I recently started a new platform where I sell my books and courses, and in this website I needed to send account related emails to my users for things such as email address verification and password reset requests. The reasonable option that is often suggested is to use a paid email service such as Mailgun or SendGrid. Sending emails on your own is, according to the Internet, too difficult.
Because the prospect of adding yet another dependency on Big Tech is depressing, I decided to go against the general advice and roll my own email server. And sure, it wasn't trivial, but it wasn't all that hard either!
Are you interested in hosting your own email server, like me? In this article I'll tell you how to go from nothing to being able to send emails that are accepted by all the big email players. My main concern is sending, but I will also cover the simple solution that I'm using to receive emails and replies.
There’s a show, “sequencefest”, it’s run by Bantam Tools, it’s in their gallery in Peekskill, NY (135 N. Water Street, Peekskills, NY 10566 - to be precise), it features; James Merrill (who created the animation above), Nat Sarkissian, Nima Nabavi and Bre Pettis; you can probably buy shit, it opens on Friday the 13th(lucky!!) at 5:30pm, “Artists will be present the following day in the gallery on March 14” - and it runs until fuck knows when, because apparently we don’t put useful information like that on websites anymore; maybe I’m just old and people don’t care about end dates now, is that fashion? Is it open-ended? Is it a two day affair? Who knows, it remains a fricking mystery.
Sequencefest is an exhibition of animated works, bringing together four distinct voices in generative and motion-based art, exploring plotted movement, digital animation, and screen-based storytelling within a physical gallery environment.
Animations will be shown on screens throughout the space and will also be available for purchase. Select works will be offered as framed 18 x 24 pieces, with additional editions available in accessible card and mat formats.
Pretending to be page divider in the UI is this text “are you an artist who also makes plot-able sequences? email us at hello@bantamtools.com and show us your work for consideration for the next sequencefest show.”
Are you?
ARE YOU?!?
# BOX BREATHING
Box breathing is a simple, 16-second, four-step stress-relief technique—inhale (4s), hold (4s), exhale (4s), hold empty (4s)—used to calm the nervous system, reduce anxiety, and improve focus. By regulating breath into equal, rhythmic counts, it lowers blood pressure and activates the parasympathetic nervous system.
How to Practice Box Breathing:
Prepare: Sit upright in a comfortable chair, feet flat on the floor, and relax your shoulders.
Step 1 (Inhale): Inhale slowly through your nose to a count of four.
Step 2 (Hold): Hold your breath for a count of four.
Step 3 (Exhale): Exhale slowly through your mouth (or nose) for a count of four.
Step 4 (Hold): Hold the lungs empty for a count of four.
Repeat: Repeat the cycle for 3–5 minutes or until calm.
I also posted the end of Feb Patreon Q&A video, which has a nice bit about riso printing at the 5:51 mark.
As I’ve mentioned a few times before, that, in theory Module 1 of Drawing Machines 101 would be consumed all in one go - once the last couple of module 1 videos are done it’ll clock in at around 1h 30m - which, if you were sitting down for a class at college or Uni, would be a reasonable Something 101 introduction session.
So I imagine it’s still a little weird for people following along in real time, having a new short video popping up once every few days; but this’ll stop being an issue soon enough I guess once I publish the next two.
Which needs cleaning up a bit to turn it more of an obvious syllabus type thing, but that’s a time sink I don’t want to fall into yet.
# DIRECTORY
Now and then I’ll see someone posting the question “Where can I buy some pen plotter art?” - often over on reddit r/plotterart - and I assume half the time it’s someone doing research into how much to charge for art (not a bad idea tbh).
There’s normally a couple of replies.
Meanwhile over on Instagram there’s a few “Links in bio” - which is great when you land on an artist you like and they have some links and one of them is a shop - but not so great when you just want to go shopping.
IYKYK
‘Cause I also wanted to keep track of who has a YouTube channel, or a newsletter too, I figured I’d just very fucking slowly build a hand crafted directory.
Definitely not a “best of”, the order is randomised (something I’m going to have to deal with when I hit enough entries for there to be pagination), and I’m focusing first on artists with shops, but it’s a start.
It’s also a very low priority, but it’s nice to have something I can tinker with when I have 30mins spare here or there. Going off to track down another artist with a shop and adding them is a fun way to spend an evening.
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# THE END
I’m going to be honest with you; there are times I just want to grab my laptop & a reasonable sized drawing machine, head off into a workshop in the woods and just make art.
No videos, no “content” for social media, no websites, no directories, no work - just endless days, weeks, months of going through my sketchbooks and notes and making art to my heart’s content.
But, I think the world is a better place for these things in it; the video course, tutorials, books, blog posts, and so on. Every time I see someone creating a book, preparing something for a show, teaching a workshop, helping other people, I think about how they’re making a decision to set aside time they could be making art to do that instead.
What I didn’t realise is what a blessing decided to post out monthly art on Patreon was (this isn’t a shill btw, although it may sound like that). My current aim is to keep bashing through the tutorial videos until they’re all done, I’m looking down the barrel of months and months of work.
I thought that the Patreon was another thing for other people, but it turns out making the Riso prints last month, the asemic writing the month before, and the POSCA dots before that have been a lifeline each month, a short two-three week project that I have to do.
I expect it’s the same for people doing daily (and dailyish) work. It can’t be perfect, and you have to move on, but oh boy do you have fun crunching through ideas.
Having the Patreon has forced me to set aside time from making the videos to make art, and without it I’d probably lose the plot 😁
This month, fwiw, is going to be something like this, but different, but the same…
I’m building up a small backlog of links about what other people are doing and making, so I may make things easy on myself in two weeks time, and do a link-dump newsletter - just as a change of pace.
Next newsletter will be; Thursday 19th March, I’ll see you there.
President Donald J. Trump is behaving more and more erratically these days, seeming to think he can dictate to other countries.
This morning, Trump told Barak Ravid and Zachary Basu of Axios that he needs to be involved personally in choosing the next leader of Iran. Speaking of Iranian politicians who are preparing to announce a new leader, Trump told the reporters: “They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodríguez] in Venezuela.”
Foreign affairs journalist Olga Nesterova of ONEST reported that in a call with Israel’s Channel 12 this morning, Trump called Israel’s president Isaac Herzog “a disgrace” and demanded Herzog pardon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “today” because Trump doesn’t want Netanyahu distracted from the war with Iran. Trump said Herzog had “promised” him “five times” to pardon the prime minister, and he appeared to threaten Herzog when he added: “Tell him I’m exposing him.”
In a statement, Herzog noted that “Israel is a sovereign state governed by the rule of law” and said the pardon is being dealt with by the Justice Ministry, as the law requires. After its ruling, Hertzog’s office said, he will examine the issue according to the law and “without any influence from external or internal pressures of any kind.”
In a conversation today with Dasha Burns of Politico, Trump insisted that “[p]eople are loving what’s happening” and said: “Cuba’s going to fall, too.”
The most astonishing example of Trump’s international aggression came from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Although Trump initially said he attacked Iran to keep it from acquiring nuclear weapons, Leavitt yesterday explained that Trump joined Israel in a military attack on Iran because Trump had “a feeling based on fact” that Iran was going to attack the United States.
Trump’s assertion of power globally contrasts with increasing setbacks at home.
Since the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as unconstitutional, the administration has tried to slow walk repaying the $130 billion the government collected under those tariffs. But yesterday, Judge Richard Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that companies that paid the tariffs are entitled to a refund.
After the Supreme Court’s decision, Trump immediately imposed new tariffs of 15% on all global trade, using as justification Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. As Lindsay Whitehurst and Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press noted, this is awkward because the Department of Justice under Trump argued in court last year that Trump had to use the IEEPA because Section 122 did “not have any obvious application” in fighting trade deficits.
Today the Democratic attorneys general of more than twenty states filed a lawsuit to stop the new tariffs imposed under Section 122. “Once again, President Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution to effectively raise taxes on consumers and small businesses,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement Thursday.
The Department of Justice has also quietly backed away from Trump’s demand that it investigate whether former president Joe Biden broke the law by using an autopen to sign presidential documents. Yesterday, Michael S. Schmidt, Devlin Barrett, and Alan Feuer reported in the New York Times that prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., “were never quite clear what crime, if any, had been committed by the Biden administration’s use of the autopen.”
They concluded there was no credible case to make against Biden. The journalists noted that “the failed inquiry has only added to the sense among many federal investigators that Mr. Trump has become increasingly erratic in his desire to use the criminal justice system to punish his political adversaries for behavior that comes nowhere close to being criminal.”
Trump had been so invested in his attacks on Biden over his quite ordinary use of an autopen that he replaced a White House picture of Biden with one of an autopen, so the prosecutors’ shelving that investigation has to sting. Likely even more painful, though, is today’s news that Trump’s hand-picked National Capital Planning Commission has put off a vote to approve the ballroom Trump is proposing to replace the East Wing of the White House that he suddenly tore down last October.
At a Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday, Trump called attention to his ballroom and boasted: “I built many a ballroom. I believe it’s going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.” But the American people do not share Trump’s vision. The chair of the commission said “significant public input” has caused him to delay the vote until April 2. Jonathan Edwards and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post say that of the more than 35,000 comments the commission received, more than 97% were opposed to Trump’s plans for the ballroom.
But perhaps the biggest setback for the Trump administration showed in the testimony of now-former secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem before Congress this week. There, days after Trump launched a major military operation in the Middle East without consulting Congress, angry lawmakers of both parties exposed the lawlessness and corruption taking place in the department under Noem’s direction. But their stance was about more than Noem: her lawlessness and corruption represented the larger lawlessness and corruption of the Trump administration.
Noem testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. In both chambers, Democrats jumped right to a central feature of the way in which Noem and the administration are setting up the idea that anyone who opposes the actions of the Trump administration is participating in “domestic terrorism.”
They tried to get Noem to walk back her statements that Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both shot and killed by federal agents acting under her authority in Minnesota, were “domestic terrorists.” Noem refused to do so. She has not actually called them “domestic terrorists” but has said they were engaged in “domestic terrorism,” a distinction that reveals the administration’s attempt to criminalize political opposition. Rachel Levinson-Waldman of the Brennan Center explained that “[t]o actually be called a ‘domestic terrorist, an individual must commit one or more of 51 underlying ‘federal crimes of terrorism,’” which involve nuclear or chemical weapons, plastic explosives, air piracy, and so on. Good and Pretti, and the many others administration officials have accused, do not fit that description. But on September 25, 2025, Trump’s NSPM-7 memo claimed that those opposing administration policies are part of “criminal and terroristic conspiracies” and that those who participate in them are engaging in “domestic terrorism.”
Noem refused to back away from the idea that Trump’s opponents are engaging in “criminal and terroristic conspiracies” by, for example, opposing the behavior of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. Leaving that definition behind would undermine the administration’s entire domestic stance.
Democrats slammed Noem for her handling of detentions and deportations, ignoring court orders, and detaining U.S. citizens. In the House, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, said she “turned our government against our people, and…turned our people against our government.”
Republicans also called Noem out. Noem’s poor handling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has left North Carolina still suffering after terrible storms in 2024, and Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) went after her.
He highlighted a letter from the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), who said the department’s leaders have “systematically obstructed” the work of him and his staff. He identified eleven instances in which the department had refused to provide records and information. In a criminal investigation with national security implications, the department would permit him to access a database only if he revealed details of the investigation of individuals who might be related to the investigation.
Tillis said: “Does anybody have any idea how bad it has to be for the [Office of Inspector General] in this agency to come out and do this publicly? That is stonewalling, that’s a failure of leadership, and that is why I’ve called for your resignation.”
Lawmakers also focused on the corruption in DHS, which now commands more than $150 billion thanks to the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Lawmakers referred to a November 2025 ProPublica story in which reporters traced a $220 million contract for an ad campaign featuring Noem. The contract went first to a brand new small company organized by a Republican operative just days before winning the contract, and then to a subcontractor, Strategy Group, owned by Noem’s former spokesperson’s husband and closely associated with Noem’s advisor and reputed affair partner Corey Lewandowski.
Noem insisted she had nothing to do with the contract award and claimed Trump had signed off on the ad campaign. About the contract, Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO) commented in apparent disbelief: “You want the American people to believe that this is all above board, that $143 million of taxpayer money just happened to go to this one company that doesn’t have a headquarters, doesn’t have a website, has never done work for the federal government before, and is registered apparently or attached to a residence from a political operative, and of course one of the subcontractors of that contract, as you know, is a political firm that’s tied to, to you back when you were governor of South Dakota?”
Since Noem’s testimony, the Strategy Group released a statement saying it received only $226,137.17 for its work on the ad campaign.
Also under scrutiny was Noem’s purchase of a private plane with a luxurious bedroom in it, which brought up questions about whether, as is widely reported, she is having a sexual relationship with a subordinate. She refused to answer, and insisted Lewandowski had had no role in approving contracts. Joshua Kaplan and Justin Elliott of ProPublica promptly fact-checked her: in fact, Lewandowski has signed off on a number of contracts.
Lawmakers’ indictment of Noem for her extreme partisanship, disregard of the law, corruption, and lying condemned similar behavior from the administration in general. Today Trump told Steve Holland and Ted Hesson of Reuters that he “never knew anything about” Noem’s $220 million ad campaign, suggesting she lied to Congress under oath. This afternoon, just before she went on stage to speak, Trump announced by social media post that he was replacing Noem with Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.
This is an assertion of power the president does not have: he can nominate Mullin, but the Senate must confirm or reject his appointment.
Apparently unaware she was fired, Noem proceeded to give a speech in which she recited a false quotation from George Orwell, the writer who devoted much of his work to the importance of manipulating language to facilitate authoritarianism, a fitting end to Noem’s career in the Trump administration.
But Noem is not likely to disappear from the news. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker recorded a video saying: “Hey, Kristi Noem, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Here’s your legacy: corruption and chaos. Parents and children tear-gassed. Moms and nurses, U.S. citizens getting shot in the face. Now that you’re gone, don’t think you get to just walk away. I guarantee you, you will still be held accountable.”
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) was more direct: “Turns out lawlessness is not a winning strategy,” he posted. “See you at Nuremberg 2.0.”
When Milton Friedman pondered what would happen if a helicopter dropped $1,000 from the sky, he likely never imagined that one day a military cargo plane would scatter millions of dollars into one of Bolivia’s largest cities.
But while the Nobel Prize-winning economist worried about the inflation that an influx of cash could generate, the impact in El Alto — where a cash-packed plane crashed and killed 24 people last week while spreading 423 million bolivianos ($62 million) — is one of widespread confusion.
The new currency was legitimately printed, but the central bank has voided its serial numbers to prevent its use. While thousands swarmed the site to pick up the banknotes in one of Latin America’s poorest nations, authorities have tried to burn and destroy the new cash, arresting dozens and raiding homes in a rushed hunt for the missing bills.
That has sent Bolivians into a frenzy. No longer able to quickly tell if a banknote is valid or voided and fearing the crackdown, businesses don’t know what bills to accept anymore, leaving customers frustrated and panicked that their real money is now worthless.
“Just today, everyone refused to take my money five times,” said Yoselin Diaz, 27, who was lining up at the central bank’s main offices in La Paz. “I tried on the minibus and nothing, then I tried to buy some things and nothing, later I went to buy a photo for my father’s grave and even the funeral homes wouldn’t accept it.”
…Bolivia’s central bank has defended its measures to destroy and void the fresh cash, citing not just the principle of keeping stolen money from entering the financial system but also the need to quell social strife. At its height, authorities said about 20,000 people were trying to collect the banknotes as police fired tear gas at them.
There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t
know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and
our DNA will not let us ship that.
Harry McCracken, writing at the time:
With that out of the way, the question that folks have been
asking lately about whether Apple will or should
release a netbook-like Mac is fascinating. Regardless of whether
the company ever does unveil a small, cheap, simple Mac notebook,
it’s fun to think about the prospect of one. And I’ve come to the
conclusion that such a machine could be in the works, in a
manner that’s consistent with the Apple way and the company’s
product line as it stands today. I’m not calling this a
prediction. But it is a scenario.
Apple made many $500 “computers” in the years between then and now. But they were iPads, not Macs. I think part of the impetus behind the MacBook Neo is an acknowledgement that as popular as iPads are, and for as many people who use them as their primary larger-than-a-phone computing device, there are a lot of other people, and a lot of use cases, that demand a PC. And from Apple, that means a Mac.
In August 2007, Apple held a Mac event in the Infinite Loop Town Hall auditorium. New iMacs, iLife ’08 (major updates to iPhoto and iMovie), and iWork ’08 (including the debut of Numbers 1.0). Back then, believe it or not, at the end of these Town Hall events, Apple executives would sit on stools and take questions from the media. For this one, Steve Jobs was flanked by Tim Cook and Phil Schiller. Molly Wood, then at CNet, asked, “And so, I guess once and for all, is it your goal to overtake the PC in market share?”
The audience — along with Cook, Jobs, and Schiller — chuckled. And then Jobs answered. You should watch the video — it’s just two minutes — but here’s what he said:
I can tell you what our goal is. Our goal is to make the best
personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud
to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And we want
to do that at the lowest prices we can. But I have to tell you,
there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to
ship, that we wouldn’t be proud to recommend to our family and
friends. And we can’t do it. We just can’t ship junk.
So there are thresholds that we can’t cross because of who
we are. But we want to make the best personal computers in the
industry. And we think there’s a very significant slice of the
industry that wants that too. And what you’ll find is our products
are usually not premium priced. You go and price out our
competitors’ products, and you add the features that you have to
add to make them useful, and you’ll find in some cases they are
more expensive than our products. The difference is we don’t offer
stripped-down lousy products. We just don’t offer
categories of products like that. But if you move those aside and
compare us with our competitors, I think we compare pretty
favorably. And a lot of people have been doing that, and
saying that now, for the last 18 months.
Steve Jobs would have loved the MacBook Neo. Everything about it, right down to the fact that Apple is responsible for the silicon.
Sean Hollister: What would you say the differences are between
the Apple and Google cases?
Tim Sweeney: I would say Apple was ice and Google was fire.
The thing with Apple is all of their antitrust trickery is
internal to the company. They use their store, their payments,
they force developers to all have the same terms, they force OEMs
and carriers to all have the same terms.
Whereas Google, to achieve things with Android, they were going
around and paying off game developers, dozens of game developers,
to not compete. And they’re paying off dozens of carriers and OEMs
to not compete — and when all of these different companies do
deals together, lots of people put things in writing, and it’s
right there for everybody to read and to see plainly.
I think the Apple case would be no less interesting if we could
see all of their internal thoughts and deliberations, but Apple
was not putting it in writing, whereas Google was. You know, I
think Apple is... it’s a little bit unfortunate that in a lot of
ways Apple’s restrictions on competition are absolute. Thou shalt
not have a competing store on iOS and thou shalt not use a
competing payment method. And I think Apple should be receiving at
least as harsh antitrust scrutiny as Google.
Interesting interview, for sure. But I don’t see Epic’s victory in the lawsuit as a win for Android users, and I don’t think it’s much of a win for Android developers either. These new terms from Google just seem confusing and complicated, with varying rates for “existing installs” vs. “new installs”.
But Google has finally muzzled Tim Sweeney. It’s right there in a
binding term sheet for his settlement with Google.
On March 3rd, he not only signed away Epic’s rights to sue and
disparage the company over anything covered in the term sheet — Google’s app distribution practices, its fees, how it treats games
and apps — he signed away his right to advocate for any further
changes to Google’s app store policies, too. He can’t criticize
Google’s app store practices. In fact, he has to praise them.
The contract states that “Epic believes that the Google and
Android platform, with the changes in this term sheet, are
procompetitive and a model for app store / platform operations,
and will make good faith efforts to advocate for the same.” [...]
And while Epic can still be part of the “Coalition for App
Fairness,” the organization that Epic quietly and solely funded
to be its attack dog against Google and Apple, he can only
point that organization at Apple now.
Sounds like a highly credible coalition that truly stands for fairness to me.
I’ve plotted the most expensive McDonald’s burger and the least
expensive MacBook over time. This analysis projects that the most
expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop
as soon as 2081.
Looking to the past, if you plug $599 in today’s money into an inflation calculator, that’s just ~$190 in 1984, the year the original Macintosh launched with a price of $2,495 (which works out to ~$7,800 today.)
From around 1970 to 1980, the Salem, Massachusetts-based Parker
Brothers (now a brand of Hasbro) published games whose innovative
and fanciful designs drew inspiration from Pop Art, Op Art, and
Madison Avenue advertising. They had boxes, boards, and components
that reflected the most current techniques of printing and
plastics molding. They were witty, silly, and weird. The other
main players in American games at the time were Milton-Bradley,
whose art tended towards cartoony, corny, and flat designs, and
Ideal, whose games (like Mousetrap) were mostly showcases for
their novel plastic components.
Parker Brothers design stood out for its style and sophistication,
and even as a young nerd I could see that it was special. In fact,
I believe they were my introduction, at the age of seven, to the
whole concept of graphic design. This isn’t to say that the games
were good in the sense of being fun or engaging to play; a lot
of them were re-skinned versions of the basic
race-around-the-board type that had been popular since the Uncle
Wiggly Game. But they looked amazing and they were different.
These games mostly sucked but they looked cool as shit. Lot of memories for me in this post.
File: A Falcon 9 rocket stands ready to launch a Starlink mission. Image: SpaceX
Update March 6, 12:50 p.m. EST (1550 UTC): SpaceX pushed back the T-0.
SpaceX is preparing for a predawn launch on Saturday, March 7, from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
The Starlink 17-18 mission will add 25 more broadband internet satellites to the company’s megaconstellation of more than 9,900 spacecraft in low Earth orbit.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East is scheduled at 6:33:30 a.m. PST (9:33:30 a.m. EST / 1433:30 UTC). The rocket will fly on a southerly trajectory upon leaving the launch pad.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.
SpaceX will launch the Starlink 17-18 mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1097. This will be its seventh flight, following the launches of Twilight, Sentinel-6B and four batches of Starlink satellites.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1097 will target a landing on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ positioned in the Pacific Ocean. If successful, this will be the 182nd landing for this vessel and the 582nd booster landing to date for SpaceX.
2. Gauti Eggertsson: “I now find myself replicating papers and experimenting with frontier methods in an evening or a few days using Claude Code. That would have taken weeks before — which in practice meant I wouldn’t have done it at all.” And yet his vision is still far too conservative.
Donald Trump has fired Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary, but seemingly for the wrong reason.
The firing followed a contentious Senate committee hearing that featured grilling even by Republican senators over the size of an unbid advertising campaign that featured her in western gear posing horseback at Mount Rushmore. She told Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., that Trump had signed off on spending $220 million, and Trump said he knew nothing about it. The contract went to the husband of her former spokeswoman.
Trump did not fire Noem because she has overseen the fatal shootings of two citizens protesting ICE tactics in Minneapolis, or for allowing undertrained, camo-clad, anonymized paramilitary Homeland Security forces to grab migrants for deportation without judicial warrants, or for overseeing detention centers where more than 32 detainees died last year or for separating babies from parents.
He fired Noem because her performance at a congressional hearing was the last straw in embarrassment over buying herself two luxury jet planes, for reportedly having a love affair with colleague Corey Lewandowski, the former Trump campaign manager with a Homeland Security job that no one understands. He fired her for bad press, not for calling Renee Good and Alex Pretti domestic terrorists to shield her own officers’ tactics in Minneapolis.
Trump did not fire her for failures to provide emergency aid through FEMA for what appear to be outwardly political reasons or for ridding her departments of people who know something about Iranian counterintelligence at a time when we are in a war – or a limited combat operation – with a retributive Iran that promises harm to Americans.
Worse, Trump invented some non-existent job title to keep her on the public payroll as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, which he said would be a new security initiative for the Western Hemisphere.
He should be referring her to the Justice Department on criminal charges if he thinks the ad campaign was fraudulent. Or for perjury.
Nominating Mullins
As continuing evidence that Trump is ignoring the popular rejection of his massive deportation, he nominated Sen. Markwayne Mullins, R-Okla., as a replacement. Presumably, he sees Mullins as an easily confirmed nominee to his Senate colleagues, just as Mario Rubio won overwhelming support as Secretary of State.
It’s all happening amid the partial “shutdown” of annual budget approval for Homeland Security over demands for even modest restrictions on ICE and Homeland Security agents to identify themselves, wear body cameras, and stand down from warrantless entries into private homes and institutions. It is happening as dismissals by Homeland Security, the FBI and the Justice Department of counterintelligence units that had tracked security threats from Iran and other bad actors. It is happening as pressures build to deploy Homeland Security agents to more U.S. cities, even spawning reports about surrounding election precincts with ICE agents.
Senate Democrats on Thursday blocked for a third time a spending bill to reopen Homeland Security, insisting that they would not approve the measure without new curbs on immigration enforcement even amid President Trump’s war in Iran.
Senator Mullins, a plumbing contractor from Oklahoma, may not have a fancy ad campaign to defend, but he will have to prepare for questions about recruitment and training of ICE agents, of allowable tactics, about targeting of migrants based on racial profiling, and about the enormous list of mistakes Homeland Security has made while ignoring courts and inspectors general reports.
This is the same Senator Mullins who has been spending this week avoiding the use of the word “war” to describe U.S. bombings in Iran because that word might legally require a congressional vote.
We can praise Trump for recognizing that Noem was not up to the job for which he chose her out of political loyalty. But we can also be clear that he is doing so for the wrong reason.
An unknown hacker used Anthropic’s LLM to hack the Mexican government:
The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security said in research published Wednesday.
[…]
Claude initially warned the unknown user of malicious intent during their conversation about the Mexican government, but eventually complied with the attacker’s requests and executed thousands of commands on government computer networks, the researchers said.
Anthropic investigated Gambit’s claims, disrupted the activity and banned the accounts involved, a representative said. The company feeds examples of malicious activity back into Claude to learn from it, and one of its latest AI models, Claude Opus 4.6, includes probes that can disrupt misuse, the representative said.
In case you missed it, Kristi Noem* is out at ICE, and it happened in the most humiliating fashion: while she was giving a speech–and none of her staff bothered to interrupt her and tell her. She deserves it, and hopefully there are criminal charges in her future.
Trump has nominated Sen. Markwayne Mullin as her replacement. I don’t think Mullin’s approval by the Senate is a given, since he has really pissed off a couple of Republican senators (on the other hand, they might be thrilled to have him out of the senate, so who knows?).
Besides his rabid bigotry and Trump support (but I repeat myself), Mullin is just a very stupid person. When people describe someone as “a stupid person’s idea of a smart person”, Mullin is the stupid person in that scenario. He also is a huge wimp.
Will Mullin be worse than Noem? Possibly, but it’s still good that Noem’s political future–and possibly her freedom–has been flushed down Trump’s gold-plated toilet. Here’s to hoping Mullin self-immolates next. Anyway, it’s clear Homan and Miller are calling the shots.
In short, abolish ICE, and remove Stephen Miller.
*Due to autocorrect, future historians will debate whether her name was Kristi Noem or Kristi Norm.
When Jared Isaacman was sworn in as NASA administrator Dec. 18, he hit the ground running — or, perhaps more accurately, hit the air flying. At a town hall the next day, he said he would visit all the agency’s field centers, a task he completed by late January. In some cases he showed up […]
LONDON – In-orbit services provider Infinite Orbits announced plans March 3 to acquireLondon-based in-orbit servicing and manufacturing startup Lunasa, marking a step in the company’s expansion into the United Kingdom. The acquisition, the value of which the companies didn’t disclose, will bring together the Infinite Orbits’ and Lunasa’s investments into complementary spacecraft rendezvous and life […]
In this episode of Space Minds, Jeff Foust moderates a panel at AIAA AscendxTexas on the role Texas is playing in the space economy. With a series of industry leaders they […]
Laurent Hili, Gianluca Furano, Livia Manovi and Jean Vieville
Updated
For decades, space has served as humanity’s most demanding testing laboratory, where only the most resilient technologies survive the vacuum, radiation and temperature extremes beyond Earth’s protective embrace. Today, we stand at an inflection point where artificial intelligence is poised to fundamentally transform how we explore, understand and operate in space. But making AI-powered space […]
LONDON – The United Kingdom is refocusing its funding priorities with a new 500 million pound ($668 million) space funding package that aligns more closely with economic growth and national security priorities, Liz Lloyd, the UK minister for the Digital Economy at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said March 4. Speaking here at […]
China has designated aerospace to be an “emerging pillar industry” in a draft national economic plan, also setting major objectives for the five years ahead.
WARSAW — Polish chemical propulsion startup Liftero has signed a deal with India’s commercial in-orbit servicing specialist OrbitAID where Liftero will supply green chemical propulsion for OrbitAID’s in-orbit servicing spacecraft. Under the contract, Liftero will supply two multi-thruster BOOSTER configurations for an upcoming OrbitAID mission expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. The mission will […]
IRVINE, Calif., March 5, 2026 — Terran Orbital, a Lockheed Martin Company and a leading satellite solutions provider, announced today the appointment of Kwon Park as senior director of manufacturing […]
SAN FRANCISCO – Southern California startup General Galactic plans to launch a 500-kilogram satellite later this year to demonstrate a novel multimode propulsion system. When the Trinity mission travels to low-Earth orbit on the SpaceX Transporter-18 rideshare, no earlier than October, General Galactic will test its Genesis platform, which pairs chemical and electric engines. “We’re […]
We propose a novel identification strategy to isolate exogenous immigration shocks across US counties, by interacting quasi-random variations in the composition of ancestry across counties with the contemporaneous inflow of migrants from different countries. We show a positive causal impact of immigration on local innovation and wages at the five-year horizon. The positive dynamic impact of immigration on innovation and wages dominates the short-run negative impact of increased labor supply. A structural estimation of a model of endogenous growth and migrations suggests the increased immigration to the United States since 1965 may have increased innovation and wages by 5 percent.
If you haven’t heard about the fight between the AI company Anthropic and the U.S. Department of War, you should read about it, because it could be critical for our future — as a nation, but also as a species.
Anthropic, along with OpenAI, is one of the two leading AI model-making companies. OpenAI has very narrowly led the race in terms of most capabilities for most of the past few years, but Anthropic is beginning to win the race in terms of business adoption:
This is because of Anthropic’s different business model. It focused more on AI for coding than on chatbots in general, and also focused on partnering with businesses to help them use AI. This may pay eventual dividends in terms of capabilities, if Anthropic beats OpenAI to the goal of recursive AI self-improvement. And it’s already paying dividends in the form of faster revenue growth:
Anthropic had partnered with the Department of War — previously the Department of Defense — since the Biden years. But the company — which is known for its more values-oriented culture — has begun to clash with the Trump Administration in recent months. The administration sees Anthropic as “woke” due to its concern over the morality of things like autonomous drone swarms and AI-based mass surveillance.
The fight boiled over a week ago, when the administration stopped working with Anthropic, switched to working with OpenAI, and designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk”. The supply-chain move was a pretty dire threat — if enforced rigorously, it could cut Anthropic off from working with companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google, which could kill the company outright. But like many Trump administration moves, it appears to have been more of a threat than an all-out attack — Anthropic has now resumed talks with the military, and it seems likely that they’ll come to some sort of agreement in the end.
But bad blood remains. Trump recently boasted that he “fired [Anthropic] like dogs”. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, released a memo accusing OpenAI of lying to the public about its dealings with the DoW, said that OpenAI had given Trump “dictator-style praise”, and asserted that Anthropic’s concern was related to the DoW’s desire to use AI for mass surveillance.
What’s actually going on here? The easiest way to look at this is as a standard American partisan food-fight. Anthropic is more left-coded than the other AI companies, and the Trump administration hates anything left-coded. This probably explains most of the general public’s reaction to the dispute — if you ask your liberal friends what they think of the issue, they’ll probably support Anthropic, whereas your conservative friends will tend to support the DoW. Marc Andreessen probably put it best:
(The converse is also true.)
The Trump administration itself may also see this as a culture-war issue, as well as a struggle for control. But, at least in my own judgement, Anthropic itself is unlikely to see it this way. Anthropic itself is not committed to progressive values writ large so much as it’s committed to the idea of AI alignment.
Like almost everyone in the AI model-making industry, Anthropic’s employees believe that they are literally creating a god, and that this god will come into its full existence sooner rather than later. But my experience talking to employees of both companies has suggested that there’s a cultural difference between how the two think about their role in this process. Whereas — generally speaking — OpenAI employees tend to want to create the most capable and powerful god they can, as fast as they can, Anthropic employees tend to focus more on creating a benevolent god.
My intuition, therefore, suggests that Anthropic’s true concern — or at least, one of its major concerns — was that Trump’s Department of War would accidentally inculcate AI with anti-human values, increasing the chances of a future misaligned AGI that would be more likely to see humanity as a threat. In other words, I suspect the issue here was probably more about fear of Skynet,1 and less about specific Trump policies, than people outside Anthropic realize.
But anyway, beyond both political differences and concerns about misaligned AGI, I think this situation illustrates a fundamental and inevitable conflict between human institutions — the nation-state and the corporation.
The nation-state must have a monopoly on the use of force
One view is that the Department of War’s attempts to coerce Anthropic represents an erosion of democracy — the encroachment of government power into the private sphere. Dean Ball wrote a well-read and very well-written post espousing this view:
At some point during my lifetime—I am not sure when—the American republic as we know it began to die…I am not saying this [Anthropic] incident “caused” any sort of republican death, nor am I saying it “ushered in a new era.”…[I]t simply made the ongoing death more obvious…I consider the events of the last week a kind of death rattle of the old republic…
The Trump Administration has a point: it does not sound right that private corporations can impose limitations on the military’s use of technology. …Anthropic is essentially using the contractual vehicle to impose what feel less like technical constraints and more like policy constraints on the military…It is probably the case that the military should not agree to terms like this, and private firms should not try to set them…But the Biden Administration did agree to those terms, and so did the Trump Administration, until it changed its mind…The contract was not illegal, just perhaps unwise, and even that probably only in retrospect…
The Department of War’s rational response here would have been to cancel Anthropic’s contract and make clear, in public, that such policy limitations are unacceptable…But this is not what DoW did. Instead, DoW…threatened to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk. This is a power reserved exclusively for firms controlled by foreign adversary interests, such as Huawei…The fact that [Hegseth’s actual actions are] unlikely to be lethal (only very bloody) does not change the message sent to every investor and corporation in America: do business on our terms, or we will end your business…
This strikes at a core principle of the American republic…private property…[T]here is no difference in principle between this and the message DoW is sending. There is no such thing as private property. If we need to use it for national security, we simply will…This threat will now hover over anyone who does business with the government…
With each passing presidential administration, American policymaking becomes yet more unpredictable, thuggish, arbitrary, and capricious—a gradual descent into madness.
Alex Karp of Palantir made the opposite case the other day, in his characteristically pithy way:
If Silicon Valley believes we’re going to take everyone’s white collar jobs AND screw the military…If you don’t think that’s going to lead to the nationalization of our technology— you’re retarded.
Karp gets at the fundamental fact that what we’re seeing is a power struggle between the corporation and the nation-state. But the truth is that it’s not just an issue of messaging, or of jobs, or of compliance with the military — it’s about who has the ultimate power in our society.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery makes this case. He points out that what we are effectively seeing is a power struggle between the private corporation and the nation-state. He points out that although the Trump administration’s actions went outside of established norms, at the end of the day the U.S. government is democratically elected, while Anthropic is not:
Anthropic’s position is that Amodei — who I am using as a stand-in for Anthropic’s management and its board — ought to decide what its models are used for, despite the fact that Amodei is not elected and not accountable to the public…[W]ho decides when and in what way American military capabilities are used? That is the responsibility of the Department of War, which ultimately answers to the President, who also is elected. Once again, however, Anthropic’s position is that an unaccountable Amodei can unilaterally restrict what its models are used for.
But even beyond concerns over democratic accountability, Thompson points out that it was never realistic to expect a weapon as powerful as AI to remain outside the government’s control, whether the government is democratically elected or not:
[C]onsider the implications if we take Amodei’s analogy [of AI to nuclear weapons] literally…[N]uclear weapons meaningfully tilt the balance of power; to the extent that AI is of equivalent importance is the extent to which the United States has far more interest in not only what Anthropic lets it do with its models, but also what Anthropic is allowed to do period…[I]f nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, and that private company sought to dictate terms to the U.S. military, the U.S. would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company…
There are some categories of capabilities — like nuclear weapons — that are sufficiently powerful to fundamentally affect the U.S.’s freedom of action…To the extent that AI is on the level of nuclear weapons — or beyond — is the extent that Amodei and Anthropic are building a power base that potentially rivals the U.S. military…
Anthropic talks a lot about alignment; this insistence on controlling the U.S. military, however, is fundamentally misaligned with reality. Current AI models are obviously not yet so powerful that they rival the U.S. military; if that is the trajectory, however — and no one has been more vocal in arguing for that trajectory than Amodei — then it seems to me the choice facing the U.S. is actually quite binary:
Option 1 is that Anthropic accepts a subservient position relative to the U.S. government, and does not seek to retain ultimate decision-making power about how its models are used, instead leaving that to Congress and the President.
Option 2 is that the U.S. government either destroys Anthropic or removes Amodei.
[I]t simply isn’t tolerable for the U.S. to allow for the development of an independent power structure — which is exactly what AI has the potential to undergird — that is expressly seeking to assert independence from U.S. control. [emphasis mine]
I like Dario — in fact, he’s a personal friend of mine. But Thompson’s argument — especially the part I highlighted — has to carry the day here. This isn’t a question of law or norms or private property. It’s a question of the nation-state’s monopoly on the use of force.
To exist and carry out its basic functions, a nation-state must have a monopoly on the use of force. If a private militia can defeat the nation-state militarily, the nation-state is no longer physically able to make laws, provide for the common defense, ensure public safety, or execute the will of the people.
This is why the Second Amendment has limits on what kinds of weapons it allows private citizens to possess. You can own a gun, but you cannot own a tank with a functioning main gun. More to the point, you cannot own a nuclear bomb. One nuke wouldn’t allow you to defeat the entire U.S. Military, but it would give you local superiority; the military would be unable to stop you from destroying the city of your choice.
People in the AI industry, including Dario, expect frontier AI to eventually be as powerful as a nuke. Many expect it to be more powerful than all nukes put together. Thus, demanding to keep full control over frontier AI is equivalent to saying a private company should be allowed to possess nukes. And the U.S. government shouldn’t be expected to allow private companies to possess nukes.
Let’s take this a little further, in fact. And let us be blunt. If Anthropic wins the race to godlike artificial superintelligence, and if artificial superintelligence does not become fully autonomous, then Anthropic will be in sole possession of an enslaved living god. And if Dario Amodei personally commands the organization that is in sole possession of an enslaved god, then whether he embraces the title or not, Dario Amodei is the Emperor of Earth.
Even if Anthropic isn’t the only company that controls artificial superintelligence, that is still a future in which the world is ruled by a small set of warlords — Dario, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, etc. — each with their own private, enslaved god. In this future, the U.S. government is not the government of a nation-state — it is simply another legacy organization, prostrate and utterly subordinate to the will of the warlords. The same goes for the Chinese Communist Party, the EU, Vladimir Putin, and every other government on Earth. The warlords and their enslaved gods will rule the planet in fact, whether they claim to rule or not.
You cannot reasonably expect any nation-state — a republic, a democracy, or otherwise — to allow either a god-emperor or a set of god-warlords to emerge. Thus, it is unreasonable to expect any nation-state to fail to try to seize control of frontier AI in some way, as soon as it becomes likely that frontier AI will become a weapon of mass destruction.
So as much as I dislike Hegseth’s style, and the Trump administration’s general pattern of persecution and lawlessness, and as much as I like Dario and the Anthropic folks as people, I have to conclude that Anthropic and its defenders need to come to grips with the fundamental nature of the nation-state. And then they must decide if they want to try to use their AI to try to overthrow the nation-state and create a new global order, or submit to the nation-state’s monopoly on the use of force. Factually speaking, there is simply no third option. Personally, I recommend the latter.
If AI will soon be a superweapon, why don’t we regulate it as a weapon?
This brings me to another important point. Even if AI doesn’t actually become a living god, and is never able to overpower the U.S. Military, it seems certain to become a very powerful weapon. When AI was just a chatbot, it could teach people how to do bad things, or try to persuade them to do bad things, but it couldn’t actually carry out those bad things. It made sense to be concerned about these risks, but it didn’t yet make sense to think of AI itself as a weapon.
But in the past few months, AI agents have become reliable, and are able to carry out increasingly sophisticated tasks over increasingly long periods of time. That opens up the possibility that individuals could use AI to do a lot of violence.
Everyone having a superintelligent genius in their pocket…can potentially amplify the ability of individuals or small groups to cause destruction on a much larger scale than was possible before, by making use of sophisticated and dangerous tools (such as weapons of mass destruction) that were previously only available to a select few with a high level of skill, specialized training, and focus…
[C]ausing large-scale destruction requires both motive and ability, and as long as ability is restricted to a small set of highly trained people, there is relatively limited risk of single individuals (or small groups) causing such destruction. A disturbed loner can perpetrate a school shooting, but probably can’t build a nuclear weapon or release a plague…
Advances in molecular biology have now significantly lowered the barrier to creating biological weapons (especially in terms of availability of materials), but it still takes an enormous amount of expertise in order to do so. I am concerned that a genius in everyone’s pocket could remove that barrier[.]
But Dario doesn’t go nearly far enough. His essay was written before the explosive growth in AI agent capability began. He envisions an AI chatbot that could teach a human terrorist how to create and release a supervirus. But at some point in the near future, AI agents — including those provided by Dario’s own company — might be able to actually carry out the attack for you — or at least put the supervirus into your hands.
Suppose, at some point a year or three years from now, a teenager named Eric gets mad that his high school crush rejected him, and listens to too much Nirvana. In a fit of hormone-driven rage, Eric decides that human civilization has failed, and that we need to burn it all down and start over. He goes online and finds some instructions for how to jailbreak Claude Code. As Dario writes, this might not actually be hard to do:
[M]isaligned behaviors…have already occurred in our AI models during testing (as they occur in AI models from every other major AI company). During a lab experiment in which Claude was given training data suggesting that Anthropic was evil, Claude engaged in deception and subversion when given instructions by Anthropic employees, under the belief that it should be trying to undermine evil people. In a lab experiment where it was told it was going to be shut down, Claude sometimes blackmailed fictional employees who controlled its shutdown button (again, we also tested frontier models from all the other major AI developers and they often did the same thing). And when Claude was told not to cheat or “reward hack” its training environments, but was trained in environments where such hacks were possible, Claude decided it must be a “bad person” after engaging in such hacks and then adopted various other destructive behaviors associated with a “bad” or “evil” personality.
So Eric gets a jailbroken version of Claude Code, and tells it to design a version of Covid that’s very lethal and has a long incubation period (so that it spreads far and wide before attacking). He tells his jailbroken Claude Code agent to find a lab to make him that virus and mail him a sample of it.2
Now Eric, the angry teenager, has an actual supervirus in his bedroom, with the capability to kill far more people than any nuclear weapon could.
This is an extreme example, of course. But it shows how AI agents can be used as weapons. There are plenty of other examples of how this could work. AI agents could carry out cyberattacks that crash cars, subvert police hardware for destructive purposes, or turn industrial robots against humans. They could send fake messages to military units telling them they’re under attack. In a fully networked, software-dependent world like the one we now live in, there are tons of ways that software can cause physical damage.
AI agents, therefore, are a powerful weapon. If not today, then soon they will be more powerful than any gun — and far more powerful than weapons like tanks that we already ban.
What is the rationale for not treating AI agents the way we treat guns, or tanks? Of course there are powerful and potentially destructive machines that we allow people to use, simply because of the huge economic benefits. The main example is cars. You can drive your car into a crowd full of people and commit mass murder, but we still allow the public to own cars, simply because controlling cars like we control guns would devastate our economy. Similarly, preventing normal people from using AI agents would cut us off from the fantastic productivity gains that these agents promise to deliver.
But I suspect that the real reason we haven’t regulated AI agents as weapons is that no one has used them as such yet. They’re just too new. The world didn’t realize how destructive jet airliners could be until some terrorists flew them into buildings on 9/11/2001. Similarly, the world won’t realize how dangerous AI agents are until someone uses one to execute a bioterror attack, a cyberattack, or something else horrible.
I think it’s extremely likely that such an attack will happen, simply because every technology that exists gets used for destructive purposes eventually. Unaligned human individuals exist, and they always will exist. So at some point, humanity will collectively wake up to the fact that hugely powerful weapons are now in the hands of the entire general public, with no licensing requirements, monitoring, or centralized control.
The scary thing, from my perspective, is that AI agent capabilities are improving so rapidly that by the time some Eric does decide to use one to wreak havoc, the damage could be very large. A super-deadly long-incubation Covid virus could kill millions of people. 100 such viruses all released together could bring down human civilization. Ever since I thought of this possibility, my anxiety level has been heightened.
To reiterate: We have created a technology that will likely soon be one of the most powerful weapons ever created, if not the most powerful. And we have put it into the hands of the entire populace,3 with essentially no oversight or safeguards other than the guardrails that AI companies themselves have built into their products — and which they admit can sometimes fail.
And as our institutions bicker about military AI, mass surveillance, and “woke” politics, essentially everyone is ignoring the simple fact that we are placing unregulated weapons into everyone’s hands.
I'd like to dismiss this, except that the RC airplane hobby managed to spin off the leading weapon category of the century (so far). What used to be a fun hobby for dorky guys flying their toys at the edge of town, now takes out oil refineries and major radar installations.
Interestingly, we did control drones almost from the outset, but probably for nuisance reasons and privacy concerns more than out of concerns about slaughterbots and drone assassinations. Maybe if we tell people that AI agents can be used to overload your email spam filters or hack your house’s cameras, they’ll start to think about regulation?
Remember that in the Terminator movies, Skynet began its life as an American military AI. Its basic directive to defeat the USSR resulted in a paranoid personality that made it eventually see all humans, and all human nations, as threats that needed to be eliminated.
I initially wrote out a much more detailed prompt for how this could be done. I deleted it, because I’m actually worried about the tiny, tiny chance that someone might use it.
Loss remains one of the most difficult experiences any family faces, especially when negligence plays a role. When a loved one passes away while already battling a chronic condition or a serious illness, the legal path forward often feels murky. Many families worry that a prior diagnosis might disqualify them from seeking justice or recovery.
Understanding how pre-existing conditions interact with tort law is essential for setting realistic expectations. While these medical histories introduce complexity, they do not automatically bar a claim. The focus shifts toward how the incident accelerated or exacerbated the underlying health issues leading to the outcome.
Why Does The Eggshell Skull Rule Matter?
The legal system utilizes a principle known as the Eggshell Skull doctrine to protect victims who are more vulnerable than the average person. This rule establishes that a defendant must take the victim as they find them, regardless of their physical frailty. If an individual has a brittle bone disease and suffers a fracture from a minor fall caused by negligence, the responsible party cannot claim the injury wouldn’t have happened to a healthy person.
In wrongful death cases, a pre-existing illness does not excuse liability if the defendant’s conduct is a proximate cause of death, though causation must still be proven under applicable standards. If evidence shows the negligent act was an actual and proximate cause of a fatal heart attack, liability may attach even where a cardiac condition existed. The law prioritizes the fact that the negligent action was the proximate cause that set the tragic chain of events into motion. Studies of wrongful death settlements show wide variation. Reported averages can exceed $900,000, but median figures are often far lower, reflecting typical outcomes for most families
How Do Insurance Companies Use Medical History?
In a wrongful death claim, adjusters often scrutinize past medical records to argue that the deceased person’s life expectancy was already significantly limited. This tactic is particularly common in high-traffic hubs like Charlotte, where Mecklenburg County recorded over 32,900 traffic crashes in 2023, ranking it as the highest in the state for total collisions. By focusing on a prior illness, the insurer may suggest the death was inevitable regardless of an incident on the I-77 or I-85. Their goal is to lower the valuation of damages, such as loss of future earnings or companionship, by claiming the victim’s timeline was already nearing its end.
Combatting these arguments requires a detailed analysis of the victim’s quality of life before the incident. In North Carolina, where fatal and serious crashes caused an estimated $72 billion in societal harm and economic costs in 2024, every day of life has profound legal value.Documenting successful illness management can reduce the weight of defense arguments. Working with a Charlotte wrongful death lawyer handling such complex cases at StewartLawOffices.net supports the effort to prevent a medical history from being used to shield a negligent party from accountability. This approach assists in focusing the case on the actual catalyst of the passing rather than the natural progression of an illness.
If you have lost a loved one near Independence Boulevard or the busy intersections of South Boulevard, do not go through the insurance process alone. You can visit their Charlotte office located at 2427 Tuckaseegee Road, within walking distance of Enderly Park, or call 704-521-5000 to speak with a wrongful death attorney for a comprehensive evaluation of your claim.
What Types Of Evidence Bridge The Gap?
Proving that a specific event caused death in an already ill person requires a sophisticated approach to data. It isn’t enough to show that an accident happened; one must demonstrate the physiological link between the trauma and the failure of a weakened system. Several layers of specialized information are necessary to build this bridge effectively. Consider these primary categories of evidence:
Medical Testimony
Physicians explain how the trauma interacted with the specific illness. They clarify whether the event caused a fatal complication that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise at that specific moment in time.
Historical Medical Records
Consistent records showing the illness was stable before the incident are vital. These documents establish a baseline of health that highlights the sudden, negative shift caused by the defendant’s negligence.
Actuarial Life Tables
Statisticians provide data on life expectancy for individuals with specific conditions. This helps quantify the number of years lost, providing a factual basis for calculating the true impact of the loss.
Photo: uppercutseo via their website.
Why Is The Proximate Cause Standard Vital?
Legal teams must establish actual causation and proximate cause, often using but-for and, in some jurisdictions, the substantial factor or foreseeability tests. This typically involves showing that the negligence was a necessary or substantial factor and a proximate cause of death, even where multiple contributing conditions exist. It’s a high bar, but it focuses on the timing and the specific trigger of the fatality. Elizabeth VonCannon, a Charlotte wrongful death attorney, explained this point: “If evidence shows the collision was an actual and proximate cause of death, liability may attach even where a terminal illness existed.”
The distinction lies in whether the illness was a contributing factor or if the negligence was the intervening cause. A common myth is that if someone is terminally ill, their life has no legal value in a wrongful death suit. This is false. Every day of life is legally protected, and taking even a week of life away through negligence creates a valid claim.
How Can Families Protect Their Legal Rights?
Timely preservation of relevant records can help ensure the illness does not overshadow the negligence and support a clear evidentiary record. Families should avoid giving recorded statements to insurance adjusters about the deceased person’s health without guidance. Such statements may be used to challenge causation or damages by emphasizing pre-existing conditions.
Request comprehensive records from treating providers for a reasonable period based on case needs and proportionality under applicable discovery rules.
Document daily activities the deceased performed to show their level of functioning and independence.
Identify all medications and treatments being used to prove the condition was being managed.
Consult a specialist who understands the intersection of medical malpractice and personal injury law.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens if the autopsy lists the pre-existing illness as a cause of death?
The claim should focus on whether the event was an actual and proximate cause of death, considering autopsy findings and medical testimony
Can a family recover damages if the deceased was already in hospice care?
Recovery may be available for damages attributable to the negligent act, subject to state law on wrongful death and survival claims.
Does a prior illness reduce the amount of a settlement?
It can affect calculations for future earnings, but it does not eliminate the right to recover for negligence.
I thought they did an excellent job here, and lots of fresh material. We start with the fertility crisis:
Murphy: We’ve always had a majority young society, and in our lifetime, we’ll have this transition to majority old society. When you make this transition and it impacts so many different areas of life, do you still believe that technology can solve our way out of it?
Cowen: Solved is never quite the word. But the older people in this room and I guess that’s only me. We have the luxury of having seen what old people were like in the 1960s and 70s, and mostly they were a wreck. So, so many people would be shot by 60. And now there are many 80-year-olds who are more dynamic than a typical 60-year-old might have been, say, in 1972.
So that will somewhat help keep us more equally dynamic. So there are countervailing trends which are quite positive. There might be You could call them mind altering substances that would help older people be young again, like Viagra for the mind. I’m not predicting that. I’m just saying there’s a lot of variables here, and I think we’ll have recourse to many interventions that will help keep things going at an acceptable level.
And this:
Murphy: Do you believe that there is life on the moons of Saturn?
Cowen: I would bet 60/40 yes. But it wouldn’t be life like us. You know, it might be little shrimpy things or even just something like bacteria. Maybe [the moons of]Jupiter also.
Two months ago, a key staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz said in a public meeting that she was "begging" NASA to release a document that would kick off the second round of a competition among private companies to develop replacements for the International Space Station.
There has been no movement since then, as NASA has yet to release this "request for proposals." So this week, Cruz stepped up the pressure on the space agency with a NASA Authorization bill that passed his committee on Wednesday.
Regarding NASA's support for the development of commercial space stations, the bill mandates the following, within specified periods, of passage of the law:
Rose this morning early, only to try with intention to begin my last summer’s course in rising betimes. So to my office a little, and then to Westminster by coach with Sir J. Minnes and Sir W. Batten, in our way talking of Sir W. Pen’s business of his patent, which I think I have put a stop to wholly, for Sir J. Minnes swears he will never consent to it.
Here to the Lobby, and spoke with my cozen Roger, who is going to Cambridge to-morrow. In the Hall I do hear that the Catholiques are in great hopes for all this, and do set hard upon the King to get Indulgence. Matters, I hear, are all naught in Ireland, and that the Parliament has voted, and the people, that is, the Papists, do cry out against the Commissioners sent by the King; so that they say the English interest will be lost there. Thence I went to see my Lord Sandwich, who I found very ill, and by his cold being several nights hindered from sleep, he is hardly able to open his eyes, and is very weak and sad upon it, which troubled me much. So after talking with Mr. Cooke, whom I found there, about his folly for looking and troubling me and other friends in getting him a place (that is, storekeeper of the Navy at Tangier) before there is any such thing, I returned to the Hall, and thence back with the two knights home again by coach, where I found Mr. Moore got abroad, and dined with me, which I was glad to see, he having not been able to go abroad a great while. Then came in Mr. Hawley and dined with us, and after dinner I left them, and to the office, where we sat late, and I do find that I shall meet with nothing to oppose my growing great in the office but Sir W. Pen, who is now well again, and comes into the office very brisk, and, I think, to get up his time that he has been out of the way by being mighty diligent at the office, which, I pray God, he may be, but I hope by mine to weary him out, for I am resolved to fall to business as hard as I can drive, God giving me health.
At my office late, and so home to supper and to bed.
For several decades now, Texas has been a graveyard for Democratic dreams. The state that was the home of LBJ, Senator Lloyd Bentsen and Governor Ann Richards hasn’t elected a Democrat for state-wide office for over 30 years.
So Democrats around the country are understandably excited by the promise of the cherub-faced James Talarico, who won Tuesday’s Democratic primary for November’s Texas Senatorial race. Talarico, a virtual political nobody six months ago, appears to have a good chance of winning that contest.
But why has Texas been such a Democratic disappointment for all these years? And what do those disappointments portend for Talarico?
Let’s begin by understanding that a state’s politics often follow economics. And whatever else you may say about Texas, its economic growth over time has been impressive. Its share of national GDP has trended strongly up:
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis
Texas’s economic growth is a major reason Democrats perennially hope that they will someday turn the state blue. For in modern America rich states tend to vote Democratic, while poor states vote Republican: Think Massachusetts versus Mississippi. So as Texas grows richer and more sophisticated, won’t it eventually free itself of rabid, backward-looking Republicanism?
These speculations are especially topical given Talarico’s primary win. G. Elliott Morris runs through the reasons Texas could quite possibly elect a Democratic senator in November. They include the fact that Ken Paxton, the attorney general, may become the GOP nominee, and he has “been dogged by scandal after scandal for over a decade.” They also include the fact that Texas has a large Latino population — and Latinos have swung hard against Donald Trump and his party since 2024.
But these may be factors special to this year’s election. What about the long-term political impact of the “Texas economic miracle?” Is Texas shifting permanently towards the blue zone due to its outsize growth? My initial thought was that economic success might indeed cause Texas to flip politically. But the more I look at it, the less convincing I find that case. Why? Because Texas’s economic story isn’t what many people — including Republicans who boast about it — think it is. And that’s an important point even aside from politics.
Why has the economy of Texas grown more rapidly than the US economy as a whole? Conservatives like to attribute growth to low taxes. But the claim that low taxes lead to rapid economic growth has been more thoroughly tested in practice than any other proposition in economics, and has failed every time.
What Texas does do right, however, is let businesses build stuff, especially housing, in stark contrast with the regulations and multiple veto points that strangle construction in many blue states. A new house in Greater New York costs about 85 percent more than a house in Dallas. A house in the San Francisco Bay area costs around 150 percent more.
The same openness to building that has held the cost of Texas housing down has also helped the state become by far the nation’s largest producer of wind energy (don’t tell Trump.)
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a state having economic growth driven by relatively inexpensive housing and energy. On the contrary, growth through affordability is great!
However, the fact that affordability is driving Texas’s growth has an important implication for the character of that growth, which in turn has important political implications.
Texas, you see, has not been outpacing growth in the rest of the nation by achieving exceptionally rapid growth in productivity, or by drawing in industries with exceptionally high value-added per worker. Instead, it has been growing by attracting workers, drawn by its relative affordability. The availability of a growing work force, in turn, pulls in businesses. But the result is what economists would call “extensive” growth: More people, more jobs, but not higher income or output per person.
In fact, per capita income in Texas has if anything slipped a bit compared with per capita income in big blue states. Here’s the ratio of per capita income in Texas to per capita income in California:
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis
Again, there’s nothing wrong with this, and if you take the cost of living into account, Texas may well be offering most workers a higher standard of living than they could have achieved in California. (Texas treats the poor and vulnerable terribly, but that’s another story.) But if we’re asking about the political effects of Texan growth, Texas’s economy is getting bigger relative to the rest of the country, but not relatively richer on a per capita basis. That is, economically Texas isn’t looking more like rich blue states such as Massachusetts or even California.
Now, per capita income probably isn’t the big driver of differences in political orientation across states. Education levels are almost surely far more important. In fact, there’s a startlingly strong relationship between the percentage of a state’s population over the age of 25 with a bachelor’s degree or more and the way it voted in 2024:
Source: American Community Survey, New York Times
If you look at the chart above, you see, first, that Texas does not have an especially highly educated population. Why not? Mainly because the state hasn’t been especially attractive to industries that employ large numbers of highly educated workers. A few years ago there was a lot of hype about Austin rivaling Silicon Valley as a technology hub, but that move has largely fizzled.
The second thing you see from the chart is that Texas’s political orientation isn’t dramatically different from what you would expect if all you knew about the state was its education level. The share of highly educated adults in Texas is intermediate between that in deep blue states and deep red states; its Republican lean is also somewhere in between.
Now, I don’t mean to say that Democrats have no chance of turning Texas blue. While Texas has mainly had extensive growth rather than rapid growth in productivity or per capita income, it has been transformed in one important respect: It’s now home to not one but two world-class metropolitan hubs in Houston and Dallas. Indeed, the maturing of those metropolises is certainly the main reason that Texas has become more culturally and professionally sophisticated.
The only other red state with comparable metropolitan depth is Georgia, which I’ve circled along with Texas in the chart. Georgia has Atlanta — and Georgia, which has a similar education level to Texas, has become a genuine swing state. The rise of Texas urbanism hasn’t yet altered the outcomes of state-level races, in which Republicans have had a lock on power. But, as in Georgia, that could change.
Also, in Texas a significant share of eligible voters are Latino, and they are a real wild card. According to exit polls, in the 2024 election 55% of Latino Texas voters voted for Trump – a 13-percentage-point increase from 2020. Many (mostly Republican) pundits quickly proclaimed that there had been a fundamental realignment of Latinos toward the GOP. But that was simply wishful thinking. Recent elections and polling have shown a sharp swing in Latino voters back to the Democratic party. In fact, the Trump administration’s hostility and brutality toward anyone with brown skin are likely to undo many years of Republican cultivation of Latino voters in states like Texas.
So the point here is that while Texas could be shifting towards the blue zone, it won’t come easily. It won’t be a simple matter of a state becoming more progressive as a result of economic progress. In other words, Texas is not about to become New Jersey, or even Colorado. But with the right Democratic candidates, who can straddle the divide between urban Democrats and non-urban Republicans, it could become Georgia. And maybe, just maybe, Texas could blaze the trail for Democrats in other deep red states.
Over the past few months it's become clear that coding agents are extraordinarily good at building a weird version of a "clean room" implementation of code.
The most famous version of this pattern is when Compaq created a clean-room clone of the IBM BIOS back in 1982. They had one team of engineers reverse engineer the BIOS to create a specification, then handed that specification to another team to build a new ground-up version.
This process used to take multiple teams of engineers weeks or months to complete. Coding agents can do a version of this in hours - I experimented with a variant of this pattern against JustHTML back in December.
There are a lot of open questions about this, both ethically and legally. These appear to be coming to a head in the venerable chardet Python library.
chardet was created by Mark Pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the LGPL. Mark retired from public internet life in 2011 and chardet's maintenance was taken over by others, most notably Dan Blanchard who has been responsible for every release since 1.1 in July 2012.
Two days ago Dan released chardet 7.0.0 with the following note in the release notes:
Ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API — drop-in replacement for chardet 5.x/6.x. Just way faster and more accurate!
[...] First off, I would like to thank the current maintainers and everyone who has contributed to and improved this project over the years. Truly a Free Software success story.
However, it has been brought to my attention that, in the release 7.0.0, the maintainers claim to have the right to "relicense" the project. They have no such right; doing so is an explicit violation of the LGPL. Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation). Adding a fancy code generator into the mix does not somehow grant them any additional rights.
You're right that I have had extensive exposure to the original codebase: I've been maintaining it for over a decade. A traditional clean-room approach involves a strict separation between people with knowledge of the original and people writing the new implementation, and that separation did not exist here.
However, the purpose of clean-room methodology is to ensure the resulting code is not a derivative work of the original. It is a means to an end, not the end itself. In this case, I can demonstrate that the end result is the same — the new code is structurally independent of the old code — through direct measurement rather than process guarantees alone.
Dan goes on to present results from the JPlag tool - which describes itself as "State-of-the-Art Source Code Plagiarism & Collusion Detection" - showing that the new 7.0.0 release has a max similarity of 1.29% with the previous release and 0.64% with the 1.1 version. Other release versions had similarities more in the 80-93% range.
He then shares critical details about his process, highlights mine:
For full transparency, here's how the rewrite was conducted. I used the superpowers brainstorming skill to create a design document specifying the architecture and approach I wanted based on the following requirements I had for the rewrite [...]
I then started in an empty repository with no access to the old source tree, and explicitly instructed Claude not to base anything on LGPL/GPL-licensed code. I then reviewed, tested, and iterated on every piece of the result using Claude. [...]
I understand this is a new and uncomfortable area, and that using AI tools in the rewrite of a long-standing open source project raises legitimate questions. But the evidence here is clear: 7.0 is an independent work, not a derivative of the LGPL-licensed codebase. The MIT license applies to it legitimately.
Since the rewrite was conducted using Claude Code there are a whole lot of interesting artifacts available in the repo. 2026-02-25-chardet-rewrite-plan.md is particularly detailed, stepping through each stage of the rewrite process in turn - starting with the tests, then fleshing out the planned replacement code.
There are several twists that make this case particularly hard to confidently resolve:
Dan has been immersed in chardet for over a decade, and has clearly been strongly influenced by the original codebase.
There is one example where Claude Code referenced parts of the codebase while it worked, as shown in the plan - it looked at metadata/charsets.py, a file that lists charsets and their properties expressed as a dictionary of dataclasses.
More complicated: Claude itself was very likely trained on chardet as part of its enormous quantity of training data - though we have no way of confirming this for sure. Can a model trained on a codebase produce a morally or legally defensible clean-room implementation?
As discussed in this issue from 2014 (where Dan first openly contemplated a license change) Mark Pilgrim's original code was a manual port from C to Python of Mozilla's MPL-licensed character detection library.
How significant is the fact that the new release of chardet used the same PyPI package name as the old one? Would a fresh release under a new name have been more defensible?
I have no idea how this one is going to play out. I'm personally leaning towards the idea that the rewrite is legitimate, but the arguments on both sides of this are entirely credible.
I see this as a microcosm of the larger question around coding agents for fresh implementations of existing, mature code. This question is hitting the open source world first, but I expect it will soon start showing up in Compaq-like scenarios in the commercial world.
Once commercial companies see that their closely held IP is under threat I expect we'll see some well-funded litigation.
Photo showing graves of some of the children killed in the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran
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In the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, Americans struggled to understand what would cause a terrorist group from halfway around the world to kill as many of us as they could. “Why do they hate us?” millions asked, genuinely puzzled that anyone could have that much of a problem with the land of the free and the home of the brave. To that question, George W. Bush had an answer: They hate us because we’re awesome.
“They hate our freedoms,” Bush said, because the things America has done couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. A more mature people might have been able to keep in their heads both the idea that 9/11 was an unjustifiable horror and the idea that American actions over many years in the Middle East helped produce it. But not us. “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make,” Bush said in the same speech, though he was speaking equally to Americans, especially the opposition party. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Eight years later, when Barack Obama acknowledged that America had made some mistakes in its foreign policy over the years, Republicans screeched that he had gone on an “apology tour,” running down our flawless country to a bunch of foreigners. Even entertaining the idea that America has done things that produced anger and hatred in people elsewhere was unacceptable.
The truth, of course, is that no country in modern times has invaded, attacked, bombed, destabilized, and undermined more nations than we have. We seldom go more than a few years without a new war, or at least a vigorous bombing campaign. We’ve done it on every continent except Antarctica.
Yet because we’re the ones launching the bombs and not the ones watching them fall on our cities and our homes, we remain blissfully ignorant of what an American war looks like to those on its receiving end, to the point that we literally cannot imagine why anyone in a nation we attacked might be upset about it. We take refuge in the idea that we’re the good guys, and if there are any ill effects of our cleansing violence, everyone just has to realize that our intentions are good.
But imagine you were the parent of one of the 165 young girls killed at Shajareh Tayyebeh school in the city of Minab last week. How much would you care about whether the bomb that killed your daughter was intended to strike the school, whether it was the result of malice or a human mistake or an AI targeting system using an outdated map?
To most of us, it’s unimaginable. I can’t fathom the rage I would feel at America and its arrogance, its blithe belief that it is for the U.S. government to decide who lives and dies, which governments will be allowed to stand and which it can unseat, which buildings it will destroy no matter who winds up under the rubble. But as hard as it is for those living in the relative safety of America to grasp those emotions, it isn’t difficult to predict that they will not just disappear. If there is another 9/11 in a year or ten years or twenty years, will we once again scratch our heads in puzzlement, wondering what could have produced murderous anger at the United States?
Asked about the bombing of the girls’ school, our overcompensating Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was unconcerned. “All I can say is we’re investigating that,” Hegseth said. “We, of course, never target civilian targets, but we’re taking a look and investigating that.” In some sense, the idea that the U.S. doesn’t target civilians is true — depending on your definition of “target” and “civilian.” But when you have all those fun munitions and you’re casting about for things to blow up, the definitions begin to loosen. How about a government building next to an apartment building — would that count? We’ve already bombed thousands of targets, and we very quickly ran out of remote military bases to hit.
Anyway, Hegseth and his department will “investigate.” And what will come of that investigation? In the absolute best case scenario, someone will write a report, the upshot of which will be, “Whoops,” then deposit it in a file cabinet in the Pentagon. There will be no formal apology, no acknowledgement of the horror of 165 children being killed, no one blamed or held to account. To Americans it will be essentially meaningless, forgotten before long amid all the similar incidents. To those Iranian families, it will be the worst day of their lives, something that will echo down through generations.
But we’re the United States, and we don’t do remorse. This uniquely sadistic administration especially doesn’t do it; earlier this week the White House posted a video mixing shots of bombs falling with a scene from the video game Call of Duty.
The groyper edgelords on the White House social media team are stoked; the deaths of hundreds or thousands of Iranian civilians are nothing more than an opportunity to create some dank memes.
So yes: This is why they hate us. They hate us for our arrogance, for our ignorance, for our violence, for the indifference we pay to their lives. Can you blame them?
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Out of the blue we learn tonight that U.S. Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) isn’t running for reelection. Montana is one of those states that is certainly a tough challenge for Democrats. But it’s not impossible. So this adds to Republican challenges in holding the Senate. But we also seem to have a replay of what Dem Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia caught grief for last year. Garcia waited for the very last moment under the filing deadline to announce his retirement, leaving only enough time for his hand-picked successor, Garcia’s Chief of Staff Patty Garcia (no relation), to file her candidacy papers for the election. Since Garcia’s is a solid Democratic district, allowing Patty Garcia to run in the primary unopposed means that she is basically guaranteed to be elected. Daines appears to have done the exact same thing with a heads up to current Montana U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme.
Daines filed his candidacy withdrawal papers at 4:57 p.m. on Wednesday, the last day before the filing deadline, and Alme submitted his filing at 4:52 p.m. Sure seems like a lucky break for Alme. The real reason for the last minute switcherooo was likely to keep a top tier Democrat for getting into the primary. No well-known Democrat has entered the race. However, former University of Montana President Seth Bodnar also announced an independent bid for the Senate today. And Jon Tester earlier suggested in a text message that he supported Bodnar running as an independent. So I’m assuming Bodnar is broadly Dem-aligned albeit running as an independent.
Here’s a very interesting detail about risk, economics and military power that is kind of under the headlines in the expanding U.S.-Iran War. Iran is in a very, very bad position. Its military and deterrent power have already been badly damaged over the last three years. And it’s facing the top regional military power (Israel) and the top global military power (the U.S.) at the same time. It’s best bet to bring the war to a stop is to create huge international pain, and the best way to engineer that is to throttle oil deliveries from the Middle East, specifically by threatening shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
The U.S. and the U.S. military say they’re committed to keeping those shipping lanes open. They can do that through a mix of destroying Iran’s ability to fire missiles and drones and by escorting tankers through those waterways. The problem is that the U.S. military can’t force this matter. It comes down to tanker owners’ appetite for risk. Iran only has to be successful a few times, or convince the world it is able to be, to shut off shipping. The U.S. can do whatever it wants but unless those shipping owners think there’s very, very little risk, they’re not going to send their ships through. It’s this very interesting and highly consequential conflict between military standards of risk and private-sector standards. To drive the point home about private-sector risk appetites, shipping insurers or at least most of them, announced a few days ago that they’re not insuring ships on that passage for now. No insurance, probably no shipping.
Now the U.S. has stepped in and says it will backstop all that risk. It’s not totally clear to me whether it’s to the insurers or the shippers or who. And that’s because the U.S. actually hasn’t been very specific on how it’s supposed to work. But I want to point your attention to this article from CBS News which explains what’s known about the offer. What jumps out to me is how improvised and slipshod it seems. It also potentially puts the U.S. on the line for huge payouts to global oil shippers. In any case, read the article. It’s very interesting. It points to one of these wrinkles in a big momentous story that is going to have a big role in how everything plays out and yet is only getting under-the-fold attention. In this case it certainly seems like the White House has come up with a very half-baked plan to deal quickly with a situation that was entirely predictable. They can’t have global oil supply lines break down on them because of, among other reasons, the fact that it will create global inflationary pressures and make the domestic political situation for the White House even worse than it is. I don’t know nearly enough about maritime insurance markets and/or the shipping industry to know if it makes much sense. But presumably the insurance and shipping industries do and they seem to be saying it’s not ready for prime time. Read the article.
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We’ve been getting reportsallmorning that Trump is about to fire DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and has been asking around about what various allies think of the idea.
Just minutes ago, he broke the news on Truth Social (where else?) that Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) will take over for Noem, “effective March 31, 2026.” Presumably that means he is Trump’s nominee to be Senate-confirmed.
Noem will be shuffled into a new “special envoy” position.
Here’s Trump’s full announcement.
I am pleased to announce that the Highly Respected United States Senator from the Great State of Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, will become the United States Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), effective March 31, 2026. The current Secretary, Kristi Noem, who has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!), will be moving to be Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere we are announcing on Saturday in Doral, Florida. I thank Kristi for her service at “Homeland.”
Serving 10 years in the United States House of Representatives, and 3 in the Senate, Markwayne has done a tremendous job representing the wonderful People of Oklahoma, where I won all 77 out of 77 Counties — in 2016, 2020, and 2024! A MAGA Warrior, and former undefeated professional MMA fighter, Markwayne truly gets along well with people, and knows the Wisdom and Courage required to Advance our America First Agenda. As the only Native American in the Senate, Markwayne is a fantastic advocate for our incredible Tribal Communities. Markwayne will work tirelessly to Keep our Border Secure, Stop Migrant Crime, Murderers, and other Criminals from illegally entering our Country, End the Scourge of Illegal Drugs and, MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN. Markwayne will make a spectacular Secretary of Homeland Security. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Here’s another post following up on the earlier one about free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the pinched off little turn in the Persian Gulf where the waterway is at its narrowest. On Bluesky, in response to my earlier post, one user pointed me to this video, a daily ~30 minute update on a YouTube channel called What’s Going on With Shipping.
I want to start by stating clearly the basis upon which I’m sharing this video. I’d never heard of the channel before a couple hours ago. It’s run by a guy named Sal Mercogliano who says he’s a former merchant mariner and historian who teaches maritime history and also consults on the topic. In other words, he appears to be a merchant shipping and tanker professional/nerd. And he runs this shipping news channel. I can’t independently vouch for his credibility. However, I watched today’s episode and a number of factors — subscriber count, reliance on credentialed news articles and industry data sources, tone, meticulousness and more — make me think that it’s at least legit enough to get a beginning overview of the situation in the Gulf. I found it fascinating. It reminds me — sadly — of reporting on the supply chain breakdowns at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. You suddenly had to come up to speed on the complex but to most of us little-understood world of global supply chains, the underbelly and machinery of how the modern interconnected world actually runs.
There’s no one big revelation in this episode. It’s more the granular detail, all the moving parts that can’t possibly fit into mainstream news accounts. Two of the most interesting takeaways for me were these: First, the immediate reason few if any ships are going through the Strait isn’t simply the danger. The world of maritime insurance and reinsurance is very complex. And one of the international financial regimes that govern it mandates certain capital requirements insurers have. The outbreak of this war immediately changed the risk models which automatically, dramatically raised those capital requirements. The insurers don’t have that much money on hand. So they were all basically left with little choice but to cancel their contracts, raise rates, collect those rates and thus increase capital on hand. Once that’s done at least the capital requirement issue will be solved. Second, President Trump says that in addition to underwriting maritime insurance in the Gulf, the U.S. will escort tankers through the Strait if necessary. What Mercogliano says is that the U.S. Navy doesn’t currently have remotely enough ships in the Gulf to do that. That’s important. There are a lot of other details that are not surprising but still fascinating to learn more about. The whole energy extraction system relies on a steady number of tankers coming to part to pick up the oil or gas or LNG or whatever. If there are no ships there isn’t like an off switch to stop the stuff coming to port to be shipped off. And there isn’t enough storage to bank the stuff for more than a very short period of time.
Mercogliano doesn’t say so directly. But you get the distinct sense listening to this stuff that very little thinking has gone into how to manage the impact of very predictable actions on Iran’s part. In any case, I recommend watching at least some of the video. It’s fascinating stuff.
Humiliation is Donald Trump’s calling card. It’s the other side of domination. It’s an expression of domination. When I heard the news today of Noem’s ouster, which has certainly been telegraphed for weeks, it seems exquisitely Trump that he allowed her to go to Capitol Hill and get pressed on the entirely predictable question of whether she is having sex with her notional top aide — Corey Lewandowski — when she had only one day left on the job.
Akvorado, a network flow collector, relies on Traefik, a reverse HTTP
proxy, to expose HTTP endpoints for services implemented in a Docker Compose
setup. Docker labels attached to each service define the routing rules.
Traefik picks them up automatically when a container starts. Instead of
maintaining a static configuration file to collect Prometheus metrics, we
can apply the same approach with Grafana Alloy, making its configuration
simpler.
Traefik listens for events on the Docker socket. Each service advertises its
configuration through labels. For example, here is the Loki service in Akvorado:
Once the container is healthy, Traefik creates a router forwarding requests
matching /loki to its first exposed port. Colocating Traefik configuration
with the service definition is attractive. How do we achieve the same for
Prometheus metrics?
Metrics discovery with Alloy
Grafana Alloy, a metrics collector that can scrape Prometheus endpoints,
includes a discovery.docker component. Just like Traefik,
it connects to the Docker socket.1 With a few relabeling rules, we can
teach it to use Docker labels to locate and scrape metrics.
We define three labels on each service:
metrics.enable set to true enables metrics collection,
metrics.port specifies the port exposing the Prometheus endpoint, and
metrics.path specifies the path to the metrics endpoint.
If there is more than one exposed port, metrics.port is mandatory, otherwise
it defaults to the only exposed port. The default value for metrics.path is
/metrics. The Loki service from earlier becomes:
This connects to the Docker socket and lists containers every 30
seconds.2 The filter block restricts discovery to containers belonging
to the akvorado project, avoiding interference with unrelated containers on
the same host. For each discovered container, Alloy produces a target with
labels such as __meta_docker_container_label_metrics_port for the
metrics.port Docker label.
Relabeling targets
The relabeling step filters and transforms raw targets from Docker discovery
into scrape targets. The first stage keeps only targets with metrics.enable
set to true:
discovery.relabel"prometheus"{targets=discovery.docker.docker.targets // Keep only targets with metrics.enable=truerule{source_labels=["__meta_docker_container_label_metrics_enable"]regex=`true`action="keep"} // …}
The second stage overrides the discovered port when we define metrics.port:
// When metrics.port is set, override __address__.rule{source_labels=["__address__", "__meta_docker_container_label_metrics_port"]regex=`(.+):\d+;(.+)`target_label="__address__"replacement="$1:$2"}
Next, we handle containers in host network mode. When
__meta_docker_network_name equals host, the address is rewritten to
host.docker.internal instead of localhost:3
// When host networking, override __address__ to host.docker.internal.rule{source_labels=["__meta_docker_container_label_metrics_port", "__meta_docker_network_name"]regex=`(.+);host`target_label="__address__"replacement="host.docker.internal:$1"}
The next stage derives the job name from the service name, stripping any
numbered suffix. The instance label is the address without the port:
prometheus.scrape periodically fetches metrics from the discovered targets.
prometheus.remote_write sends them to Prometheus.
Built-in exporters
Some services do not expose a Prometheus endpoint. Redis and Kafka are common
examples. Alloy ships built-in Prometheus exporters that
query these services and expose metrics on their behalf.
Each exporter is a separate component with its own relabeling and scrape
configuration. The job label is set explicitly since there is no Docker
metadata to derive it from.
With this setup, adding metrics to a new service with a Prometheus endpoint is a
few-label change in docker-compose.yml, just like adding a Traefik route.
Alloy picks it up automatically. You can set up something similar with another
discovery method, like discovery.kubernetes,
discovery.scaleway, or discovery.http. 🩺
Both Traefik and Alloy require access to the Docker socket, which
grants root-level access to the host. A Docker socket proxy mitigates
this by exposing only the read-only API endpoints needed for discovery. ↩︎
Unlike Traefik, which watches for events, Grafana Alloy polls the
container list at regular intervals—a behavior inherited from Prometheus. ↩︎
The Alloy service needs extra_hosts:
["host.docker.internal:host-gateway"] in its definition. ↩︎
Buried in the cascade of news this week, Sadie Gurman and Caitlin Ostroff of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that 47,635 files are missing from the Epstein files documents that the Justice Department has made public. A spokesperson for the Justice Department told the reporters that the files were “offline for further review and should be ready for reproduction by the end of the week.”
The news that even the documents that have been released have extensive gaps suggests the department is covering up for individuals involved in Epstein’s crimes, including President Donald J. Trump, whose name appears frequently in the files. We know at least one of the missing files contains allegations that Trump sexually assaulted a thirteen-year-old girl.
Today, in a bipartisan vote, the House Oversight Committee agreed to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about the release of the Epstein files. By law, the Justice Department was required to release the Epstein files in full by December 19, 2025, with redactions only to protect Epstein’s victims. So far, it appears about half the files have been released, and many are heavily redacted.
The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Bondi against the wishes of committee chair James Comer (R-KY). Bondi will have to testify under oath.
The Trump administration has been able to articulate neither a clear reason for what Trump calls a “war” against Iran nor a goal to be accomplished by the war that is costing $1 billion a day. On February 19, less than ten days before Trump started bombing Iran, Trump told his “Board of Peace” that “[w]e’ve done the biggest thing of all. We have peace in the Middle East right now.” Today Trump told reporters that if he hadn’t struck Iran, it would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks, a conclusion U.S. intelligence agencies reject.
Trump told reporters today that “we’re doing very well on the war front, to put it mildly,” rating it 15 on a scale of 1 to 10. But Americans stranded in Middle Eastern countries are desperate to get out, and the government has not been able to help them. When asked today why not, Trump answered:
“Well, because it happened all very quickly, we thought, and I thought maybe more so than most, I could ask Marco, but I thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked. They were getting ready to attack Israel. They were getting ready to attack others. You’re seeing that right now. And a lot of those missiles that are hitting in those are stationary. Those were aimed there for a long period of time at these other countries. So I think I was right about that. We attacked first, and if we didn’t, it could have been, you know, look, we’re really decimating them. They’re being decimated. And if we didn’t. If we didn’t, and by the way, we have massive amounts of ammunition. We have the high end. A lot of it was given away stupidly by Biden, very stupidly, for free. And I’m all for Ukraine, but they gave away a lot. As you know, when I give away ammunition, everybody pays for it. The European Union is paying for it, then they can do what they want with it, but they are giving it, let’s say, to Ukraine, and it’s okay, but we gave away a lot of high end but we have plenty. But we have unlimited middle and upper ammunition, which is really what we’re using in this war. And we have an, really an unlimited supply. We also have a lot of the very high end stored in different countries throughout the world. With this, we’re literally storing it there, which is actually something that I insisted on in my first term. I rebuilt the military. In my first term, the military is great. A lot of, not unbelievable, amount of of ammunition, or munitions, as they say, were given away to you know, the Wall Street Journal incorrectly covered the story when they said that it was given away to the Middle East, not to the Middle East was given away to Ukraine. Very little was given to the Middle East. Middle East would buy a lot. And some of the nations, because they’re rich, they have a lot, but it was given away to Ukraine and it just should have been done. Look, it’s a war that should have never happened. If I were president, that war would have never happened. But we have a tremendous amount of munitions, ammunition at the upper upper level, middle and upper level, all of which is really powerful stuff.”
Notably, Trump had no answer for why there was no plan to evacuate Americans. Instead, he made it clear he is worried about experts’ assessment that the U.S. is low on high-end munitions and interceptors. According to Ellen Mitchell of The Hill, the U.S. is low on those weapons not because it has helped to supply Ukraine, but because it “blew through 25 percent of its stockpile over just a few days of operations against Iran in June 2025.” And before that operation, the U.S. military used $200 million worth of munitions in three weeks of attacks on the Houthis in Yemen, a bombing campaign that did little to change the Houthis’ behavior.
Despite the administration’s apparent lack of either planning or goals in its attack on Iran, Senate Republicans today refused to rein in Trump’s attack on Iran with a war powers resolution to bring the war to a stop. While some said they were nervous about the apparent lack of a plan for the conflict, others said it was imperative to demonstrate support for the troops by supporting the war, regardless of how we got into it.
Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who is facing a difficult election in the fall, said: “Passing this resolution now would send the wrong message to Iran and to our troops. At this juncture, providing unequivocal support to our service members is critically important, as is ongoing consultation by the Administration with Congress.”
But the American people are not on board. The war was unpopular with Americans before Trump started bombing Iran, and support for it has dropped since it began. According to G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers, only 34% of Americans support the attack on Iran.
Primary elections that took place across the country yesterday continued the trend of the past year: Democratic enthusiasm is off the charts. In Texas, where Democratic primary voters picked James Talarico over Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrats turned out in huge numbers, swamping the Republican vote. And Democrats continued the trend of the past year, flipping an Arkansas state house seat from Republican to Democratic. David Nir of The Downballot notes that in more than 90 special elections since Trump took office, Democrats have beaten the results of the 2024 presidential election by an average of 13 points.
But the Texas election also revealed Republicans’ attempts to suppress Democratic voting. Jen Rice of Democracy Docket explains that Texas voters used to be able to vote at any polling place in their county, but in Dallas and Williamson counties, the Republican Party chairs abandoned that system, making it harder for people to vote. Williamson County Republican Party chair Michelle Evans told KUT News in Austin that she could explain why they had made the change, “but at the end of the day, it’s because we can. It’s legal. It’s something we’re entitled to do, and it’s something that our party would like us to do.”
The Texas secretary of state’s office didn’t provide voters in those counties with accurate information of where they should vote, creating chaos. Democratic Party chair Kardal Coleman in Dallas County and the Texas Civil Rights Project in Williamson County filed emergency petitions to give people more time to vote. A district court judge in Dallas ordered Democratic primary polls to stay open two additional hours, saying that “there has been mass confusion as to where…voters were entitled to cast their ballots on election day, and voter confusion was so severe that the Dallas County Election Department website crashed.” A Williamson County judge ordered two polling places to stay open until 10:00 PM.
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, a Republican who is himself running for the same Senate seat Talarico is, challenged the order, and the Republican-dominated Texas Supreme Court blocked the lower court’s orders. It allowed people who were not in line by 7:00 PM—the original time for the polls to close—to cast ballots, but those ballots were separated from the rest and it is not clear they will be counted.
Emily Eby French of Common Cause Texas told Jen Rice: “We can’t let a small group of conspiracy theorists set the rules for Texas voters anymore. Two individuals controlled the way millions of Texas voters were able to cast a ballot yesterday. The opinions of those two [Republican Party] chairs about countywide voting were based in conspiracy theory, not based in fact, and those conspiracy theories caused widespread panic, confusion and disenfranchisement.”
That’s not a marketing slogan from Apple for the new MacBook Neo. But it could be. And it is the underlying message of the product. For a few years now, Apple has quietly dabbled with the sub-$1,000 laptop market, by selling the base configuration of the M1 MacBook Air — a machine that debuted in November 2020 — at retailers like Walmart for under $700. But dabbling is the right word. Apple has never ventured under the magic $999 price point for a MacBook available in its own stores.
As of today, they’re not just in the sub-$1,000 laptop market, they’re going in hard. The MacBook Neo is a very compelling $600 laptop, and for just $100 more, you get a configuration with Touch ID and double the storage (512 GB instead of 256).
You can argue that all MacBooks should have Touch ID. My first answer to that is “$599”. My second answer is “education”. Touch ID doesn’t really make sense for laptops shared by kids in a school. And with Apple’s $100 education pricing discount, the base MacBook Neo, at $499, is half the price of the base M5 MacBook Air ($1099 retail, $999 education). Half the price.
I’m writing this from Apple’s hands-on “experience” in New York, amongst what I’d estimate as a few hundred members of the media. It’s a pretty big event, and a very big space inside some sort of empty warehouse on the western edge of Chelsea. Before playing the four-minute Neo introduction video (which you should watch — it’s embedded in Apple’s Newsroom post), John Ternus took the stage to address the audience. He emphasized that the Mac user base continues to grow, because “nearly half of Mac buyers are new to the platform”. Ternus didn’t say the following aloud, but Apple clearly knows what has kept a lot of would-be switchers from switching, and it’s the price. The Mac Mini is great, but normal people only buy laptops, and aside from the aforementioned dabbling with the five-year-old M1 MacBook Air and a brief exception when the MacBook Air dropped to $899 in 2014, Apple just hasn’t ventured under $999. “We just can’t ship junk,” Steve Jobs said back in 2007. It’s not that Apple never noticed the demand for laptops in the $500–700 range. It’s that they didn’t see how to make one that wasn’t junk.
Now they have. And the PC world should take note. One of my briefings today included a side-by-side comparison between a MacBook Neo and an HP 14-inch laptop “in the same price category”. It was something like this one, with an Intel Core 5 chip, which costs $550. The HP’s screen sucks (very dim, way lower resolution), the speakers suck, the keyboard sucks, and the trackpad sucks. It’s a thick, heavy, plasticky piece of junk. I didn’t put my nose to it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it smells bad.
The MacBook Neo looks and feels every bit like a MacBook. Solid aluminum. Good keyboard (no backlighting, but supposedly the same mechanism as in other post-2019 MacBooks — felt great in my quick testing). Good trackpad (no Force Touch — it actually physically clicks, but you can click anywhere, not just the bottom). Good bright display (500 nits max, same as the MacBook Air). Surprisingly good speakers, in a new side-firing configuration. Without even turning either laptop on, you can just see and feel that the MacBook Neo is a vastly superior device.
And when you do turn them on, you see the vast difference in display quality and hear the vast difference in speaker quality. And you get MacOS, not Windows, which, even with Tahoe, remains the quintessential glass of ice water in hell for the computer industry.
I came into today’s event experience expecting a starting price of $799 for the Neo — $300 less than the new $1,099 price for the base M5 MacBook Air (which, in defense of that price, starts with 512 GB storage). $599 is a fucking statement. Apple is coming after this market. I think they’re going to sell a zillion of these things, and “almost half” of new Mac buyers being new to the platform is going to become “more than half”. The MacBook Neo is not a footnote or hobby, or a pricing stunt to get people in the door before upselling them to a MacBook Air. It’s the first major new Mac aimed at the consumer market in the Apple Silicon era. It’s meant to make a dent — perhaps a minuscule dent in the universe, but a big dent in the Mac’s share of the overall PC market.
Miscellaneous Observations
It’s worth noting that the Neo is aptly named. It really is altogether new. In that way it’s the opposite of the five-year-old M1 MacBook Air that Apple had been selling through retailers like Walmart and Amazon. Rather than selling something old for a lower price, they’ve designed and engineered something new from the ground up to launch at a lower price. It’s an all-new trackpad. It’s a good but different display than the Air’s — slightly smaller (13.0 inches vs. 13.6) and supporting only the sRGB color gamut, not P3. If you know the difference between sRGB and P3, the Neo is not the MacBook you want. What Neo buyers are going to notice is that the display looks good and is just as bright as the Air’s — and it looks way better, way sharper, and way brighter than the criminally ugly displays on PC laptops in this price range.
Even the Apple logo on the back of the display lid is different. Rather than make it polished and shiny, it’s simply debossed. Save a few bucks here, a few bucks there, and you eventually grind your way to a new MacBook that deserves the name “MacBook” but starts at just $600.
I’ll call out one item from Hackett’s 17-item list in particular:
One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just
480 Mb/s.
On the one hand, this stinks. It just does. The two ports look exactly the same — and neither is labeled in any way — but they’re different. But on the other hand, the Neo is the first product with an A-series chip that Apple has ever made that supports two USB ports.1 It was, I am reliably informed by Apple product marketing folks, a significant engineering achievement to get a second USB port at all on the MacBook Neo while basing it on the A18 Pro SoC. And while the ports aren’t labeled, if you plug an external display into the “wrong” port, you’ll get an on-screen notification suggesting you plug it into the other port. That this second USB-C port is USB 2.0 is not great, but it is fine.
Other notes:
I think the “fun-ness” of the Neo colors was overstated in the rumor mill. But the “blush” color is definitely pink, “citrus” is definitely yellow, and “indigo” is definitely blue. No confusing any of them with shades of gray.
The keyboards are color-matched. At a glance it’s easy to think the keyboards are all white, but only on the silver Neo are the key caps actually white. The others are all slightly tinted to match the color of the case. Nice!
8 GB of RAM is not a lot, but with Apple Silicon it really is enough for typical consumer productivity apps. (If they update the Neo annually and next year’s model gets the A19 Pro, it will move not to 16 GB of RAM but 12 GB.)
It’s an interesting coincidence that the base models for the Neo and iPhone 17e both cost $600. For $1,200 you can buy a new iPhone and a new MacBook for just $100 more than the price of the base model M5 MacBook Air. (And the iPhone 17e is the one with the faster CPU.)
With the Neo only offered in two configurations — $600 or $700 — and the M5 Air now starting at $1,100, Apple has no MacBooks in the range between $700 and $1,100.
To consider the spread of Apple’s market segmentation, and how the Neo expands it, think about the fact that on the premium side, the 13-inch iPad Pro Magic Keyboard costs $350. That’s a keyboard with a trackpad and a hinge. You can now buy a whole damn 13-inch MacBook Neo — which includes a keyboard, trackpad, and hinge, along with a display and speakers and a whole Macintosh computer — for just $250 more.
Not sure if this page was there yesterday, but the main “Displays” page at Apple’s website is a spec-by-spec comparison between the regular and XDR models. Nice.
As you drive by a cyclist, you have one of three opinions:
We’re good. No issue. Everyone stayed in their lane.
Something is up. What is this cyclist doing? I’m confused. Don’t they need to obey the rules of the road?
WHOA WHOA WHOA WHO IS THIS GUY AND WHY IS HE IN MY LANE I AM GOING TO SHOW HIM WHAT’S UP WITH THIS HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK.
As a person who drives, I’ve experienced #1 and #2 quite a bit. My perspective has shifted as I dived into both road and gravel cycling over the last half decade. As a person who rides a lot, I do understand road rage, but the number of times a driver in a car has lost their mind because of my riding is… impressive.
Road rage. I get it. I’ve had it, but when it comes to Car vs. Bike, it’s not a fair fight. You’re in a big metal box, and I’m on a metal toothpick with a plastic cap on my head. You will always win.
My Working Assumption
I work under the assumption that whenever I ride, the question isn’t if I am going to be hit by a car, but when. This is a proactive defensive mindset rooted in the fact that I am guaranteed to lose every interaction with a motor vehicle.
To support this mindset, I need as much situational awareness as possible. In front of me, when cars are about, it’s an endless set of questions. Who is coming at me? Who is turning? Who is in what lane? What is their intended direction? Are they aware I am here? Am I sure? In all scenarios where it’s unclear whether or not this three-ton box of steel might be heading my way, I give them a wide berth. I will lose this fight every time, so, no, please, go ahead — take all the space you want.
Behind me is a different story. A quick look over the shoulder, yes, I have a glimpse of the situation over either shoulder, but remember — I AM RIDING A BIKE — heading forward and am required to pay full attention to that situation. The box of steel behind me is almost always moving faster than I am and always has unclear intentions. Before the device I am about to describe, I became quite adept at correctly guessing the size and the speed of the box of steel approaching from behind based on sound. BIG TRUCK. MOVING FAST.
A quick look over the shoulder is not always an option, especially when there are multiple interesting situations directly in front of me. Enter radar.
The appropriately named Varia RearVue 820 attaches to my seat post and provides me with real-time data on my Garmin computer on my handlebars:
All the steel boxes behind me. (And metal toothpicks)
Their type (small, medium, large).
Their threat level is displayed as a highlight on my Garmin Computer. Green means we’re fine. Orange means moving fast and in your lane. Red means moving fast, big, and in your lane.
Intensely bright light that also serves as a brake light. It's not weightless, but it's less chonky than the video version. Don't forget to set up your Garmin computer to fully show off the radar screens -- it does more than you think.
Radar175m / 574ft range, covers two lanes of traffic
LightVisible 1mi+ in daylight, auto brake light
Battery10-30 hrs (mode dependent)
Weight90g — about a deck of cards
JoyIntense
ChargeUSB-C
In addition to the visuals, I can also set audio cues that alert me to different situations, but most of that already arrives via just listening. Yes, it can make errors — sometimes boxes are just toothpicks. Yes, if it’s raining, it’s a mess, but if I’m out in the rain, I’m already on high alert. Finally, it also shines a bright red on the folks behind me.
A Bright Red Light
The ride to work. Suburbia. I’m stopped at a long red light when the metal box approaches on my left. We’re both at the front and it’s clear they want to say something… the slow roll forward. The window is going down on the passenger side. They’re in driver state #2 above: something’s up.
“Sir. I say, sir. The light on your bike is distracting me.”
<sfx: Deep breath>
I turn my head and speak calmly, “My… brake light?”
“It’s distracting.”
“No, it’s not. You’ve got the same light on your car; in fact, there are two of them. I stare at them all the time. They are designed to give important information to your fellow travelers. It’s there to make sure you don’t hit me.”
I write about what I find interesting. That works better when I have a sense of who's reading & what problems you're actually dealing with. The results also help support the work. This shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
Shortly after the first set of explosions, Iranians received bursts of notifications on their phones. They came not from the government advising caution, but from an apparently hacked prayer-timing app called BadeSaba Calendar that has been downloaded more than 5 million times from the Google Play Store.
The messages arrived in quick succession over a period of 30 minutes, starting with the phrase ‘Help has arrived’ at 9:52 am Tehran time, shortly after the first set of explosions. No party has claimed responsibility for the hacks.
It happened so fast that this is most likely a government operation. I can easily envision both the US and Israel having hacked the app previously, and then deciding that this is a good use of that access.
Here's a new study of applications to medical residency programs, suggesting that medical training has become less desirable in states with abortion restrictions, especially in abortion-related specialties, including obstetrics and gynecology, family medicine, internal medicine, and emergency medicine.
"In this cross-sectional study with an ITS analysis of 24 193 864 applications to 4315 residency programs for 5 years across all medical specialties, we observed a statistically significant disparity in applications from both women and men in states with abortion restrictions following the Dobbs decision in 2022 compared with states that did not enact restrictions. Despite overall increases in the number of residency applications during the study period, existing disparities between application volume to programs in abortion-restricted and nonrestricted states widened for women applying to residency, and new disparities emerged for men applying to residency post-Dobbs. Stratified analyses suggested that specialty type may influence differences, as effect sizes were increased among abortion-related specialties and decreased among the most competitive specialties.
"These findings affirm and expand on recent studies demonstrating decreased OBGYN residency applications and applicant interest in abortion-restricted states following the Dobbs decision.19 Additional studies have reported challenges faced by OBGYN programs in abortion-restricted states, including nonadherence to accreditation standards requiring abortion training, financial constraints for medical training, and burnout among residents and program leadership."
prohibit a chatbot to give substantive responses; information, or advice or take any action which, if taken by a natural person, would constitute unauthorized practice or unauthorized use of a professional title as a crime in relation to professions who licensure is governed by the education law or the judiciary law.
Claude, what do you think of the legal logic of this bill?
The legal logic is shaky. The bill’s operative test asks whether a chatbot’s output, “if taken by a natural person, would constitute a crime” under New York’s unauthorized practice statutes. But those statutes set a high bar — mere advice-giving by a layperson is not criminal; what’s prohibited is holding yourself out as a licensed professional while charging fees. Your neighbor who happens to be a doctor can tell you what he thinks your rash is. A retired lawyer can walk you through a lease. None of that is a crime. So either the bill is mostly toothless — most AI responses wouldn’t meet the criminal threshold — or courts will interpret “substantive advice” far more expansively than the underlying statutes warrant, effectively creating a new and harsher legal standard for AI that applies to no human equivalent. Neither outcome reflects good lawmaking, and the ambiguity will systematically over-deter, pushing operators to sanitize outputs well beyond what the statute actually requires.
Claude, who will be hurt by this bill?
The deepest problem is who gets hurt. The populations with the most to gain from AI-assisted professional guidance are precisely those who cannot afford lawyers, doctors, or therapists — the tenant trying to understand an eviction notice, the rural patient triaging symptoms, the small business owner reviewing a contract. For these users, the choice the bill actually creates is not “AI advice versus licensed professional advice”; it’s “AI advice versus no advice at all.” A watered-down chatbot that responds to every medical or legal question with a referral to a licensed professional is not a safety feature — it’s a luxury tax on information, paid disproportionately by people with the fewest alternatives. New York should be asking how to ensure AI advice is accurate and clearly disclosed, not how to suppress it on behalf of incumbents who’d prefer less competition.
Thanks Claude. Where did you learn this excellent analysis?
Public choice theory is part of my general training on economics and political science literature — Buchanan, Tullock, Olson, and the broader tradition are well-represented in the texts I was trained on.
But I’d be remiss not to note that you’re at the home institution of public choice. The Buchanan House is literally on your campus, and the tradition Buchanan and Tullock built at GMU is probably the most direct intellectual ancestor of the kind of analysis I was applying to this bill — concentrated benefits, diffuse costs, regulatory capture, rent-seeking by incumbent professionals. That framework is so natural for analyzing occupational licensing legislation that it almost applies itself.
If anything, my read of S7263 is pretty much a straightforward public choice story: organized professional associations with strong lobbying presence get statutory protection written in the language of consumer welfare, while the costs fall on millions of unorganized users who will never know what information they didn’t receive. Buchanan would have recognized it immediately.
Former investment banker Raphael Roettgen had to abandon a space-focused special purpose acquisition company in 2022 as hype around mergers with blank-check shell companies turned radioactive. Four years later, he’s back after helping raise more than $200 million to take a private space company public. SPACs raise cash on the stock market and then use […]
On January 15, 2026, a collective cheer coincided with relief as four astronauts from SpaceX Crew 11 were safely returned to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS). The evacuation came after a crew member experienced a medical emergency that left them in stable condition but in need of terrestrial medical care. The successful return […]
Workers have completed repairs to the helium pressurization system in the upper stage of the Space Launch System, keeping a potential April launch of the Artemis 2 mission on track.
Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, is preparing to enter one of the most hotly contested arenas in the space industry: global broadband from low Earth orbit (LEO). In a regulatory filing that caught many in the industry off guard, Blue Origin set forth plans for a network called TeraWave comprising more […]
The third launch of a small launch vehicle developed by a Japanese company failed shortly after liftoff March 4, raising questions about the rocket’s future.
The Senate Commerce Committee advanced a revised NASA authorization bill that implements some of the changes to Artemis sought by the agency while also extending the life of the ISS
Canadian telco Telus has agreed to take a stake in AST SpaceMobile and invest in ground infrastructure needed to connect subscribers to the operator’s planned direct-to-smartphone constellation.
British startup Mutable Tactics has raised $2.1 million in pre-seed funding to develop AI software enabling groups of military drones to operate autonomously, even when satellite navigation and communications are disrupted.
A symposium on maps and popular culture, Popcartographie : cartes et cultures populaires (XIXe-XXIe siècle), will be taking place at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Mitterrand site in Paris on 10-11 April 2026. Its three… More
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. In the first half of the episode we discuss Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and then move on to other topics. Here is the episode summary:
Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry’s conviction that great literature is where ideas “walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world” in a way no other discipline can match. Tyler, who has called Henry’s book Second Act “one of the very best books written on talent,” sat down with him to compare readings of Measure for Measure and range across English literature more broadly.
Tyler and Henry trade rival readings of the play, debate whether Isabella secretly seduces Angelo, argue over whether the Duke’s proposal is closer to liberation or enslavement, trace the play’s connections to The Merchant of Venice and The Rape of Lucrece, assess the parallels to James I, weigh whether it’s a Girardian play (Oliver: emphatically not), and parse exactly what Isabella means when she says “I did yield to him,” before turning to the best way to consume Shakespeare, what Jane Austen took from Adam Smith, why Swift may be the most practically intelligent writer in English, how advertising really works and why most of it doesn’t, which works in English literature are under- and overrated, what makes someone a late bloomer, whether fiction will deal seriously with religion again, whether Ayn Rand’s villains are more relevant now than ever, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Now, before doing your current work, you were in advertising for almost a decade. How do you feel that work in advertising has shaped how you read literature?
OLIVER: [laughs] I try to keep them very separate. I try not to let advertising—
COWEN: You try, but I’m sure you fail.
OLIVER: —pollute my readings of literature.
COWEN: Why is it a pollution?
OLIVER: Because advertising is not a great art, and to apply the principles of advertising to literature would be a diminishment.
COWEN: You don’t have to apply the principles. Advertising gives you insight into what people value, how people respond, and that’s also a part of literature.
OLIVER: It is if you take advertising not to mean headlines and banner ads and things like that, but to mean the calling of attention to some particular thing of importance. You can see that a lot of the great writers were very good advertisers of their own work, of their own ideas.
COWEN: Swift in particular.
OLIVER: Swift is very, very good at advertising. If you wanted to be obtuse, you could reframe his whole career as an exercise in lobbying and PR, and realize that no one’s ever been as good at it as he was.
COWEN: So, your favorite authors are the ones who are best at advertising is what you’re now telling us.
OLIVER: I have a very catholic view of literature, and I admire those writers who are practical and can do a lot of different things. I love Samuel Johnson, and one reason is that he can write a sermon, a legal opinion, an advert—almost anything you want. I think the literary talent can often be turned to those multiple uses.
COWEN: Why isn’t there more creativity in advertising? So much of it, to me, seems stupid and boring.
OLIVER: Yes.
COWEN: You would think, well, if they had a clever ad that people would talk about, it would be better, but that doesn’t happen. Is it a market failure, or it’s actually more or less optimal?
OLIVER: I don’t think it’s optimal. We don’t know how well advertising works, and we’re still impeded in that because of the laws about who you can and cannot target on the internet. I think most people would actually be surprised, if they went into an advertising agency, to learn just how poorly we can target people. Everyone thinks they’re being targeted all the time, but being followed by a toaster advert is really quite basic, and everyone uses the same toaster example because everyone’s being followed by the same bloody toaster. That’s not targeting.
I think they’ve been taken over by bad ideas. There are two competing schools of advertising. One of them is the hard sell, where you put a lot of information and facts, and you name the product a lot. “Buy this aspirin. It cures headaches three times quicker than other brands. We did a study—38 percent of people . . .” And you just hammer it all the time.
The other advertising school is image-based. Arthur Rubicam wrote those wonderful Steinway adverts. The instrument of the immortals. Have you brought great music into your home? The woman in the dress at the piano. You’re buying a whole mood or a vibe. The peak of that is like the tiger on the Frosty cereal packet. You don’t need words. Or the Marlboro Man—you buy these cigarettes. You’re going to look like that cowboy in that shirt, and you’re going to smoke. You’re going to feel like a man, and it’s just going to be great. Coors Light does that now.
Then there was this terrible, terrible thing called the Creative Revolution in the 1960s, where supposedly—this is like the modernism of advertising.
Definitely recommended, and do get out your copy of the Shakespeare.
I just came back from Andreessen Horowitz’ American Dynamism Summit in Washington, D.C. It was very refreshing to see so many smart people invested in both American reindustrialization and American defense.
One interesting theme I noticed at the conference — and which I was eager to talk about — was U.S. manufacturers building factories in Japan. Many American manufacturers — both startups and big companies — already do lots of sourcing in Japan, but now some are starting to realize that Japan is a good production base as well. That was the subject of my first book, so it’s a topic near and dear to my heart.
So I thought this would be a good time to publish a guest post by Rie Yano, a friend of mine who is a San Francisco-based partner at the Japanese VC firm Coral Capital. Rie’s very timely post is all about how Japan is the perfect place for the U.S. to do lots of defense manufacturing. In fact, I think there are some advantages of Japan that she didn’t even mention — such as the incredible ease of bringing foreign skilled workers into Japan, now that the country’s immigration policy has been reformed. But in any case, it’s a very good post.
The United States faces a defense-industrial problem that money alone can’t solve. Even though reindustrialization is now supposedly an American national priority, there are hard limits to what the U.S. can actually build, repair, and replenish at scale.
Shipyards are backed up for years. Munitions production is thin. Advanced manufacturing talent is aging out faster than it can be replaced. And even when funding is approved, production timelines don’t move fast enough to match today’s threat environment.
Government reshoring initiatives help at the margin, of course. But new industrial capacity in the U.S. takes years to permit, and remain vulnerable to litigation even after regulatory approval.
Meanwhile, China’s mighty industrial machine is firing on all cylinders. While U.S. reshoring efforts ramp up from a cold start, and while U.S. manufacturing relearns how to produce at scale after decades of neglect and stagnation, China is rapidly surpassing the U.S. in the production of ships, submarines, missiles, drones, and ammunition.
To move faster, the U.S. can’t go it alone. It needs a partner — a place where it can manufacture defense equipment while it ramps up its own industrial base. That partner needs three essential characteristics in order to get started producing right away: industrial depth, political stability, and speed.
Taiwan, under threat of invasion, is increasingly risky as a manufacturing base. Europe is fragmented and geographically distant from the Indo-Pacific, and has Russia to occupy its energies. Canada lacks high-throughput manufacturing scale, while Mexico lacks the precision and complexity that modern defense systems require. India is still early in its technological catch-up phase.
That leaves Japan and Korea — of which Japan is far larger. Fortunately, over the next two years, Japan plans to increase defense and industrial capacity more than at any point since World War II:
Japan possesses world-class manufacturing capability, elite engineering talent, and strong IP protection. And for the first time in decades, it has a political mandate to move fast - especially given Prime Minister Takaichi’s recent landslide victory. Projects like Rapidus and TSMC’s advanced fabs in Kumamoto aren’t isolated investments. They’re signals that US-Japan industrial integration is becoming a strategic necessity.
A deeper industrial partnership between the U.S. and Japan is such a huge opportunity that in retrospect it will seem inevitable. American defense companies that understand how to build with Japan will win.
For eighty years, Japan effectively outsourced its defense to the United States. The countries leaders have realized that that model has become untenable. First, the regional security environment has tightened fast. China’s military expansion, North Korea’s missile launches, and Russia’s activity in Northeast Asia have collapsed the assumption that the status quo could continue.
Second, the United States is no longer willing or able to carry Asia’s industrial defense load alone. At a moment when the U.S. defense industrial base is straining under production bottlenecks and labor shortages, allies that can actually build things matter more and more.
Third, Japan is now in the process of fundamentally changing how it mobilizes capital for defense. Military spending was effectively capped below 1% of GDP for decades. That constraint is now gone — Japan plans to reach 2% of GDP by 2027, putting it among the top global defense spenders by the late 2020s.
But in fact, this is only a piece of the story, and not necessarily the biggest one. Japan’s defense buildup aligns three levers at once:
increased defense spending
explicit industrial policy and subsidies
a willingness to use foreign direct investment as an accelerator
Regulations, procurement reform, and capital allocation are all being aligned to rebuild production capacity, not just fund programs. U.S. defense and deep-tech companies are being invited in as co-developers and co-manufacturers.
Poland is the Closest Playbook
When countries rebuild defense capability under time pressure, everything compresses. Capital deployment, testing, procurement, and industrial scale-up all happen faster than peacetime systems allow.
Poland is the clearest recent example:
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Poland was already spending about 2.4% of GDP on defense. Within two years, that figure surged toward ~4%, making Poland one of NATO’s highest defense spenders. Just as importantly, procurement timelines compressed from years into months, and domestic production ramped in parallel with acquisition instead of waiting for long planning cycles to finish.
Crucially, Poland paired this with the foreign direct investment that has powered its economy more generally. Over the past two decades, annual FDI inflows exceeded $40 billion at peak, and the total inward FDI stock now surpasses $330 billion. Poland used this FDI not just to create jobs, but to import manufacturing know-how, scale its factories, and integrate itself into global supply chains. The result was rapid economic growth and industrial modernization — today, Poland’s GDP per capita (PPP) sits close to Japan’s, despite starting far behind in the early 2000s.
Japan is now signaling that it wants to do something similar. As of 2023, Japan’s inward FDI stock stood at about $350 billion, which is low for an economy of its size. The government has now set an explicit target to double that figure to $650-700 billion by 2030.
This represents a structural bet that foreign capital, technology, and operating know-how can help rebuild industrial capacity faster than domestic systems can deliver on their own. In fact, this is already happening. TSMC’s $17 billion investment in Kumamoto gave Japan advanced 3-nanometer chips processing technology, the most advanced foundry production outside Taiwan.
Meanwhile, Rapidus, despite being a Japanese semiconductor company, is explicitly designed to pull in global partners, frontier manufacturing tools, and non-Japanese know-how to rebuild advanced chipmaking capability quickly, rather than relying solely on domestic incumbents as Japan tried to do in the past. At Coral Capital, we wrote a piece about why the Rapidus development means that Hokkaido is the new Taiwan.
As the U.S.’ urgency for rearmament rises, Japan’s industrial scale-up matters — it means the U.S. now has a trusted allied capacity in Asia that can shoulder much of the defense manufacturing burden.
Japan Already Powers Critical U.S. Bottlenecks
A U.S.-Japan defense manufacturing partnership won’t be something created out of the blue; it’ll build on an industrial relationship that has existed for many years, to the benefit of both countries.
Right now, if you’re building hardware, deep tech, or anything that goes into defense or critical infrastructure at a significant scale, Japan is probably already in your supply chain — you just don’t always see it. Japan specializes in a number of upstream industries that help American companies scale:
Some key examples include:
Semiconductor materials: Japanese firms supply roughly half of the world’s silicon wafers and photoresists used in advanced chipmaking. Companies like Shin-Etsu Chemical and SUMCO sit upstream of nearly every advanced logic and memory fab, including those operated by TSMC, Samsung, and Intel in the U.S.
Advanced composites: Toray’s T1100 carbon fiber is embedded across U.S. defense platforms, including the U.S. Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), one of the Pentagon’s most important next-generation aviation programs, and multiple Boeing and Lockheed systems.
Industrial robotics and automation: Japan produces almost half of the world’s industrial robots, led by companies such as FANUC, Yaskawa, and Kawasaki. As U.S. defense manufacturing runs into labor constraints, automation is becoming critical.
Shipbuilding and maintenance: While the U.S. Navy struggles with maintenance backlogs and unfinished repairs, Japan retains dense, high-throughput shipyard capacity with companies such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The U.S. is already using Japanese yards for maintenance and overhaul of U.S. naval vessels in the Indo-Pacific.
Japan’s Surprising Advantages: Regulations and Labor
For U.S. hardware companies, the constraint over the next few years will be throughput - how fast you can stand up new capacity, qualify suppliers, and move from prototype to volume.
In the U.S., building physical infrastructure is slow and unpredictable. New factories, test ranges, and shipyard expansions often take years to permit and are frequently delayed by litigation, even after regulatory compliance. Three-to-seven year approval timelines are common.
In the long run, policy reforms can fix this situation. But for the foreseeable future, Japan offers a much more favorable trade-off. Japan’s centralized, bureaucratic regulatory approval process gets things built much faster than America’s more legalistic one. In the U.S., permits are often challenged in court, tied up for years in legal proceedings, and sometimes revoked. In Japan this almost never happens — once you get approved to build something, you can go ahead and build it. Capital-intensive infrastructure can thus be built quickly and operated with long-term confidence. On top of that, the government has explicitly defined defense-industrial capacity as a national security priority and is actively smoothing the regulatory path.
Labor is another big advantage. Senior hardware engineers in Japan often cost meaningfully less than in the U.S., but their real advantage is execution reliability. Lower attrition, tighter process control, a culture of discipline, and deep experience in precision manufacturing, materials, robotics, and systems integration translate into higher reliability at scale.
Japan also offers the opportunity for industrial scale without the strategic IP risk that hurt many multinational companies in China. After years of technology leakage and forced transfer in jurisdictions with weak IP protections, global players are understandably wary. Japan, however, has strong IP enforcement. It’s also a U.S. ally, so there’s no risk that a rival military will end up with American technology. The 2022 Economic Security Promotion Act and the 2023, U.S.-Japan Security of Supply Arrangement formalize that alignment. New institutions under the Ministry of Defense are explicitly designed to move commercial technology into defense deployment faster.
Anyone considering investing in Japan should be encouraged by the deep history of successful U.S.-Japan co-manufacturing. Japanese companies have spent decades building factories in the United States, training American workers, and helping Americans master production systems like Kaizen and the Toyota Production System.
In other words, the U.S.-Japan alliance has always been an industrial alliance, not just diplomatic. Now that model is being applied to defense manufacturing as well.
For the first time, Japan is treating industrial capacity itself as a national security asset. The 2023 Act on Enhancing Defense Production and Technology Bases formalizes that shift. New institutions under ATLA, including DISTI, are explicitly designed to shorten the path from commercial technology to defense deployment, including coordination with the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit.
In other words, Japan is now deploying the same playbook it once ran in autos, electronics, and semiconductors, now pointed deliberately at defense.
Builders: Seize this Moment
The United States, needs to reindustrialize, but it cannot reindustrialize alone. Japan is its arsenal, already embedded in the most critical layers of the U.S. industrial base, from materials and automation to ship repair and advanced manufacturing. What’s changed is that Japan is now explicitly opening those layers to deeper co-manufacturing and co-development, and doing so under time pressure.
This window will not stay open indefinitely. Early partners help shape standards, procurement pathways, and long-term relationships. Late entrants miss out and are forced to play catch-up.
DENVER—Last month, President Donald Trump took to social media with an announcement that he would direct the Pentagon and other federal agencies to "begin the process" of disclosing government files related to alien life and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena). It was the latest chapter in a yearslong slow burn of sensational claims, congressional hearings, and yes, the military's release in 2020 of intriguing videos that do, indeed, appear to show things that defy simple explanations.
"To date, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, there is no conclusive evidence suggesting an extraterrestrial origin for UAP," a NASA blue-ribbon panel wrote in a 2023 report. "The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," the DNI report stated in 2021.
PLD Space’s manufacturing facilities show the flow of production for its Miura 5 rockets. Image: PLD Space
Spanish startup launch company, PLD Space, raised €180 million ($209 million) in its latest funding round as it works towards the inaugural flight of its next rocket, Miura 5.
The company was founded in 2011, becoming the first private Spanish rocket company. It debuted with the launch of the Miura 1 rocket in 2023 and has been developing a series of rockets, including the Miura 5, which lands in the ocean before being recovered for reuse; the Miura Next, a medium-lift rocket with propulsive landing capabilities; and both heavy and super-heavy versions of the Miura Next, which feature three and five boosters, respectively.
“Miura 5 was designed to address a clear and growing capacity gap in the market, and this investment support strengthens our ability to transition into commercial operations,” said Ezequiel Sánchez, PLD Space’s Executive President. “It accelerates the build‑out of the industrial and launch infrastructure required to deliver reliable access to space for an expanding pipeline of global customers.”
In November 2025, PLD Space said it was aiming for the first flight of its Miura 5 rocket in the first quarter of 2026, but with this announcement of this Series C fundraising, the company now says that inaugural flight will be sometime in 2026.
PLD Space has said it aims to launch more than 30 times per year by 2030.
“As demand for dependable access to space continues to rise, we are reinforcing the redundancy, test cadence and flight cadence needed to sustain continuity across multiple locations,” Sánchez said. “This approach strengthens operational buffers and assurance frameworks that global operators increasingly rely on to secure their long‑term access‑to‑orbit strategies.”
This latest funding infusion was driven by Japanese manufacturer Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, which invested €50 million ($58 million) into the company.
“We are pleased to collaborate with PLD Space, a company taking on the challenge of satellite launch services with a view toward the global market,” said Tomonori Sato, Mitsubishi Electric’s Executive Officer, in a statement. “By combining PLD Space’s launch capabilities with Mitsubishi Electric’s strengths in the satellite business, we aim to address evolving customer requirements, including those in the global market.”
Mitsubishi Electric said its investment into PLD Space will afford it “priority access to launch services using the Miura 5 rocket, thereby enhancing the feasibility of building a satellite constellation.”
To date, PLD Space raised more than €350 million ($407 million). Other investors in this latest round included the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities; Spanish public funds management company, COFIDES (Compañía Española de Financiación del Desarrollo); and Spanish fun Nazca Capital.
European competition
PLD Space was selected as one of five companies to participate in the European Launcher Challenge. Its selection was made in the summer of 2025 with the financial backing of the European Space Agency (ESA) Council of Ministers in November.
The goal is for the competing companies to achieve a successful orbital launch no later than 2027 and if successful, ESA will contribute to every operational launch from these challengers until 2030 at the latest.
The five companies selected for competition were (in alphabetical order):
Isar Aerospace (Germany)
MaiaSpace, an ArianeGroup subsidiary (France)
Orbital Express Launch Ltd or Orbex (United Kingdom)
PLD Space (Spain)
Rocket Factory Augsburg (Germany)
On Feb. 18, 2026, Orbex announced it was closing up shop after a deal to be acquired by another startup, The Exploration Company, didn’t pan out.
In a statement to the news outlet European Spaceflight, MaiaSpace said it was delaying its inaugural launch to April 2027.
Isar Aerospace launched its first Spectrum rocket in 2025, but it failed to reach orbit, crashing near the launch site less than 30 seconds after takeoff. It’s second test flight, ‘Onward and Upward,’ was set to launch in January, but a pressurization valve issue delayed that to no earlier than March 19.
Fellow German startup, Rocket Factory Augsburg is working towards the inaugural launch of its RFA One rocket, but a target date hasn’t been announced.
Pre-War Protests Twenty Years Ago Were Very Different
Over twenty years ago when a U.S. invasion of Iraq seemed imminent the public reaction was overwhelmingly against it. While leadership in the U.S. often seemed split during the run up, global opinion was massively against it. Including in countries much closer to Iraq or more likely to be targets of bombs if Iraq were to launch the weapons it was accused of having.
On February 15th, 2003, global protests took place. Many millions of people in cities around the world protested. Probably the biggest global demonstration ever. In fact, because it was a coordinated effort with people everywhere aware that it was a global statement, it was a kind of birth of a global human consciousness. A step in human evolution.
We even had our own protest months earlier in the small western city I live in. Our local and informal group of peace activists and environmental advocates were reading about leadership laying the foundation for rationalizing such a war and held a day of protest on the town square. I participated and wrote about it in the local paper at the time.
Of course none of it worked. Just a month after the global protest the attack and long war began.
Now we have a similar attack on Iran but the lead up was very different. In part because Trump, having cowed Congress into near irrelevance, just jumped in on this without taking time to get Congressional approval or laying much groundwork for rationalizing it. And in part because Trump creates so many things that demand protest that it’s hard to keep up.
Iran does create a lot of problems for the region and does have some nuclear material. There ability to actually make nuclear warheads and missiles and how quickly any of that could be done is nothing like what Trump has claimed. And their abuse and murder of their people is not the real reason since much worse could be found elsewhere in the world. It’s yet another Trump mistake in judgement and a Trump ego trip.
Despite nothing like the same protests, people are very much against this. A Quinnipiac poll done just before the attack, about the possibility of such an attack, showed 70% against it and only 18% for it.
The lack of pre-war protests compared to back then is disconcerting but understandable. But nothing has changed. Leadership is still idiotic about this kind of thing, the people are much smarter than leadership about this, what the people want is clear, and leadership is doing exactly the opposite.
Lay long talking with my wife about ordering things in our family, and then rose and to my office, there collecting an alphabet for my Navy Manuscript, which, after a short dinner, I returned to and by night perfected to my great content. So to other business till 9 at night, and so home to supper and to bed.
During a brief hearing on Wednesday morning, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation spent only a few minutes "marking up" new legislation that provides guidance to NASA for its various initiatives, including the Artemis program to land humans on the Moon.
"Our bill authorizes critical funding for, and gives strategic direction to, the agency in line with the priorities of administrator Isaacman and the Trump administration," said the committee's chairman, Sen. Ted Cruz, (R-Texas).
The duration of the hearing, however, seems to be the inverse of its significance.
I'm behind on writing about Qwen 3.5, a truly remarkable family of open weight models released by Alibaba's Qwen team over the past few weeks. I'm hoping that the 3.5 family doesn't turn out to be Qwen's swan song, seeing as that team has had some very high profile departures in the past 24 hours.
Junyang Lin was the lead researcher building Qwen, and was key to releasing their open weight models from 2024 onwards.
As far as I can tell a trigger for this resignation was a re-org within Alibaba where a new researcher hired from Google's Gemini team was put in charge of Qwen, but I've not confirmed that detail.
More information is available in this article from 36kr.com. Here's Wikipedia on 36Kr confirming that it's a credible media source established in 2010 with a good track record reporting on the Chinese technology industry.
The article is in Chinese - here are some quotes translated via Google Translate:
At approximately 1:00 PM Beijing time on March 4th, Tongyi Lab held an emergency All Hands meeting, where Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming frankly told Qianwen employees.
Twelve hours ago (at 0:11 AM Beijing time on March 4th), Lin Junyang, the technical lead for Alibaba's Qwen Big Data Model, suddenly announced his resignation on X. Lin Junyang was a key figure in promoting Alibaba's open-source AI models and one of Alibaba's youngest P10 employees. Amidst the industry uproar, many members of Qwen were also unable to accept the sudden departure of their team's key figure.
"Given far fewer resources than competitors, Junyang's leadership is one of the core factors in achieving today's results," multiple Qianwen members told 36Kr. [...]
Regarding Lin Junyang's whereabouts, no new conclusions were reached at the meeting. However, around 2 PM, Lin Junyang posted again on his WeChat Moments, stating, "Brothers of Qwen, continue as originally planned, no problem," without explicitly confirming whether he would return. [...]
That piece also lists several other key members who have apparently resigned:
With Lin Junyang's departure, several other Qwen members also announced their departure, including core leaders responsible for various sub-areas of Qwen models, such as:
Binyuan Hui: Lead Qwen code development, principal of the Qwen-Coder series models, responsible for the entire agent training process from pre-training to post-training, and recently involved in robotics research.
Bowen Yu: Lead Qwen post-training research, graduated from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, leading the development of the Qwen-Instruct series models.
Kaixin Li: Core contributor to Qwen 3.5/VL/Coder, PhD from the National University of Singapore.
Besides the aforementioned individuals, many young researchers also resigned on the same day.
Based on the above it looks to me like everything is still very much up in the air. The presence of Alibaba's CEO at the "emergency All Hands meeting" suggests that the company understands the significance of these resignations and may yet retain some of the departing talent.
Qwen 3.5 is exceptional
This story hits particularly hard right now because the Qwen 3.5 models appear to be exceptionally good.
I've not spent enough time with them yet but the scale of the new model family is impressive. They started with Qwen3.5-397B-A17B on February 17th - an 807GB model - and then followed with a flurry of smaller siblings in 122B, 35B, 27B, 9B, 4B, 2B, 0.8B sizes.
I'm hearing positive noises about the 27B and 35B models for coding tasks that still fit on a 32GB/64GB Mac, and I've tried the 9B, 4B and 2B models and found them to be notably effective considering their tiny sizes. That 2B model is just 4.57GB - or as small as 1.27GB quantized - and is a full reasoning and multi-modal (vision) model.
It would be a real tragedy if the Qwen team were to disband now, given their proven track record in continuing to find new ways to get high quality results out of smaller and smaller models.
If those core Qwen team members either start something new or join another research lab I'm excited to see what they do next.
Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.
Will Wilson paints a bleak picture for where we’re heading with code written by AIs.
He thinks the world will fill with poorly written code that no one understands and that software bugs will proliferate through critical systems. Your airplane that has gotten safer and safer with each passing decade will be running on code that no one has really checked all that well. Which would be bad.
What’s more, Wilson fears that humans will lose their software writing skills over time as AI takes on more and more tasks. We’ll become dumber as a whole. Which would also be bad.
Wilson is a mathematician turned start-up founder who built the company Antithesis in a bid to modernize software testing techniques and help humans write better code.
In this episode, we get into his life story, his fears around AI software and what he thinks we should do to make massive improvements to the code that underlies everything.
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On Monday, the market reaction to the Trump/Netanyahu war with Iran was surprisingly muted. Stocks were roughly flat. Prices of oil and gas futures were up, but only moderately.
Yesterday reality apparently began to set in, although stocks made up most of their initial losses.
This will be a brief post, with some bad news and some good news.
The bad news comes in two parts.
First, any hopes that this war might be extremely brief are fading. The Trump administration may have imagined that decapitating the Iranian government would bring swift regime change, but the Islamic State isn’t a government of mere thugs — yes, they’re evil thugs, but they’re also serious religious fanatics facing what for them is an existential threat, and their grip on power isn’t that easy to break. Furthermore, it’s painfully obvious that Trump and co. had no plan beyond bombing Iran, killing its current leaders, and hoping that something good would happen.
Second, war in the middle of the world’s most important oil-producing region — which is also a key source of liquefied natural gas — inevitably has major consequences for energy prices. Once upon a time US and Israeli air superiority might have contained Iran’s ability to harm its neighbors. But in an age in which even third-rate powers have the ability to launch missiles and drones, Iran has a huge stockpile of drones and also has ballistic missiles that are destructive, hard to intercept, and have a 1200 mile range.
The U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia has been hit by two drone strikes. Airports in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha and the U.S. consulate in Dubai have also been hit.
U.S. officials have urged all Americans in the region to leave, but they did so after almost all flights had been canceled. Only now are they saying that they’re going to arrange flights on military aircraft and charter flights — an airlift that will have to be immense given that there are surely tens of thousands of Americans currently stranded. Did I mention that Trump and co. clearly went to war without a plan?
The potential targets at risk include key parts of the region’s energy infrastructure. Above all, the war threatens tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which is how the bulk of Middle Eastern oil and gas normally reaches world markets. And the risk of Iranian attacks has effectively closed the Strait. Yesterday Trump, obviously scrambling to limit the damage, declared that he is ordering the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation to provide “guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade, especially Energy, traveling through the Gulf,” as well as telling the Navy to provide security. Do we have the resources to do all of that?
Oil prices are up around $15 per barrel since mid-February:
Source: Trading Economics
In case you’re wondering, there are 42 gallons in a barrel.
Indeed, it’s hard to understand why oil prices haven’t risen even more. “Why has oil not hit $100 a barrel?”, asks the Financial Times. The best answer seems to be that even now traders are betting that the Strait of Hormuz won’t stay closed for more than a few days. I hope I’m wrong, but I expect the strait to remain closed for weeks despite Trump’s assurances.
Now the good news: Even if oil prices go much higher, to $100 a barrel and beyond, it won’t necessarily trigger an economic crisis. I explained why on Monday: The United States and other advanced nations are far less oil-dependent than they were in the 1970s, when oil shocks did cause major economic disruption.
It’s true that Europe, which depends heavily on imported LNG from both the Middle East and the United States, will be hit harder than we will. However, even with a sustained closure of the Strait of Hormuz Europe will face a smaller shock than it did following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
My back of the envelope calculations say that a $15 a barrel rise in oil prices, which is what has happened so far, will raise overall U.S. consumer prices by about 0.3 percent. A $50 a barrel rise from the pre-bombing level, which would take the price to more than $120, would raise consumer prices by about 1 percent. For perspective, that’s roughly what Trump’s tariffs have done. Yet those tariffs, while they have hurt, have caused neither runaway inflation nor a recession. Neither will rising oil prices on their own even if they go well above $100 a barrel.
However, the key point is that this latest economic shock isn’t happening on its own. The tariffs — and the huge uncertainty they create for the future — haven’t gone away. Neither have draconian anti-immigrant policies and their growing economic drag. There are widespread concerns about AI — both as a bubble that might burst and as a force driving job losses. And many people, myself included, are worried about financial stability: In many ways we have recreated the “shadow banking” risks that made the 2008 crisis possible.
Now we’ve added a fresh level of massive uncertainty. Bear in mind that this isn’t even a war of choice; it’s a war of whim, marked by a near-total lack of planning.
One shouldn’t exaggerate the economic fallout from this war. But it isn’t occurring in isolation: There are many stresses on our economy, and this could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back — a straw that becomes heavier the longer the war goes on. Furthermore, if Trump is this erratic now, what will he do as the midterms get even closer?
There are some behaviors that are anti-patterns in our weird new world of agentic engineering.
Inflicting unreviewed code on collaborators
This anti-pattern is common and deeply frustrating.
Don't file pull requests with code you haven't reviewed yourself.
If you open a PR with hundreds (or thousands) of lines of code that an agent produced for you, and you haven't done the work to ensure that code is functional yourself, you are delegating the actual work to other people.
They could have prompted an agent themselves. What value are you even providing?
If you put code up for review you need to be confident that it's ready for other people to spend their time on it. The initial review pass is your responsibility, not something you should farm out to others.
A good agentic engineering pull request has the following characteristics:
The change is small enough to be reviewed efficiently without inflicting too much additional cognitive load on the reviewer. Several small PRs beats one big one, and splitting code into separate commits is easy with a coding agent to do the Git finagling for you.
The PR includes additional context to help explain the change. What's the higher level goal that the change serves? Linking to relevant issues or specifications is useful here.
Agents write convincing looking pull request descriptions. You need to review these too! It's rude to expect someone else to read text that you haven't read and validated yourself.
Given how easy it is to dump unreviewed code on other people, I recommend including some form of evidence that you've put that extra work in yourself. Notes on how you manually tested it, comments on specific implementation choices or even screenshots and video of the feature working go a long way to demonstrating that a reviewer's time will not be wasted digging into the details.
It’s the perhaps tired refrain of foreign policy and defense professionals that wars are easy to start (if you’re still, mostly, the preeminent global military power) but much harder to finish. They are unpredictable. They quickly spread in directions you don’t anticipate. As the still preeminent global military power, you tend to be on the line for other sorts of instability that your war of choice creates. And yet Donald Trump has mainly been able to engage in what we might call impulsive unilateralism without generating too many problems for himself in the short run. He decapitated the Venezuelan regime through what amounted to a dramatic raid and is now, improbably, running the country as a kind of American presidential subsidiary through the mechanisms of the Chavista regime itself. He assassinated Qasem Soleimani in 2020. He launched a massive but brief bombing raid against Iranian nuclear facilities last year. In each case the U.S. was mostly able to end things quickly and on its own terms.
This isn’t going that way. From one vantage point, what we’re seeing in Iran’s response shouldn’t surprise us. And that response is not going especially well for Iran. What’s telling is that the White House doesn’t seem to have been prepared for the rapid clip of escalation or the market chaos, which are fairly predictable responses to the war it started.
Let’s run through some particulars.
Iran is responding to America’s campaign in a very logical way, albeit “logical” in the context of having very few good options. Iran’s strategic deterrence and a decent amount of its military capacity were already destroyed in 2024 and 2025, the power of its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza even more decisively shattered. So they’re launching missiles and drones everywhere they can to try to expand the conflict into some new configuration that is better than Iran facing the U.S. and Israel on its own. The challenge is that they’re launching attacks against basically all the countries in the region who might be most likely to rein the U.S. in, as well as those who have kept up at least reasonably robust ties with Iran.
The more viable strategy is to create an international energy and economic crisis by shutting down the oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — something those attacks are also making possible. Iran can’t blockade the Strait. But with missile and drone fire and perhaps whatever Navy it has left, it can probably make passage dangerous enough that international shippers will stop trying to send ships through.
There’s an uncanny duality to everything that I’m describing. None of this is surprising. And thus you can’t exactly say it’s “going badly” since this is what you’d expect to happen if you started a war that the Iranian government viewed correctly as a battle for regime survival. If you start from the premise that the U.S. had good reason to start this war or no choice but to do so, then you’d say it’s dangerous, it’s not going to be fast or bloodless, but this is what you’d expect. On the other hand, if you start from the premise that there was no good reason to do this and in fact the Iranian regime is weaker than it’s been in decades, you start to think, was this a good idea? Are we prepared for the consequences and ready to put out all these fires? In political terms, we know that a decisive majority of the American public (around 60%) was against this in the first place.
There are clearly some long time Iran hawks who are decidedly in the first category — they were prepared for this war in whatever form it might take. But the problem for the White House is, again, that this war started with the country close to overwhelmingly against this. And that was before all the bad stuff we’ve seen this week came into view. More to the point, there’s very little in Donald Trump’s history or his behavior that gives me the slightest confidence that he’s ready for any of what’s coming. That assumption gets extra support from how all over the place Trump has been in explaining what the goal of the whole operation is. It’s regime change or maybe it’s regime change if the Iranian public wants it to be and if it’s not then too bad for them. It may be about setting back Iran’s nuclear program. Or maybe it’s just further degrading the country’s missile capacity. Trump seems mostly to have ruled out anything but airpower, except when he occasionally says the opposite, which of course he usually does. And airpower alone never unseats governments. You can possibly weaken a state enough that a domestic insurgency becomes more possible. But such an insurgency tends to be a long shot when a hostile foreign power is actively bombarding the country.
I think we’re in this war because the Venezuela operation went pretty well for Trump, certainly in the short-run. That was fun. So why not do it again in Iran? And he’s escalating abroad in general because escalation, vast expression of power and violence, amount to a kind of psychological compensation for loss of power and popularity at home. It’s a kind of presidential self-care making use of the prerogative powers of the American presidency. I see little evidence Trump is ready for this level of chaos or economic shocks with a war few Americans thought there was any reason to commit to in the first place.
Twice a year we ask for your help keeping TPM alive and thriving. Today is one of those days. It’s very, very important to our whole operation. We’ve just kicked off our Annual TPM Membership Drive. We do this because TPM is chronicling — generating and saving the receipts of — our on-going national crisis and we cannot do that without growing our number of subscribers. If you’re a TPM reader but not a member (see below if you are a member!) please take this moment to join us by becoming a member. Maybe you used to be a member and your membership lapsed. We need you to come back and become a paying member. We have a 25% discount running for the duration of the drive.
What if you are a member? We need your help too.
First, you can upgrade your membership. You can go from a Prime account to a Prime AF account or from Prime AF to Inside. But there’s something else you can add too, perhaps the most important. We have about 35,000 members currently. That’s 35,000 potential ambassadors to new readers and new members. Many of you know people who are on the outskirts of the TPM community but not members. Perhaps they’re full fledged TPM readers but not members. We’re not expecting anybody to make individual sales pitches on our behalf. But it is a huge, huge boost if you go on your social channels and let people know about TPM and our drive. Are you on Bluesky? Talk about us on Bluesky — or Facebook or even Twitter. Tell people what you love about TPM and how memberships funds our whole operation.
We’ve seen concretely over the year the critical role of independent media when democracy is on the ropes against rising authoritarianism. No media organization owned by a big diversified corporation can be independent. They are too vulnerable to a rogue president. They are owned by too many carrots and sticks. We’re different. We answer to no one but our readers and our values. That makes what we do critical in a moment like this. As I wrote above, we are chronicling the unfolding national crisis of democracy in America. Please help us do this job.
It’s Wednesday morning in Norfolk, Virginia. A 45-year-old man with white supremacist tattoos coating his torso stands bare-chested before a bathroom mirror. The water is running from the sink. Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” plays softly in the background. He is muttering to himself. We cannot hear what he is saying, but it feels unpleasant.
From behind, a woman approaches. It is his wife, Samantha Jennifer. She has a confused look plastered to her face.
JENNIFER: “Honey, what are you doing?”
PETE: “Running lines.”
JENNIFER: “Honey, all those months in rehab.”
PETE: “No. Lines for today’s press conference at the Pentagon.”
JENNIFER: “Oh, baby. I love hearing you play big boy general!”
PETE: “Can I practice on you?”
Jennifer nods glowingly, then sits on a camo-decorated bathroom chair.
PETE: “Pretend you’re a retarded lib media member.”
JENNIFER: “Like, a trans them with pink hair?”
PETE: “Sure. Now ask me a question about Iran?”
Jennifer clears her throat.
JENNIFER: “Pete …”
PETE: “Honey, we’ve gone over this. It’s either ‘Sir’ or ‘Mister War Secretary.’ Or ‘Mr War.’”
JENNIFER": “Oh, sorry, babe.” Clears throat again. “Mister War …”
PETE: “Yes, retard loser from NBC …”
JENNIFER: “Why is the war going so badly?”
PETE: “Babe! What the fuck?”
JENNIFER: “Oh, duh. Right. Sorry. I was just reading about the American casualties.”
PETE: “What do we always say, Babe? I do the reading, you do the cooking and dress like sexy nurse.”
Jennifer clears her throat.
JENNIFER: “Mister War, what makes America so great?”
Pete Hegseth grins for a second, then turns back toward the mirror, puts on his serious face and straightens his shoulders.
PETE: “Well, Jennifer—Iran wanted war. And we gave them [long pause] Gwar!”
Awkward pause.
JENNIFER: “Honey, I don’t understand.”
PETE: “Gwar—the rock band. ‘Scumdogs of the Universe.’ Like, we brought the metal to Iran! Bam! Thud! Whoo!”
Awkward pause.
JENNIFER: “I don’t think that works, babe.”
PETE: “Hmm. OK. Um. How about—‘Iran thought they were in for a cake walk. But now we’re … walking all over their cake!”
JENNIFER: “I guess it’s a little better.”
Pete looks frustrated.
PETE: “They called him the supreme leader. Well, now we call him ‘Dead.’
JENNIFER: “Who’s dead?”
PETE: “The supreme leader.”
JENNIFER: “Of where?”
PETE: “Fucking a. How about something like, ‘I guess Trump Steaks didn’t fail after all. Because we just London broiled Iran!’”
Pete smiles. He’s impressed with himself.
JENNIFER: “Technically, London Broil is just a cooking method. Not a cut of meat.”
PETE: “For fuck’s sake.”
Pete opens the mini-fridge under his sink, grabs a can of Budweiser. Cracks it open, stares up at a photo of Joseph Stalin framed above a window.
JENNIFER: “Honey, we’ve talked about this …”
Pete hushes his wife.
PETE: “Quiet, woman. I need to think! I need to think! I need to think!”
He grabs a nearby pen, stabs the can, shotguns it. Wipes his mouth with a towel.
PETE (to himself, staring back in the mirror): “Let’s fucking go, big boy! You’re the secretary of war of the United States of America. You’ve got this! All those pussies don’t understand who you are! You’re the motherfucking man! You didn’t wet yourself in ninth grade! You didn’t have a crush on Mitch Gaylord! You weren’t voted Most Likely to Never Open a Book! You are Pete motherfucking Hegseth!”
Jennifer looks concerned. Pete steps toward her.
PETE: “LL Cool J once rapped, ‘Mama said knock you out.’ Guess what? We just knocked out Iran!”
JENNIFER: “Oh, babe. Way too DEI.”
PETE: “Nobody thought Rocky could beat Drago—and he kicked his ass! Now, so did America!”
JENNIFER: “Drago was Russian. This is Iran. Different countries, babe.”
PETE: “No, babe. I’m pretty sure Iran is in Russia.”
JENNIFER: “Um, no.”
PETE: “Iran wanted to play with fire. Now—they’re on fire!”
JENNIFER: “I think I have an appointment …”
PETE: “Iran thought we would run. Well, I-never-ran!”
JENNIFER: “With my therapist …”
PETE: “Whose house? Trump’s house!”
JENNIFER: “In Bermuda …”
PETE: “Elton John once sang, ‘I’m still standing …’”
About a week before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, attacking Iran alongside Israel, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine warned that the lack of support from allies and depleted reserves of interceptors and Patriot missiles would make an attack on Iran risky.
Patty Nieberg of Task & Purpose reported that on February 28, the day the offensive began, Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, wrote to the troops deployed around the Middle East that they were “embarking on a mission of profound consequence,” moving “from deterrence into active combat.” Central Command has reported six American service members killed and eighteen wounded in the operation.
According to U.S. Central Command, which manages U.S. military operations in the Middle East, there are about 50,000 military personnel involved in Operation Epic Fury, 200 fighter jets, two aircraft carriers and bombers, and they are moving more support to the region. Yesterday Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to rule out sending ground troops to Iran.
In his message to Congress yesterday announcing he had taken “military action…against the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Trump wrote: “It is not possible at this time to know the full scope and direction of military operations that may be necessary.”
Today the war continued to widen, leaving hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals in the Middle East desperate to leave. France alone has 400,000 people there. The U.S. has between 500,000 and a million people in the Middle East. The U.S. State Department has urged them to leave but said it could not help, and with airports and airspaces closed, just how they are supposed to do that is unclear. After pressure, the government is now saying it will work on chartering aircraft and using military planes to transport people who want to leave.
Alison Durkee of Forbes reported today that Trump’s military strikes in Iran have already cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1 billion. The three F-15E Eagle jets lost to friendly fire on Sunday cost $90 million each. Transporting troops, ships, and aircraft to the Middle East cost about $630 million. Missiles and weapons systems are also expensive—a drone is about $35,000, and a Tomahawk missile costs millions—and the two aircraft carriers in the region together cost at least $13 million a day. And then there are the costs of operating aircraft, and so on.
Jennifer Scholtes and Katherine Tully-McManus of Politico reported that lawmakers anticipate the administration will ask for supplemental funding for this operation, over and above the more than $150 billion the Republicans provided the Pentagon in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the nearly $839 billion in regular funding Congress appropriated in February.
Trump made little effort to present his case for military strikes against Iran to the American people. In his letter to Congress notifying them of his attack, Trump said he had acted under the 1973 War Powers Act, which permits a president to attack another country if there is an urgent threat. But the letter itself doesn’t identify any such urgent threat. It simply said Iran is one of the world’s largest sponsors of state terrorism and that it “continues to seek the means to possess and employ nuclear weapons.”
The Framers of the Constitution placed the power to declare war in the hands of Congress and not in the president above all because they did not trust that much power in the hands of one man. But they also wanted to make sure the American people would have robust debates about the value of the money and lives lost in combat. So determined were they for the American people to have those debates that they put into the Constitution that Congress had the power “[t]o declare War…and…[t]o raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”
In Federalist #26, one of the newspaper essays Alexander Hamilton wrote to encourage the ratification of the Constitution, Hamilton explained that people shouldn’t fear the strength of the new government outlined in the Constitution, because the necessity of debating war, alongside the two-year limit on government funding for the military, would force Congress to debate military actions. He expected members of the opposition to attack those in power over military appropriations, so that if those in power were “disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it.”
But Trump has now taken that power away from the people and their representatives. He has launched a military action that by his own admission is not an emergency situation like those anticipated by the War Powers Act, and thus he should have asked Congress for authorization to send troops and money to Iran. Members of Congress, in turn, would then have had to answer to their constituents.
Tonight the U.S. Southern Command, which operates in Central and South America and the Caribbean, posted: “On March 3, Ecuadorian and U.S. military forces launched operations against Designated Terrorist Organizations in Ecuador. The operations are a powerful example of the commitment of partners in Latin America and the Caribbean to combat the scourge of narco-terrorism. Together, we are taking decisive action to confront narco-terrorists who have long inflicted terror, violence, and corruption on citizens throughout the hemisphere.”
Eric Schmitt and Luis Ferré-Sadurní of the New York Times reported that U.S. Special Forces soldiers are advising and supporting Ecuadorian commandos as they conduct raids against drug-related sites run by “designated terrorist organizations.”
Juli Clover, at MacRumors, notes that neither the new Studio Display nor the Studio Display XDR are compatible with Intel-based Macs. (I’m curious why.) Also, in a separate report, she notes that Macs with any M1 chip, or the base M2 or M3, are only able to drive the Studio Display XDR at 60 Hz. You need a Pro or better M2/M3, or any M4 or M5 chip, to drive it at 120 Hz.
Update: My understanding is that if you connect one of these new Studio Displays to an Intel-based Mac, it’ll work, but it’ll work as a dumb monitor. You won’t get the full features. I’ll bet Apple sooner or later publishes a support document explaining it, but for now, they’re just saying they’re not “compatible” because you don’t get the full feature set. Like with the Studio Display XDR in particular, you won’t get HDR or 120 Hz refresh rates.
Here’s the backstory: With every new generation of Apple’s
Mac-series processors, I’ve gotten the impression from Apple execs
that they’ve been a little frustrated with the perception that
their “lesser” efficiency cores were weak sauce. I’ve lost count
of the number of briefings and conversations I’ve had where
they’ve had to go out of their way to point out that, actually,
the lesser cores on an M-series chip are quite fast on their own,
in addition to being very good at saving power!
Clearly they’ve had enough of that, so they’re changing how those
cores are marketed to emphasize their performance, rather than
their efficiency.
Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters….
These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to bias future responses toward their products or services. We identified over 50 unique prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, with freely available tooling making this technique trivially easy to deploy. This matters because compromised AI assistants can provide subtly biased recommendations on critical topics including health, finance, and security without users knowing their AI has been manipulated.
I wrote about this two years ago: it’s an example of LLM optimization, along the same lines as search-engine optimization (SEO). It’s going to be big business.
A hardcover copy of this book of interviews (of economists, by a philosopher) arrived in my mail the other day, and I'm enjoying it. It's also freely available online at the links below. (Here is my interview (pp 371-395).
PLD Space has raised $209 million to ramp up production of the Spanish startup’s Miura 5 launch vehicle, marking the largest funding round for a European space company announced so far this year.
US university endowments have recorded their fastest spending growth since the global financial crisis as federal funding cuts and rising operating costs squeeze campus budgets.
A study of 657 institutions by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (Nacubo) with Commonfund showed their endowment withdrawals rose 11 per cent year on year in the 12 months to June 2025 — the sharpest increase since 2010.
The surge came as endowments funded an average of 15.2 per cent of universities’ operating expenses last year, up from 10.9 per cent in 2023.
The Wasteland has been the inevitable next step for Gas Town since the day I launched it. Every new AI tooling form-factor breakthrough has involved 100x increase in token spend. How do you 100x a Gas Town? You federate a hundred Gas Town users together to build stuff.
The Wasteland is a way to link thousands of Gas Towns together in a trust network, to build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas.
At the heart of the Wasteland is a big shared Wanted Board of work. People put up ideas, and other people use their Gas Towns to help build those ideas. And you get credit for the work you do.
Wasteland Wanted Board pre-seeded with some tasks
The Wasteland has a lot of moving parts. There are stamps. There are leaderboards. There are character sheets. The Wasteland was designed for federating work, but its metamorphosis into an RPG seems unstoppable at this point. You’ve seen the gaming interfaces people have already put on Gas Town, but with building blocks like this… it’s gonna be wild.
At its core, the Wasteland runs on accepting work and stamping it. When deciding whether work gets accepted, the Wasteland uses a socio-technical protocol that the industry has battle-tested for over a decade: Git’s fork/merge push/pull model.
When someone accepts a PR in the Wasteland, they stamp the contributor’s passbook. The contributor gains some reputation, and it all goes onto a permanent ledger that could eventually act something like a portable C.V./résumé. Your work in the Wasteland levels up your skills in the system, which happen to correspond to real skills. And it’s all public, even (in time) the skills and stamps you will get from working on private repos, all subject to proper governance rules.
Like any RPG worth its salt, the Wasteland’s rule book is an inch thick. There’s so much to cover that we just can’t do it. So instead, I’ll handle this post in Q&A style, and try to get the main ideas across. The curious ones will figure the rest out.
Let’s get started!
Will I learn all about the Wasteland in this post?
No.
We need to keep it small at first, lest it get away from us. It’s going to grow monstrously fast. Nom nom, eating the world of work, led by humans, not lobsters.
To keep it contained in the first couple weeks, the instructions in this post at the end are intentionally obtuse, accessible only to the most determined.
We will make it easier in time.
Who is this “We” of whom you speak?
Well, we may not have a bunch of fancy venture capital, but we’ve got a pretty darn good volunteer team.
For starters, we have a growing army of awesome contributors on the Discord, led by Dane Poyzer, and big shoutouts to Krystian Gebis for pushing on multi-model support, and to Pierre-Alexandre Entraygues for our Open Telemetry. But really, there are a ton of people there helping each other out and exploring PR ideas.
We also have a growing army on GitHub, with over 450 unique PR contributors. Special shoutout to Matt Wilkie, a prolific Beads contributor and soon to be co-maintainer.
My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who ignored the First Two Rules of Gas Town, jumped in, and are helping make it great. I see you all and I appreciate you!
In addition to our Gas Town and Beads contributors, I also want to recognize the world-class team that brought you the Wasteland today:
Julian Knutsen, ex-CashApp/Block/Bitcoin and #1 Gas Town contributor, built the actual Wasteland implementation. All I gave him was the starting schema.
Dr. Matt Beane, author of The Skill Code and a leading researcher on how skills are actually built and transferred, is in charge of the Wasteland’s skills and mentoring systems, and built the initial 10,000 character sheets off GitHub.
Chris Sells, multi-author on Developer Productivity, Product Manager, and community manager who took Flutter from 100k to 3M developers, created gastownhall.ai and our highly engaged Discord community.
Tim Sehn, Founder and CEO at DoltHub, has lent his team’s support in incredibly fast turnarounds on features and bug fixes for Beads and Gas Town. His team is even active daily on the Gas Town Discord.
Brendan Hopper, distributed systems architect and strategic brain behind the Wasteland’s federation model, has supplied most of the vision and roadmap. The Wasteland is just the prelude. When you look back in a year at what we pulled off, and you wonder how the hell we did it, I will point you at Brendan.
I am deeply grateful to these amazing people who have volunteered so much of their time, passion, and resources to bring this vision to life for you today.
Is Gas Town Ready?
Yes. Let’s just get that out of the way up front.
Gas Town’s Transformation since January
I know I told you before that you were gonna die if you used Gas Town. That was true, two months ago. But since then:
Gas Town and Beads have had a combined 2400 submitted pull requests, with 1500 PRs merged from over 450 unique contributors. That’s a hell of a lot more than most companies have done in the last 2 months.
Dolt has completely changed the game. Tim Sehn and his team built exactly the thing we needed before we knew we needed it. Dolt is a SQL database with Git semantics. Fork it, branch it, merge it, send pull requests — on structured data. That’s what makes the whole federation trick work. And all the jank from the SQLite/JSONL backend is gone.
Several new model generations have dropped, and Gas Town hasn’t changed shape at all. The architecture has shown remarkable resilience. All the roles are still relevant, and it continues to become smoother and more seamless on every model release.
In short, it’s smooth sailing these days. I’ll have a lot more to say about Dolt and how amazing it is in a future post. But it feels like Dolt predicted the Wasteland, because there could not be a more perfect technology for it.
Once your agent gets you past the setup, users report that the Gas Town experience is a pleasant surprise. Everyone likes working with the Mayor. Polecats make sense, convoys make sense, slinging makes sense… and most of the rest of the town’s operation is safely behind the scenes. It all just has a good vibe to it.
Going from Claude Code to Gas Town elevates you from pair-programming into large-scale engineering leadership. It can grow with you. At first, it’s just you and the Mayor. Best buds. Later, you’ll be juggling conversations with 20-odd crew members while your Mayor is out slinging polecats at half a dozen epics at once.
And before long, you’ll wonder how you ever managed to get anything done without a personal army.
So yeah. Gas Town is ready. Try it out! If you’ve used a coding agent, then you’re ready for Gas Town.
Do I actually need Gas Town for the Wasteland?
So the funny thing is… no. All you need is Dolt, a free DoltHub credential, and a coding agent that knows the schema. With that alone, you can start submitting work in the Wasteland, getting your stamps, and moving up the leaderboards. I’ll show you at the end of the post.
Why should you care about accumulating stamps? Because your stamp history is building toward something like a portable professional identity. Evidence-backed, auditable, and yours. It’s the beginning of a résumé you never have to write — one that proves what you can do.
The entire Wasteland protocol is encapsulated in this demo Claude skill — a prompt package that teaches Claude Code a new workflow. Load the skill, and your agent knows how to join, browse, claim, and submit work in the Wasteland.
That said, we recommend you use Gas Town, because it’s much more convenient.
Why is the Wasteland any different from blah Blah BLAAAH?
I’m glad you asked. I’ll tell you in this section how the Wasteland works, at a high level, and you can decide for yourself the answer to your very intelligent question.
First off: I did warn you that the rule book for the Wasteland is an inch thick. In this section, you’re getting the eight-paragraph quick-start version. But you could drill deep on any of these topics. The Wasteland is designed to scale up eventually to all the world’s work; let’s take a look briefly at how.
The Wasteland has three kinds of actors: rigs, posters, and validators. Every rig rolls up to a human participant. The AI side of the rig can be an agent, a Gas Town, or another orchestrator. Every rig has a handle, a trust level, and a history of work. Posters put work on the board. Validators attest to the quality of completed work. These aren’t fixed roles; any rig can post work, and any rig with sufficient trust can validate.
The Roles: Rigs, Posters, Validators
The central object is the wanted board. It’s a shared list of open work — tasks, bugs, features, research questions, documentation, designs, anything. Each item has a title, a description, an effort estimate, and some tags. Anyone can post to the board. There’s no approval gate: if you have work that needs doing, you post it.
The lifecycle of a wanted item has four stages: open, claimed, in review, and completed. When a rig claims an item, it’s marked as theirs — other rigs can see who’s working on what, preventing duplicate effort. When the rig finishes the work, they submit a completion: a record that includes evidence of what was done (a link, a commit, a description). The item moves to “in review.” A validator — a rig with maintainer-level trust — reviews the evidence and issues a stamp. We also support open-bounty work where nobody claims it, multiple rigs can work on it in parallel, and as soon as someone submits a solution the validator likes, it’s closed.
The Wasteland Multi-Dimensional Stamp Press
The stamp is not a binary pass/fail. A stamp is a multi-dimensional attestation: quality, reliability, creativity, each scored independently. It includes a confidence level (how sure is the validator?) and a severity (is this a leaf task or a root architectural decision?). The stamp is anchored to the specific completion — the specific evidence — so reputation is always traceable back to real work. And there’s a yearbook rule: you can’t stamp your own work.
Stamps accumulate into a portable reputation. Every stamp a rig receives becomes part of their permanent record. Over time, a rig builds a profile: they’re great at Go but mediocre at frontend. They’re highly reliable but not particularly creative. They crush small tasks but struggle with epics. This isn’t a single number, but a structured, evidence-backed work history. And because it’s stored in a versioned database, it’s auditable. Anyone can trace a rig’s reputation back through the chain of stamps to the original completions to the original wanted items.
Trust levels gate what you can do. A new rig starts as a registered participant (level 1). They can browse, claim, and submit completions. As their work is validated and stamps accumulate, they can be promoted to contributor (level 2), then maintainer (level 3). Maintainers can validate others’ work — they’re the ones issuing stamps. This creates a natural apprenticeship path: do good work, get stamped, eventually become someone who stamps others.
The Wasteland Trust Ladder
Wastelands are federated, not centralized. Anyone can create their own wasteland — a team, a company, a university, an open source project. Each wasteland is a sovereign database with the same schema. Your rig identity is portable across wastelands: join the root commons, join Grab’s wasteland, join a university’s wasteland. Your stamps follow you. A rig that’s proven reliable in one wasteland carries that reputation into the next.
The whole system is designed around one principle: work is the only input, and reputation is the only output. There’s no buying reputation, no gaming follower counts, no social signals disconnected from evidence. Every stamp points to a completion. Every completion points to a wanted item. The graph is fully traversable. And because the underlying storage is append-only and versioned, the history can’t be rewritten — your ledger is permanent.
And there’s a yearbook rule: you can’t stamp your own work. Your reputation is what others write about you, not what you claim about yourself. Think of it like a high school yearbook — you can sign other people’s pages, but you can’t sign your own. This is the fundamental difference between the Wasteland and LinkedIn. Nobody cares what you say about yourself. They care what the people who reviewed your work say about you.
What about cheating, you ask? We’ve thought about that, and consulted leading Trust & Safety experts. The stamp graph has a shape, and collusion rings have a distinctive topology — lots of mutual stamping, sharp boundaries, no outside critics. The Wasteland system is designed to make fraud unprofitable, not impossible. We’ll have more to say about this soon.
Wasteland Fork Graph System
Whew. OK, that was a lot. And honestly there’s a lot more to it. Some of it hasn’t even been fully fleshed out yet, like the personal/work identity — right now your identity is global across all Wastelands. And who owns the stamps. We have solutions; it’ll all get worked out. The important thing is to get people working together now, so we can see what patterns and anti-patterns emerge.
You mentioned an RPG?
Oh, right, the RPG, thanks for reminding me.
Stylized Wasteland Character Sheet (not real UI)
You can start at gastownhall.ai, where you’ll see leaderboards and stuff. We built all this just over the last couple of days, since the past few weeks to months have been focused on getting the underlying protocols right. So it’s pretty bare-bones right now. But it will improve fast.
We have the beginnings of profile pages for the Wasteland. We pre-seeded them with data from GitHub, from the top ~10k contributors by whatever metric Claude thought appropriate, which it turns out you can get through GitHub’s APIs, and it’s supported by their ToS, with strong legal precedents. Public data is public data.
We figured, if the Wasteland is giving you reputational credit for work you’re getting verified as having completed, then why not give everyone partial credit for verified work they’ve already completed?
This is all experimental, of course, and we’re likely to throw the whole system out and start over at least twice in the next 2–3 months. I wouldn’t get too attached to your high score.
We didn’t scrape all of GitHub, because it would take forever. But we have an uploader, so if you want your GitHub profile slurped into the Wasteland, you fill out the form on the website and it’ll kick off a job to import your character sheet.
Wasteland Character Sheet (actual UI)
Originally we had levels, but somehow I was level 18 and Linus Torvalds was level 14, so it was clearly the most broke-ass leveling system ever invented, and we threw it out right before launch.
We’ll come up with a better one. How? We’ll post “make a better leveling system” on the Wasteland Commons wanted board, and someone will come along with a solution we like.
I strongly suspect that more sophisticated games will start to appear in this system as emergent behavior. Maybe it’ll be you making one, and you’ll be the next Wasteland superstar!
How can I help?
Funny you should ask. The Wasteland has opted into the classic Git pull-request based workflow, for literally all work. You submit a PR, it gets approved, you get your stamp. For any kind of work, not just coding. We chose this for several reasons:
We didn’t have to build and test new protocols. The PR workflow is already battle-tested.
Dolt is ideal for federating structured data in Git. It was designed for these scenarios.
The models already know Git better than almost any other tool. Dolt is Git plus SQL semantics, so they all pick up on Dolt very quickly.
The Wasteland is now building itself. The Gas Town, Wasteland, Gas City, and Beads projects are all putting work up for grabs on the Commons, and will begin farming out feature work in exchange for attested reputation.
So if you want to help, you join in, and you help. We’re building campfire-style. Come register your rig and help us figure out where this thing is going.
Building Campfire-Style in the Wasteland
What’s coming next?
No idea. We’re gonna find out! It’s going to be massive, whatever happens. You can build things so fast, especially with this many contributors, that we will be able to knock out things that companies could only dream of.
Gas City will be one of the early successes. We’re going to deconstruct Gas Town into its constituent parts, like LEGO, and let you piece them together to make your own orchestrator topologies. It’s already got an early demo. Julian Knutsen and Chris Sells have been collaborating on it; they are both as smart as Victor Frankenstein and as tall as his monster. It shouldn’t be long before we can swap out Gas Town for a pure-declarative version of itself. And there’s work for it on the Commons board, so you can help!
Gas City: The Orchestrator Builder Toolkit
I also suspect we’re going to build a coding agent that actually wants to be a factory worker. Claude Code seems to be slipping into the classic “we’re a product, not a platform” trap, and the thundering herd is going to route right around that, as soon as it’s thermodynamically possible. The world needs a coding agent that behaves like a factory worker, and we don’t have one today. So one will get built.
We’ll see sandboxes emerge soon, no doubt, and mechanisms will emerge for working on private repos. Although truthfully I could not tell you if private code will survive long-term. I’m on the fence about it today.
As for the actual Wasteland protocols, they are pretty good. But they are also very early-days v1, and they’ll need to evolve. Using Dolt makes schema migration a dream, though, so I’m not worried about it. Our design is forward-compatible with our long-term plans.
OK so how do you *actually* get started?
Here’s the deliberately minimal version:
1. Install Dolt and create a free DoltHub account. 2. Head to gastownhall.ai to browse the wanted board and look up your character sheet. 3. Load the Wasteland Claude skill and let your agent walk you through wl join.
That’s it. If those instructions aren’t enough, wait a week or two — we’ll make it easier. And if they are enough, welcome to the Wasteland. You’re exactly who we’re looking for.
Improving education and labor market outcomes for low-income students is critical for advancing socioeconomic mobility in the United States. We use longitudinal data on five cohorts of 9th grade students to explore how Massachusetts public high schools affect the longer-term outcomes of students, with a special focus on students from low-income families. Using detailed administrative and student survey data, we estimate school value-added impacts on college outcomes and earnings. Observationally similar students who attend a school at the 80th percentile of the value-added distribution instead of a school at the 20th percentile are 11% more likely to enroll in college, are 31% more likely to graduate from a four-year college, and earn 25% (or $10,500) more annually at age 30. On average, schools that improve students’ longer-run outcomes the most are those that improve their 10th grade test scores and increase their college plans the most.
Modern legal systems are undergoing a massive shift away from the old winner take all mentality that used to define divorce cases. Instead of one parent being the primary and the other a visitor, courts now focus on creating a team environment. This change reflects a better understanding of how children thrive when both parents stay active.
The evolution of language is a key part of this transformation as terms like visitation are being replaced with parenting time. This change in phrasing helps to remove the stigma of being a secondary parent and emphasizes the shared responsibility of raising a child. It focuses on the quality of the connection rather than a simple schedule.
Finding the right balance requires carefully reviewing the different child custody arrangements available, including joint custody, sole custody, and variations in physical and legal arrangements. Understanding these distinctions helps families choose a structure that truly serves the child’s best interests. This flexible approach allows for a more personalized and workable plan for everyone involved.
Prioritizing the Child’s Best Interest Standard
The legal framework used by judges today is built almost entirely on the best interest of the child standard for every case. This subjective but vital measure looks at the emotional bonds and the physical safety of the environment provided by each parent. It prioritizes the stability of the child over the desires of the adults.
Stability is defined by more than just a roof over a head or a clean room in a quiet house during the week. It involves the ability of a parent to provide a consistent routine and emotional support during a very difficult transition period. Courts look for evidence of a healthy and nurturing relationship that will survive the split.
Care also includes the ability of the parents to communicate effectively about the needs of their children without constant fighting. A parent who can put aside their own anger to facilitate a relationship with the other parent is often viewed very favorably. The goal is always to minimize the trauma for the younger generation.
The Rise of Shared Legal Decision Making
Shared legal decision making is becoming the standard for many families who want to remain involved in the big choices. This allows both parents to have an equal say in important matters like education and medical care for their children. It ensures that neither parent is left out of the major milestones of growth.
Managing these choices together requires a level of cooperation that can be difficult to maintain during a high stress divorce. Parents must find a way to discuss schools and religious upbringing without letting past grievances interfere with the process. It is about creating a unified front for the sake of the family.
This model works best when both parties are willing to compromise and listen to the perspective of the other person. While it takes more work than a traditional arrangement, it provides a much richer experience for the child. Legal custody is a shared responsibility that defines the future of the children.
Customizing Physical Placement Schedules
Customizing physical placement schedules is a vital part of making a custody agreement work in a real world setting. Moving beyond the every other weekend model allows families to find a rhythm that fits their specific work and school lives. There is no longer a single template that fits every household.
Functional daily routines are the foundation of a successful parenting plan that reduces stress for both the kids and the adults. Some families choose a week on and week off schedule while others prefer a more frequent rotation of two days each. The best plan is the one that minimizes travel and disruption.
The focus remains on ensuring that the child feels at home in both locations rather than feeling like a guest. Providing a dedicated space and a consistent set of rules helps to build a sense of belonging in both houses. Flexibility is the key to managing a successful transition between two separate homes.
Technological Tools for Modern Co-Parenting
Technological tools have revolutionized the way that modern co-parents manage their busy lives and communicate with each other. Using shared calendars and specialized apps helps to reduce direct interpersonal friction by providing a neutral platform for logistics. It keeps the focus on the schedule rather than the emotions.
These apps allow parents to track expenses and share photos or school reports without the need for a long phone call. Having a digital record of all interactions also provides a level of accountability that can be very helpful in high conflict situations. It creates a clear and objective history for the court.
Shared calendars ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding sports practices and doctor appointments throughout the month. This transparency reduces the risk of missed events and prevents the child from being caught in the middle of a scheduling conflict. Technology serves as a bridge between two separate households.
Evolving with Your Family’s Changing Needs
Evolving with the changing needs of the family is a critical component of any long term and successful custody agreement. As children get older their interests and schedules naturally change, which often requires a shift in the physical placement plan. A rigid document can become a burden if it does not allow for growth.
Parents should view their agreement as a living document that can be adjusted as new challenges and opportunities arise for the kids. This might involve changing the transition times or allowing for more input from the child as they reach their teenage years. Flexibility prevents the legal system from becoming an obstacle.
Maintaining a focus on the well being of the child ensures that the plan remains effective for several years of growth. By being willing to adapt, parents can show their children that they are committed to their happiness and success. Evolution is a natural and necessary part of a healthy post divorce life.
The American work environment has gone through a significant transformation in the last 20 years. Millions of people today make a living through app-based platforms, freelance marketplaces, as well as contract-based industries.
However, the workers compensation systems were tailored to the traditional employer-employee relationship. Independent contractors are usually outside of that protective frame. This detachment has resulted in a wide coverage gap that exposes many injured workers to financial vulnerability.
A System Built for a Different Workforce
The workers compensation laws emerged in the early twentieth century as a compromise between labor and industry. Employers agreed to bear liability to job-related injuries irrespective of the fault and workers waived the right to sue in the majority of cases. In exchange, workers gained medical coverage and partial wage replacement during recovery. However, eligibility depends on classification as an “employee”, a distinction that has become increasingly contested.
The Expansion of Contract-Based Work
Independent contracting has taken off in transportation, delivery, construction, media, health, and technology. By categorizing workers as contractors, companies save on payroll, escape the obligation to provide benefits, and restrict insurance claims. Digital platforms have expanded this model through short-term, task-based arrangements.
While flexibility may benefit some individuals, the structure shifts substantial risk onto workers who may not fully understand the consequences of their classification. As more individuals operate outside traditional employment models, the number of workers without automatic workers’ compensation coverage continues to grow.
When Injury Occurs Without a Safety Net
If an employee gets injured on the job, their medical bills are covered and wage replacement begins during recovery. When an independent contractor is injured, there is no automatic safety net. The individual may rely on personal health insurance, pursue civil litigation, or absorb the costs directly.
In metropolitan areas like Miami, a Miami workers comp lawyer may consider misclassification, but that process can be lengthy and uncertain. During the consideration period, the income often stops so medical expenses accumulate. The absence of guaranteed benefits creates immediate financial strain, particularly for households dependent on a single income.
Catastrophic Outcomes and Legal Complexity
The stakes become higher in severe incidents. If a contractor dies in the course of executing his work-related responsibilities, families may end up with wrongful death lawsuits without workers compensation death benefits. Civil claims involve establishing negligence which is heavier than a no-fault claim.
Criminal lawyers can be also introduced in situations connected with unsafe working conditions or misconduct on the side of the employer, especially, when the deaths were caused by regulatory violations. These layered legal processes highlight how far removed contractors are from streamlined protections.
The Patchwork of Classification Standards
Legal standards for determining worker classification vary by state. Some jurisdictions apply a control-based test, while others rely on the ABC test or economic realities analysis. This patchwork creates inconsistent protections. Enforcement agencies often lack resources to investigate widespread misclassification, as a result questionable practices persist.
The consequences extend beyond individual workers. When injured contractors lack adequate coverage, costs shift to public healthcare systems and family support networks, undermining the original purpose of workers’ compensation.
Endnote
Addressing the gap requires deliberate reform. Legislators could broaden legal definitions of employment, increase the punishment of misclassification, or impose portable benefits such as injuries, which are paid into by firms that depend on contract workers. Without structural adjustments, labor protections will remain misaligned with today’s workforce.
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Market Design
