 statute miles. That will be followed nearly an hour later by the apogee raise maneuver, which will put Orion into a high Earth orbit at 43,730 x 0 statute miles.
Nearly two hours after that, Orion will separate from the ICPS and an hour-long manual piloting demonstration will begin. Wiseman and Glover will take the stick and bring the spaceship up to about 10 meters away from the upper stage to demonstrate the dexterity of the vehicle, which will be needed for future docking operations with landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX.
The crew will then be able to get about four hours of sleep before they’re woken up by one more perigee raising burn to close out Flight Day 1 and their return to sleep. At that point, they will be in an orbit of 44,555 x 115 statute miles.
The big decision point will come on Thursday when NASA makes the call on whether the spacecraft and the crew are ready to commit to their journey to the Moon. If so, the main engine on the Orion’s service module will fire for the trans-lunar injection (TLI) burn less than two hours into Flight Day 2.
There are some abort options that would prevent the crew from going out to the Moon, if necessary, but making a u-turn becomes less optimal the further out the crew gets.
Depending on the time and day they launch, they are poised to see parts of the far side of the Moon that humans have never seen directly with their own eyes. Those unique observations will help researchers understand more about the makeup of the Moon and the journey will help NASA and its partners learn more about living in a radiation environment beyond Earth’s atmosphere and protection.
Meet the crew
Learn more about the four individuals who will be the first to live and work onboard an Orion spacecraft.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—This will be the third time I have observed NASA’s Orion spacecraft take flight. But with this one, for the first time, am I genuinely hopeful about the future of the space agency and its plans to build a station on the surface of the Moon.
The two previous flights, in 2014 and 2022, both felt hollow. NASA, an aging bureaucracy, has repeatedly sought to recapture its fading glory while also looking toward a supposedly brighter future. Agency leaders would say things like this, from then-NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, after the first Orion launch in 2014: “This is the beginning of the Mars era.”
It wasn’t. No one who was paying attention believed it. But it was the kind of thing you had to say, I guess.
[continued from yesterday. P.G.] …and to that purpose I lay long talking with my wife about my father’s coming, which I expect to-day, coming up with the horses brought up for my Lord. Up and to my office, where doing business all the morning, and at Sir W. Batten’s, whither Mr. Gauden and many others came to us about business. Then home to dinner, where W. Joyce came, and he still a talking impertinent fellow. So to the office again, and hearing by and by that Madam Clerke, Pierce, and others were come to see my wife I stepped in and staid a little with them, and so to the office again, where late, and so home to supper and to bed.
Over the weekend I noticed an example of one of the most significant features of the last decade-plus in American politics, though it’s one that still remains too little remarked upon. Lauren Egan writes a newsletter covering the Democratic Party for The Bulwark. Sunday night’s edition was about pundit and political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, “He Was a Legendary Independent Pundit. Then Trump Arrived.” Basically, How did Stuart Rothenberg come down with, as MAGA puts it, Trump Derangement Syndrome? Toward the end of the piece, Egan gets at what I think is the underlying issue here and some of the commonality I’m about to note.
Let’s start this story in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At the time, there were a handful of men — pretty much all men, as I recall — who played a very specific role in the political-journalistic ecosystem. They were rigorously, perhaps obsessively, non-partisan and were go-to people on basic questions of politics. They’d appear on shows, be on call for quotes for journalists at the big papers. Rothenberg and Charlie Cook played that role in the electoral analysis and predictions space. Larry Sabato also occupied that space, though he also played in the political analysis one. In the latter space were Norm Ornstein (AEI) and Thomas Mann (Brookings). I think they were on PBS Newshour for a long time as a pair. Their analysis was on the mechanics of governing, less the explicitly political stuff and generally not electoral stuff.
These guys played a key role as arbiters in the journalistic-political ecosystem. They were analysts, not reporters. So they brought presumably some deeper thought, some historical perspective to the matter. But the key was the neutral arbitrator-ness. In a sense they were referees, and the point of their role was that their views were sort of like a currency that was accepted on both sides of the aisle, as it were.
This all began to break down during Barack Obama’s presidency. And I tie it in my mind to a column Mann and Ornstein wrote in April 2012 in The Washington Post: Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. It’s difficult to overstate the impact of this rebellion against the orthodoxy that in many ways had defined each man’s career and prominence. They later expanded on this piece in a book called It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. The gist of both was that it’s not polarization, extremism, the decline of comity, the breaking of norms. The issue is the GOP, a party which already then was essentially a revanchist party of the sectarian right masquerading as a center-right party of government. Of course, this doesn’t mean there aren’t issues with Democrats. But the big structural issue is the GOP. This has been a constant TPM theme for many years and the subject of countless posts. So I don’t want to dwell on that point but rather the effect on these analysts and political journalism more generally.
The business model of modern journalism, or now rather legacy journalism, is one based on balance. People often think this is about the evolution of modern journalism. It’s not. It’s part of the business model of post-war journalism. As the parties diverged in the late 20th century this put increasing tension on that model. And Republican operatives increasingly saw it as a system they could game. Broadly, anything that represented the Republican “position” had to be reported at face value and placed on equal terms with whatever the Democrats’ one was. We know this story. In the late Bush years and early Obama years, you could feel this model coming under growing strain; that opinion piece above was a case of the model just snapping. The model had to break or people like these would be forced to say things that were absurd, treat absurd things as though they were real.
So yeah, you have these exemplars of neutrality, dispassion, not taking sides. And I’m sure they would have liked it to stay that way. But it didn’t. The world of politics changed. And you could prioritize balance and neutrality but that would likely mean becoming a liar on someone else’s behalf. And this same breakdown happened in the more general news environment as well. It’s the origins of “bothsidesism” and all the rest.
As I was writing this though, I wanted to step back and ask myself a different question. Usually when we talk about there not being “two sides,” we mean that one position is based on factual information and the other is not. But it’s not like there aren’t two political sides. There’s a chaotic authoritarian nationalist “side” and there’s a kinda civic democratic side. Those are two real and definable things. So why can’t there be two sides in a broader civic debate? I was thinking about this this morning. And I think broadly there are two reasons. One is that, broadly speaking, these kinds of journalist/commentator elites are bought into the broad definition of American democracy. They struggle to treat attacks on the foundation of the democratic system as a legitimate “side.” But the broader issue goes to something like empiricism or civic debate itself. The essence of Trumpism and probably all authoritarian nationalism is that the leader is right. “Trump is right” trumps any policy prescription or any political goal. You can either operate within that set of rules and framework or you can’t. And most people from the old system can’t.
This goes to part of the broader crisis of journalism at the moment. There is a pervasive billionaire assumption that mainstream legacy journalism is “liberal,” and there’s a big market for news that gets outside of the liberal bubble, has views from both sides of the spectrum, is as welcoming to the MAGA right as to the Democratic left. As my friend Eric Alterman wrote in his book about liberal bias and the media wars, there was a time when something kind of like this was somewhat true. (Basically in the 1960s when a certain kind of Cold War liberalism did broadly inform the values of news media at the national level.) But that hasn’t been the case for decades. That billionaire view is simply wrong, inasmuch as most of what you get in legacy media is a huge effort to inoculate against charges of “media bias.” What there is though is a basic commitment to that empirical/civic mindset and set of values. And the nature of our current political moment is that the American right today is anti-empirical and anti-civic. That’s why when the Post or now CBS News goes searching for these underserved viewers hungering for journalism outside the liberal bubble, they fail. Because in a basic sense the current American right simply isn’t interested in news or journalism as most of us conceive it. Look at Fox or OANN or any of the other TV news clones and you can see that. When the Post or CBS try to do this, they don’t find any new viewers and lose a lot of their existing ones who feel insulted.
Obviously this isn’t to say that legacy media doesn’t have its shortcomings. Of course it does. Indeed, it’s another perverse part of our current moment that those who are invested in the future of civic democracy sort of have to speak for “legacy media” as something we’re either responsible for or like or want to speak up for. But the basic reality remains this. Our new political world in the U.S. and around much of the globe is no longer simply right vs. left but authoritarian vs. civic democratic. And those two poles involved not just different policy positions but different ideational systems, different ways of thinking about research, facts, power and more. Journalism as most of us understand it, the way most journalists understand it, is inextricably located in the civic democratic space, though it isn’t inherently liberal in the old sense of the word. Without knowing that basic fact, you can’t understand much of anything about contemporary politics and journalism and the big fights about our future that we are all, intentionally or not, involved in today.
Three years ago, Hunter Walker heard that Mark Robinson, then the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, was about to enter that state’s governors race. He also heard that Robinson had a penchant for extreme statements. And so, Hunter dug into his Facebook page, where Robinson had for years been an inveterate poster. In March 2023, TPM offered one of the first comprehensive looks at the public proclamations of this bizarre governor candidate-to-be — a man who would later be reported to have offered on porn forums such memorable self-descriptions as “I’m a black NAZI.” (Robinson denied at the time that the account was his, and even sued CNN, which had published the story.)
After losing in November 2024, Robinson got quieter. But, now, he’s back, with a sort-of apology. Hunter has that story here.
Image: The redesigned and revised chronological book edition. Photo: Marie Verdeil.
Between 2019 and 2021, Low-tech Magazine published three books containing selections of articles from the website, spanning 14 years (2007-2021). In 2024, we launched the “compressed edition”, which squeezes the article catalog of the three-volume book series into just one book of 620 pages.
We did this by switching to a smaller font size, downsizing most images, and opting for a two-column layout. I rewrote some articles, especially older ones, resulting not only in fewer pages but also in better articles.
This revised edition of the original, “uncompressed” series is based on the edits made for the compressed edition. However, we increased the font and image sizes and returned to a one-column layout for improved reading comfort.
The book design is a collaborative effort by Laia Comellas, Marie Verdeil, and Johanna Gratzer. Marie Verdeil made the covers, Vaiva Vinskaitė did the typesetting.
Image: The redesigned and revised chronological book edition. Photo: Marie Verdeil.
Image: The redesigned and revised chronological book edition. Photo: Marie Verdeil.
Image: The redesigned and revised chronological book edition. Photo: Marie Verdeil.
The books are available in paperback and hardcover:
We’re also working on the final edits for Volume IV (2022-2026), expected to launch in May.
Patrons have free access to all ebooks, and early access to print books at a reduced price. They also receive exclusive content, which includes previews of new building projects and behind-the-scenes news.
Our books are also available as epubs. However, the chronological series is still based on the original book edition. We temporary lowered their price and will launch the new versions in a couple of months.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The two-day countdown for the launch of NASA's Artemis II mission began Monday evening, with clocks timed for the first of six opportunities in early April to send a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon.
Liftoff from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is scheduled for a two-hour launch window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC) on Wednesday. NASA has backup launch opportunities each day through Monday, April 6, or else the mission will have to wait until the end of the month.
Mission managers said Monday that all systems were looking good for launch this week. The weather forecast is favorable, with an 80 percent chance of acceptable conditions for liftoff Wednesday. The only weather concern at the launch site in Florida is a low chance of rain showers and cloud cover that could present a risk of lightning. But with a two-hour launch window, there should be plenty of time to wait out any scattered storms.
Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have won the 2026 Turing Award for inventing quantum cryptography.
I am incredibly pleased to see them get this recognition. I have always thought the technology to be fantastic, even though I think it’s largely unnecessary. I wrote up my thoughts back in 2008, in an essay titled “Quantum Cryptography: As Awesome As It Is Pointless.”
Back then, I wrote:
While I like the science of quantum cryptography—my undergraduate degree was in physics—I don’t see any commercial value in it. I don’t believe it solves any security problem that needs solving. I don’t believe that it’s worth paying for, and I can’t imagine anyone but a few technophiles buying and deploying it. Systems that use it don’t magically become unbreakable, because the quantum part doesn’t address the weak points of the system.
Security is a chain; it’s as strong as the weakest link. Mathematical cryptography, as bad as it sometimes is, is the strongest link in most security chains. Our symmetric and public-key algorithms are pretty good, even though they’re not based on much rigorous mathematical theory. The real problems are elsewhere: computer security, network security, user interface and so on.
Cryptography is the one area of security that we can get right. We already have good encryption algorithms, good authentication algorithms and good key-agreement protocols. Maybe quantum cryptography can make that link stronger, but why would anyone bother? There are far more serious security problems to worry about, and it makes much more sense to spend effort securing those.
As I’ve often said, it’s like defending yourself against an approaching attacker by putting a huge stake in the ground. It’s useless to argue about whether the stake should be 50 feet tall or 100 feet tall, because either way, the attacker is going to go around it. Even quantum cryptography doesn’t “solve” all of cryptography: The keys are exchanged with photons, but a conventional mathematical algorithm takes over for the actual encryption.
What about quantum computation? I’m not worried; the math is ahead of the physics. Reports of progress in that area are overblown. And if there’s a security crisis because of a quantum computation breakthrough, it’s because our systems aren’t crypto-agile.
Yesterday, I had the chance to witness someone who's one of the most dedicated, competent advocates for privacy and digital rights bring that message to a whole new platform. It turns out, it's pretty delightful, especially in a moment when our civil liberties and rights online couldn't matter more!
Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has been a tireless fighter for protecting everyone's digital civil liberties, and I was lucky enough to get to tag along as she took the story of that work to The Daily Show yesterday. It was no surprise that the conversation was so fluent and insightful on the topic, but I think a lot of people in the audience didn't expect that it would be such a fun and even delightful conversation about a topic that is, too often, confusing or complicated or boring.
Six years ago, when I first joined the board of the EFF, I was already a believer in the core principles the organization stood for, but one of my biggest hopes was that the messages and mission of the entire team could just be brought to a larger audience. That couldn't have been more perfectly accomplished than seeing Cindy translate some topics that were fairly technical, or which involved fairly arcane legal concerns, and make them very accessible. And this work is vital because both the overreaching, authoritarian government, and the irresponsible, unaccountable forces of big tech are threatening our rights more than ever.
I gotta admit, it was pretty fun to watch Cindy hand Jon a "Let's Sue the Government!" t-shirt. You can get one just like his if you donate to EFF or become a member!
More broadly, though, the interview was also just a wonderful milestone to see at a personal level. Part of the story that Cindy was telling on the show is the broader narrative she captures in her book, Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, out from MIT Press. (And full disclosure there, I recently joined their management board as well, more on that soon.) The book captures so many of the lessons that can only come from decades of fighting in the trenches, which are lessons that so many organizations are going to need in order to be resilient in the years to come, even if they're not working in the exact same disciplines. In addition to being something of a valedictory for Cindy's tenure at the EFF, the lessons of the book seem to set the stage for the new chapter that promises to unfold under the new executive director Nicole Ozer, as she carries forward this work.
But if it isn't clear enough, I'll say it directly: as happy as I am to celebrate good people getting the word out about vital work, these are dangerous and trying times. The most powerful people and companies in the world, along with the most authoritarian administration we've ever seen, are all working to try to roll back all of the digital rights that we rely on every day to benefit from the power of the Internet. The issues that EFF helps protect for us couldn't matter more. So, if you can, support the EFF with your donation (you can even get a copy of Cindy's book if you become a Gold-level member!) and take action in your own community to help push back the onslaught of bad policy and corporate overreach that threatens us all.
And finally, for those of you in NYC: If you liked the conversation above, and want to dig in even further, come out and join us on April 23, where I'll be sitting down with Cindy at the Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library. It promises to be an engaging conversation, and I hope to see some of you there!
I grew up hearing about the horrors of the Battle of the Bulge but never really understood why the battle mattered so much. This eighth episode in our Battle of the Bulge series makes the importance of the battle crystal clear:
Yesterday, I had the chance to speak with Dr. Vanessa Williamson of the Brookings Institution about the relationship between taxes and democracy. I sought her out because I thought the ideas in her 2025 book, The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History are a great companion to my conversation with Dr. Timothy Snyder about the difference between freedom FROM and freedom TO.
Our conversation was all that I had hoped and more. I’m calling attention to it because her explanation of taxation, democracy, power, and accountability strikes me as something that should be on far more radar screens than it is.
I hope you enjoy it. A day later, I’m still blown away.
Showing reporters on Air Force One a series of posterboard images of his new ballroom last night, Trump told them: “I thought I’d do this now because it’s easier. I’m so busy that I don’t have time to do this. But, ah, I’m fighting wars and other things. But this is very important ’cause this is going to be with us for a long time and it’s going to be, I think it’ll be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world.”
At 7:26 this morning, about two hours before the stock market opened, Trump’s social media account posted: “The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalination plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’ This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
When he decided to go to war with Iran, Trump apparently fantasized that the operation would look like his strike on Venezuela, in which a fast attack enabled U.S. forces to grab Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores, leaving behind Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who appeared willing to work with the Trump administration, in power. The initial strikes of Israel and the U.S. on Iran did indeed kill that regime’s leadership, but officials simply replaced that leadership from within the regime, making Trump’s claim of regime change as imaginary as his claim that the U.S. and Iran have been at war for 47 years.
More shocking in this statement, though, is that Trump appears to be trying to force his will on the Iranians by threatening to commit war crimes. International law recognizes attacks on civilian infrastructure—like those Russian president Vladimir Putin has been carrying out on Ukraine for years—as war crimes. The Geneva Convention specifically prohibits attacks on drinking water, so Trump’s threat to attack the desalination plants that make seawater drinkable is, as Shashank Joshi of The Economist notes, not only stupid because Iran could do the same to other Gulf states, but “also, quite obviously,...very illegal.”
Joshi notes that “[Arizona Democratic senator] Mark Kelly et al were right to warn of illegal orders,” and Charles A. Ray of The Steady State explains that not just Trump but anyone carrying out these orders would be implicated in potential criminality. Trump’s threat comes the day after Christiaan Triebert and John Ismay of the New York Times reported that on the first day of attacks, U.S. forces hit not just the girls’ school we knew about, but also, in a different city, a sports hall used by civilians and a nearby elementary school, killing at least 21 people.
Trump apparently had no plan B for what to do if the initial plan to strike Iran and knock out its leaders failed, and is now flailing. His repeated assurances that talks with Iran are making “great progress” contrast with Iran’s insistence it is not engaged in talks with the United States. Trump entered the war with vague promises of “regime change” and promises to guarantee Iran never developed a nuclear weapon but now is reduced to hoping for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, putting the U.S. in the odd position of fighting a war to achieve the conditions that existed before it started the war.
On Sunday, Trump told the Financial Times that “my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran” as the U.S. did when it took control of Venezuelan oil fields. This sounds like bluster, but he is also massing U.S. troops in the region.
Meanwhile, the price of oil rose to $116 a barrel after strikes against Israel by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. The Houthis have the potential to disrupt yet another key strait, the Bab el-Mandeb, through which tankers carry about 10% of the world’s oil out of the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and into the Arabian Sea, from where it can go into the Indian Ocean and to the rest of the world.
In the 1980s, a faction of the Republican Party that was determined to cut taxes and regulations and to get rid of programs that benefiting racial minorities and women went to war against the federal government. Those so-called Movement Conservatives—“movement” because they were a political movement, and “conservatives” because they wanted to take the U.S. back to a time before the New Deal—became increasingly radical over time. Some, like activist Grover Norquist, wanted to take the government back even further, to the time of the robber barons in the 1890s, before “the socialists took over” with the Progressive Era and its income taxes and regulation.
But Americans liked the programs that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, protected equality before the law, and provided international security, so Movement Conservatives focused on taking power away from Congress, where the people’s voices could be heard, and centering power in the president.
Now we are seeing what that sort of a government, devoid of experts and beholden to the whims of a single man, looks like. After a year in power, Trump’s administration has embroiled the U.S. in a war of choice that has created an extraordinary global energy crisis, inflation is rising, job growth is down, and Republicans in Congress have abdicated their authority to oversee the war or other government agencies, or even to fix a problem of their own making in a partial government shutdown. Instead, they are seemingly content to let Trump do whatever he wishes.
Trump’s imperial presidency has demonstrated the country’s need for the allies he has disdained, as he has been forced to beg for their help. They have generally refused to get involved in a war Trump started without consulting them; today Spain’s defense minister said Spain has closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in operations against Iran.
Trump appears to be turning not to the gutted State Department, but to his usual cadre of billionaires to help him figure out a way forward. Edward Wong, Theodore Schliefer, Tyler Pager, and Ryan Mac of the New York Times reported that when Trump talked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India last Tuesday, billionaire Elon Musk took part in the call, although the readouts from both the U.S. and the Indian government did not mention his participation.
Now, with Congress out of session until April 13, Trump is putting the people and matériel in place to escalate the war. And yet, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, the new goal of freeing traffic in the Strait of Hormuz leaves the Iranians rather than the U.S. in control of the terms of declaring victory. An Associated Press–National Opinion Research Center (AP-NORC) poll from March 25 shows that 59% of Americans think the U.S. has gone too far in Iran, with only 13% supporting escalation. Sixty-two percent oppose sending ground troops into Iran, while only 12% favor the idea.
Even so, as David Kurtz wrote today in Talking Points Memo, “There’s no telling what President Trump will resort to doing to save face, create the mirage of victory, and extricate himself from the box canyon into which he so triumphantly galloped.”
What we do know, though, is that Trump is extraordinarily unlikely ever to do anything that will conflict with the wishes of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Trump has blockaded Cuba, strangling its energy sector by blocking off all oil tankers from the island. Although he has stopped Venezuelan and Mexican tankers, today he permitted a Russian-flagged tanker to get through the blockade to sell oil that will help fund Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Asked why he permitted that tanker through, Trump answered: “He loses one boatload of oil, that’s all it is. If he wants to do that, and if other countries want to do it, doesn’t bother me much.” World affairs journalist Frida Ghitis commented: “When Mexico tried to send oil to Cuba, Trump immediately threatened to impose crushing tariffs on it, or on any country that broke his blockade of the island. Now Russia is sending Cuba oil and Trump says it’s fine, no problem. The mystery continues.”
We can also be sure that Trump will find time to keep attacking those he perceives to be his enemies. As J.D. Wolf of Meidas News reported today, Trump has posted about continuing to try to prosecute New York attorney general Letitia James fourteen times in the past five days. James successfully prosecuted Trump, some of his children, and the Trump Organization for fraud. Trump has tried unsuccessfully and repeatedly to charge her with mortgage fraud or insurance fraud.
Peter Sullivan of Axios reported today that to pay for the war and find more money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Republicans are considering making cuts to federal health care spending. House majority leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Sullivan that they were looking at areas of “waste and fraud and abuse.”
As the administration flails, insiders are leaking about some of the administration’s most powerful individuals. Two senior sources from the Department of Homeland Security leaked stories about White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to the Daily Mail, a tabloid out of the United Kingdom. They claimed Miller demanded agents in Minneapolis be sent to areas where DHS knew there would be a lot of protesters because he wanted to “force confrontations” between agents and protesters that would enable the administration to “win the ‘PR battle.’” They echoed others in suggesting that Miller, not the president, was in charge of immigration policy.
Yesterday Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post reported that former high-ranking military officials, experts on religion and law, and veterans groups, as well as current Pentagon staff and officers, have expressed deep concern over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s extremist evangelical worship services and his casting of the U.S. military as a force for Christian holy war. Last Wednesday he prayed for U.S. troops to assert “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” saying: “We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”
G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers and Fifty Plus One reported today that Trump has hit a new approval low among all American adults, with 58.1% disapproving of his job in office and just 37.6% approving, an overall difference of -21 . A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll has Trump’s job approval rating at 33%.
Tonight Trump’s social media account posted an AI-generated video of a future President Donald J. Trump Presidential Library. To triumphal music, the video features a gleaming skyscraper containing what appears to be the airplane the president pressured Qatar into giving him, along with what seems to be a replica of the Oval Office…and a model of his anticipated ballroom.
Bryan Caplan keeps hammering this point home, it is good to see follow-up work:
In the United States, college dropout risk is sizable. We provide new empirical evidence that beliefs about the likelihood of earning a bachelor’s degree predict college enrollment, and that the distribution of these beliefs exhibits widespread optimism. We incorporate this distribution of beliefs into an overlapping generations model with college as a risky investment that can be financed via federal loans, grants, family transfers, or earnings. We then examine the welfare impact of access to federal student loans. We find that access can reduce welfare for young adults who are low-skilled, poor, and optimistic, due to their mistaken beliefs.
Today is The Map Room’s 23rd anniversary. As a thank-you to paid members of my Patreon, whose generous support has enabled me to remove ads from The Map Room, and as an enticement to those… More
It was a sunny day in July, 2012, and I was about 2/3 of the way south of San Francisco on Hwy 5 to LA. I had taken off mid-day driving my truck to LA, for the memorial that Thursday of my college buddy Dick Zanuck.
For almost 3 hours I cruised without the radio, fueled by a blended-ice double-shot latte as well as a little sativa to enable right brain function — focusing on stuff Dick and I did together— since I was scheduled to talk at his memorial at The Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverley Hills the next day.
And lo and behold, after all those hours of concentration, he came alive in my mind. Not in physical body of course, but in spirit. He was there!
And I thought this is probably what is meant by the concept of immortality. People leave their bodies, but their essence remains alive in our memories.
There are plants that grow steadily for weeks and then suddenly shoot up. Same thing with concepts. You think about something or study a subject and one day, poom! You put it all together and enter another realm of consciousness.
That’s what happened to me that day, thinking about Dick and our stunts and adventures in the ‘50s. I never put it all together before, but when I finally did, it was rich — the stuff we did, the fun we had came alive.
Phi Gamma Delta (Fiji House) at Stanford, 1954. Zanuck is 3rd from right in 2nd row. I’m in middle of front row with (ulp!) white bucks (well, at least I rubbed ashes on new white bucks to get some character).
We were roommates for a couple of years. We were similar in our interests: surfing, sunshine, hanging out at the beach, volleyball, boozing, partying — and girls. We decorated our room with spears and African masks that we borrowed from 20th Century Fox prop rooms (his dad, Darryl F. Zanuck, was head of Fox in those years).
Dick was going to be a movie producer, and there were no classes at Stanford that could teach him about this profession. I was going to go into the insurance business with my family, and there were no insurance classes at Stanford.
So we didn’t attend a lot of classes. Whenever the surf was up in Santa Cruz, that was our priority. We went to a movie almost every night, at Fox theaters using his pass that got us in for 25 cents. We played a lot of 2-man volleyball. There were a lot of (sometimes fiendish) practical jokes.
We made a lot of trips to LA., and to the family house in Palm Springs. We’d go to a party, have a good time and take off for LA, arriving in the early dawn. The Zanucks had this large wonderful house on the beach in Santa Monica, where you’d go to sleep at night to the sound of crashing waves.
We took an epic trip to Baja, borrowing a jeep and trailer from 20th Century Fox— surfing at Punta Colonet. We also made two road trips to Mazatlan in the mid-’50s; we were the 2nd surfers (Matt Kivlin was the 1st) to go there.
We were a good combination of Northern California boy and Southern California boy. I loved the looseness of LA. One of those things I remember in crystal clear fashion, was rolling down Highway One at Malibu at dawn, with DJ Dick (Huggy Boy) Hugg playing “Loop de Loop Mambo” by the Coasters on the radio (there were no DJs like this in San Francisco), then going into a drive-in where there was a cabinet with all the pies and a mirror reflecting them to to produce a double image.
LA was visual. LA was loose. LA was image. The water was 5-10 degrees warmer. Music on the radio was way better.The girls were friendlier. In the ‘50s, there were a third as many people in California as there are today, and LA (at least Malibu) was a paradise. We got balsa wood surfboards from Dale Velzy and surfed at the Malibu Colony when you could walk down to the beach through vacant lots. It’s where I got my first ride (on Dick’s brother-in-law Bobby Jacks’ 60 pound, 11-foot balsa/redwood surfboard) leading to a lifetime of surfing.
After graduation, we went our separate ways — he ended up producing over 30 films, including Jaws, The Verdict, and then in 1989, with his wife Lili, the Academy-Award winning Driving Miss Daisy. On the other hand, I started smoking weed in the mid-’60s, dropped out of the straight world in 1965, took up with the countercultural movement of the era, and worked as a carpenter. But even though we had chosen different paths and were in opposite political camps, we still communicated and visited and had that spark of competitiveness and fun up until he unexpectedly passed away in 2012.
There were 5 speakers at the church, which was packed: Dean Zanuck, Tim Burton, Sherry Lansing (head of Paramount), Clint Eastwood and lastly — ulp! —Lloyd.
I was really nervous when Clint finished. Sherry reached over and patted me and said “You can do it.”
So here’s my talk. It actually went over well, since this was a side of Dick they knew nothing about — his wild years before settling down.
In normal times, about 20 percent of the world’s oil production passes through the Strait of Hormuz. That flow has been cut off except for Iranian oil and a handful of other vessels the Iranians are allowing through. This disruption has led to a large spike in oil futures prices:
Source: Trading Economics
But this price rise has been speculative, driven by the (justified) expectation of future shortages rather than a current lack of oil. In fact, so far deliveries to markets around the world haven’t declined, because shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to major markets takes 4-6 weeks. As a result there was a large quantity of oil already at sea, outside the Strait, when the war began.
However, this grace period is about to end. The oil crisis is about to get physical. The map at the top of this post shows J.P. Morgan’s estimates of when tankers from the Gulf will stop arriving at various destinations. Deliveries to Asian markets will end this week; deliveries to Europe will end next week.
And once the crisis gets physical, there will no longer be room for jawboning the markets. Since the war began there have been several occasions on which Donald Trump has been able to talk prices down by asserting that meaningful negotiations are underway with his invisible friends the Iranian regime, but that won’t work once the oil runs out. So prices will have to rise to whatever level destroys enough demand to match it to the available supply.
PS: The United States buys little oil from the Persian Gulf, but we can expect U.S. oil prices to rise in response to shortages around the world.
So how high will oil prices get? I’ve written about this before, but I thought it might be useful to update the analysis, emphasizing how uncertain the prospects are and the real risk of extremely high prices.
There are two big sources of uncertainty. The first is that we don’t know how much oil will manage to escape the Gulf. Right now oil supply is drastically curtailed, but not by the full 20 million barrels of oil a day that used to flow through the Strait of Hormuz. The Saudis have a pipeline that lets them ship some of their oil to the Red Sea; Oman has a pipeline that takes some oil around the Strait. And Iran has been letting millions of barrels of its own oil pass. Whether all these “leakages” will continue depends on the course of the war.
Second, how high must prices rise to choke off a given amount of demand? We know from previous oil shocks that the price elasticity of demand for crude oil is low — that is, even large price increases only cause small declines in demand. But in the current crisis it matters just how low that elasticity, a number that is impossible to estimate with any precision, really is.
So, what is a reasonable range of possibilities? I’ve considered three scenarios for the disruption to oil supply: a “low disruption” scenario in which supply is reduced “only” 8 percent from normal levels, a medium scenario in which supply falls 12 percent, and a high disruption scenario in which it falls 16 percent. I’ve also considered three alternatives for the price elasticity of oil demand: “high” at 0.2, medium at 0.15, and low at 0.1.
And I assume that in the absence of this war the Brent price would be $65 a barrel. In that case I get the following matrix:
Readers should know that Robin Brooks has done a conceptually similar analysis. My numbers, however, are more alarming — and I believe that you should be alarmed.
In particular, by presenting the analysis this way, I risk conveying the impression that we should assume a moderate, medium/medium outcome. That is not at all a safe assumption.
After all, what would it take to get to my “high disruption” scenario? That’s what might happen if Iranian oil exports are cut off, say by a U.S. attack on Kharg Island, and if supply via pipelines is hindered by Iranian retaliation against other Gulf oil facilities as well as attacks by the Houthis on Red Sea shipping. That is not an outlandish possibility. It is, in fact, exactly what we should expect if the Trump administration follows through on what appear to be its current war plans.
And if oil really does go to $200 or more, it’s all too easy to envisage a full-blown global economic crisis, with an inflation surge and quite likely a recession.
Ever since this war began I’ve noticed a sharp divide in sentiment among experts. Finance and macroeconomics experts have been relatively sanguine about our ability to ride out this storm. But talk to or read energy experts — people who focus on the physical side of the oil crisis — and their hair is on fire.
I’m mostly a macroeconomist. But my hair is definitely starting to smolder.
I'm working on integrating datasette-files into other plugins, such as datasette-extract. This necessitated a new release of the base plugin.
owners_can_edit and owners_can_delete configuration options, plus the files-edit and files-delete actions are now scoped to a new FileResource which is a child of FileSourceResource. #18
The file picker UI is now available as a <datasette-file-picker> Web Component. Thanks, Alex Garcia. #19
New from datasette_files import get_file Python API for other plugins that need to access file data. #20
Note that the main issues that people currently unknowingly face with local models mostly revolve around the harness and some intricacies around model chat templates and prompt construction. Sometimes there are even pure inference bugs. From typing the task in the client to the actual result, there is a long chain of components that atm are not only fragile - are also developed by different parties. So it's difficult to consolidate the entire stack and you have to keep in mind that what you are currently observing is with very high probability still broken in some subtle way along that chain.
— Georgi Gerganov, explaining why it's hard to find local models that work well with coding agents
Thereallo, after spelunking inside the APK bundle for the Android version:
Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every
4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background,
syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers.
Loads JavaScript from a random person’s GitHub Pages site
(lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is
compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app’s WebView. [...]
Is any of this illegal? Probably not. Is it what you’d expect from
an official government app? Probably not either.
Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
The app is, at least temporarily, popular. As I type this it’s #3 in the iOS App Store top free apps list, sandwiched between Claude and Gemini. I don’t know how similar the iOS app is to the Android one, but I took one for the team and installed it, and after poking around for a few minutes, it hasn’t even prompted me to ask for location access. It’s a crappy app, to be sure. A lot of flashing between screen transitions. When you open an article, there’s a “< Back” button top left, and an “X” button top right. Both buttons seem to do the same thing. There’s no share sheet for “news” articles, which seems particularly stupid. You can’t even copy a link to an article and share it manually.
But the iOS version has a clean privacy report card in the App Store, and I don’t see anything in the app that makes me doubt that. It seems like the Android version is quite different.
[Update: Someone on Reddit claims to have analyzed the iOS app bundle and discovered similar code as in the Android app, but I still don’t see any way to actually get the iOS app to even ask for location permission. I think there might be code in the app that never gets called. Like I wrote above, it’s clearly not a well-crafted app. If anyone knows how to get the iOS app to actually ask for location access, let me know how.]
Most security teams don’t have a talent problem, they have a noise problem. Manual phishing remediation, chasing risky OAuth permissions, and auditing file shares shouldn’t be a full-time job.
Material Security unifies your cloud workspace, bringing detection and response for email, files, and accounts into one place. It’s security that actually works: augmenting the native gaps in Google and Microsoft without the usual enterprise bloat.
Stop fighting fragmented consoles and start focusing on strategy. It’s time to simplify your SecOps.
So when you have a world defined only by brand, it’s going to be a
weird, bad world.
Graham’s thoughtful essay focuses on the mechanical watch industry. But I disagree with his conclusion. I think the market for mechanical watches has never been more fun or vibrant than it is today. The action, for me at least, isn’t with the high-end luxury Swiss brands. It’s with the indies, from companies like Baltic and Halios.
It’s also interesting to ponder Graham’s essay in the context of other industries. I think it’s self evident that the entire market for phones — the most popular and lucrative consumer devices in the world — is defined by a single brand, and every competitor just copies that one brand with varying degrees of shamelessness. That’s bad and weird.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, during an on-stage interview at The Hill & Valley Forum last week, was asked “What do you see as America’s unique advantages that other countries don’t have?”
His answer, after taking a moment to think, “America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump.”
The Council will be co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael
Kratsios. The following individuals have been appointed:
Marc Andreessen
Sergey Brin
Safra Catz
Michael Dell
Jacob DeWitte
Fred Ehrsam
Larry Ellison
David Friedberg
Jensen Huang
John Martinis
Bob Mumgaard
Lisa Su
Mark Zuckerberg
Under President Trump, PCAST will focus on topics related to the
opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies present to
the American workforce, and ensuring all Americans thrive in the
Golden Age of Innovation.
Scientific American observes that 12/13 are executives, and only one, Martinis, is an academic researcher. But I mean, of course a council like this, from this administration, is going to be made up of big-cap corporate executives and founders. I’d say it’s more surprising there is even one academic researcher than that there aren’t more.
I’m more intrigued by the companies who aren’t represented: no one from Apple, no one from Microsoft, no one from Amazon. (That left room for two from Oracle, that well known bastion of corporate virtue.) Read into that what you will. Me, I can’t help but suspect that this administration is taking on a profound stink, and something like appointments to this council are akin to a game of music chairs where Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Andy Jassy, and Jeff Bezos are happy not to have gotten seats.
Last week at the United Nations General Assembly, governments were confronted with a simple moral test: whether to formally recognize and take a stand against the enduring legacy of the enslavement of Africans and its continuing impact on millions of lives today. This was not about the past alone, but about the systems of exploitation that persist in the present.
Yet instead of standing on the side of justice, 52 countries abstained while Argentina, Israel, and the United States voted against the nonbinding resolution, which passed with 123 votes.
There is no neutral ground when it comes to slavery.
Ghana sponsored the resolution, which passed with strong support from African and Caribbean nations still damaged by the transatlantic chattel slave trade from the 15th Century into the late 19th Century.
The resolution called the slave trade the “gravest crime against humanity.” It also called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs.”
This was not a complicated geopolitical question. It was not a matter of interpretation or nuance. It was a vote on one of the most brutal and enduring injustices in human history.
And yet, 52 countries chose to abstain. Abstention is not neutrality. Abstention is a decision.
Wise Words
We should heed the words of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
As Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid activist who received the 1984 Peace Prize, taught: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
By refusing to take a stand, these governments aligned themselves, not with the victims, but with a system that continues to exploit hundreds of millions of vulnerable people.
Damage Endures
The legacy of the enslavement of Africans is not confined to history books; it lives on today in the structures of the global economy, where exploitation remains deeply embedded. Tens of millions of children, many of them in regions historically scarred by that legacy, are still forced into labor, deprived of education, dignity, and freedom.
We must also confront an uncomfortable reality: there are more people living in conditions of slavery today than at any other time in history, even if they are not chattel slaves in the historical and legal sense. Modern slavery has evolved, hidden in supply chains, factories, farms, and informal economies, but its essence remains the same: the systematic exploitation of human beings for profit.
Among the 52 countries that abstained are, in alphabetical order, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, among others. These are not marginal actors in the global economy. They are some of its principal architects and beneficiaries.
The uncomfortable truth is that many of these countries, along with the United States, which voted against, are not passive observers.
Who Benefits
The 52 nations, and the three that voted against the resolution, are among the main financial beneficiaries of a global system built on exploitation and child labor in the Global South, and, in many cases, even within their own borders, where the labor of hundreds of millions of the poorest and most vulnerable, including little girls and little boys, is systematically undervalued and exploited to sustain consumption and profit.
I often hear the argument that those who provide work to children are helping them survive. This claim is not only misleading; it is appalling. It ignores a fundamental reality: every child who works loses far more than he or she earns, because that child is not in school. For these small children, work is a lifelong trap.
What is taken from these exploited children is not just time, but opportunity, dignity, and the possibility of a better future.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the modern world: nations that speak the language of human rights while benefiting from their violation.
Neutrality, in this context, is not caution; it is complicity. Abstention allows governments to avoid accountability while continuing to profit from injustice. It signals to corporations that there is no urgency to change. And it tells victims that their suffering does not merit even the most basic act of solidarity: a vote.
History does not judge kindly those who remain silent in the face of injustice. The great moral struggles of humanity, from the abolition of slavery to the fight against apartheid, were not won by those who abstained, but by those who chose to stand clearly and unequivocally on the side of human dignity.
Moral Duty
The 52 countries that refused to take that stand, together with the three that voted against, did more than miss a diplomatic opportunity, they revealed a deeper truth: economic interests still outweigh moral responsibility in the global order.
Ending modern forms of slavery and child labor requires more than words. It requires courage. It requires governments willing to confront the systems that benefit them. It requires a recognition that the legacy of the enslavement of Africans is not past; it is present.
There is no neutral ground when it comes to slavery. There never has been.
There never will be.
“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.
Pinker writes about how Trivers introduced game-theoretic ideas into evolutionary biology (with genes as the players, and selection into subsequent generations as the payoffs). It's a well written tribute.
"Trivers’s contributions belong in the special category of ideas that are obvious once they are explained, yet eluded great minds for ages; simple enough to be stated in a few words, yet with implications that have busied scientists for decades. In an astonishing creative burst from 1971 to 1975, Trivers wrote five seminal essays that invoked patterns of genetic overlap to explain each of the major human relationships: male with female, parent with child, sibling with sibling, partner with partner, and a person with himself or herself."
Some attendees at an AI Tinkerers meetup in early Feb were asking me what it’s like to be the maintainer of a big OSS project where the community PRs are all AI slop. They thought it would make for a good blog post. I thought so too, at the time!
It turned out to be very, very, very hard to write down. It’s in many ways the opposite of conventional wisdom for software maintainers, OSS or otherwise. So this post has given me over 2 months of writer’s block. (I had to update that duration many times while writing this.)
Why is it so important for me to tell you how I deal with a storm of AI-generated PRs? Because I’m beginning to believe that my “vibe maintainer” workflow, crazy as it might sound, will be what a lot of you are doing before long. Everyone who works on successful OSS will soon have to deal with PR storms.
Vibe Maintainer: Using AI to help manage AI-generated PRs
The Rising Tide
To give you a sense of the scale I work at, I’m cruising towards 50 contributor PRs a day, combined between Beads (20k stars, 5 months old) and Gas Town (13k stars, 3 months old). That’s seven days a week; if I take a day or two off, they pile up and I may have to deal with 100 or more in a single day.
It’s an enthusiastic community. We’ve had over 1000 unique contributors between the two repos, with over 4k PRs (2300+ merged), and over 15k commits, all in just a few months. And we have a great community with almost two thousand Gas Town users hanging out chatting on the Gas Town Hall Discord.
Through all that, my median time to resolution is about 15 hours, with few PRs waiting more than a few days. This is high velocity. But I still manage to keep my quality bar high enough that both projects continue to exhibit strong growth. It may look like I’m only merging 60% of the PRs from the metrics, but that’s an artifact of fix-merging. I actually merge about 88% of all incoming contributor PRs, one way or another, and both projects are flourishing from it.
Beads in particular is well-integrated with the broader ecosystem — for instance, it now has solid integration with GitHub, GitLab, Linear, JIRA, Azure DevOps, Notion, and five self-hosted storage options. This is all encapsulated as a rich plugin interface for backend engines that each of them implement. Nearly all of that was from community contributions.
It’s safe to say people love Beads and Gas Town, even though mostly only agents have ever seen their source code. I certainly haven’t. No time for field trips.
I’m a very lazy person, and maintaining a popular OSS repo, let alone two of them, would simply not have been possible for me, like ever, up until maybe a year ago. I’m getting by with AI, that’s the only way. As my PR volume has increased, I’ve been able to keep afloat through model and tool improvements, automating as much of the decision tree as I can.
Even with AI help, keeping up with community PRs takes me 15–20 hours a week, usually 2 to 3 hours a day. Sometimes much, much more.
I wish I could tell you it’s easy work. I have at least managed to automate all the easy stuff, which is about half the PRs, sometimes up to two thirds of them. I was recently inspired by Dane Poyzer’s gt-toolkit package — a series of Gas Town formulas he published, which now has its own little user subcommunity. Dane’s formulas help you run his ambitious long running idea-to-delivery workflow, which is geared at comprehensive feature development and moving through mountains of work with his Gas Towns. My own PR workflow is now a formula as well.
Before we dive into the vibe maintainer workflow, let’s revisit why it’s needed at all. Am I not just bringing this on myself by allowing AI-assisted PRs in the first place?
Live of a Vibe Maintainer: Gems and Dead Birds
Saying No to AI: The “Fork You” Problem
Since 99% of my incoming PR submissions are AI-generated, it stands to reason that I could reduce my workload by 99% by saying “No AI PRs.” In that world, instead of doing all this crazy vibe maintainer stuff, I’d just wake up every morning, brew some coffee, shake my fist at the sky, browse HN, and maybe take the mule to town. The easy life.
Most OSS maintainers go this route. They straight-up forbid AI-generated or even AI-assisted pull requests. And I can understand why. The crap you see in AI-generated PRs these days can turn you into the Clint Eastwood angry-porch meme, practically overnight. Rather than deal with it, they outlaw it.
That of course triggers an arms race. You can get an AI-assisted PR accepted, but only if you sneak it in. So we hear comical stories of once-rejected PRs suddenly being accepted after they’re resubmitted with all the AI DNA scrubbed from the crime scene, hee hee haw haw.
But that’s the official party line for most OSS projects today: “No AI.” It all has to be done by sneaking. The whole status quo in open-source is characterized by historic levels of silliness.
Here’s the problem with that old-school approach. We are headed toward a world in which if you refuse enough PRs, the community will consider you a dead-end street and begin routing around you. They will copy your software, either by forking it or rewriting it from the ground up, and use their own mutated version from then on. They might even develop a community around their version.
Software survival is now about velocity–specifically, keeping up with what your users want. Even a permissively-licensed OSS project can be forked and lose a ton of users and mindshare, if the project owners don’t listen to a sufficiently large subcommunity of their happy users.
As just one of many easy examples, Roo Code is a big community that forked off Cline (a VS Code extension). And now people are forking Roo; Kilo is a huge one. That’s a sad list of at least three communities effectively fighting over a code base. They could have united, but none of them could keep up with what their own users wanted, so it keeps on forking.
That particular fork family all happened before coding agents came into their own in late 2025. It was hard back then. Now that everyone on earth has access to powerful coding agents, we will see way more forks. Forking used to be a declaration of war. Now it’s simply a declaration that someone liked your software enough to want to change it, but you said No.
It’s always been trivial to create a fork. The hard part has always been maintaining the fork. As the fork’s community grows, so does the maintenance burden. It used to take a good-sized team to support a fork, which was almost like a rival gang. Nobody liked a fork. There was always bad blood. The XEmacs/Emacs rivalry was absolutely the stuff of legend. You wouldn’t believe some of it. It used to basically require corporate backing to have a credible fork of a large OSS project.
Today, things are astoundingly different. With the coding agents of 2026, everyone who loves your software is a credible threat to forking you. Any grandma who wants to use your software for gardening could build a massive grandma subcommunity with your stuff if you don’t take her PRs. She might not even know she’s done it. It’s just there for the taking, and you weren’t flexible enough. So her agent routed around you.
There’s nothing wrong with forks per se; that’s how evolution will happen. But it’s also a ton of duplication that might not have been necessary. A lot of people just want to add a small feature or fix to an existing software product, not clone the whole damn thing and maintain it for the rest of their lives. They want to share tokens and energy by pooling features and fixes together, as a community. So there are good reasons to avoid forking.
I do actively encourage forks where people are trying to take the code in a direction I just can’t follow. The earliest big fork was beads_rust from Jeffrey Emanuel, who told me he was very embarrassed to be forking my code, until we chatted about it and I gave it my heartfelt blessing.
This was a situation where he wanted only the streamlined original code’s behavior. Nothing else. And that’s one thing I couldn’t offer with my kitchen-sink approach to making my tool community- and AI-friendly. So I was happy he made that fork for those who need that streamlining.
If your software is popular, and you want to avoid forking (or rewriting), you need to build and foster your community. You need to let your system expand to accommodate the needs of as many users as practical.
People will ask more and more of your software, so you also have to decide where to draw your lines. You choose what belongs in your code, and what to exclude–any of which may go off to live in a fork somewhere to “compete” with you. Choose wisely!
The Gravitational-Well Finish Line
My own approach is radically different from how most OSS maintainers work: I say Yes to AI. Instead of rejecting AI submissions, I encourage everyone to use AI to submit their PRs (subject to a growing list of hygiene rules). Indeed, I both observe and expect 99% of incoming PRs to be AI-assisted.
Why? Because this empowers my users to turn their wishes into code and get it into the system. It keeps them from thinking about off-ramps. It keeps them from forking me, and unites them into a larger community, which means they all benefit from sharing rather than reimplementing. It’s a net token savings, so software with strong communities will tend to survive.
Do some contributor PRs belong in a fork? Absolutely! I maintain high standards for what goes into the Beads and Gas Town core. I’ll reject PRs for many reasons, including being too opinionated, niche, or they don’t pull their tech-debt weight.
But if there’s a germ of a good idea in there, I try hard to find it and cultivate it.
Instead of requiring perfect PRs from everyone, I aim to find a quick resolution that is satisfying to all parties. I accept most PRs, but still maintain hard lines on architecture, what goes in core, code quality, and many other AI-era design principles (e.g. ZFC). If I were to send every PR back to the contributor for fixes, the rest of the community might be losing out on some important fix or feature for days to weeks. And there it is, sitting there in the PR; it just has issues with it.
In this situation, if you want to maximize throughput, then you may need to fix the contributor’s code yourself before it can be merged. Most OSS maintainers say, “Go fix your code.” I try my best to fix it myself and get it merged. There’s an art to this that I’ll discuss below.
My core philosophy is, help contributors get to the finish line. I optimize for community throughput. I review every PR and try to find the value in it, and have my worker agents do something appropriate for each one.
The PR Sheriff
My sheriff workflow consists of runs, where I try to resolve all PRs in a run, though I’m not always able. A run kicks off automatically every time I restart my designated sheriff crew members in my Gas Town, because I place a “sheriff bead” on their hook. So they notice it when they wake up. I can also start runs manually.
I discovered today, after many months of using this workflow with my Gas Town crew members, that the Mayor is actually way better at it. Like, far, far better, it’s crazy how much better it is. The Mayor, acting as PR Sheriff, takes a more holistic view, makes better decisions, and makes better use of Gas Town resources to get the PRs reviewed, fix-merged, and escalated in parallel.
The Mayor is my new PR Sheriff for my rigs
This was big news. It means I can shrink my Gas Town crew down to maybe 3 agents per rig (from 8 apiece), which will be huge for memory pressure. Huge for running it in parallel with Gas City while I cut over. More on that later.
Anyway, the workflow begins with the sheriff pulling descriptions of all open PRs, and categorizing them into easy-wins, fix-merge, and needs-review.
Easy wins are things like targeted bug fixes, doc updates, dependency bot auto-upgrades, and automatically closing drafts, PRs from banned contributors, etc. These are handled automatically every 2 hours with a patrol, which contributes to my sub-day median turnaround time. And they’re handled automatically during a PR sheriff run.
The first fix-merge candidates are easy wins that are broken for some reason — they fail CI, they need a rebase, or they have a simple error in them, but aside from that, they fit all the easy-win criteria. The sheriff may decide to auto-fix-merge those. My Mayor decided to sling them to polecats, which was nice.
Needs-review is any PR that looks kind of suspicious for some reason, so we’re going to have to have an agent suss it out, do a deep dive, and produce a report. These can be farmed to crew members or polecats, as the instructions are usually pretty simple. The reports can be handled however you like, e.g. having the sheriff summarize them for you. Or I sometimes go directly to the agents’ tmux sessions and read their reports.
From needs-review, we get a set of possible recommendations:
Easy win. Oops, it turned out to fit the easy-win criteria after all. Happens sometimes.
Merge. Agent recommends to human that we merge this PR. It may be small or big, but it is well-tested, broadly useful, well-documented, and good to go.
Merge-fix. It’s mergeable but we need to fix some issues afterward. But it’s OK to do it in a follow-up commit. We merge the PR as-is, then push a follow-up fix to main.
Fix-merge. It’s pretty busted, so we’re going to pull it locally, make a bunch of changes, and then we’ll push it; you will see the contributor attribution in the CHANGELOG.
Cherry-pick. The PR contains M items (features and/or fixes) and we only want N < M of them. We cherry pick the N things locally, fix them as needed, and commit them with attribution. We close the PR, effectively throwing the rest away, with an explanation.
Split-merge. The PR contains M items, but they’re separate concerns, and really should all have been in separate PRs. We pull it locally, split them into separate commits, and push them all with attribution to the original contributor.
Reimplement. The PR is essentially rejected, perhaps because I don’t like its design. But it was trying to solve some fundamental problem. So we see if we can find a better design, and if so, we implement it that way. We then close the PR thanking them and letting them know how we solved it.
Retire. This PR is obsolete; it may have been superseded by another PR (often from the same author, interestingly), or fixed by some other mechanism. Close it with a thank-you.
Reject. This may be a feature that does not pay its weight in tech debt, or one that is too niche to include in the core. Or it might be a design that does not fit my standards. Close the PR with a polite note to the sender.
Request changes. Last resort. This can lead to contributor starvation, so there’s almost never a good reason to do this, but I do use it occasionally.
There are a few other possible outcomes, such as re-routing the PR to the right project, banning the contributor, etc. But this is a pretty good starter list.
The PR decision tree has many outcomes
Notice that the first resort for almost every OSS maintainer, which is to send your PR back requesting changes, is the last resort in my vibe maintainer workflow. It ranks even lower than rejection, which itself is very serious, because rejection can lead to forking. And it’s cumulative. The more PRs you reject, the higher the chance of someone getting fed up with you.
Requesting changes is unfortunately the last resort because is quickly leads to contributor starvation; if you keep making them rebase it, the sheer velocity of the project can prevent their PR from landing for weeks, until you take steps to help it along. So you might as well help it right from the start. Don’t send it back for changes.
If there is good in the PR, then you should absorb that good into your code base, right there and then, rejecting anything you don’t like, and transforming the parts you’re absorbing. You can make bug fixes, architectural fixes, change the naming, make it a plugin, mix and match.
Most of the time, it’s Claude telling you, hey, this PR is mostly healthy but it’s missing a kidney, and you say, please add the kidney.
But sometimes, Claude looks at PR that adds a face-hugging alien to each worker, and it sizes it up, and says, “This PR is well-constructed, and the alien is robustly hugged to the agent’s face, with good test coverage and updates to all relevant work formulas.”
And you say, Claude, it’s a fucking face-hugging alien. And Claude says, oh right, that’s a very good point, we probably don’t want that, shall I close it with a polite note?
And that’s why the last 25% or so of pull requests need human review. At least, so far. It’s because there’s still a thing called taste that current models can’t be trusted with. Not yet.
Fix-merging: Keep the good parts, give contributor credit
PR Hygiene
I’ve instituted some lightweight hygiene rules for contributors. I don’t enforce them yet, and I’ve only announced them in a few places. I’m working to get them baked into the CONTRIBUTOR.md files and other important locations.
Here are some examples of hygiene rules for my repos:
Cross-project pollution: Beads must not know about Gas Town. Do not put Gas Town concepts into Beads. Gas Town doesn’t know about Gas City, and the Wasteland doesn’t know about any of them.
Use plugins whenever possible. Do not put stuff in core if there is a way to do it with integrations/extensions/plugins.
Don’t submit drafts. I’ll just close them.
One concern per PR. Split up large PRs.
Remove all unnecessary files. Minimalist. Make the fewest changes possible.
Rebase. Don’t use an old fork; rebase right before you submit the PR.
Right now, my policy is to fix all these things, and just complain about them when I close the PR. As the models get smarter, more of this can be handled automatically. But in general, I think people who abuse it might start getting banned, since they’re basically pushing their QA for their PRs (and associated costs for fixing them) onto me.
Summing Up
That’s a pretty good overview of the PR workflow. I know I said it was hard to write down. It was, dammit.
When you get down to the last 5–10% of the PRs, they’re usually hefty features, and you may need to spend a lot of time digging into them and figuring out whether you really want to pull them in. You may ask the agent a ton of questions about each PR, ask it to consider alternatives, or just tell it you don’t see the point. If the agent can’t justify the PR, then it’s probably not worth taking yet.
But that last 5% to 10% is the part that takes hours a day. There’s always a list of PRs that are just right on the edge and need my judgment call, though I wish it weren’t so. It is definitely getting easier now that Gas Town is becoming essentially feature-complete, due to the launch of Gas City. So I auto-close any large features and redirect the contributors to Gas City.
Summing it all up, being a vibe maintainer means trying to absorb the good parts from every PR, and there are various techniques for approaching it, depending on what’s wrong with the PR. It means only rejecting PRs with no alternative as a last resort, since each rejection increases the chances that someone’s going to fork you.
Most of all, it means helping contributors get to the finish line, with attribution, in whatever way you deem best for your projects and repos. Maximize community throughput, and you’ll have a happy and thriving community. In fact, I’m pleased to report that Beads crossed from 19.9k to 20k stars on GitHub as I was finishing this draft tonight.
My main success metric is whether my users are happy, and so far it’s looking pretty good!
Speaking of Gas City
Gas City went to alpha last week, and aims to be generally available later in April. What’s Gas City, you ask?
Gas City is a ground-up rewrite of Gas Town from first principles, using the MEOW stack (i.e., Beads and Dolt, the fundamental substrate of Gas Town.) It is almost a perfect proper superset of Gas Town’s features, and can be used as a drop-in replacement for Gas Town — except Gas City is also an orchestrator-builder.
Gas Town is a “pack” within Gas City, a fully declarative bundle of prompts and skills, no code at all — it still has the iconic original Mayor, Deacon, Dogs, Polecats, Witness, Refinery, and Crew, with their various hooks, inboxes, skills, prompts, and sandboxes. But there’s no dedicated code — unlike in the OG Gas Town, which is a large kitchen-sink binary.
Gas City was built by my buddies Julian Knutsen and Chris Sells, and as far as I can tell, it is exactly what I envisioned and outlined to them when they first suggested tackling it. They did a bang-up job. So good that Gas Town itself, the binary, is I think not long for this earth. Only its shape, the original characters, and all the individual features we loved about Gas Town remain — all available as LEGO-like pieces for creating your own agent orchestration shapes.
Beads, the original, powered fully by Dolt (Git for structured data), will live on as version 1.0. The MEOW stack from Gas Town, including formulas, molecules, hooks, the GUPP engine, and Nondeterministic Idempotence (NDI) are all implemented in Beads and Dolt. That means that all work is decomposed into durable, version-controlled, SQL-queryable orchestration steps.
That’s all stuff that your orchestrator doesn’t have, especially if you’re using something Claw-based…unless you’re also using Beads, or else you reimplemented the whole damn MEOW stack, including Dolt, which would just be incredibly foolish of you.
I think the MEOW stack and Dolt give both Gas Town and Gas City a gargantuan advantage over anyone using postgres and snapshots, or git-lfs, or really anything other than Dolt or Datomic for their agentic memory system. If you’re using Datomic, bravo. You’ve got a nice system with everything agents need for world-class forensics and mistake-recovery in production. I just prefer Dolt because it uses Git as its protocol. Both are great.
If you think of Gas Town as a Dark Factory (it is!), then Gas City is a Dark Factory Factory. I am putting my money where my mouth is, and diving in to start orchestrating my own game’s production systems using Gas City as my new SREs. I want to live this a bit before I evangelize it further.
Stay tuned for several upcoming announcements and new blog posts from me. I’ve been sitting on quite a backlog while I was trying to squeeze this one out. Unnnggghhh. I’ve got a post about dark factories coming up, including some insights into how to make a coding agent into the perfect dark factory worker — something I think coding agents will all need soon just to survive. But as a dark factory user, I’m biased, so who knows.
I’ve mentioned the Wasteland, and there’s more coming there. There has been a bunch of work behind the scenes, and it’s an important building block. Our two thousand Discord users are basically an army. We’re sitting on that army and it’s restless. I’m headed to Portland in the morning for a meeting of our generals, called by Chris Sells, and one of the topics for discussion is how best to put that army to use. Fun times.
I’ve also got upcoming announcements about Gas Town and Beads, both of which are headed to v1.0 very soon. And a blog post in the form of a totally untrue made-up fantasy-horror campfire story about a fake monster called the SaaS-Eater, whose wings shall beat a mighty Saas Hurricane, whose wind will de-SaaS companies and save them millions of storytale coins, which is all of course utter hogwash, merely an amusing fiction for scaring small children and investors and the general public. But I’m a horror fan, so we’ll see. Maybe an army could beat it. Or create it. Now that my Vibe Maintainer post is out, I can finally get to that blog backlog, and try my hand at some proper fiction.
See you next time. And to all of you who, one way or another, manage to read everything I write — thank you! When I hear those stories it really does help with the writer’s block. I hope you’re all having fun with agents and orchestrators. I’m absolutely having the time of my life. More posts coming soon!
Don’t forget to come visit our Discord at gastownhall.ai!
Pattern: The worse things get, the worse things get. Every time you try to intervene, it gets even worse.
Transformation: Map the effects & how they affect each other. Find the cycle with an even number of inhibitions. Go upstream & push one of the effects the opposite direction.
Okay, that’s an abstract brainful. But this is the most powerful tool I have for making big changes with small efforts, so it’s worth it. I promise. We’ll start with an example.
Yes, there are skills AIs haven’t mastered. But if your skill still appears to be the exclusive province of humans, that might mean the major AI companies do not yet consider it very important to master right away. Eventually it will rise to the top of the list.
Chinese firm CAS Space successfully reached orbit with the first launch of its Kinetica-2 launch vehicle Monday, with a prototype cargo spacecraft among the payloads.
Here’s the version of the orbital data center story you keep reading: Elon Musk says space will be the cheapest place to run AI within 36 months. LoneStar announces plans for a lunar data center. NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin Space-1 makes headlines. These are real announcements, and they all have one thing in common. Nobody talks about the source of electricity. While […]
SAN FRANCISCO – Voyager Technologies announced plans March 30 to help Icarus Robotics test a free-flying platform, called Joyride, on the International Space Station. Under the agreement, Voyager will handle payload integration, safety certification, coordination of a 2027 launch, on-orbit operations planning and execution for Joyride-1, a technology demonstration. Icarus Robotics was founded in Brooklyn, […]
Starcloud has raised $170 million to accelerate development of its next-generation spacecraft, reaching a $1.1 billion valuation as it awaits permission to deploy an 88,000-strong orbital data center network.
MILAN — The European Space Agency has launched the first two satellites of the Celeste in-orbit demonstration mission from New Zealand aboard a Rocket Lab Electron launcher on March 28. The two satellites were launched at 10:14 CET and separated from the launcher about an hour later into a quasi-polar low Earth orbit at 510 […]
Specification Searching in the Race between Education and Technology: Joseph Francis criticizes a canonical model of the American labor market, which has been used to advocate for more funding for education to reduce inequality. He shows how the model has routinely failed to predict the evolution of the college wage premium. Ad hoc econometric adjustments have been necessary to make the model fit the data, most notably in Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz’s well-known book. (The commented-on authors are hereby invited to reply in a future issue.)
Globalization and the China Shock: A Reassessment: David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson estimated the effect of imports of manufactured goods from China from 1990 to 2007 on employment, wages, and social welfare payments in the USA, concluding that imports from China reduced manufacturing employment and lowered wages of workers in non-manufacturing industries. Robert Kaestner argues that the authors’ focus only on Chinese imports, which are correlated with imports from other countries and likely other omitted variables, muddles the interpretation and usefulness of their results. Kaestner argues that their estimates do not measure the effect of Chinese imports on employment and wages holding all other things equal, and do not even measure the broader equilibrium effect of Chinese imports on outcomes that includes changes in imports from other countries. Overall, the evidence suggests that omitted variable bias is likely, which renders their estimates uninformative. (The commented-on authors are hereby invited to reply in a future issue.)
Learning on machine learning on the housing supply impact of land use reforms: An Urban Studies article reports relatively modest housing-stock gains from liberalization, based on a dataset of reforms identified via machine learning applied to newspaper coverage. Researchers at the American Enterprise Institute challenge the article’s methodology and conclusions, and the Urban Studies authors respond.
An Article in Science on Covid Origins Contains a Fundamental Error: An influential article claimed that Bayesian analysis of the molecular phylogeny of early SARS-CoV-2 cases indicated that the likelihood that two successful introductions to humans had occurred was greater than the likelihood that just one had occurred. After correcting a fundamental error in Bayesian reasoning, the results presented in that paper imply larger likelihood for a single introduction, reducing the plausibility of the wet-market zoonosis account of Covid’s origins. (The commented-on authors were invited to reply and the invitation remains open.)
A Critique of Synthetic Control Method Studies on Covid-19 Policy—Evidence from Sweden: Five studies employing the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) conclude that Sweden would have experienced lower mortality had it imposed a mandatory lockdown in early 2020. Dividing Sweden into four hypothetical countries based on winter holiday timing—a proxy for pre-lockdown viral seeding—Jonas Herby shows that the estimated lockdown effect varies dramatically across regions with identical policies, suggesting SCM captures variation in viral spread rather than a causal policy effect. Sweden’s low excess mortality in the end suggests that Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, was right all along. (The commented-on authors are hereby invited to reply in a future issue.)
Central Banking Research Is Increasingly Directed to Environment, Inequality, Gender, and Race: Radu Șimandan and Cristian Valeriu Păun use the Scopus database to show how environment, inequality, gender, and race have soared as topics in research outlets supposedly focused on money and banking. They discuss the hazards of subverting price stability and other traditional central bank mandates.
Power Analysis Is Essential—A Case Study in Rounded Shapes: A Journal of Consumer Research article reported an A/B test where simply rounding the corners of square buttons increased click-through rate by 55 percent, but provided no power analysis. Ron Kohavi and coauthors show that the original study was highly underpowered. They report that three high powered A/B replications, each over two thousand times larger, had estimated effects approximately two orders of magnitude smaller than initially claimed. (The commented-on authors are hereby invited to reply in a future issue.)
The Ideological Profile of France’s Economic Bestsellers: Alexis Sémanne inspects the 100 economics bestsellers for 2024, as listed by a leading French bookseller. He develops seven categories and evaluates each book for its ideological tendency. Quite few of the books offer a freedom-oriented perspective.
Green Vanities in Europe:John Constable reviews A Green Entrepreneurial State? Exploring the Pitfalls of Green Deals, edited by Magnus Henrekson, Christian Sandström, and Mikael Stenkula, a book which reveals more than the fact that green deals in Europe have been failures.
Plains in western Nebraska, divided by the North Platte River, appear in light shades of green and brown in a false-color satellite image.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A burned area on the plains of western Nebraska appears as a large tan area in a false-color satellite image.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Plains in western Nebraska, divided by the North Platte River, appear in light shades of green and brown in a false-color satellite image.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A burned area on the plains of western Nebraska appears as a large tan area in a false-color satellite image.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
February 28, 2026
March 29, 2026
Acquired with the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-21 satellite on February 28 and March 29, 2026, these false-color images (bands M11-I2-I1) show grasslands in western Nebraska before and after several wildland fires spread through the area. NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin.
On the afternoon of March 12, 2026, a wildland fire ignited in Morrill County, Nebraska. Within 12 hours, high winds had propelled flames approximately 70 miles (110 kilometers) east-southeast across the prairie. The Morrill fire would burn over 640,000 acres (260,000 hectares) within a week, becoming the largest wildfire in the state’s history.
This image (right) shows the extent of recently burned areas near the North Platte River in western Nebraska on March 29. By this time, authorities reported the Morrill fire was 100 percent contained. However, crews were working to contain two smaller blazes immediately to the northeast, the Ashby and Minor fires, which ignited early on March 26. For comparison, the left image was acquired on February 28, before the fires. Both are false-color to better distinguish the burned areas.
The fires occurred amid an active start for wildfires in the U.S. in 2026. The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reported that 15,436 fires had burned 1,510,973 acres nationwide as of March 27. That’s far higher than the 10-year average—9,195 fires burning 664,792 acres—for the same period.
The Great Plains have been particularly prone to fire in early 2026. Exceptionally dry fuels contributed to rapid fire growth and other unusual fire behavior for the time of year, according to the NIFC. Throughout the winter, much of the region saw warmer and windier-than-average conditions, as well as less than 50 percent of average precipitation over a 90-day period, leading to low soil moisture and grass fuels that were primed to burn.
The fires in western Nebraska affected large areas of ranch and pasture lands, destroyed homes, barns, and fences, and injured or killed livestock, according to news reports. The Morrill fire also burned much of the Crescent Lake National Wildlife Refuge in the Nebraska Sandhills, an area of grasslands, wetlands, and dunes used by migratory birds. Despite the fires, reports indicate that hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes are still making their annual migration through the Platte River valley.
When my sons were little, I chose a children's adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey for bedtime storytelling. Before we started, I explained two reasons why this old story was special.
For a start, the Odyssey was the first time a hero in Western culture was celebrated for smarts and cunning—and not just fighting and violence. It was as if Homer had grown up after creating the Iliad (in which 239 characters, identified by name, meet their death), and decided to tell a more civilized tale.
I applaud that. We all need role models who only fight as a last resort, not as a way of life. So we can still learn from Homer.
My second reason for liking the Odyssey was a more personal one. I explained to my sons that the hero Odysseus wasn’t seeking adventure—he just wanted to get home. All his efforts were directed at returning to his wife and child. So he was just like their dad, I added, who would always come home to them as soon as he could.
But Odysseus was like their dad in other respects too. That’s because he had jobs to do out in the world, and he took his responsibilities seriously. So he made sure to take care of business—and only then make the journey home. In the case of the Odyssey, that entire round trip lasted twenty years (much worse, I admit, than my typical commute).
I was reminded of all these things when I watched the new sci-fi blockbuster movie Project Hail Mary, based on Andy Weir’s 2021 bestselling novel.
Up betimes and found my weather-glass sunk again just to the same position which it was last night before I had any fire made in my chamber, which had made it rise in two hours time above half a degree. So to my office where all the morning and at the Glass-house, and after dinner by coach with Sir W. Pen I carried my wife and her woman to Westminster, they to visit Mrs. Ferrers and Clerke, we to the Duke, where we did our usual business, and afterwards to the Tangier Committee, where among other things we all of us sealed and signed the Contract for building the Mole with my Lord Tiviott, Sir J. Lawson, and Mr. Cholmeley. A thing I did with a very ill will, because a thing which I did not at all understand, nor any or few of the whole board. We did also read over the propositions for the Civill government and Law Merchant of the town, as they were agreed on this morning at the Glasshouse by Sir R. Ford and Sir W. Rider, who drew them, Mr. Povy and myself as a Committee appointed to prepare them, which were in substance but not in the manner of executing them independent wholly upon the Governor consenting to.
Thence to see my Lord Sandwich, who I found very merry and every day better and better. So to my wife, who waited my coming at my Lord’s lodgings, and took her up and by coach home, where no sooner come but to bed, finding myself just in the same condition I was lately by the extreme cold weather, my pores stopt and so my body all inflamed and itching. So keeping myself warm and provoking myself to a moderate sweat, and so somewhat better in the morning… [continued tomorrow. P.G.]
Because we should report the crime data when they improve too. Almost three months into the year, homicides have cratered compared to the same time period last year: 34 versus 12 (or maybe ten*?). In fact, nearly every crime category, especially robberies (muggings) and car-related crimes has plunged, with one exception–assaults with dangerous weapon.
That has increased by thirty-five percent during the same time period. Some of that might be different reporting by police (how they classify non-homicides has been a matter of controversy), but what is worth noting is that nearly the entire increase is due to assaults without guns, which might explain why homicides have remained low.
To return to the subject of homicides, if the decline we have seen over the last two years continues at the same pace, we would be on pace for around 80-85 murders. We have not hit peak murder season yet–that starts in April and continues through early September–but hopefully homicides will stay low.
Good job, D.C.
*Based on the dates of two of the homicides, it does not appear that they occurred this year, so it might be ten, not twelve.
“Without fuel they were nothing. They'd built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped.” — “The Road Warrior”
Here is a chart of U.S. gasoline prices:
$4/gallon gas isn’t historically that high. If you measure relative to typical American incomes, it’s considerably lower now than it was in the early 2010s. But that’s cold comfort to people who have to commute every day to work, and who just saw their weekly gas bill increase by 50%. Those people have every right to be upset about Donald Trump’s war in Iran.
You know who’s not feeling the heat in their daily commute? People who drive electric cars. To them, the war in Iran isn’t a source of daily pain at the pump, because they don’t even go to the pump. Instead, they just park their cars in their driveways and garages every night, and attach a little cable to the back of the car, and in the morning the car is charged and ready to go.
And this means they get to drive around much more cheaply than people who fill up their cars at the pump. Yes, the price of electricity is higher than it was before the pandemic. But even so, an analysis last December by Autoblog found that it cost EV drivers only 5 cents to drive each mile, compared to 12 cents for good old gasoline-powered cars. And that was before the Iran War spiked the price of gas!
For years, whenever I’d say that EVs are the wave of the future, I was met with an absolute torrent of nonsense. “What about range anxiety?”, I’d hear from people who were unaware that EV range has tripled over the last decade. “But it takes so long to charge up,” I’d hear from people who don’t realize that EVs charge up while you sleep. “We’re going to run out of minerals!”, I’d hear from people who had never actually looked up the numbers. And so on.
This sort of nonsense failed to sway Yours Truly, obviously, but it did a number on the United States as a whole. Despite Elon Musk being one of their biggest backers, the Trump administration went on a crusade against EVs, canceling government support for American battery factories and canceling subsidies for EVs. In a free market, the end of those subsidies wouldn’t have mattered, since Chinese batteries and EVs are much cheaper anyway, but U.S. tariffs are so high that they make Chinese batteries and cars extremely artificially expensive. On top of that, Musk’s political antics made people stop wanting to buy Teslas. Ford utterly bungled its own EV rollout. And American consumers became increasingly reluctant to buy EVs in general, probably motivated by the aforementioned blizzard of FUD1 and nonsense surrounding the technology.
Everyone who was paying attention realized that the U.S. was falling alarmingly behind in this crucial technology. Here’s what Hengrui Liu and Kelly Sims Gallagher wrote in January:
Ford and General Motors had recently announced US$19.5 billion and $6 billion in EV-related write-downs, respectively…The message from Detroit was unmistakable: The United States is pulling back from a transition that much of the world is accelerating…
In China, Europe and a growing number of emerging markets, including Vietnam and Indonesia, electric vehicles now make up a higher share of new passenger vehicle sales than in the United States...That means the U.S. pullback on EV production is…an industrial competitiveness problem, with direct implications for the future of U.S. automakers, suppliers and autoworkers. Slower EV production and slower adoption in the U.S. can keep prices higher, delay improvements in batteries and software, and increase the risk that the next generation of automotive value creation will happen elsewhere.
Now, don’t get me wrong: EV drivers in these countries are still going to be very put out by Trump’s war in Iran. Liquefied natural gas exports are being severely disrupted, both by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and by Iran’s strikes on Qatari refining infrastructure. That will send global electricity prices up, especially if you live in Asia, where most of the Gulf’s LNG goes. But of course, even that won’t make EVs a bad deal for customers in Asia and Europe, since oil prices have risen even more than LNG prices.
And the U.S. is in a completely different situation. Natural gas markets are fragmented, since — unlike oil — it’s costly to transport natural gas in liquid form. That means that the U.S., with its abundant shale gas, isn’t very affected by overseas wars. Natural gas prices are up only a little bit in the U.S., and even that is mostly due to the AI boom and a cold winter.
In other words, if you’re an American who drives an EV, the Iran War is hurting you a lot less right now.
Yes, at some point the war will end — probably when Trump backs down and makes some sort of “deal”. Crude oil supplies will resume, and gasoline prices will slowly follow. But if you drive a gas-powered car, you have to realize that this is just going to keep happening.
The price of oil, and thus the price of gas, is extremely vulnerable to supply shocks. Oil demand is very inelastic in the short run. If there’s a small disruption to supply, it’s very hard for lots of people to stop driving to work, or moving things by truck and ship and plane. Oil is also an indispensable input into plastics, which are necessary for much of the modern economy. So when there’s some sort of supply disruption — for example, the Strait of Hormuz getting shut down by the Iran war — a few people can switch away from oil, but most people just desperately offer to pay more and more. So the price shoots up very quickly.
This is why even though only 20% of global oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting much of that supply caused oil prices to almost double. As I wrote the other day, this isn’t apocalyptic, especially for America (which is a major oil producer). But it could send inflation creeping up and curb economic activity a bit. And for people who drive gasoline powered cars, it’s a major headache.
And it’s a headache that’s going to happen again, and again, and again. Here’s a comparison of oil and gasoline prices versus electricity prices in the U.S. since the turn of the century:
As you can see, oil and gasoline bounce around far more than electricity does. If you drive a gas-powered car, you are economically vulnerable to these periodic price shocks. If you drive an electric car, you are not vulnerable. It’s as simple as that.
In fact, the price shocks may get even worse over the coming decades. The Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the Houthis’ closure of the Red Sea, show how modern drone warfare makes it much easier for land powers to shut down commerce through key maritime choke points. The fact that oil is a global market means that any war, anywhere in the world, can shut down those choke points and send the price of gasoline skyrocketing everywhere in the world — including in America.
And Trump’s flailing efforts in Iran show how U.S. power is no longer a bulwark against such conflicts — both because the U.S. is more of a force for chaos than a force for order now, and because changes in military technology make the U.S. much less capable of stopping the cheap fleets of drones that can threaten global shipping. In 1991, you could count on Uncle Sam to use its military might to keep oil prices low; today, you can’t. “Just go to war in the Mideast and make oil prices go down” simply doesn’t work anymore.
The Iran War provides a vivid demonstration that the energy transition isn’t a climate issue — it’s an issue of national security. If there’s a silver lining to Trump’s stupid war, it’s that it’ll speed the world’s transition to solar power, wind power, and electric vehicles. Countries around the world are realizing how vulnerable their dependence on fossil fuels makes them. From Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, here’s a rundown of emergency measures various nations are being forced to take in response to the Iran war:
The Philippines declared a national energy emergency…Sri Lanka instituted a weekly public holiday for public officials and schools. It has also revived a QR code-based fuel rationing system that limits private cars to 25 liters of petrol per week…Pakistan closed schools for two weeks and cut free fuel allocations for government vehicles by 50%. It also hiked high-octane fuel prices by 60%…Bangladesh…shut down universities and colleges and implemented five-hour rolling blackouts for households to prioritize the garment export sector…South Korea launched a nationwide energy-saving campaign and released a record 22.46 million barrels of strategic oil reserves. It also temporarily lifted limits on burning coal…Thailand ordered civil servants to work from home, set office air conditioning to 26–27°C, and halted petroleum exports to preserve domestic stock…Japan…announced its largest-ever release of strategic oil reserves, approximately 45 days' worth, to stabilize local markets…Egypt ordered early closures for malls, restaurants, and government offices while switching off illuminated billboards…Myanmar introduced an "odd-even" rationing system where private vehicles can only purchase fuel on alternating days based on their license plate numbers…India has invoked emergency powers to divert liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) away from industrial users to prioritize household cooking needs…Slovenia became the first EU member to implement fuel rationing, limiting private drivers to 50 liters of petrol per week and businesses to 200 liters.
Unlike in previous episodes of crisis and disruption in fossil fuel markets, countries now have another option — build more solar, wind, and batteries. Auston Vernon has some good back-of-the-envelope estimates of how much countries can compensate for lost oil supply by going electric. And Todd Woody has a rundown of various ways that people and countries are either going electric, or considering going electric, as a result of the war. Buying an EV, of course, is the most obvious way to go electric:
As gasoline prices climb — hitting $6.81 a gallon at a nearby station on Wednesday — a flurry of drivers are making appointments to check out Ever’s lightly used EVs, many priced under $30,000…Ever is just one dealership, but signs of a shift are playing out across the world. In Southeast Asia, buyers are flocking to Chinese EV giant BYD Co.’s stores…
High fuel prices in Europe are also sparking a new wave of interest in EVs. In the UK, car site Autotrader recorded a surge in EV inquiries since the first attacks at the end of February…In Denmark, used EV searches on Bilbasen, a major online car marketplace, have jumped by as much as 80,000 a week…
American online searches for electric cars rose 20% in the first week of the war and dealers have reported more inquiries from buyers.
As Woody notes, this would not be the first time an oil shock led to a sustained shift toward vehicles that used less oil — the oil crises of 1973 and 1979 inaugurated the era of cheap fuel-efficient Japanese cars.
That story ended with Detroit rebounding in the late 90s and 2000s after oil prices went back down, by shifting to high-margin gas-guzzling SUVs. This episode might eventually end the same way — as the Iran war ends and oil demand falls from the global shift to EVs, oil prices will eventually fall again, and Detroit will go back to its same old tired strategy. Woody notes that “US carmakers are sticking to their decisions to scale back on EVs even as demand grows in the rest of the world.”
But this time won’t be like the 90s. Batteries have fallen so much in price that EVs are simply better than gasoline-powered cars now. Even if Fortress America uses tariffs and toxic political nonsense to keep itself wedded to obsolete internal combustion technology, its car companies will be cut off from global markets. The rest of the world does not have the luxury of forcing itself to use outmoded legacy tech, and the appetite for Detroit’s ancient gas-guzzlers will be very low.
Meanwhile, America’s stubborn refusal to adopt EVs will have other negative long-term consequences. Since the same tech used to make EVs is also used to make drones, robots, and electronics, the U.S. lack of EVs will crimp demand for these fundamental technologies and limit the scale that American component manufacturers can achieve. That will hobble and weaken American manufacturing even as it delivers the industrial future to China on a silver platter.
And as for American drivers, they will continue to live forever with intermittent spikes in gasoline prices — sometimes lasting for months, sometimes lasting for years — while paying triple for each mile and standing around at a gas station once a week. Perhaps, as they anxiously scan the latest news from the Middle East, they will comfort themselves with decades-old nonsense about “range anxiety”. Meanwhile, the increasingly affluent and secure middle classes of more pragmatic nations wake up in the morning to their fully charged EVs, cheerfully unconcerned with developments in the Strait of Hormuz.
Choosing to disbelieve in technological innovation has real consequences.
In Morning Memo and Where Things Stand today, we noted some news that broke as the weekend was beginning and, I think, got less attention than it should have. Here’s FCC Chair Brendan Carr playing the hits for a CPAC crowd that was, on other issues, divided:
“President Trump took on the fake news media. And President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR, defunded. Joy Reid, gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-eyes Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. Stephen Colbert is leaving, CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough, CNN is gonna have new ownership as well.”
To some extent this is pandering to the audience. Not all of this is the result of his work atop the FCC. On the other hand, he has found ways to exercise his power that go beyond what he can actually do in that job, such as through his gradual trickle of social media threats — some believable, some baseless. It’s hard to argue with his assessment of the results.
The U.S. is approaching a newly dangerous phase of its war against Iran. The administration is signaling that it will likely soon commence ground operations in Iran that will yet stop short of a full-scale invasion. Obviously, certainly to many TPM readers, this whole situation and war of choice are very bad things. But I want to point your attention to something specific.
The U.S. is talking variously about degrading Iranian missile, drone and nuclear capacities. But if you look closely at words and especially actions the real aim appears to be to force Iran to let the U.S. out of the war with something it can call a win. “Say we won and stop fucking with the Strait and we’re all set,” the administration is basically saying. The problem is that if this scenario is basically accurate the U.S. is escalating with nothing it can call a “win” that isn’t 100% at the discretion of Iran, which now seems even more under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps than before the war, to offer. So what if the U.S. does a limited ground operation and Iran says, Nope, we’re still not giving you your win. What then? Full-scale invasion? As I’ve written, military planners and heads of state who are smart really want goals they can at least realistically try to achieve entirely on their own terms. So we want this piece of territory. Or we want to break this specific thing. In that case, you don’t need the other side to agree to anything. You can achieve your goals by force.
Eventually, you’ll want to make peace. But you can leave that to the other guys to worry about. You have what you want. But if your goal is entirely at the other guy’s discretion, you’ve got a big problem. And that really seems like what the U.S. is getting into now.
Of course, you need to have thought all of this through in advance. And this is very much the result of getting into this conflict with no clear idea of what we were trying to accomplish. Or perhaps we went into this with the really foolish or extremely high-risk assumption that the enemy state would shatter quickly. That clearly hasn’t happened and now seems highly unlikely, especially since the U.S. has made it clear it wants out.
You evaluate a war not by how much each side blows up but by who emerges stronger, either in relative or absolute terms, when the war ends. Who achieved what? If Iran emerges from this conflict with some kind of effective control of the Strait of Hormuz, that will be a tremendous strategic victory. In fact, even surviving the full force of U.S. aerial bombardment for a month is a big deterrent accomplishment. Right now Iran holds the initiative in the whole conflict. And the president is escalating but without any goal or off-ramp that isn’t under Iran’s control to give or deny. Sometimes you simply have to admit you got it wrong and try to redefine goals that are workable. But the president appears to be on the brink of a severe escalation, banking on the hope that blowing up more things will take the initiative back from Iran when that seems highly unlikely.
Last year, just before the Fourth of July holiday, the US Space Force officially took ownership of a new operating system for the GPS navigation network, raising hopes that one of the military's most troubled space programs might finally bear fruit.
The GPS Next-Generation Operational Control System, or OCX, is designed for command and control of the military's constellation of more than 30 GPS satellites. It consists of software to handle new signals and jam-resistant capabilities of the latest generation of GPS satellites, GPS III, which started launching in 2018. The ground segment also includes two master control stations and upgrades to ground monitoring stations around the world, among other hardware elements.
RTX Corporation, formerly known as Raytheon, won a Pentagon contract in 2010 to develop and deliver the control system. The program was supposed to be complete in 2016 at a cost of $3.7 billion. Today, the official cost for the ground system for the GPS III satellites stands at $7.6 billion. RTX is developing an OCX augmentation projected to cost more than $400 million to support a new series of GPS IIIF satellites set to begin launching next year, bringing the total effort to $8 billion.
A thoughtful review of Apple’s system to alert users that the camera is on. It’s really well-designed, and important in a world where malware could surreptitiously start recording.
The reason it’s tempting to think that a dedicated camera indicator light is more secure than an on-display indicator is the fact that hardware is generally more secure than software, because it’s harder to tamper with. With hardware, a dedicated hardware indicator light can be connected to the camera hardware such that if the camera is accessed, the light must turn on, with no way for software running on the device, no matter its privileges, to change that. With an indicator light that is rendered on the display, it’s not foolish to worry that malicious software, with sufficient privileges, could draw over the pixels on the display where the camera indicator is rendered, disguising that the camera is in use.
If this were implemented simplistically, that concern would be completely valid. But Apple’s implementation of this is far from simplistic.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stands in the launch position at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station ahead of the launch of the Starlink 6-88 mission. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now
SpaceX’s fleet-leading Falcon 9 booster made a record-breaking 34th flight Monday on a mission to deploy a batch of 29 satellites for the company’s internet service.
Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida happened at 5:15 p.m. EDT (2115 UTC). Forecasters Sunday predicted a 70 percent chance of acceptable weather for launch with violations of the cumulus cloud, surface electric fields, thick cloud layers rules.
The Falcon 9 first stage booster for the mission set a new record for reusability launching for a 34th time. Booster 1076 entered the SpaceX fleet in 2021 and since then has launch missions including CRS-22, Crew-3, Turksat 5B, Crew-4, CRS-25, Eutelsat Hotbird 13G, SES O3B mPOWER-A, PSN Satria, Telkomsat Merah Putih 2, Galileo L13, Koreasat-6A Crew-6 and USSF-124, plus 22 batches of Starlink satellites.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1067 landed on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean.
Quick Answer — Which Free Online Passport Photo Maker Should You Use Right Now?
If you need a compliant US passport photo today, the most reliable option is a free online passport photo maker that processes your image against official government specifications — not just generic cropping templates. After testing five tools against the US State Department’s updated 2026 standards, PhotoGov ranks first for compliance accuracy and transparency. If you’re applying or renewing a US passport specifically, skip any tool that uses automated AI enhancements — since January 2026, the State Department rejects those photos automatically, with no grace period.
What’s Different in 2026 — and Why Your Go-To Photo Tool Could Now Let You Down
Passport photo services are all just variations on one another, most people say. Submit a selfie, crop it to 2×2 inches, download it, done. That logic worked fine in 2023. In 2026, it can kick your entire passport application to the curb before a human reviewer even lays eyes on it. Here’s what changed — and what that means before you choose a tool.
The US AI-Editing Ban: What “Zero Tolerance” Really Means
As of January 1, 2026, the US Department of State stopped accepting passport photos that have been digitally retouched. That includes background editing, skin smoothing, lighting adjustment, color filters, or any other modification performed by an automated app or AI solution. The State Department’s official instructions on travel.state.gov are clear: do not “alter your photo with computer software, phone applications or filters, or AI.” “No modification of the photo you upload is permitted.”
This isn’t a new rule — the principle has been established for a long time. What changed is enforcement. Automated systems are now able to detect non-compliant images before they are viewed by a human, and there is no appeal process at the initial processing stage. A flagged photo means your entire application is bounced back and you have to start all over again.
For users of online photo editors, this means a compliance pitfall that very few listicles point out: many popular “free” passport photo makers — including a handful of the highest-rated ones that come up in search results — automatically replace your photo background or normalize lighting as core features. Those very attributes, when applied to a US passport photo, are now grounds for denial.
There’s also an international push worth mentioning. The International Civil Aviation Organization has started transitioning member countries to the ISO/IEC 39794 biometric encoding standard, which requires capturing more detailed facial geometry. While the full transition is scheduled to be completed by 2030, photographs created using tools that haven’t adapted to the new dimensional accuracy requirements for biometric checks are already getting rejected at some application centers.
Why Rejection Rates Reached 300,000+ in 2024
More than 300,000 passport applications were declined by the US State Department in 2024 for having non-compliant photos — and that was before the even more stringent 2026 rules took effect. The most common reasons were bad lighting, head-to-frame ratio too big or too small, shadows appearing on the background or face, and the use of beauty-enhancement filters on photos, which some applicants hadn’t realized were turned on.
Numbers are likely to climb in 2026, not fall. With stricter enforcement and more applicants using phone-based photo tools, the margin for error is smaller. A picture that would have passed in 2023 could now be flagged by the State Department’s automated scanner.
The practical takeaway: tool selection is no longer just a convenience decision. It is a compliance decision. Below is how we ranked each tool against that standard — which ones met the bar, and which ones didn’t.
How We Tested These Products
Not all passport photo tools fail for the same reasons. Some crop inaccurately. Some perform background processing that runs afoul of US digital-alteration rules. Some are genuinely free to download, while others watermark your photo until you pay. To cut through the noise, we held every tool reviewed here to the same five-point scale.
Our 5-Point Compliance Rubric
Compliance with US Standards — The most critical factor for 2026. Does the software generate a photo that complies with the US State Department’s standards, including: 2×2 size, white or off-white background, head size of 1 to 1⅜ inches from chin to crown, neutral expression, no shadows, and no digital manipulation? Tools that perform automatic AI corrections on the background or face rank lower on this list, no matter how clean the results look, since the act of processing itself triggers rejection under current rules.
Background Processing Accuracy — A clean, white background is required for US passport photos. We checked whether each tool can deliver a clear, shadow-free background — and, more importantly, how it achieves that. Tools that replace the background via automated segmentation also introduce the AI-alteration risk described above. Tools that direct users to take their photo against a correct background before uploading, or that allow only manual cropping, carry lower compliance risk for US-based applications specifically.
Convenience and Processing Time — Time elapsed from photo upload until a ready-to-use downloadable file is available. This includes how clear the instructions are, how many steps are involved, and whether the tool tells you if your photo doesn’t meet requirements. A perfectly compliant tool that buries the download behind five confusing screens isn’t worth recommending.
Transparency — No Hidden Charges or Watermarks — “Free” means a lot of different things in this category. Some tools are completely free. Some let you preview for free but require payment to download a watermark-free file. We make the actual pricing model clear for every tool, because an app that isn’t truly free at download isn’t a free app.
Handling Difficult Cases — Infant and child passport photos are rejected nearly three times more often than adult photos, chiefly because of shadows, closed eyes, and visible hands. We also evaluated how each tool handles images taken in suboptimal lighting and whether it offers actionable guidance for edge cases — beyond a generic error message.
Tools are evaluated primarily on criteria 1 and 2, since a fast and easy tool that produces a rejectable photo is worse than a slower tool that passes. Tie-breakers are cost transparency and handling of difficult cases.
The Top 5 Free Online Passport Photo Makers in 2026
#1 — PhotoGov
For US passport applicants in 2026, PhotoGov is the safest all-around bet.
What sets it apart from most tools in this category is how it handles your image. Instead of applying automated AI edits, PhotoGov uses a human-assisted system that formats your photo to official government requirements. That distinction matters under the State Department’s current rules, which prohibit AI-edited photos for US passport submissions.
How it works: Take a selfie on your phone or computer → the system crops and formats the photo to US passport specifications → a compliance check is applied → you download the result. The free tier includes the basic digital photo output.
A few things worth noting before you get started:
The platform is ad-free and doesn’t watermark previews to force an upgrade
It supports multiple countries and document types, not just US passports
If first-time acceptance is your priority on a US application or renewal, this is as low-risk as it gets among the tools tested
Free tier
Yes
Human review
Yes
US compliance risk
Low
Best for
US passport and visa applications
#2 — Passport Photo Online
Passport Photo Online is the longest-standing name in this category — and a top choice for many applicants outside the US.
Upload a selfie and the platform automatically crops, resizes, and formats your photo. A human specialist checks the result, usually within a couple of minutes. The acceptance guarantee is meaningful: if your photo is rejected by the issuing agency, the service will re-edit it for free.
The catch for US applicants: The tool’s processing pipeline appears to have some tolerance for background modification, which is at odds with the State Department’s zero-alterations policy. For applications outside the US — UK, Canada, Schengen countries — this is more or less a non-issue. For a US passport specifically, confirm with the platform whether your processed output complies with current State Department guidance before submitting.
There are also limits to the free tier. Most users will hit a paywall before downloading a full-resolution file, so set your expectations accordingly.
Free tier
Freemium
Human review
Yes
US compliance risk
Medium
Best for
Non-US applications, users who want an acceptance guarantee
#3 — IDPhoto4You
Since 2009, IDPhoto4You has offered a genuinely free service — no paywall, no advertisements, no watermarks, and no account required.
The tradeoff is control. Because the tool has removed auto face-detection, you have to manually position the crop box over your face. That puts more responsibility on the user to get the head positioning right — which is one of the most common reasons photos get rejected.
What it does well:
Covers 73 countries and supports a wide range of document types
Clean UI with no upsell interruptions
No app download needed — works on any device
Where it falls short:
No background removal — you need to take the photo against a plain white or light background before uploading
No compliance check or feedback on whether your photo meets requirements
Results vary depending on how precisely you position the crop
A good choice for experienced users who know what they need and just want a resizing and formatting utility. More challenging for first-time applicants or anyone unfamiliar with passport photo rules.
Free tier
Yes — fully free
Human review
No
US compliance risk
Medium (user-dependent)
Best for
DIY-confident users, non-US documents
#4 — PassportPhotoWiz
PassportPhotoWiz takes a notably different approach to one of the bigger concerns in this space: privacy.
All photo processing is done in your browser. Your image is never sent to a third-party server, so you don’t have to worry about your biometric data being stored or processed elsewhere. For users concerned about where their face data goes, that’s a significant feature.
Practical strengths:
No sign-up required
Processing is instant with no waiting
Background removal included
Supports major document-issuing countries, including the US, UK, Canada, and Australia
Limits to know:
No human verification — compliance check is automated only
Country template coverage is narrower than some competitors
No acceptance guarantee
For US applicants, the background removal feature once again raises the question of whether automated editing conflicts with the State Department’s current photo rules. The tool’s on-device processing may reduce that concern, but there is no clear official guidance distinguishing on-device from server-side processing.
Free tier
Yes — fully free
Human review
No
US compliance risk
Low–Medium
Best for
Privacy-conscious users, fast digital submissions
#5 — Cutout.Pro Passport Photo Maker
Cutout.Pro is a broad creative platform with a passport photo maker among its many editing features. The background removal quality is genuinely impressive — one of the cleanest results in our testing — and the printable sheet (4×6, A4, multiple layout options) is convenient if you need physical copies.
There is also a suit-changer option that lets you swap in formal attire. It’s a fun feature, but flagged: a digitally altered piece of clothing is a potential compliance issue under US standards.
The bigger concern: Cutout.Pro is fundamentally an AI-driven platform. Its passport photo maker runs on the same automated image processing system as the rest of the platform. That is a significant compliance risk for US passport submissions under 2026 rules — the tool is not marketed as a government-compliance service and makes no claims about conforming to State Department requirements.
It works well for non-US applications, where the AI-editing ban doesn’t apply. Proceed with caution for US passports.
Free tier
Freemium
Human review
No
US compliance risk
High (for US submissions)
Best for
Non-US applications, users who need print layouts
Tool Comparison at a Glance
Tool
Free Tier
US Compliant
Human Review
Background Auto-Removed
Processing Time
Best For
PhotoGov
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
~30 sec
US passport, compliance priority
Passport Photo Online
⚠️ Freemium
⚠️ Verify first
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
~3 min
Non-US, acceptance guarantee
IDPhoto4You
✅ Yes
⚠️ Manual
❌ No
❌ No
Manual
DIY-confident users
PassportPhotoWiz
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
❌ No
✅ Yes
Instant
Privacy-conscious users
Cutout.Pro
⚠️ Freemium
❌ Risk
❌ No
✅ Yes
Instant
Non-US, print layouts
A couple of things this chart doesn’t capture, but that are worth noting:
“US Compliant” is conditional. No third-party tool can guarantee acceptance — that determination is always made by the issuing office. What the compliance column reflects here is whether the tool’s processing method aligns with current State Department guidance, particularly on digital modifications.
Processing time matters more than it sounds. If you’re renewing a passport under a deadline, a tool that requires manual adjustment or queues your photo for human review adds meaningful wait time. Factor that against your timeline.
Free doesn’t always mean free to download. IDPhoto4You and PassportPhotoWiz are entirely free from start to finish. PhotoGov provides a free digital file download on its basic plan. Passport Photo Online and Cutout.Pro offer free previews but generally require payment for a full-resolution, watermark-free file.
Red Flags — 3 Things to Watch for When Choosing Any Tool
Most passport photo tools look legitimate at first glance. Clean UI, reassuring language about “compliance,” a prominent upload button. The problems usually surface after you’ve already submitted your application.
Here are three specific red flags to check before you commit to any tool.
1. The Tool Replaces Your Background Automatically — and Calls It a Feature
Background removal is sold as a convenience. For US passport applications in 2026, it’s a liability.
Digitally altered photos are not permitted — and that includes backgrounds. Tools that use image-segmentation technology to replace your background with white are applying precisely the type of digital manipulation the policy is designed to prevent.
What to look for instead: A tool that either instructs you to take your photo against a plain white background before uploading, or one that is transparent about how its background processing works and whether it aligns with US State Department policy. If a tool’s front page leads with “instant background removal” as its main feature, that’s a yellow flag for US submissions specifically.
2. The Preview Is Free — the Photo Isn’t
This is the most common bait-and-switch among passport photo tools.
You upload your photo, the tool processes it, and you’re shown a clean, compliant-looking result — and only then does a prompt appear asking you to pay for a full-resolution, watermark-free download. The “free” part of the tool is the preview, not the finished file.
How to check before you waste your time: Before uploading, read the tool’s pricing page. Look for language like “free preview,” “download from $X,” or “digital delivery with purchase.” If the pricing model isn’t clearly stated upfront, assume there’s a paywall at the end.
IDPhoto4You and PassportPhotoWiz are the only two fully free end-to-end options on this list — no watermark, no account, no payment. PhotoGov provides a free digital download at the standard tier. The others are effectively freemium.
3. The Tool Hasn’t Updated Its Specs for 2026
Passport photo requirements change. The US State Department has revised its digital submission requirements, the transition to ISO/IEC 39794 biometric encoding is underway, and national regulations — UK photo recency rules, Germany’s digital-only requirement — have all shifted in the past year.
A tool that was properly calibrated in 2023 may be producing out-of-spec photos today.
Signs a tool is out of date:
The “specifications” section shows old pixel dimensions or file size limits
There’s no mention of 2025–2026 regulatory updates anywhere on the site
The tool allows glasses in photos without flagging them — glasses are no longer permitted in US passport photos without a signed affidavit from a medical provider
When in doubt, cross-check any tool’s output specifications against the official requirements at travel.state.gov before you file.
FAQs
Is a free online passport photo maker acceptable for US applications in 2026?
Yes — with an important caveat. The tool you use should not perform any digital editing on your photo. That includes automated background replacement, lighting correction, skin smoothing, or any other in-app processing.
For online renewals specifically, the State Department’s automated photo checker reviews your submission before it ever reaches a human. A photo processed through a tool that applies AI enhancements is likely to be flagged at that stage, regardless of how clean it looks.
Best approach: Use a service that is transparent about how it processes your photos and that aligns with the latest State Department guidelines. PhotoGov is designed to meet this standard. IDPhoto4You and PassportPhotoWiz are also safe options, provided you take your photo against a proper white background before uploading.
Are AI-edited passport photos actually being rejected by the US State Department?
Yes. This is no longer a theoretical risk.
The State Department’s official guidance explicitly states that applicants should not edit their photo with “computer software, phone apps or filters, or artificial intelligence.” Beginning in January 2026, automated detection systems flag non-compliant images before a human reviewer sees them — and no grace period or appeals window is available at the initial processing stage.
A rejected photo means your entire application is sent back. You’ll need to submit a new compliant photo and reapply, which can set back your timeline by several weeks.
In practical terms, any service that performs automated image enhancement as part of its standard workflow — even enhancements you didn’t explicitly enable — poses a compliance risk for US submissions.
How do I take a compliant passport photo at home?
The source photo matters as much as the tool. A few essential basics:
Background: Plain white or off-white. No patterns, no shadows on the wall behind you. A white bedsheet or a blank wall in natural light works well.
Lighting: Bright, diffused light on your face. Avoid direct sunlight, which creates harsh shadows. Facing a window rather than sitting with your back to one is a reliable approach.
Expression: Neutral. Mouth closed, eyes open and looking directly at the camera. Do not smile.
Framing: Center your face in the frame. Your entire head should be visible — chin, both ears, and the top of your hair.
Camera settings: Turn off any beauty mode, portrait smoothing, or filter your phone applies automatically. These are enabled by default on many phones and can cause your photo to be rejected.
Once you have a clean source image, the tool’s job is formatting — not fixing. That distinction is the crux of the 2026 compliance challenge.
How is a digital passport photo different from a printed one?
A digital passport photo is a JPEG file that you submit electronically — used for online passport renewal, visa applications submitted through government portals, and similar digital submissions. The US State Department’s online renewal process, for example, requires a digital upload rather than a physical print.
A printed passport photo is a 2×2 inch photograph that you print and submit with a paper application. Most tools can produce both: a digital file for download and a printable sheet — usually containing multiple copies on a 4×6 inch sheet — that you can print at home or at a photo lab.
If you’re unsure which format your application requires, check the instructions for your application type at travel.state.gov.
Can I use the same photo for my passport and visa applications?
Usually yes — as long as the photo meets the requirements for both documents. US passport and US visa photos share the same basic requirements: 2×2 inches, white background, neutral expression, taken within the last 6 months.
However, some countries require visa photos with slightly different specifications — different dimensions, a different background color, or a different head-size ratio. If you’re applying for a visa from one of those countries, check their requirements directly rather than assuming your passport photo will work.
One additional caveat: the US State Department now uses more sophisticated duplicate-detection algorithms that can identify previously submitted photos. A fresh photo should be taken for each new application, whether for a passport or a visa.
Final Recommendation
The right tool depends on what you’re applying for — and how much compliance risk you’re willing to accept.
For most readers, that risk matters quite a bit. A rejected passport application doesn’t just mean the hassle of resubmitting. It consumes processing time you may not have, especially if travel is already booked. Given that more than 300,000 US applications were rejected for photo-related issues in 2024 — before the stricter 2026 rules took effect — treating tool selection as an afterthought is a gamble that rarely pays off.
For US passport and visa applications, the guidance is consistent: use a tool designed specifically for government-compliance standards that does not apply automated AI enhancements to your photo. Of all the tools tested, PhotoGov is the strongest option on both counts. It’s free at the core tier and transparent about its processing approach in a way that aligns with State Department guidance — something most tools in this category can’t say.
For non-US applications — UK, Canada, Schengen, and other countries where the AI-editing ban doesn’t apply — the calculus shifts. Passport Photo Online is a strong choice with a real acceptance guarantee. PassportPhotoWiz is ideal for privacy-conscious users. Cutout.Pro produces clean output if you need a formatted print sheet for a non-US document.
For users who simply need a free formatting utility and are confident they can take a technically sound source photo, IDPhoto4You remains the most straightforwardly free option — no account, no watermark, no upsell.
One final point worth stating clearly: no third-party tool can guarantee your photo will be accepted. That determination belongs to the issuing authority. What these tools can do — if chosen carefully — is give you a photo that gives the compliance checker nothing to reject.
That’s the real objective. Start with a clean photo, use the right tool, and let the result speak for itself.
For official US passport photo requirements, refer directly to the State Department’s guidance attravel.state.gov.
This matters for the AI question, and the book leaves it unfinished. If the breakthroughs of the past required social conditions, not just cognitive capacity, then what does it mean when the next breakthroughs are produced by systems that have no social conditions at all? A neural net does not need a university chair or financial independence from the church. It does not need to reorganize its commitments. It does not, in any recognizable sense, have commitments. The machine that replaces the marginalist is not a better marginalist. It is a different kind of thing entirely.
Mining rarely changes in neat, report-friendly increments. It changes in shifts. A bench advances while a grader “just fixes that corner,” a stockpile grows unevenly because one side is easier to dump on today, a haul road is nudged outward because the old line is suddenly too tight for the current traffic pattern. By the time the office map is updated, the site has already moved again—sometimes quietly, sometimes aggressively.
That is why gnss devices matter on mining operations: not as trophies of technology, but as tools that keep measurement close to reality. The goal isn’t to make a beautiful model. The goal is to stop planning and arguing from last week’s terrain.
Three Daily Questions, Repeated Until the Mine Stops Moving
Most measurement work in mining—no matter how it’s packaged—answers the same three questions:
How much moved? Volumes for stockpiles, cut/fill, dumps, and material movement.
Where did it move? Progress: bench lines, crest/toe positions, road alignments, drill patterns, as-built surfaces.
Did it move safely? Exclusion zones, stand-off distances, berm compliance, traffic separation, temporary keep-out areas.
If those answers are consistent, decisions keep pace. If they aren’t, you get familiar conversations: production says one thing, survey says another, and everyone blames “the model” as if it were a single person with opinions.
Start With One Boring Agreement: What Reference Are We Using?
Before you talk about workflows, settle the reference story. It’s not glamorous, but it’s where avoidable errors begin.
Coordinate reference and vertical datum: pick one, document it, publish it.
Control: decide what points are trusted, how they’re protected, and how they’re checked.
Corrections: choose a method that works where you actually operate, not where a coverage map looks optimistic.
Mining sites chew up control points. They also change access. That’s normal. The mistake is letting reference discipline drift, because then you can’t tell whether your “change” is real change or a shifting coordinate setup.
Choose Tools Like an Operator, Not Like a Catalog
Mining measurement is a toolkit job. Each method is good at something and annoying at something else. The best workflows accept that and combine methods intentionally.
Rovers for Edges That Matter
When a line has consequences—crest and toe, berm alignment, drainage channels, road edges, safety boundaries—you want deliberate, traceable capture. A rover is slower, but it’s controllable. It also encourages a useful habit: thinking about breaklines instead of only surfaces.
A good practical rule: walk the geometry that changes decisions. Don’t rely on a surface to “imply” the edge of a bench if that edge determines stand-off.
Vehicle-Mounted Capture for Long Corridors
Roads, ramps, and long linear assets change often and are expensive to walk frequently. Mobile capture can keep you current—if you enforce quality control. Without checks, it becomes a firehose of points that look precise and behave inconsistently.
The difference is not the sensor. It’s whether you have a simple routine: known-point check, consistent speed assumptions, and filtering rules that don’t change every time someone processes the file.
Drone Surfaces for Coverage and Volumes
For stockpiles, dumps, and broad surface updates, drone mapping is often the fastest way to get density and coverage. It’s also easy to produce output that is visually convincing and quietly offset if reference and QA are sloppy.
Here, the workflow discipline is non-negotiable: repeatable ground reference, repeatable flight planning, repeatable processing settings. The mine doesn’t need new “art” every week; it needs comparable surfaces.
The Hybrid That Saves Arguments
A surface without reliable edges can be politely misleading. A set of edges without a surface can be incomplete. The productive compromise is simple: use drones for surfaces, rovers for edges. It’s not ideology; it’s a way to keep models from smoothing away the very lines people care about.
Volumes: Most Disputes Are Boundary Disputes
Volume disagreements are rarely caused by one bad measurement. They’re caused by inconsistent definitions.
If the boundary polygon changes, the volume changes—sometimes more than the pile did. If filtering choices change, the volume changes. If the “base surface” assumption changes, the volume changes. People then argue about the receiver, because arguing about boundaries sounds less technical and therefore more uncomfortable.
A defensible volume workflow keeps a few things fixed:
Versioned boundaries: treat stockpile and dump polygons like controlled assets.
Consistent capture logic: same method, similar density, same reference approach.
Simple cross-checks: spot checks on known points, repeat a small test area, compare weekly deltas for sanity.
This doesn’t create perfect truth. It creates consistent truth—good enough for trend decisions and clear enough to investigate when something looks wrong.
Progress: Make It Useful to People Who Don’t Love GIS
Progress tracking fails when it becomes a file dump. Most supervisors don’t need a giant surface; they need clarity: “Where are we compared to plan, and what should move next?”
A better progress package is lighter:
current surface for context,
crest/toe lines and key road edges,
a small set of annotated deltas (“bench advanced here,” “ramp shifted here”),
and a short list of field actions (“rebuild berm along this segment,” “update signage here,” “adjust drill pattern boundary”)
This is where survey becomes operational, not archival. You’re giving crews a narrative they can act on, not a dataset they have to interpret.
Safety Zones: Keep Them Current or They Become Fiction
Safety buffers are easy to draw and hard to maintain, because the site keeps changing. Exclusion zones near active faces, stand-off distances around unstable ground, separation zones for light vehicles versus haulage—these aren’t “set once” layers. They are living boundaries.
A useful safety-zone workflow is:
easy to update,
easy to distribute,
hard to misread,
and fast enough that it doesn’t lag a week behind operations.
If safety layers update only after a long processing cycle, they become historical documents—interesting, but not protective.
The Part Everyone Postpones: Data Governance
Mining sites often have multiple data producers: survey, contractors, drone teams, engineers. Without basic governance, you end up with two authoritative maps that disagree—both “correct” inside their own rules.
You don’t need a bureaucracy. You need a baseline:
one reference standard (horizontal + vertical),
one official repository for control and transformations,
a naming convention that prevents “final_v7_reallyfinal,”
Day 4: pilot one stockpile and one active area; record what breaks.
Day 5: QA the pilot (known points, boundary versioning, export tests).
Days 6–7: write the short field and office checklists—short enough that crews will actually follow them.
If the checklist doesn’t fit on one page, it won’t get used when the mine is busy.
Keep Measurement Close to Reality
Mining decisions are time-sensitive. When your measurements lag, planning drifts, and safety layers become outdated stories about yesterday’s ground. The point of positioning workflows isn’t to create perfect models; it’s to keep operational truth current.
Measure volumes consistently, track progress in a way people can act on, and treat safety zones as living boundaries. Do those three well, and the site stops “surprising” you on paper—because the paper finally keeps up with the ground.
I moved to Orange County from North Hollywood about four years ago.
I had been diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer and relocating here was the only way my insurance would work with City of Hope, a hospital I wanted to get into. It was an easy decision. My fiancée had spent a lot of her life here and her parents still lived in Ladera Ranch. So now we live in Ladera Ranch.
Before the move, I was a bit nervous about life down here. I had very low expectations. My fiancée and her parents were great, but I also knew that Orange County had … a reputation.
It could have been L.A. snobbery driving that rep, but the first time I set foot in Huntington Beach, (I’m a comedian and used to work a gig in Huntington) a dude at the bar told me, “Huntington Beach used to be the white supremacist capital of Southern California.” It was an odd answer to, “Do they validate parking here?” and after he said it, he looked dejected, very much upset by the used to. He was genuinely down that Huntington Beach seemed to have lost that title. With that, I’m assuming, he sauntered off to the beach at night to sing David Allen Coe and Lee Greenwood songs under his breath.
On our second day living here, I drove to the gym. It was only a 15-minute trip, but my heart sank every time I passed a “Blue Lives Matter” or “Let’s Go Brandon” decal on cars.
In many ways, this fucking place makes the town from Footloose look like the town from Footloose had drag shows after town hall meetings. It was instant regret.
I found myself saying, “Oh, fuck off” aloud when I gassed up and saw that some choad put a sticker of Joe Biden next to the gas prices with an “I did that!” word bubble. I’m stunned I didn’t see more “I don’t eat at Chick-Fil-A cause I like the food” T-shirts.
But then …
I arrived at the gym and parked next to a beat-up old truck. I was ready to see a, “Here are my Top 5 racial slurs” sticker affixed to the bumper, but instead the one sticker read, “Veterans for Biden.” Holy shit! I looked again. And again. Rubbed my eyes. I didn’t imagine it. It was real. Maybe this place ain’t all half bad. I almost waited for whoever drove that truck to be done with their workout so I could hug them.
The more I got to know my area of Orange County, the more I noticed (like most places) the cool people well outnumbered the shitty ones. I started to ignore all the pro-Trump shit I saw and, since the election, I’ve seen a whole lot less pro-Trump material. Is it possible some people are realizing they got conned? Hmm.
The only pro-Trump rally I’ve ever seen in Ladera was the Trump merch kiosk on Antonio. It boasted roughly the same turnout as John Turturro’s character’s funeral in Miller’s Crossing.
Okay, the other pro-Trump rally I’ve seen is when the check-out line at Stater Brothers grows more than five people long. My fiancée and I even went to a Ladera Ranch Pride gathering at a park near our apartment to show support, and it was wonderful to see how many people were there. Sure, there was a small handful of chumps walking around like the Mississippi Burning villains trying to start shit, but they were rightfully ignored, and soon took off.
The party went on.
My biggest gripe about Orange County has much less to do with the MAGA and much more to do with the sad fact that there are only, like, two places worth going to for pizza. Oh, and those damn Stater Brothers commercials, which look as if they were filmed using the Heaven’s Gate cult a week before they got ready for the comet.
I’m happy I live here now. I have no idea if Orange County could ever go blue, but I love that even if it stays purple (despite Trump’s best efforts to melt this nation), my fiancée and I are here to push back against it. We’ve found plenty of friends willing to do the same.
It feels like victory in a time when progressives need as many as they can get.
The news has come at us so fast and furiously in 2026 that I’ve hated to take a night off because the doubling-up of news just makes the next night harder. But it hit me today that the last image I had queued up to post for a night off was one of my friend Peter Ralston’s photos, perfect for February because it was titled “Almost March.”
We’re now at March 29 and I have yet to use it.
It’s definitely time for a night off.
Another of Peter’s photos perfectly captures the spring, especially a spring you just know is going to be full of hard work. It’s called “March” and I’m posting it just under the wire. It’s one of my favorites of his.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
[Photo, “March,” by Peter Ralston]
—
Notes:
You can find Peter at his gallery in Rockport, Maine, or at www.ralstongallery.com.
You walk in without thinking much of it, but something settles almost immediately. You slow down, you stay longer than planned, and everything just seems to flow.
Then there are places that do the opposite. Nothing is obviously wrong, but you feel slightly out of place. You move quicker, you notice less, and before long, you are ready to leave.
In both cases, the difference rarely comes down to one obvious factor. It is usually a collection of small details working in the background, shaping how the space feels without drawing attention to themselves.
First impressions happen faster than we think
Most people form an opinion of a place within seconds.
It is not a conscious decision. It happens before we have taken in the layout or looked closely at anything. The brain is already picking up on signals, deciding whether a space feels comfortable or not.
These early impressions tend to stick. Once we feel at ease, we are more open to staying. If something feels off, even slightly, it is difficult to shake that feeling.
Lighting sets the pace
Lighting plays a big role in how a space is experienced, even if it is rarely noticed directly.
Soft, warmer lighting tends to create a slower, more relaxed environment. It encourages people to settle in and take their time. This is why restaurants and cafés often lean toward this kind of lighting. It supports a longer, more comfortable visit.
Brighter, harsher lighting has a different effect. It can make a space feel more functional, but also more rushed. People tend to move through more quickly, even if they do not realise why.
Layout influences movement
The way a space is arranged affects how people move through it.
Open, well-spaced layouts feel easier to navigate. There is less friction, and people are more likely to explore without feeling guided or restricted.
When a space feels crowded or slightly disjointed, movement becomes more deliberate. People focus on getting from one point to another rather than taking their time.
These differences may seem small, but they change how long someone stays and how they interact with the environment.
Sound shapes the mood more than we realise
Sound is one of the least discussed elements of a space, yet it has a strong influence on how we experience it.
It is not just about volume. It is about the overall feel. The pace of the audio, the tone, and how it blends with everything else happening in the room.
In dining environments, for example, carefully chosen music for restaurants can help create a sense of comfort without becoming the focus. When it fits naturally, it supports conversation and helps people settle into the experience.
When it does not fit, it tends to stand out in a way that feels distracting, even if people cannot explain why.
Small discomforts add up
Physical comfort is another factor that often goes unnoticed until it is missing.
Something as simple as seating, spacing, or temperature can influence how long someone is willing to stay. If a chair is slightly uncomfortable or the room feels too warm, it can quietly affect the experience.
Individually, these details may seem minor. Together, they can shift the overall feeling of a place.
Consistency makes a space feel intentional
The spaces that tend to feel the best are usually the ones where everything works together.
Nothing feels out of place. The lighting, layout, and overall atmosphere all align in a way that feels natural. You are not thinking about any one element. You are just comfortable being there.
This sense of consistency is what makes a space feel intentional rather than accidental.
Why these details matter more than we think
Most people do not walk into a space analysing its design. They are not thinking about lighting levels or sound choices in a conscious way.
But these elements still shape the experience.
They influence how long we stay, how we feel while we are there, and whether we want to come back. Over time, those small moments build into lasting impressions.
The spaces we return to
When you think about the places you return to again and again, it is rarely just about what they offer.
It is how they feel.
They are easy to be in. Nothing distracts from the experience. You can settle in without thinking about it.
And more often than not, that feeling is created by small, overlooked details working quietly in the background, doing far more than we give them credit for.
3. Profile of Hussein Aboubakr. Good piece on one of today’s best thinkers and writers. Link to Twitter and Substack. Unlike many writers on these topics, it is not about your opinion of Israel, rather each piece is interesting and substantive. Try his essay on Mahfouz.
5. “China is cracking down on families who opt to bury their dead in empty high-rise properties — known as “bone ash apartments” — rather than pay skyrocketing costs for cemetery plots.” (FT)
Long before a lab leak/pangolin connoisseur/over-eager chiropterologist made mRNA vaccines famous, Jake Becraft and Tasuku Kitada were exploring ways in which mRNA technology could be applied to trea…
Do you remember the “Axis of Evil”? In 2002 George W. Bush introduced this phrase as the opening salvo in his campaign to build support for military action against Iraq and possibly Iran and North Korea — regimes that, in fact, had nothing to do with 9/11. Those were the days when the US was still a nation in which presidents believed that they needed to make a case for war, even if that case was fraudulent.
I say fraudulent both because the supposed case for invading Iraq, WMDs, was fake and because Bush’s claim that those countries were members of a united front was a bizarre misrepresentation: all three regimes were indeed evil, but Iraq and Iran were enemies rather than allies, while both had little interaction with North Korea.
Today, however, there really is a coalition of regimes and political movements that one can justifiably call an axis of evil — a coalition that is bound together by a shared hatred for democracy and freedom. Call it the Axis of Autocracy. The most important players in that axis are Vladimir Putin; Viktor Orbán in Hungary; right-wing European political movements like Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD; and, of course, the Trump administration. And unlike Bush’s imaginary grouping, the Axis of Autocracy is a true alliance.
Allies, after all, help each other in times of need. And that’s what Trump is doing for Viktor Orbán. Despite Orbánist control of the Hungarian media and extensive electoral rigging, Fidesz, Orbán’s party, is at serious risk of losing power in the next election. So Trump is rushing to its aid with extravagant statements of support, as you can see in the Truth Social post above. Beyond that, JD Vance will be visiting Hungary, in effect to campaign for Fidesz, just a few days before the election.
The overt politicking on behalf of any foreign leader runs counter to a long tradition of American administrations generally staying out of other countries’ domestic politics.
Indeed. There would be deafening howls of outrage if a foreign government were similarly to insert itself into a U.S. election. But then Vance has also positioned himself as a strong defender of Germany’s AfD, which, as NBC says,
has included leaders who have embraced old Nazi slogans and minimized the atrocities of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.
Trump’s brazen allegiance to the Axis of Autocracy is now playing out – to America’s detriment – in his disastrous war against Iran. Russia, by all accounts, is supplying extensive aid to Iran, providing real-time targeting information about the locations of U.S. warships and aircraft. According to Ukraine, Russia took satellite photos of a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia just days before Iran struck the base, wounding multiple U.S. service members and destroying a crucial surveillance aircraft. Western intelligence sources indicate that Russia is supplying the Iranian regime with sophisticated drones.
Yet Trump continues to staunchly defend Putin and is becoming ever more explicit in his support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Have we ever before in this country seen a president side with a foreign regime that is actively putting the lives of American service people in danger? Has this happened in any country with a democratically elected head of state? It would be akin to LBJ and Nixon siding with the Chinese during the Vietnam War.
The betrayal is almost too deep to fathom.
So what motivates the slavish devotion of Trump and MAGA to Orbán, Putin and the AfD? I can make sense of Trump’s affinity with petrostate autocrats and tech broligarchs because they, after all, can shower him with private planes, millions for his vainglorious ballroom, and hundreds of millions of dollars of purchases of his crypto con.
But neither Orbán nor Putin have the unfettered deep pockets to bankroll Trump in the style to which he is accustomed. Nor can they give him any political capital with the average American voter. So it’s clear that the major source of affinity between MAGA, Fidesz and Putinism is something more raw and atavistic: a shared commitment to racism, ethnonationalism, and social illiberalism. Unlike the Europeans who chastise Trump for breaking norms and threatening allies with invasion, Trump is in his element in the company of swaggering, deceitful and power-hungry strongmen.
Indeed, autocracy itself is a shared value. Trump and those around him clearly admire systems in which the Leader — Trump’s capitalization in his Orbán post, not mine — faces no restraints and is protected from criticism, perhaps one in which critics have a tendency to die after falling out of windows.
And autocracy as a value in itself explains the flip side of the current U.S. government’s affinity for authoritarian regimes: Its loathing for democratic governments in Europe and, especially, its ever-more-open hostility to Ukraine.
All that being said, I personally remain amazed by Trump’s willingness to betray Americans on the battlefield by allying himself with Putin despite Russia’s aid to Iran. This is, after all, Trump’s war, and his personal political fate may depend on whether he can somehow extricate himself from the quagmire he got us into.
It’s just another proof of the Trumpian dictum: every time you think he can’t go any lower, he does.
Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox, a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here's how he describes it in the model card:
Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library. The model has absolutely no training inputs from after 1899 — the vocabulary and ideas are formed exclusively from nineteenth-century literature.
Mr. Chatterbox's training corpus was 28,035 books, with an estimated 2.93 billion input tokens after filtering. The model has roughly 340 million paramaters, roughly the same size as GPT-2-Medium. The difference is, of course, that unlike GPT-2, Mr. Chatterbox is trained entirely on historical data.
Given how hard it is to train a useful LLM without using vast amounts of scraped, unlicensed data I've been dreaming of a model like this for a couple of years now. What would a model trained on out-of-copyright text be like to chat with?
Thanks to Trip we can now find out for ourselves!
The model itself is tiny, at least by Large Language Model standards - just 2.05GB on disk. You can try it out using Trip's HuggingFace Spaces demo:
Honestly, it's pretty terrible. Talking with it feels more like chatting with a Markov chain than an LLM - the responses may have a delightfully Victorian flavor to them but it's hard to get a response that usefully answers a question.
The 2022 Chinchilla paper suggests a ratio of 20x the parameter count to training tokens. For a 340m model that would suggest around 7 billion tokens, more than twice the British Library corpus used here. The smallest Qwen 3.5 model is 600m parameters and that model family starts to get interesting at 2b - so my hunch is we would need 4x or more the training data to get something that starts to feel like a useful conversational partner.
But what a fun project!
Running it locally with LLM
I decided to see if I could run the model on my own machine using my LLM framework.
Trip trained the model using Andrej Karpathy's nanochat, so I cloned that project, pulled the model weights and told Claude to build a Python script to run the model. Once we had that working (which ended up needing some extra details from the Space demo source code) I had Claude read the LLM plugin tutorial and build the rest of the plugin.
When you are finished with the model you can delete the cached file using:
llm mrchatterbox delete-model
This is the first time I've had Claude Code build a full LLM model plugin from scratch and it worked really well. I expect I'll be using this method again in the future.
I continue to hope we can get a useful model from entirely public domain data. The fact that Trip was able to get this far using nanochat and 2.93 billion training tokens is a promising start.
Update 31st March 2026: I had missed this when I first published this piece but Trip has his own detailed writeup of the project which goes into much more detail about how he trained the model. Here's how the books were filtered for pre-training:
First, I downloaded the British Library dataset split of all 19th-century books. I filtered those down to books contemporaneous with the reign of Queen Victoria—which, unfortunately, cut out the novels of Jane Austen—and further filtered those down to a set of books with a optical character recognition (OCR) confidence of .65 or above, as listed in the metadata. This left me with 28,035 books, or roughly 2.93 billion tokes for pretraining data.
Getting it to behave like a conversational model was a lot harder. Trip started by trying to train on plays by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, but found they didn't provide enough pairs. Then he tried extracting dialogue pairs from the books themselves with poor results. The approach that worked was to have Claude Haiku and GPT-4o-mini generate synthetic conversation pairs for the supervised fine tuning, which solved the problem but sadly I think dilutes the "no training inputs from after 1899" claim from the original model card.
A month into the war, and now they’re talking about pointless ground action and/or war crimes.
TRANSCRIPT
Pete Hegseth believes in the lethality fairy, and that’s a very bad thing. Hi, Paul Krugman here.
Most people watching this probably don’t get the reference. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, a number of governments did what economic textbooks say is exactly the wrong thing. They slashed government spending in the face of mass unemployment. And they justified this in part by arguing that although, yeah, sure, if we slash spending and eliminate a bunch of jobs, that should be bad, could make things worse. never mind because it will improve confidence and that will lead to economic expansion. I, in an essay in 2010, called this believing in the “confidence fairy,” one of the coinages that seemed to stick.
And of course, the confidence fairy never arrived. Countries that created worse unemployment by engaging in austerity policies suffered worse unemployment. There was no rescue from improved confidence.
In this case, our Secretary of Defense, which is his legal title, although he calls himself the Secretary of War, continually argues that if only we get even more violent, if only we do even more damage, that this will somehow translate into success in Iran. He clearly relishes the thought of violence himself. He’s now holding prayer breakfasts, and in his prayer breakfast, he called upon the Lord to support us in “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
I think this is deeply un-American, but anyway, aside from the evilness — I don’t think there’s any other way to put it — of the world view, how is this supposed to work? If you look at the plans or ideas that are being bruited for using ground forces now, and that’s clearly very much sort the next step here, for using ground forces against Iran, well, yeah, you can seize Kharg Island, although hanging onto it could be very expensive, but then what?
You’ve cut off Iranian oil exports, we could do that anytime anyway, then what? You can, well, try to occupy some of Iran, but the relevant coastline is well over a thousand kilometers long. Missiles and drones can be fired from deep inside Iran. 10,000 soldiers, maybe, is not remotely enough to secure the Persian Gulf, let alone allow shipping to transit, let alone allow tankers to transit through the Strait of Hormuz. So this doesn’t make any sense, unless you somehow think that the sheer act of violence will shock and awe Iran into submission, which, if it was going to happen, would have happened already. Clearly not on the cards.
Hegseth is all, we are going to kill lots of people. Trump is vacillating. In his Truth Social post this morning, he started out by saying we are on the verge of successful negotiations, and we’ll get the Strait open soon because we’re having extremely good talks with the Iranians.
Other presidents have been accused of negotiating with themselves. Trump is negotiating with his imaginary friends. There’s no reason at all to believe that these talks are actually happening.
But he then pivots midway through the post, to saying, and if we don’t get this, then we’re going to start bombing civilian power plants and water supplies.
So give us what we want or we’ll commit a massive, massive war crime, which I hope is not going to happen. But even if it did, why would you think this would open up the Strait of Hormuz? So it’s this lust for violence with no actual coherent story about how that violence is going to produce results. It’s horrifying.
I really don’t know how this ends, except that it does feel as if this is a quagmire largely in the minds of top Trump officials, Trump himself and Hegseth, who having this utterly unshakable belief that hurting people will produce great results, respond to each failure of violence to produce results by getting even more destructive with no end game in sight.
It’s well known that grade inflation has “degraded” the informational content of grades at many colleges. At Harvard, two-thirds of all undergraduate grades are now A’s—up from about a quarter two decades ago. In response, a Harvard faculty committee has proposed capping A grades at 20 percent of each class (plus a cushion for small courses). That may give professors some cover to resist further inflation, but it doesn’t solve the real problem.
The real problem is not inflation per se. It’s that students are penalized for taking harder courses with stronger peers. A grade cap leaves that distortion intact—and can even amplify it. As Harvard economist Scott Kominers argues:
A grade cap systematically penalizes ambitious students for surrounding themselves with strong classmates. Perverse course-shopping incentives ensue as a result. A student who is prepared for an advanced course but concerned about landing in the bottom 80 percent may choose to drop down preemptively—seeking out a pond where they are a relatively bigger fish. As strong students move into lower-level courses, competition for A grades increases there while harder courses continue to shrink—reducing their A allocation further and driving more students away.
The underlying issue is informational. A grade tries to capture two things—student ability and course difficulty—with a single number. Gans and Kominers show that in general this is impossible: if some students take math and earn B’s while others take political science and earn A’s, there is no way, from grades alone, to tell whether the difference reflects ability or course difficulty.
There is, however, a solution in some cases. Clearly, if every student takes some math and political science courses, informative patterns can emerge. If math students tend to get B’s in math but A’s in political science, while political science students get A’s in their own field but C’s in math, you can begin to separate course difficulty from student ability.
Students don’t all overlap the same classes. But full overlap isn’t necessary—you just need a connected network. If Alice just takes math courses, Joe takes math and political science courses, and Bob just takes political science courses, then Alice and Bob can be compared through Joe. With enough of these links, the entire system can be stitched together. The more overlap, the more precise the estimates.
Valen Johnson proposed a practical method along these lines in 1997. Gans and Kominers embed the same intuition in a much more general framework, showing exactly what can and cannot be inferred, and under what conditions.
The great thing about achievement indexes based on relative comparisons is that they are robust to grade inflation and do not penalize students for taking hard classes or subjects. A political science student who chooses to take a tough math class instead of an easy-A intro to sociology course won’t be penalized because their low math grade will, in effect, by boosted by the difficulty of the course/quality of the students. That’s good for the student and also good for disciplines that have lost students over the years because they held the line on grade inflation.
One final point. Harvard’s cap proposal appears to have been developed with little engagement with researchers who have studied problems like these for decades in the mechanism and market design literature—people like Kominers, Gans, Budish, Roth, Maskin, and Sönmez, some of them at Harvard! Moreover, this isn’t a case of ignoring high-theory for practice. The high-theory of mechanism design has produced real-world systems including kidney exchanges, school choice mechanisms, physician-resident matching, even the assignment of students to courses at Harvard, as well as many other mechanisms. Mechanism design is practical.
Grade inflation is a mechanism design problem—and we know a lot about how to solve it, if we want to solve it.
"Democracy is in grave peril, worldwide. This is the message of two authoritative recent reports — one, from Sweden’s V-Dem, subtitled “Unraveling The Democratic Era?” and the other, from Freedom House in the US, subtitled “The Growing Shadow of Autocracy”. These make two fundamental points. The first is that what Stanford’s Larry Diamond has labelled a “democratic recession”, which began two decades ago, is beginning to look dangerously like a democratic depression. The other is that, in 2025, the Trump administration launched what turned out to be the swiftest decline in the health of any significant democracy in recent times.
The subtitle of the piece is “Evidence From Chinese and Swedish Twins.” Abstract:
Economists have long studied how parental behavior shapes within-family inequality, yet empirical findings remain mixed. Using twins data from China and Sweden, we examine the predominant mechanisms reported in the literature. Parents in both countries invest similarly during childhood. Inter vivos transfers, however, differ: Chinese parents reinforce income inequality, whereas Swedish parents distribute wealth equally; the reinforcing pattern reflects exchange motives. Bequests are divided equally in both countries. Parental education plays a key role: less educated parents reinforce income inequality, whereas more educated parents transfer wealth equally. Cross-country differences in parental education may thus help explain the mixed findings.
Cerulean blue meltwater flows through drainage channels on the Nivlisen Ice Shelf, Antarctica, in this image acquired on January 6, 2026, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Summer is a busy season at Schirmacher Oasis, a rocky, ice-free plateau in Queen Maud Land, East Antarctica. Located near the grounding line of Nivlisen Ice Shelfand about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the open waters of the Lazarev Sea, the “oasis” of land amid an otherwise continuous expanse of ice is home to dozens of small ice-covered freshwater lakes and two research stations.
It’s the season when all-white snow petrels are sometimes spotted soaring over the oasis, and fuzzy south polar skua and Wilson’s storm petrel chicks grow up in sheltered crevices on its cliffs and ridges. Under constant sunlight, the plateau’s freshwater lakes come to life, supporting cyanobacterial growth and teeming with microscopic tardigrades, rotifers, and nematodes. At times, groups of Adélie penguins toddle through the oasis and attempt to breed.
The summer months are also when temperatures creep just above freezing long enough for expansive networks of seasonal melt ponds and drainage channels on and within the surrounding ice to fill with bright blue meltwater that flows north onto and across the Nivlisen Ice Shelf. The satellite image above shows seasonal melt on January 6, 2026, during the peak of the 2026 melt season.
Lakes dot the rocky surface of Schirmacher Oasis in this image acquired on January 6, 2026, by the OLI on Landsat 9.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
The Nivlisen Ice Shelf is a floating tongue that forms as glacial ice flows off Antarctica and into the waters of the Lazarev Sea. The many blue ice areas found around the oasis are snow-free areas where old, compressed glacial ice with few air bubbles has been exposed by powerful katabatic winds and sublimation. This dense ice absorbs red wavelengths of light and reflects blue wavelengths, making it appear blue. Blue ice areas are rare in Antarctica, covering about 1 percent of the continent’s surface.
“The image captures the Nivlisen Ice Shelf during a phase of strong, system-wide hydrological connectivity,” said Geetha Priya Murugesan, a remote sensing scientist with the Centre for Incubation, Innovation, Research and Consultancy (CIIRC) and Jyothy Institute of Technology in Bengaluru, India. Such features aren’t always visible in optical satellite imagery, she added, noting that they are often frozen, buried under snow, or drained. “This image is notable because the ‘cerulean veins’ we see on the surface align with a deeper, persistent plumbing system that we monitor with radar.”
Surface drainage channels filled with meltwater flow across the Nivlisen Ice Shelf in this image acquired on January 6, 2026, by the OLI on Landsat 9.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Murugesan and colleagues have analyzed decades of satellite data and conducted several years of field research in the area, including in 2026. Their work shows that since 2000, the surface melting caused by seasonal melt ponds and channels on the ice shelf has grown in depth, area, and volume. The depth and volume of melt features grew by a factor of 1.5, while their surface area increased by a factor of 1.2.
Murugesan thinks that the visibility of the drainage network in images like these hints at a deeper vulnerability of the ice shelf. The drainage channels trace preexisting structural weaknesses, including crevasses, that act as “hydraulic pathways” that concentrate meltwater in vulnerable zones near the grounding line, where it can weaken the ice shelf, Murugesan said.
The researchers have also linked peak melting periods like this one to atmospheric rivers and foehn winds that enhance surface melting and help route meltwater through the drainage networks. The dark color—low albedo—of the many blue ice areas surrounding the oasis contributes to drainage events by making ice surfaces less reflective, warmer, and thus more prone to summer melting, Murugesan added.
While Murugesan and colleagues are currently conducting a detailed analysis of the 2026 melt season to determine how it compares to past years, she said it appears to be a “strong melt event consistent with elevated melt conditions.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.Story by Adam Voiland.
After Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics in 2023, she received hundreds of invitations and requests. She accepted just three.
One of them was advising the WNBA players union as the women prepared to negotiate a new labor deal with the league.
When Goldin replied via email to Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the players union, “I remember just reading it and screaming,” Jackson said. Goldin had one requirement: She refused to be paid.
This month, the two sides reached a collective bargaining agreement that gave Women’s National Basketball Association players a nearly 400% raise. Starting this season, players’ average salary will top $580,000.
It isn’t just the biggest pay increase in U.S. league history. It is, as far as Goldin is aware, the biggest increase any union anywhere has ever negotiated.
“It’s astounding,” the 79-year-old Harvard economist said.
Mike Bass, a spokesman who represents both the National Basketball Association and the WNBA, called the deal “transformational.”
…More recently, as the pay negotiations stretched on, Goldin said she stayed focused not on the countless separate points in the typical lengthy labor deal but on one central equation: the fraction of league revenue going to players’ salary and benefits.
Goldin’s calculations had a calming effect on the players, said Jackson, the union’s executive director.
Two sunlit spheres can be seen in today's Picture of the Week. While these orbs share similarities in their shape and in being illuminated by the same star, they are vastly different. The one farthest away from the camera, hiding behind the clouds, is our own Moon, the Earth's only natural satellite. The other object is the dome of a telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory, located in the outskirts of the Atacama Desert, in northern Chile.
The telescope is one of the three in the French project Exoplanets in Transits and their Atmospheres (ExTrA). ExTrA is focused on detecting Earth-sized worlds in the Milky Way. It relies on the transit method, where planets block a fraction of the light from the star they orbit when passing between it and Earth, just like a partial eclipse. ExTrA centres on worlds orbiting red dwarfs –– stars much smaller, colder and dimmer than the Sun. Because red dwarfs are small, planets crossing in front of them block more light, making them easier to find than planets orbiting regular stars.
Who knows, perhaps some of these planets may look as otherworldly as the landscape of this picture. “These places compel me every time to think about our position in the Universe, putting my life ‘in context’ so to say,” says the photographer, ESO astronomer Luca Sbordone. “It always brings me peace.”
File: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket stands at Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base ahead of the Starlink 17-31 mission on March 13, 2026. Image: SpaceX
SpaceX launched 119 payloads to a Sun-synchronous, low Earth orbit on a rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
Liftoff of the Transporter-16 mission from Space Launch Complex 4 East aboard a Falcon 9 rocket occurred at 4:02 a.m. PDT (7:02 a.m. EDT / 1102 UTC).
The Falcon 9 first stage booster for this mission was B1093 making its 12th flight. Previously it launched a pair of missions for the Space Development Agency and nine batches of Starlink satellites.
A little more than 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1093 landed on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ positioned in the Pacific Ocean. It was the 187th landing on this vessel and the 592nd booster landing for the company to date.
What’s onboard?
Like previous SpaceX’s rideshare missions, this flight carried dozens of customers, from companies to sovereign governments to academia.
Exolaunch, with 57 payloads, and Seops Space, with 19 were responsible for booking the majority of the customers.
“Exolaunch is enabling launch access for more than 25 commercial, institutional, and government customers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, France, Finland, Greece, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, and more on this mission,” Exolaunch said in a statement in February.
The payloads overseen by Seops Space are a combination of 14 CubeSats and five PocketQubes. The latter of which are from a company called Alba Orbital and are Earth observation satellites.
“The Seops Transporter-16 manifest represents a truly global cross-section of the small satellite community, with payloads originating from 13 countries, including Canada, France, Malaysia, Nepal, Norway, Romania, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam,” Seops said in a statement.
Other notable payloads include Varda Space’s sixth reentry satellite bus, designed for on-orbit manufacturing, and the so-called ‘cake topper,’ the Gravitas satellite from K2 Space.
The Gravitas satellite has a wingspan of 40 meters with its solar panels unfurled and weighs about two metric tons. It’s designed to produce 20 kW of electricity. It will test technologies that will be needed for power-hungry in-orbit data centers.
At K2 Space, we’re Building Bigger to deploy the largest satellites ever on orbit.
Matt Cooper, our Principal Mission Assurance Engineer, describes what it’s taken to get Gravitas on orbit. As our first free-flying satellite, it meant working through every step end-to-end, from… pic.twitter.com/pEJ1tOkdfj
The subtitle of the movie is Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, and here is the trailer.
Overall this film was better and smarter than I was expecting. Intelligent people were allowed to speak, and to present various sides of the issue. It was also interesting to see how various people one knows come across on the big screen.
It is easy enough to mock the final section of the movie, which calls for a participatory “civil rights” movement on AI, negotiations with China, and a big voice for trade unions in the decisions. What Dan Klein calls “the people’s romance.” The Straussian read there is correct, even though it probably was not intended by the moviemakers. In reality, for better or worse, the final decisions will continue to be made by the national security establishment.
On a weekend, there were five other people in the theater.
Market Design
