Antiques Roadshow
Appreciating typography is a study in paradox. The primary goal of well-designed typography is to help you read the words, not appreciate how the words are composed of letters and how each of those individual letters has been designed to convey a small bit of meaning. If you see the typography rather than read the words, the typography has failed in its job, right? You should be reading, not staring at the shape of that uppercase A.
The goal with typography is functional, right? To convey the meaning, not the feeling?
Wrong.
Feeling is always conveyed. The question is, depending on the project, “How much feeling is required?”
I’ve created a full-time job for myself talking to Claude Code. This is Claude running from the command line of macOS, which gives me unhindered access to my data. I’m using Ghostty. I’m staring at a fixed-width typeface all day. Apple provides a functional and gorgeous fixed-width variant of their San Francisco typeface called SF Mono, which I’ve been using for months, but, well, I have a short attention span — typographically speaking.
In the past month, I’ve evaluated many additional fixed-width typefaces favored by the nerdcore. Here are the six that have made my cut:1
The question is: how do they make you feel? For a typeface designed for coding, you first want fixed-width. Every letter and symbol is the same width, giving you a predictable and readable grid. But how wide? And how tall? Also, how much information do you want to be able to see on a screen?
Your brain builds a very personal and emotional impression of the collection of letters that make words that convey meaning. In the case of terminal or coding typefaces, the design goal is certainly to provide structural function and not feeling, but here’s the deal:
They do.
Flight to New York. My boarding procedure for moderate to long flights is: sit down, find a movie I’ve seen a dozen times, and hit play. No sound. This is visual background noise while I sort wifi, prepare for a meal, and find a project. On this flight, I picked Blade Runner. Fun fact: I can recite 50% of the dialogue from this movie from memory.
As I’ve been researching typography for Ghostty, novel typography tends to jump out at me. Like when you buy a car, and all you see is your new car on the road. Except it’s typography.
Here are clips from the title sequence for Blade Runner:
There’s a lot to dissect in this sequence, but let’s start with the punchline. This is a single typeface. It’s Goudy Oldstyle — that’s it. However, this is how they used typography:
Keep looking. The crawl is set like a book, not a movie — first-line indents, generous word spacing — and Frederic Goudy would approve: they letterspace the caps, never the lowercase, obeying his famous dictum that “anyone who would letterspace lowercase would steal sheep.”5 Also, what’s up with that chonky em dash? It’s probably been years since you’ve seen this, so here it is again:
Unlike our functional fixed-width typefaces, the role of typography in this title sequence is partly functional — to set the story — but the primary purpose is establishing mood. Director Ridley Scott expertly drops us into the middle of a dystopian future where we’ve enslaved the robots and, duh, they are rebelling.
Chances are, you never think about typography. You happily scribe your Messages (SF Pro), Mails (Helvetica), and Slacks (Lato), thinking nothing of serifs, ligatures, or kerning. You are content trusting that a someone else has chosen a proper typeface for your current task. Maybe you bold, you underline, and you italicize to slightly adjust meaning. No issue. Respect.
However, we now live in a world where everyone is capable of building whatever they want thanks to the robots. They’re doing it — right now. They find immense joy in typing in a couple of sentences and watching the robots merrily build whatever they ask. See? I don’t need to be an engineer to build an app. And they are correct. Sorta.
With optimism in my heart and a firm belief that the robots can legitimately help many humans, I can confirm that the majority of consumer-facing things being built by humans who’ve never built a thing… are garbage. Building a tool for yourself? A quick script to read your feeds and generate a pleasant-to-read output? A+. Robots crush that… for you. Building a feed reader anyone on the planet can easily use to read any number of feeds? No. No, you aren’t; you can say you are, but until you’ve built a thing for everyone, you will not appreciate that the last 10% of the work:
Don’t believe me? Here’s the first version of the title sequence for Blade Runner’s work print, the close-to-complete cut before the theatrical release:
That title typeface? Impact. A fine typeface, but a clumsy path-of-least-resistance slap-to-the-face choice to set the tone of a future science fiction masterpiece. Garbage6.
I’ve never filmed a movie, but I have built quite a few products that you are using right now. In all the design debates, we never explicitly debate feeling: we obsess over the details. That obsession is what you feel when you use our products. It’s the collective voice of every single human who contributed small and large decisions to the product.
A good product sounds like the humans who created it, and that’s what you will feel.
In case you missed this gem, yesterday’s Orange County Register ran a piece headlined, PHOTOGRAPH AT OC FAIR CONDEMNED BY COUNTY REPUBLICANS AS CALL TO VIOLENCE AGAINST TRUMP.
This, from Claire Wang’s article …
And I’m going to say something that may well shock some readers of this website.
Deep breath.
Deep breath.
Deep breath.
I (gasp) can see Will O’Neill’s point.
I mean it—I can.
Here is the photograph he is referring to, which languishes inside one of the hangars within the OC Fair …
And while I don’t think it’s a particularly big deal, it does seem sorta weird to highlight the image of a bunch of kids wishing the United States president a “happy last birthday”—aka: we hope you die.
So, again, on the surface I don’t fully disagree with Will O’Neill’s point.
But …
I’m just wondering, for kicks and giggles. Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump supporters attacked and destroyed the United States Capitol? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump supporters (on that same day) set up a noose for the purpose of hanging Mike Pence? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump praised Montana congressman Greg Gianforte for physically assaulting a reporter? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump respond to George Floyd protests with “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump advised the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump said of a heckler at his rally, “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.” Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump saw protesters outside the White House and said to Defense Secretary Mark Esper, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump said this of journalistic protections: “You take the writer and/or the publisher of the paper … and you say, ‘Who is the leaker? National security.’ And they say, ‘We’re not gonna tell you.’ They say, ‘That’s okay, you’re going to jail.’ And when this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner very shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that leaker is!’”
Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump bragged about grabbing women by the pussies? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up after Trump cheated on his wife with a porn star he raw dogged? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump mocked a disabled reporter? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump referred to myriad women as ugly and dumb? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when the only refugees Trump allowed into America were white South Africans?
Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump mocked POWs for being captured? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump had John McCain’s name covered on a battleship? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when we learned Trump made $2 billion over the past 1 1/2 years?
Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump tried to overturn an election he lost? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump said he won California three-straight times? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump said the fix was in on Spencer Pratt? Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump lied about decreasing drug prices by “2,000%, 3,000%.” Why did Will O’Neill never speak up when Trump said he “opened up the water” for SoCal?
Honestly, I can go on. And on. And on. And on.
Truth be told, Will O’Neill doesn’t care about a photograph in the OC Fair. Like, truly doesn’t care. He’s not actually offended. Or bothered. Or even irritated. It’s just an opportunity to make some noise, and were the image a bunch of kids mocking Joe Biden or Barack Obama, O’Neill wouldn’t have uttered a peep.
But, alas, Will O’Neill is nothing more than a sad, pathetic, little political opportunist; a dime-a-dozen regional hack who somehow looks at his children and looks at his wife and still—despite their gazes—believes this is how he should behave.
So, hey, take the picture down, OC Fair. Make Will O’Neill happy.
But just be warned: The silence will last, oh, a week. Maybe 10 days, max.
Then he’ll find something else to complain about—while ignoring the cruel, violent, disgusting, irredeemable pig in the White House.*1
Whose death, to be clear, I eagerly anticipate with streamers, balloons and a seven-layer cake.
On Friday night, a court filing from Capital One denied there was any political motivation behind the closure of more than 380 bank accounts in the names of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization. Instead, it stated, the accounts were closed “for anti-money laundering reasons.” It said “transaction patterns” had triggered the review.
President Donald J. Trump has maintained that banks refused to do business with him after January 6, 2021, for political reasons. As Allison Morrow of CNN reported yesterday, Trump and his supporters, including cryptocurrency ventures, have used the idea that they were being “debanked” because of their political beliefs to claim they are victims. Last year, Trump and the Trump Organization sued Capital One in federal court in Florida, saying they had sustained “considerable financial harm” after the bank closed about 385 of their accounts.
Observers note that the story of Trump wanting immunity from IRS audits and the revelation that his bank activity mirrored that of money launderers might well be the same story.
That story recalls the work of national security specialist Natasha Bertrand in 2018, when she reported in The Atlantic that Trump’s rabid attacks on FBI and Justice Department officials centered on those with extensive experience in investigating money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they interfaced with Russia.
Trump went after officials he claimed were “Democrats” who were part of a “witch hunt” against him as they examined the ties of his 2016 campaign to Russian operatives. But Bertrand pointed out that his primary targets—Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, Andrew Weissmann, Andrew McCabe—all specialized in investigations into organized crime and money laundering. She noted that the probe into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian operatives was primarily a counterintelligence investigation and that Russia’s criminal syndicates and intelligence services had become increasingly intertwined.
In July 2017, Trump told the New York Times that it would be unacceptable for those investigating his campaign’s ties to Russia to look at his or his family’s personal finances. That would be a “red line,” he said. “I have no income from Russia. I don’t do business with Russia.” (This denial contradicts Donald Trump Jr.’s 2008 statement that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets” and Eric Trump’s 2014 boast, “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”) Bertrand noted that Trump’s links to “Russian oligarchs and mobsters” were “documented” and that his Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, “was repeatedly cited by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for having inadequate money-laundering controls.”
Financial irregularities surrounding Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein are also in the news today. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who is famous for following money trails doggedly, released a report saying that JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank held off on filing required suspicious activity reports in transactions associated with Jeffrey Epstein.
The report, titled “Looking the Other Way: How Wall Street Banks Enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s Sex Trafficking,” came out of a multi-year investigation. Investigators “found significant evidence that JPMorgan Chase (JPMC), Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America violated anti–money laundering laws by failing to screen and report Epstein’s suspicious financial transactions in a timely manner.”
It describes how top banks enabled Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation by ignoring suspicious financial transactions by those associated with him, appearing eager to use Epstein’s connections to other wealthy individuals. The report explains that Epstein’s lawyer Darren Indyke and his accountants Richard Kahn and Harry Beller “executed thousands of suspicious cash withdrawals and wire transfers, potentially in furtherance of human trafficking. Disturbingly, federal prosecutors have never even questioned them in connection with criminal investigations.”
Federal law designed to prevent money laundering requires banks to notify the Treasury with a suspicious activities report (SAR) within 60 days of detecting activity that raises red flags. The investigators found that the three banks most closely associated with Epstein put off reporting suspicious activity for years, filing reports of more than $1.4 billion retroactively only after Epstein was arrested for the second time in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking. The suspicious transactions included “thousands of wire transfers, major withdrawals of cash, payments to women and girls, and correspondent banking in high-risk foreign jurisdictions (including Russia). They also include tens of millions in payments to his conspirator and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.”
The report concludes that “top executives at major Wall Street banks were aware of Epstein’s suspicious financial activity for years but withheld information from the U.S. government, protecting Epstein from federal scrutiny” as they sought access to his money, which generated millions in fees every year, and to the money of his friends.
Top of the list of those friends was billionaire Leon Black, the former chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management Inc. The report concludes that Black “was overwhelmingly the largest source of funding for Epstein’s sex trafficking,” providing Epstein’s primary source of income between 2012 and 2017. Those payments amounted to about $166 million.
Bank of America took five to seven years to report those transactions even though bank officials thought they had “no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose.” Black told the Republican-dominated House Oversight Committee that he paid that money to Epstein for “tax, estate planning and other related services” and was not aware of Epstein’s “nefarious activity.”
The report concludes that “Bank of America likely violated federal anti-money laundering laws by failing to properly screen and report” those payments.
The report also covers already-released SARs from JPMorgan Chase, showing that the bank waited years to file those SARs despite the fact that bankers flagged more than $1 billion of transactions as suspicious, including payments to women in many countries and large cash withdrawals. It explains how Deutsche Bank AG, as well, delayed for years reporting more than $250 million in suspicious transactions tied to Epstein.
The report notes that JPMorgan Chase cut ties to Epstein as a client in 2013 out of concerns he was engaged in money laundering. This is an interesting mirror of the recent news from Capital One, since Trump also sued JPMorgan Chase and its chief executive officer Jamie Dimon for $5 billion, alleging they “debanked” him after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Wyden, who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, chastised Republicans for not working with him on this project. He noted that Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) who is currently running for governor, refused to join him in subpoenaing records in the Epstein banking matter even as she publicly complained that Democrats were hampering the investigation into those records.
The report also pointed out that Republicans have blocked Wyden’s measure that would require the Treasury Department to produce copies of all suspicious activity reports related to Epstein and his co-conspirators for congressional committees, and it singled out U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for refusing to produce those records to the Senate Finance Committee.
The report called for the Department of Justice, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the Comptroller of the Currency to “conduct thorough investigations of the activities laid out in this report and…levy fines or criminal penalties, as appropriate.” The report emphasized that such an investigation should include looking at the behavior of individual bankers, as well as the banks themselves.
“Investigations into the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein have thus uncovered an important finding that extends beyond Epstein himself: Wall Street banks have been willing to turn a blind eye to the suspicious transactions of ultra-wealthy clients, even if the failure to scrutinize and report these transactions runs directly afoul of federal law,” the report said. “If federal prosecutors are serious about preventing the next Jeffrey Epstein, they must hold Wall Street accountable.”
Congress passed federal securities laws and banking regulation in the 1930s after it became clear that a small group of wealthy investors had manipulated the markets and misused bank funds. Pressure to clean up Wall Street came from entrepreneurs and small investors, who knew they could not do business or make gains in the market if the system was rigged against them. A healthy economy depended on a level playing field for everyone.
Now, it appears, we are watching the dismantling of those protections and not only the long-term skewing of our system toward the very wealthy, but also a dramatic skewing in real time. On Saturday, Trump began selling access to his social media posts to Wall Street trading firms milliseconds before they go public, permitting them to buy and sell with insider information. The cost for this service, according to Marina Dunbar of The Guardian, is up to $100,000 a month.
Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law, an expert in government conflicts of interest rules, told Bernard Condon of the Associated Press that this scheme is “yet more brazen corruption, an improper exploitation of government power to enrich himself.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/business/capital-one-trump-org-money-laundering
https://abcnews.com/US/capital-closed-hundreds-trumps-bank-accounts-2021-anti/story?id=135273257
https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-sessions-russia-recusal-new-york-times/3951596.html
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/22/business/jpmorgan-chase-trump-lawsuit-debanking
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/01/trump-truth-social-early-access
https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_wall_street_epstein_report.pdf
Businesses serving customers in the United Arab Emirates need more than a website that simply stays online. Pages must load quickly, applications must respond consistently, and infrastructure must remain stable during advertising campaigns, product launches, seasonal sales, and other periods of increased demand. When shared hosting can no longer provide predictable performance or sufficient control, moving to a UAE VPS server becomes a practical next step.
A virtual private server gives a project an isolated environment with allocated computing resources. The business can choose the operating system, install the required software, configure access rules, monitor usage, and resize the server as the workload changes. This makes VPS hosting suitable for online stores, corporate websites, SaaS products, APIs, development environments, and internal business services.
For projects focused on users in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and the wider Gulf region, server location matters as much as the configuration itself. Hosting an application closer to its audience can reduce network distance, improve response times, and create a more consistent experience for regional users.
Every request between a user and a server passes through a network route. The greater the physical and network distance, the longer the response may take. A website hosted far from its primary audience can still work, but customers may notice slower page generation or delayed API responses.
A UAE VPS server places infrastructure in Dubai instead of relying on a remote location in Europe, North America, or Asia. This can be valuable for e-commerce platforms, booking services, fintech applications, media projects, business portals, and other systems used mainly by customers in the UAE or nearby countries.
Local hosting is not a replacement for application optimization. Heavy scripts, inefficient database queries, oversized images, and unnecessary plugins can slow down any website. However, selecting an appropriate location removes one source of avoidable delay and gives the technical team a better foundation for performance improvements.
Shared hosting is often a convenient starting point for a small website. The provider manages most server-level tasks, and the customer does not need to configure the operating system. This simplicity comes with limitations.
Several websites may use the same pool of resources, while access to system settings is restricted. The project may be unable to install specific software, change database parameters, run persistent background processes, or configure custom security tools.
These restrictions become more visible as the project grows. An online store may need additional workers to process orders. A SaaS platform may require queues, scheduled jobs, containers, and monitoring agents. A corporate application may need stricter access rules than standard hosting can provide.
A UAE VPS server gives administrators full access to the virtual environment. They can configure the server around the application instead of adapting the application to the limits of a shared platform.
Traffic is rarely constant. Retailers experience seasonal sales, travel services receive more bookings during holidays, and marketing campaigns may bring thousands of visitors within a short period.
The first step in preparing for a peak is understanding the current workload. The team should review traffic analytics, CPU utilization, memory consumption, disk activity, database response time, and application errors. Historical data from previous campaigns can help estimate how much demand may increase.
Load testing can simulate multiple customers opening pages, searching a catalog, logging in, submitting forms, or completing purchases at the same time. The goal is not only to determine when the server fails, but also to identify which component becomes the first bottleneck.
A UAE VPS server can be resized when the project needs more CPU, RAM, or storage. These changes should be made before the campaign begins, leaving enough time to test the updated configuration under realistic conditions.
Vertical scaling increases the resources assigned to an existing virtual machine. It is usually the simplest option when a project needs additional capacity quickly. More processor cores can help with concurrent requests, while additional RAM can support databases, application processes, and caching.
Horizontal scaling adds more virtual machines and distributes the workload between them. Several web servers can operate behind a load balancer, while databases, caches, and background workers run separately.
A smaller project may begin with one UAE VPS server and scale vertically as demand grows. Later, the architecture can be divided into several components. Horizontal scaling requires more preparation because sessions, files, and database connections must work correctly across multiple servers.
More powerful infrastructure cannot fully compensate for an inefficient application. Before increasing the VPS configuration, the team should check whether the existing resources are being used effectively.
Frontend optimization may include compressing images, reducing unnecessary JavaScript, and enabling browser caching. Backend work may involve improving slow database queries, adding indexes, limiting excessive logging, and removing unnecessary operations.
Caching can reduce repeated work. Frequently requested public pages and application data can be stored temporarily instead of being generated again for every visitor. Personalized areas, shopping carts, payment pages, and account information should be excluded from inappropriate caching rules.
Administrators can also configure the web server, database, process manager, PHP workers, container limits, and other components based on real workload data. This level of control is one of the main advantages of a UAE VPS server over basic hosting.
The main server does not need to deliver every file directly. Product images, videos, stylesheets, scripts, and documents can create significant network and disk load.
A content delivery network can cache static resources and serve them from distributed nodes. Object storage can keep images, archives, backups, and exports outside the local system disk.
Separating files from the application simplifies scaling because additional virtual machines can access the same storage. The UAE VPS server can then focus on authentication, database queries, checkout processes, API requests, and business logic.
Monitoring should be configured before the project experiences a serious problem. Basic metrics include CPU load, RAM usage, free disk space, network traffic, and the status of critical services.
Application monitoring provides another layer of visibility. A virtual machine may be running normally while customers are unable to log in, submit an order, or complete a payment. External checks can verify whether important pages and customer actions work correctly.
If the UAE VPS server regularly approaches its resource limits, the business can upgrade it before performance deteriorates. If most resources remain unused, the configuration may be larger than necessary.
Backups protect a project only when they are complete, stored safely, and ready to be restored. Database copies, application files, configuration files, access settings, and certificates may all be required for recovery.
Copies should not be stored only on the same virtual machine as the production environment. If the server becomes unavailable, local backups may also be inaccessible. The team should test restoration in a separate environment and document the required steps.
Before a major campaign, everyone involved should know who initiates recovery, where backups are located, and how long the procedure is expected to take.
A VPS offers more control than shared hosting, but server administration must be taken seriously. The operating system and installed software should be updated, unused services should be disabled, and administrative access should be limited.
Firewall rules can restrict access to databases and management interfaces. SSH keys can protect remote access, while two-factor authentication can secure the provider control panel. Logs should be monitored for repeated login attempts and unusual traffic.
Security rules should be tested before a high-traffic event. An overly strict configuration can block customers, external integrations, payment callbacks, or search engine crawlers.
The correct configuration depends on how the application uses resources. CPU-intensive services need sufficient processing capacity, while database-heavy applications often benefit from additional RAM and fast storage. Projects serving large files may need more disk space and network bandwidth.
Linux is commonly used for web servers, containers, databases, and development tools. Windows may be required for Microsoft-based applications or remote desktop environments.
The team should avoid selecting a server only because it is the cheapest option. An undersized environment may become unstable as soon as traffic increases, while excessive capacity creates unnecessary costs.
A reasonable starting configuration should support the current workload and include a resource reserve. After deployment, monitoring data can show whether the UAE VPS server should be expanded or reduced.
Serverspace deploys UAE cloud servers in the Equinix DX1 data center in Dubai. The facility is designed to Tier III standards and hosts the UAE Internet Exchange, making it an important connectivity point for the Middle East. Users can configure CPU, RAM, SSD, and bandwidth parameters and select Linux, Windows, or FreeBSD templates. The service also provides control-panel management, 24/7 support, billing in ten-minute intervals, and unlimited traffic.
These features allow businesses to create infrastructure for a long-term production system or a temporary project without being tied to a fixed standard plan. The environment can be adapted for websites, APIs, e-commerce backends, development systems, databases, and corporate services.
A UAE VPS server is useful when a business needs regional infrastructure, allocated virtual resources, administrative control, and room for future growth. It provides a stronger foundation than shared hosting for projects that depend on stable performance and custom server configuration.
The server location can improve the experience of users in the UAE and neighboring markets, while flexible resources make it easier to prepare for traffic peaks. Monitoring, backups, security controls, caching, and application optimization remain essential regardless of the selected configuration.
The best results come from treating VPS hosting as part of a complete infrastructure strategy. The business should understand its workload, test expected traffic, prepare a recovery plan, and scale resources before customers notice a problem. With this preparation, a UAE VPS server can support both everyday operations and the periods when demand is at its highest.
Photo: Brett Sayles via Pexels
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SAN FRANCISCO – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will continue to evaluate data from Spire Global’s Hyperspectral Microwave Sounder (HyMS) under a $3 million contract extension announced Aug. 4. […]
The post NOAA purchases Spire hyperspectral microwave sounder data appeared first on SpaceNews.
Neuraspace, the Portuguese space traffic management startup, announced around $18 million in fresh funding Aug. 5 to expand European space domain awareness and defense capabilities.
The post Neuraspace raises $18 million to expand sovereign space awareness appeared first on SpaceNews.
Voyager Technologies remains upbeat about the prospects for its Starlab commercial space station but is hoping for some tweaks to NASA’s plans to support the station’s development.
The post Voyager seeks relaxed requirements in NASA commercial space station RFP appeared first on SpaceNews.
SpaceX plans to start deploying upgraded Starlink satellites into orbit on the next flight of its Starship vehicle, scheduled for as soon as the end of the month.
The post SpaceX to begin Starship orbital flights appeared first on SpaceNews.
The companies, along with a third unidentified vendor, won $615 million in contracts for the AMTI satellite program
The post Rocket Lab, STR win Space Force contracts for airborne-target tracking appeared first on SpaceNews.
Arctic communications award will fund an expansion of Telesat’s Lightspeed, taking the planned LEO network to 225 spacecraft
The post Telesat lands $1.63 billion Canadian defense contract appeared first on SpaceNews.
Another wave of constellations has staked claims for communications satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO), but what hope do newcomers have alongside the industry’s entrenched, vertically integrated giants? A mix of […]
The post Finding room in Starlink’s shadow appeared first on SpaceNews.
The mood was celebratory at the ribbon-cutting for Muon Space’s San Jose, California, manufacturing facility in June. State, local, United States Space Force and Pentagon representatives lauded the startup and, […]
The post Satellite manufacturing thrives in California despite cost and regulatory pressures appeared first on SpaceNews.
Europe risks becoming dependent on foreign orbital computing infrastructure as U.S. companies and China’s government-led push accelerate the development of space-based data centers, according to the European Space Policy Institute.
The post Think tank warns Europe’s orbital compute gap is widening appeared first on SpaceNews.
1. A catalog of past AI predictions.
2. Jasmine Sun on why people do not want data centers. And Jasmine Sun on Ezra Klein, on data centers (NYT).
3. A bot running an SF retail boutique? (NYT)
5. On the NYC grocery store plan.
6. New credit card gives you tokens instead of miles.
7. Does AI mean the end of math heroes? Some other heroes too?
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
This composite of seven images from the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover shows Earth, visible as a small bright dot moving from upper left to lower right, passing behind the Martian moon Phobos on July 2, 2026, 1,907th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.
The black background is the result of image processing that removed extraneous light in the background to enhance detail.
Figure A is an annotated composite of nine images taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard Perseverance on July 2, 2026. The inset on the upper right, comprised of five images, shows Earth — the small bright dot moving from upper left to lower right — passing behind the Martian moon Phobos.
The rectangle outlined at the left in the annotation indicates the patch of sky that was imaged several times to capture Earth passing behind Phobos. In the larger rectangular inset, the images captured from that patch of sky are displayed in time order from left to right, with Phobos moving up and Earth moving down.
The gray of the Martian sky is the approximate true color of the twilight (about 40 minutes after sunset) on that sol. It is blue-gray lower, where it is brighter, and reddish gray above.
Figure B includes annotations showing the local solar time on Mars during which the five individual images that captured the occultation were taken.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which is managed by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Arizona State University leads the operations of the rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument, working in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, on the design, fabrication, testing, and operation of the cameras.
For more about Perseverance:
science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/
The post NASA’s Perseverance Captures Phobos and Earth appeared first on NASA Science.
They’re not always just standing around like people claim. There is always the threat of unaccountable violence.
While I’m not naive about the various immunities and protections police departments receive, there are still some safeguards in place and some political response to dissent by the governed. But when it comes to the National Guard deployment, there is no political authority to which the residents of the mainland colony known as the District of Columbia can turn. And that means there is no recourse other than after-the-fact civil suits when something like this happens (boldface mine):
Anna King was sitting on a bench one afternoon outside her home on a busy street in Washington, D.C., scrolling on her phone when three National Guard members entered her front gate, confronted her and pushed her to the ground, tying her hands behind her back with zip ties…
“Get away from me right now,” King, a retired U.S. Army captain who served in Iraq and earned both a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, can be heard telling the three male guard members in the video as they approach her on the bench. “You have absolutely no authority to detain me.”
As she tries to make her way to her front steps to go inside, the three Idaho National Guard members grab King and wrestle her to the ground. You can hear King yelling “Get off of me!” and coughing, while two of the troops tighten the zip ties on her hands…
Now, the ACLU of the District of Columbia and the private law firm Levy Firestone Muse have filed a federal tort claim against the Idaho National Guard on King’s behalf, seeking $3 million in damages from what they describe as an assault that led to lasting and serious injuries…
The National Guard says King was approached by the troops because she was suspected of assaulting a guard member two days earlier, something her attorneys called “baseless” in their filing. They say no charges around such an incident have been filed against King.
King’s attorneys say that they believe she was approached by the guard because she has been a vocal critic of their deployment in the city for months, hanging large signs outside her house with messages like “Occupation: Troops Out” and “National Guard Stop Being So Embarrassing.”
…Perloff says King sustained serious injuries to her wrist from the tight zip ties and required surgery, but is also suffering from post-traumatic symptoms from the incident.
Again, I’m not naive about the reality of policing, but we should not have unaccountable dipshits from Idaho entering people’s private property without warrants and arresting them without cause.
For most readers, D.C. statehood is about two more Democratic senators, but for the residents of the mainland colony is about self-governance and governing with consent.
D.C. statehood now.
What causes unusual knots of gas and dust in
Mississippi Today has the story:
‘Kidney chains’ could save lives and billions of healthcare dollars, advocates say. by Pat Boone, Robert Hays and Steve Young
"Editor’s note: Entertainer Pat Boone, Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young and actor Robert Hays of “Airplane” fame signed on as authors of a guest essay provided by US Blood Donors.org for Mississippi Today on “Kidney Chains.”
"This guest essay, though, written from a national perspective is of special importance to MT Ideas since Mississippi is among the states with the highest number of kidney disease-related deaths per 100,000 adjusted for age, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.*
"Hundreds of thousands of dialysis patients in the United States could receive lifesaving kidney transplants sooner if one simple idea became widely known: “kidney chains”— sequences of living-donor transplants that allow one donor to save multiple lives.
The goal is simple: Make “kidney chains” a household phrase.
Kidney chains allow living donors who are incompatible with their intended recipient to help initiate a sequence of transplants that can save multiple lives. The concept builds on Nobel Prize-recognized work** in market design and has already enabled thousands of lifesaving kidney transplants.
########
*Figure from the NCHS
###########
** The video link is to the last three minutes of this 15 minute talk from 2014
I created the dominant assurance contract aka the refund bonus mechanism in 1998–it’s a mechanism capable of producing some types of public goods privately–in recent years working with Tim Cason and Robertas Zubrickas I’ve put refund bonuses to the test in lab experiments and they work! I’ve written an accessible Refund Bonus Explainer that covers this body of work. Here’s one bit:
The dike is a public good. Once it stands, it protects everyone nearby, and a neighbor who contributed nothing cannot easily be excluded. That property is what makes it hard to finance.
Paul Samuelson defined public goods in 1954, and he was pessimistic about them. Each person does better by understating what the good is worth to him, so it is, in Samuelson’s words, “in the selfish interest of each person to give false signals, to pretend to have less interest in a given collective consumption activity than he really has.” From this he concluded that “no decentralized pricing system can serve to determine optimally these levels of collective consumption.” Public goods, on this view, are what governments are for. Refund bonuses challenge that conclusion.
Read the whole thing and here is my Rent Control Explainer.
The post Dominant Assurance Contract aka Refund Bonus Explainer appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
This is disturbing:
…a team of security researchers at UC San Diego, who found that a model of aftermarket car alarm known as the KARR Security System, installed in more than 2 million vehicles across the US by their estimate, can let any hacker within Bluetooth range send radio commands to silently unlock the car at will, turn off its alarm, honk the car’s horn or flash its lights, or even disable its ignition and leave a driver stranded.
Attribution is preliminary, and so far it seems no real damage.
And it seems like this is a campaign that has targeted at least seven states. And, because this is where the US is right now, Trump doesn’t believe it’s Iran and that Minnesota…I guess…hacked itself.
“I think I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent,” Trump said. “I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. They like to say, ‘Oh, it’s Iran.’ Iran should be so lucky. Iran’s got bigger problems than worrying about Minnesota.”
No word on whether he believes the other six states have hacked themselves as well.
Slashdot thread.
This Python package ports it to MLX for running on Apple Silicon.
I got it running on my M5 Max MacBook Pro. I cloned the repo and ran the model like this:
Market Design
# First download the models
uvx --from huggingface_hub hf download MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3 \
--include 'FL2VA/*' --exclude 'FL2VA/transformer/*'
uvx --from huggingface_hub hf download pipenetwork/MiniMax-H3-MLX-8bit
# Now run the prompt
uv run --with mlx-vlm \
--with-requirements requirements.txt python scripts/generate.py \
"a rainbow colored skunk leaps over a mossy log in a supermarket" \
-o skunk.mp4 \
-c ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--MiniMaxAI--MiniMax-H3/snapshots/fa9c8ab1eaa21c8ae25e7e40b83b2e6002f340af/FL2VA \
-t ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--pipenetwork--MiniMax-H3-MLX-8bit/snapshots/3ac52081470b0488921c3ec3ba84a39097bf2361
Here's the video I got for the prompt:
a rainbow colored skunk leaps over a mossy log in a supermarket
It downloaded ~115 GB of model files, and the video generation took just under 45 minutes.
The video is impressive, but the audio is weird speech-like garbage, because I didn't provide any prompt guidance as to what the audio should be. The prompting guide (which I didn't read prior to this experiment) has a whole bunch of information on how to get this to work.
Tags: ai, generative-ai, mlx, text-to-video, minimax
Release: condense-json 1.1
After shipping condense-json 1.0 I started integrating it into LLM, and found there were some desirable new features already:
- Replacements object can now include values other than strings. These will be identified and used as structural replacements by
condense_json()anduncondense_json(). #8- Objects can be used as the basis for merge operations.
condense_json()will identify if there are objects that are a close match and will store instructions for keys to update or delete.uncondense_json()can then apply these merges.
I also added some round-trip tests using the Hypothesis property-based Python testing library.
Tags: json
For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube.
Transcript
Contrary to what Trump administration officials say, we are not experiencing explosive economic growth. We are, however, experiencing an explosion in misery — and Donald Trump deserves full credit.
Hi, Paul Krugman here, slightly different location. I want to talk about food stamps and health insurance, two areas where things have gotten dramatically worse just in the past year and are continuing to get worse. There's going to be a lot more hungry people in America, especially hungry children, by the end of this year, and a lot more people without health insurance or with inadequate health insurance. And it all can be tied directly to legislative action or inaction on the part the Trump administration and its allies.
Here's what has happened. So we have what everybody still calls food stamps, though it's officially Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But we have a situation now where the One Big Beautiful Bill didn't exactly cut the rate of benefits, but what it did was to impose work requirements.
You might say, well,shouldn't people who can work work? Yeah, but that's not really what's happening. What's happening is that people who can work and do work —because among those who can work who are receiving food stamps, the vast majority do in fact work — must show proof of work. And that is, for many such people, a basically impossible burden.
I mean, think of who is likely to be on food stamps. They may well be irregularly employed. They certainly may not have a job where they can call up the HR department and get the necessary forms. They are also presented with a complicated paperwork requirement. We're talking about people who are, to some extent, lacking in formal education. But above all — I've never been poor, thank God — but as everyone who's studied or been poor can tell you, the biggest issue of poverty in some sense is the cognitive burden, the constant struggle to just make ends meet, which is a huge burden on everything else.
So you're imposing a bureaucratic hurdle, really a bureaucratic barricade in front of exactly the people least able to get across it. So of course, we're seeing a lot of people losing nutritional assistance with millions of those people children.
Health insurance is a rather different story. The Affordable Care Act made a huge positive difference to many people's lives — in this case some people I do know quite well, small business people and so on. But the way it was set up, there are subsidies to help you purchase insurance through the exchanges. The subsidies are means tested. I could not get a subsidy for health insurance, nor should I. So they fade out with income. But as originally set up, they faded out too quickly with rising income, and there was a cliff at 400% of the poverty line, no more subsidies, which was clearly bad policy. And they knew that at the time. It was just that trying to scrape together enough votes to get that thing enacted was hard.
So during the Biden years, the subsidy program was improved. It became somewhat more generous, but more important, it no longer had a cliff. It just gradually faded out.
Unfortunately, that was not a permanent change. It wasn't enacted into legislation for forever. There was a cutoff date. Why? Well, two words, Joe Manchin. But in any case, obviously, Trump and Republicans in Congress refuse to even contemplate extending those enhanced benefits. And so a lot of people are now faced with vastly higher costs if they want to retain their health insurance.
Interestingly, these are not the poorest. The poorest are going to be on Medicaid and even people a little bit above that are still going to have the full subsidy. But it's people in the middle class whose income is a little above 400% of the poverty line and suddenly have no subsidy available. That is a hardship for, again, millions of people.
So far we know that enrollment on the exchanges that were set up to buy health insurance has dropped by about three million so far. Probably a lot more to come. And probably that understates the loss because people trying to save money because things are more expensive are in many cases stepping down to less comprehensive plans. So there's an increase in the number of underinsured too. Which means that a large number of Americans who had adequate health insurance no longer do.
How should we think about all of this? The Trump administration has put out a report on the decline in Affordable Care Act enrollment, which is really a blood-boiling document because it portrays the big rise in enrollment that took place during the Biden years as a problem because it was an increase in fraud.
Now, is there fraud? Yes, there's fraud in the Affordable Care Act. Is there fraud in the food stamp program? Yes — there's fraud in every program, public and private sector as well. There's fraud in the endless pasta deal at Olive Garden. There's fraud in frequent flyer schemes. There is no reason to believe that there is significant fraud in the sense that it's a significant, important part of any of these programs.
And one thing that you always want to bear in mind when we're talking about these means-tested programs is how cheap they are. The average food stamp recipient receives $187 a month in nutritional assistance — $187 a month, a little over $2,000 a year. Maybe one way to put that in context is to say that Donald Trump's East Wing Ballroom Project, the one that is so far still just a hole in the ground and hopefully will never be finished, is costing $600 million. So that project alone, that scam, because we know that there's a lot of corruption involved, that is the equivalent of food stamps for 300,000 people for a year.
So the things that we're talking about here are, it's not really about the money. It is one of those “the cruelty is the point” stories. And we could go on about that, but clearly the fact that a lot of people are going to suffer is not an unintended byproduct of these policies. It is kind of, in some ways, the goal.
It's also enormously destructive, not just for people's lives now, but for the future.
One of the best established facts about the benefits of government spending is that nutritional and health assistance to children pays off for society as a whole. That children who received food stamps or Medicaid in their early years grow up to be healthier, more productive adults who pay more in taxes and are less likely to need government assistance. The rates of return on both the food stamp program and Medicaid, the original aid for health care for the poor, are enormous. They're far bigger, far better substantiated than almost anything else you can do.
If you ask, you know, what do we know about the payoff to infrastructure investment? Well, we think it's pretty big, but... that's not based on solid evidence. The evidence on these programs is enormous.
So by cutting back on these programs, by creating this explosion of misery, they're not only making millions of Americans much, much poorer than they were, they're also making the country as a whole substantially poorer in the long run. It's an anti-growth policy. But of course, the cruelty is the point.
And here we are. Many things happen to the economy, many things happen to society that are outside the control of the guy in the White House. Many bad things aren't really the fault of the party in power. This is absolutely, totally Donald Trump's fault.
Inauguration Day 2025 looked and felt like a coronation, as Donald Trump was installed in a position of immense, unprecedented power. Since he had returned to office despite the Jan. 6 insurrection, it was obvious that time-honored checks and balances on presidential authority wouldn’t apply to him. And the megabillionaires who had spent vast sums to assure Trump’s victory had no qualms about appearing as the new MAGA oligarchy. Through their political and monetary fealty to Trump, they had positioned themselves to dictate policy, free from petty democratic constraints and concern for public welfare. They evidently expected that they would spend years effectively ruling the nation in their interests, along with the president they had bought.
Now, a year and a half later, the oligarchs’ victory celebrations look premature. Newly elected presidents usually experience a few months of positive net approval, but Trump’s “honeymoon” barely lasted a month. He is now plumbing new depths of public disapproval:
Furthermore, Trump’s plunge is like a vortex pulling the entire Republican Party down with him. G. Elliott Morris’s model gives Democrats an 85 percent chance of taking the House despite extreme GOP gerrymandering. He also gives the Democrats a 55 percent chance of taking the Senate, despite its overrepresentation of small, rural states that strongly tilts its composition towards the Republicans.
And you know what has an even worse approval rating than Donald Trump? AI data centers:
There are substantive reasons to oppose these centers, but beyond concerns over rising electricity bills, pollution, water depletion and noise, the controversy over data centers has become a proxy for public backlash against the power of the broligarchs and their disregard for the welfare of ordinary Americans.
According to historical experience, this kind of massive shift in public sentiment should have induced hedging on the part of the big money. That is, based on past patterns we would have expected billionaires to give more money to Democrats during the midterm elections compared to the 2024 election as a way to maintain influence if the balance of power in Washington shifts.
But that’s not what is happening this time: instead, oligarchs are doubling down on MAGA. An analysis by the Washington Post finds that megadonors have already spent more than $1.6 billion on the November midterms. Here’s how that spending breaks down:
What’s the rationale here? Why are the billionaires doubling down in support of a hugely unpopular president and his hugely unpopular agenda?
This partly reflects a change in the nature of billionaires’ relationship with the extreme right. Twenty years ago American conservatism was dominated by a “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” strategy in which corporations and the wealthy used racism and bigotry to advance their goals — tax cuts and deregulation — without necessarily being racists and bigots themselves. Today Elon Musk isn’t putting on a show of being a neo-Nazi, because that’s who he really is.
Beyond that, Trump’s second presidency is so pervasively corrupt, abusive and destructive that it will be virtually impossible for anyone who supported him to move on and rehabilitate themselves. Outside of MAGA, who will ever be willing to trust Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos again? Frankly, what political hopeful would be stupid or venal enough to associate with them?
Indeed, I believe and hope that if Democrats regain power, they won’t repeat past mistakes by trying to “move on” from the corruption and scandals of the previous regime. It’s now clear that Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, enabled Trump’s return to power by slow-walking the investigation of January 6th. Earlier, Barack Obama let Republicans off the hook by not pursuing the lies that led to the Iraq war. Let’s hope that this time the Democrats, once in control of one or both houses of Congress, will quickly initiate investigations, hearings and, where warranted, prosecutions. And it’s unlikely that Trump’s billionaire money men will escape unscathed.
So rather than trying to mollify the Democrats and defuse the coming political reckoning, the billionaire class is opening the money taps, going all out to prevent Democrats from being elected. And why not? For Musk, the Koch Brothers, Ken Griffin, Alex Karp and others hundreds of millions is pocket change, while billion-dollar business interests and, in some cases, possible criminal charges are at stake.
Rather than being daunted by the flood of billionaire money, Democrats should treat this as a campaign theme. Robert Reich had a good post yesterday titled “The Stink of Musk,” arguing that “Musk’s money shouldn’t be viewed as a problem. It’s an opportunity.” If Musk supports a candidate, that in itself can be used as an argument that said candidate is not on the side of ordinary Americans.
Reich is not only right, but the strategy of highlighting oligarch support as a reason not to vote for politicians can and should extend beyond Musk money. A case in point: when Forbes magazine finds it noteworthy that the likes of Ken Griffin, Stephen Schwarzman and Paul Singer are pouring large sums into Susan Collins’s campaign in Maine, there is an obvious case to be made that Collins is working for the billionaire class and not the working class, the middle class, or even the bottom 99 percent.
Just as the billionaires have come to the obvious realization that there is no turning back on MAGAdom, Democrats must also realize that there is no turning back on opposition to the billionaire agenda. Any failure to address corporate tax giveaways, shrinking paychecks, loss of healthcare, epidemics, loss of SNAP benefits and, yes, predatory data centers, will be perceived by ordinary Americans for the betrayal that it is. We, as a country, are at an unavoidable fork in the road. Perhaps we should extend some thanks to the billionaire class for clarifying that.
MUSICAL CODA
Nothing to do with the topic
I released LLM 0.32 this morning, the most significant new version of LLM since the initial launch of the project. The new version includes support for visible reasoning traces, server-side provider tools, redesigned content-addressable SQLite logs, new models, and new features enabled by the OpenAI Responses API. I also released a new version of the llm-anthropic plugin with substantial updates of its own.
Running LLM against reasoning models now displays their reasoning traces to standard error, so you can see what they are "thinking" without that information being included in the standard output that you might pipe to another tool. Add -R/--hide-reasoning to turn this off.
LLM includes support out-of-the-box for the GPT-5.6 model family, and the new default model used with llm "prompt" is now the inexpensive but capable GPT-5.6 Luna.
LLM calls can now use server-side tools from various providers. OpenAI provide a code execution environment as a server-side tool; LLM can now run prompts that benefit from that like so:
llm --tool CodeInterpreter 'Show current python and SQLite versions'OpenAI also gets a WebSearch tool.
The llm-anthropic plugin adds WebSearch, WebFetch, CodeExecution, and AnthropicMCP, which looks like this:
llm -m claude-sonnet-5 -T 'AnthropicMCP("https://datasette.simonwillison.net/-/mcp")' \
'how many rows in the blog_blogmark table?'That causes Anthropic to execute MCP calls against my new datasette-mcp plugin as part of a single request/response interaction with their API.
The new llm openai endpoint command provides a tool for executing prompts against any OpenAI compatible endpoint as a one-liner. These aren't logged, which makes this a handy tool for running one-off prompts against anything that speaks the lingua franca of the LLM API world.
Here's how I use that to run prompts against Gemma 4 12B running in my localhost LM Studio API, via uvx (no LLM installation required) and mixing in the llm-tools-quickjs tool plugin for good measure:
uvx --with llm-tools-quickjs \
llm openai endpoint http://localhost:1234/v1 -m google/gemma-4-12b \
-T QuickJS 'Use QuickJS to multiply 3434 * 2434' --td
LLM's Python API previously required you to create a conversation and then send messages to it one at a time. This was an abstraction over the true nature of LLMs, where each request carries a complete history of the messages that came before it. That abstraction started to get in the way for some more advanced cases, so the new release introduces a model.prompt(messages=[]) parameter that can be used like this:
import llm from llm import user, assistant, system model = llm.get_model("gpt-5.6-luna") response = model.prompt(messages=[ system("You are a helpful pirate."), user("What is the capital of France?"), assistant("Paris, matey."), user("And Germany?"), ]) print(response.text())
LLM previously returned an iterable sequence of strings from each prompt. This worked great when models returned a string response, but failed to predict the weird shape that models would evolve towards. Today many models return a mix of reasoning text, output strings, tool calls, and even image attachments. With LLM 0.32 you can do this instead:
for event in model.prompt("Explain cats").stream_events(): if event.type == "reasoning": print(f"[thinking] {event.chunk}", end="", flush=True) elif event.type == "text": print(event.chunk, end="", flush=True) else: print(f"Other event: {event}")
Combine these features and we can finally provide a robust implementation of the semi-standard OpenAI chat completions API, which I've now released as the llm-chat-completions-server plugin:
llm install llm-chat-completions-server
llm chat-completions-server --port 9000
# Server is now running on http://127.0.0.1:9000/v1Now you can run prompts against LLM via that server, using the new llm openai endpoint command!
llm openai endpoint http://127.0.0.1:9000/v1 'hello' -m gpt-5.4-miniThe bigger challenge with that kind of API concerns logging. If we're going to support the pattern where the message sequence is appended to on every request, ideally we can avoid logging all of that duplicate JSON for every turn.
The solution is the new content-addressable message store, modeled after Git. You can see the new schema for that in the documentation, but the llm logs and llm logs --json commands have both been upgraded to convert that format back into something that's easy to consume.
There is a whole lot more in this release. The 0.32 release notes are pretty comprehensive, and the notes for 0.32rc2, 0.32rc, 0.32a3, 0.32a2, and 0.32a0 should fill in any gaps.
Existing LLM plugins should all continue to work, but plugins that provide extra models will need to be upgraded to 0.32 in order to participate fully in the new streaming events system. There's a guide to implementing plugins with Structured messages and streaming events in the documentation.
I've updated some of my own plugins:
WebSearch, WebFetch, CodeExecution, and AnthropicMCP server-side tools.Quite a few of the lower-level tools changes in this release were driven by the needs of Datasette Agent. When I started work on LLM, the term "agent" had such a vague definition that I refused to use it. In September 2025 I came around to the idea that "An LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal" is well established enough now that I could stop avoiding the term entirely.
Tool chains can now pause for human approval and resume from a stored message history - both needed by Datasette Agent.
Looking at LLM today it's beginning to look very agent-shaped to me. There's something neat about having a CLI utility that can mix and match different tools from different sources with different models all as a one-liner, and that includes a Python library powerful enough to build systems like Datasette Agent and llm-coding-agent.
Maybe the next version of LLM will bake the concept of an "agent" into the core library. I'm still trying to figure out what that would look like.
Tags: projects, releases, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, llm, anthropic, llm-tool-use, llm-reasoning, model-context-protocol
Release: llm-anthropic 0.26
Includes new features enabled by LLM 0.32:
- New models:
claude-fable-5,claude-sonnet-5, andclaude-opus-5. #75, #76- Added server-side tools for
WebSearch,WebFetch,CodeExecution, andAnthropicMCP, available through LLM's-Tinterface or Pythontools=. The previous-o web_search*options have been removed in favor of-T WebSearch. #79- Upgraded to llm>=0.32. Reasoning, tool calls, tool results, and server-side tool results now stream as typed events. Reasoning for
llmCLI prompts now displays to standard error unless you pass--hide-reasoning/-R.- Simplified extended thinking to
thinkingandthinking_effort(low,medium,high,xhigh, ormax). Claude 5 models think by default;-o thinking 0disables thinking for Sonnet 5 and Opus 5, while Fable 5 always thinks.-R/--hide-reasoningnow omits reasoning from responses and logs. Thethinking_budget,thinking_display, andthinking_adaptiveoptions have been removed. #80
Tags: llm, anthropic, claude, model-context-protocol
Retracing his grandparents’ journey to Iceland’s Vatnajökull glacier, a writer draws on storytelling to grasp climate change
- by Aeon Video
This paper investigates why China’s recurrent credit expansions have coincided with persistently weak inflation. We argue that this pattern reflects the country’s production-oriented monetary regime. At the aggregate level, faster monetary-financial expansion temporarily raises PPI inflation but depresses it over longer horizons. At the sectoral level, liability growth among listed industrial firms is followed by weaker producer prices, lower profitability, higher leverage, rising inventories, and reduced capacity utilization. We also find asymmetric supply-chain transmission: downstream liability growth raises upstream PPI inflation, while upstream liability growth does not generate a corresponding downstream price response. These findings indicate that credit expansion in China tends to sustain production and balance sheets rather than stimulate final demand. As a result, monetary policy operates less as a conventional tool for demand management and durable reflation, and more as a mechanism for preserving production capacity and supporting growth.
That is from a new paper by . I have to say I understand the result but not exactly the mechanism. I am reminded of Milton Friedman’s dictum not to focus too much on the first-order effects of an increase in money supply.
The post Is this why China finds it so hard to inflate producer prices? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Roden Readers —
There is sweat and then there is s-w-e-a-t and the out-of-doorsness in Japan is presently a natural machine that produces nothing but sweat and sweat and sweat and swelter. Dryness has been eradicated. Fire is impossible to start. Blowtorch any single thing and it will laugh in your face. The implicit ubiquity of moistness inspired Japanese dictionary publishers to excise “dry.” A useless word. The only sane response is to find a cool cave at the top of a mountain and hibernate until November. (Or go to Victoria, Canada, which I did; more on that below.)
Update Aug. 5, 6:09 a.m. EDT (1009 UTC): SpaceX confirmed deployment of the three BlueBird satellites.
SpaceX launched the latest trio of AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in the predawn hours of Wednesday morning.
The Falcon 9 rocket carried satellites numbered 11, 12, and 13 in to orbit. The mission came about a month-and-a-half after SpaceX launched the BlueBird 8-10 mission.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 3:49 a.m. EDT (0749 UTC). The rocket flew on a northeasterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast an 85 percent chance for favorable weather during liftoff. Meteorologists are tracking the possible interference from anvil, thick, and cumulus clouds.
“A weak mid-level low centered over Georgia this morning will begin to dissipate through the overnight period,” launch weather officers wrote. “Lingering influence from this feature will promote continued light southwesterly low-mid level flow during the primary launch window.”
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1077. It became the fifth Falcon booster to achieve at least 30 flights, with four out of those five boosters are still in operation.
More than 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1077 landed on the droneship, A Shortfall of Gravitas, positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. This was the 162nd landing on this vessel and the 645th Falcon booster landing to date.
The trio of BlueBird satellites were deployed several minutes apart beginning about 54 minutes after liftoff. Because of the size of the payload adaptor, SpaceX didn’t broadcast the deployment live, but rather confirmed the release on social media.
The 2,400-square-foot sized satellites will take a couple of weeks to deploy to their full size and complete checkouts before entering into the broader constellation.
In late July, AST SpaceMobile CEO Abel Avellan said on social media that the next trio of satellites following this launch are not too far behind the three satellites launching on Wednesday morning. He said they have production in flow through satellite 42.
“We invented a new way to design, manufacture at scale, deploy, and fly lightweight composite stackable architecture combined, with the world’s largest and most advanced direct-to-device and radar phased-array with the ability to launch them in groups of 3, 5, 6, or 8 on a single launch,” Avellan wrote.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is able to launch three satellites at most with its Falcon 9 rocket with the eight-satellite configuration reserved for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which has a seven-meter diameter payload fairing. However, the latter rocket is grounded for an undetermined amount of time following the May 28 pad explosion.
BlueBirds 11, 12, and 13 are stacked and getting ready for their August 5th orbital launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
BlueBirds 14, 15, and 16 to follow right after.
Production advancing through BlueBird 42.
Built in Texas.… pic.twitter.com/I8JXqCmGV7
— AST SpaceMobile (@AST_SpaceMobile) July 31, 2026
In addition to his well-known public roles, he worked very hard to help and befriend me when I was younger. Here are the Google searches for Victor. Less well known about Victor is that he had one of the world’s best collections of private letters. He also once gave me a very nice small painting by Jack Savitzky, for which I remain grateful.
The post Victor Niederhoffer, RIP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The Democratic primaries, especially those in Michigan (today) and Wisconsin (next Tuesday) have once again brought up the issue of “electability.” As usual, the more moderate candidates argue that primary voters should choose them because they’re electable, and the progressives argue that in fact they’re the electable ones. There’s no question that the Democratic Party, in the states but especially in Washington, agrees with the moderates.
One way to address this question, which I’ve advocated in the past, is to say that primary voters should stop worrying about electability altogether. Instead of trying to figure out which candidate someone else might like, vote for the candidate you like, and you’ll probably wind up doing better in the end.
Unfortunately, primary voters, who are more aware and involved than the average voter, love playing amateur political consultant; it’s difficult to get them to stop thinking about the general election. So rather than ignoring it, we should rethink what we talk about when we talk about electability.
The traditional conception of electability is simple and straightforward:
“The more ideologically moderate candidate is the more electable one”
Sometimes you might throw in features of identity, like race and gender (i.e. white candidates are supposedly more electable than non-white candidates and men are more electable than women), but in this line of thinking, ideology is what matters most. If you need to win over a general electorate, especially in a closely divided state like Michigan or Wisconsin, you have to appeal to the middle, and you do that with moderate positions on policy issues.
As I’ve noted many times, in congressional races, policy moderation has lost much of the power it once had to give candidates an advantage. But even if it still helps rather than hurts in and of itself, it may be far less important than other factors — and it’s certainly not so powerful that we should assume that it swamps everything else.
Yet that’s how the Democratic Party often treats it. When the party apparatus like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee are trying to figure out which candidate to throw their support behind and which to try to push out of a race, they look for candidates who can raise money (i.e. they’re either rich enough to self-finance or they have a lot of rich friends), candidates who are already known to voters, and perhaps above all, candidates who are safe centrists.
It’s not always a bad formula. For instance, former governor Roy Cooper was recruited by Chuck Schumer to run in North Carolina, and he checks all the boxes — and it looks like he’s probably going to win. But apply the same formula everywhere, and you get candidates like Haley Stevens, an uninspiring normie Democrat who was also the party’s choice, and looks like she’s going to get beaten by Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate primary.
I can’t say for sure which of those two is more electable, because we can’t run the experiment twice. Polls taken now aren’t all that useful given that the general election hasn’t started, but they seem to show Stevens doing a tiny bit better than El-Sayed against Mike Rogers, who will be the Republican nominee — but within the margin of error, so no meaningful difference.
While it’s certainly possible for a candidate to be so at odds ideologically from the state they’re running in that they can’t win, that’s usually not what people highlight when they argue that electability ought to be the top concern. Instead, they often point to candidates who flamed out spectacularly and lost winnable races, like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware in 2010, or Todd Akin in Missouri in 2012.
But those examples almost never have anything to do with ideology. O’Donnell was so wacky that she felt compelled to air an ad making clear that she was not, in fact, a witch. Akin averred that rape exceptions in abortion bans were unnecessary because in a “legitimate rape,” a woman’s mysterious ladyparts will render a pregnancy impossible. They were just terrible candidates.
On the other side, Barack Obama wasn’t electable because Black men with thin resumes and the middle name “Hussein” are always great to nominate for president. And Donald Trump wasn’t electable because vulgar con men who sexually abuse women are the strongest candidates.
So if ideological moderation isn’t the most important factor in genuine electability, what is? I’d argue there are three key variables:
Electability factor #1: The timing. Timing is perhaps the most under-considered determinant of political outcomes, but it affects everything. Obama’s timing was perfect in 2008; the Iraq War, the financial meltdown, and the end of the unpopular Bush presidency primed the public for someone who represented the most dramatic break possible with the status quo, and he was it. Likewise, in 2016, with the gnawing feeling that the system wasn’t serving people well, plus the yearning among so many voters for an authentic racist and misogynist (especially given that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee), Trump’s despicable personality and outsider status allowed him to squeak to victory when he might not have been able to in a different year.
Electability factor #2: The candidate. This seems obvious, but it apparently isn’t. Good candidates are more electable than bad candidates, whatever their ideology, and charisma matters. Watch Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed for any length of time, and it becomes clear that he’s just a better politician on the campaign trail than she is. He’s more articulate, he speaks less in bromides and cliches, he’s confident where she’s cautious, he’s willing to try to persuade anyone while she doesn’t quite know how to deal with being challenged, and he seems to be outworking her. Good campaigners don’t always make good officeholders, but being good at campaigning makes a difference in getting elected.
Electability factor #3: The message. This is directly related to factor #1: Has the candidate hit upon a message that is not just compelling, but compelling at this particular moment? The political situation of this moment is that voters are pissed off — they’re pissed off at Trump, they’re pissed off about the economy, they’re pissed off about corruption, and they’re pissed off at the fact that ten years after Trump himself said he was going to fight a “rigged” system, the system seems more rigged than ever.
El-Sayed’s answer is a simple slogan that he repeats over and over and has even turned into a call-and-response at his rallies: “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all.” It may not be all-encompassing, but it’s easy to remember and it communicates what he’s about.
Stevens says some of the same things — her website says “Haley is running for Senate to continue to fight for Michiganders and our economy while standing up to the Trump-Musk chaos agenda” — but in part because she is in fact a creature of the establishment, the “fighter” stuff doesn’t come off as particularly authentic, and she can’t plausibly say she’s going to challenge the status quo.
In a different year, Stevens might be able to argue persuasively that she’s the more electable one. But to make that argument this year, you’d have to still believe that ideology is all that matters. Or that the inevitable torrent of hateful anti-Muslim bigotry Republicans will pour down on El-Sayed will be enough to defeat him (which maybe it will).
Anyhow, this is my plea: If we’re going to talk about electability, don’t limit it to ideology, because that’s only a small part of the story.
One final note, especially given that it looks like El-Sayed is going to win, as will Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin governor race, as have a number of other progressive candidates who have challenged Democratic incumbents. If you haven’t seen it yet, I wrote a piece at Public Notice about the decision moderate Democrats will face once the primaries are over: Should they keep attacking progressive candidates who won, in order to fight a supposed “battle for the soul of the party,” or should they do everything they can to help those candidates win even if they aren’t all that comfortable with them? You can probably imagine which position I take, but I think the full argument might be worth your time.
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In the last few days, you may have heard about Leopold Aschenbrenner—the wonder kid hedge fund manager who lost tens of billions over the course of a few days. It’s the biggest financial fiasco of the year.
If you didn’t read about it in the news, don’t worry. Hollywood will certainly make it into a movie. This 25-year-old hot shot’s financial empire was literally collapsing while guests were showing up for his blowout wedding at a fake Tuscan villa in California. The screenplay practically writes itself.
It’s Wolves of Wall Street meets Under the Tuscan Sun. Throw in a dose of Margin Call for good measure.
This tyro’s investing strategy looks more like gambling addiction than high finance. Aschenbrenner borrowed to the hilt, using four times leverage to buy AI stocks by the truckload. Then he added to his risk by shorting companies he was sure AI would replace. In other words, instead of hedging his AI position—which is standard practice (and why they call them hedge funds), he doubled down, setting himself up for a failure of Biblical proportions.
When you take chances like this, even a small downturn in AI stocks will wipe out your entire capital. That’s pretty much what happened last week.
I wanted to learn more about the young man behind this collapse—so I went to his Wikipedia page. There I discovered his connection to fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and the latter’s Effective Altruism philosophy.
What are the odds that the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the year is connected to the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the decade?
But there it is.
And—another coincidence!—the woman who assisted Bankman-Fried, and served 14 months in prison for fraud and money laundering, also helped run her college’s Effective Altruism club.
This is getting to be a trend.
But, of course, none of this is coincidence.
I wrote about Effective Altruism back in 2023, and shared my own history with consequentialist ethical systems of this sort.
I really could have pursued a career in philosophy—as hard as that is to believe. You’re asking: Can anybody get hired in that field? But as a young man, I managed to beat out a dozen Rhode Scholars when I took a first in the subject at Oxford. I even got exempted from the oral exams on the strength of my performance. I could have parlayed that into a PhD and a sweet teaching gig.
Lord Quinton, president of my Oxford college and a famous philosopher in his own right, was the first person to congratulate me. But I could tell he was a little shocked. He knew me as an eccentric jazz musician from Los Angeles, and here I was making a mark in analytic philosophy.
But I walked away from all this—because I‘d grown disillusioned with analytical philosophy, and especially the misguided ethical systems that were at the core of my studies. These were the predecessors of Effective Altruism. That term didn’t exist back then, but the worldview did—these systems are all variants of utilitarianism, a starry-eyed moral calculus invented by Jeremy Bentham two hundred years ago.
By the way, Bentham also invented the Panopticon, a prison concept that is the model for today’s surveillance capitalism.
Behavioral interventions have become central to modern public policy, but their empirical promise remains contested because estimated treatment effects often appear small. We argue that a policy response is economically meaningful only relative to the response generated by alternative policies. We assemble more than 1,200 estimates from over 600 studies comparing “nudges” and traditional price interventions in the markets for cigarettes, alcohol, influenza vaccination, electricity, and residential water. Translating nudge effects into equivalent price changes, we find that behavioral interventions often correspond to enormous fiscal interventions, from an 11% tax on electricity to a 100% subsidy on influenza vaccinations. Nudges are also more cost-effective than price instruments in all markets, but cost-effectiveness does not predict the welfare ranking of policies. Using a behavioral extension of the Marginal Value of Public Funds, we show that nudges have high welfare returns at the margin, while price instruments often generate larger total surplus at scale.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
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The coastal dune system in Lençóis Maranhenses National Park in northeastern Brazil is among the most surreal landscapes on Earth. At first glance, the park looks like a desert, but it is far from it. This place receives about 125 centimeters (50 inches) of rain per year—slightly more than Seattle and double what falls in London.
The result is a paradox: rows of sparkling white quartz dunes, some rising 30 meters (100 feet), soar over a mosaic of blue and green freshwater lagoons. The park’s name stems from the Portuguese word lençóis, meaning “bedsheets,” a reference that makes the most sense when the park is viewed from afar. From that perspective, the sweeping curves of the largest coastal dune field in South America resemble a rumpled, white bedsheet.
These Landsat 9 images were captured in June 2026, around the time when lagoon water levels typically peak. The partially impermeable layer of bedrock and clay beneath the sand prevents the lagoons from draining during the wet season. However, as rains subside between August and November, the water table falls, and by December, most of the lagoons dry up.
The dune field, a tan area within an expanse of green, is the centerpiece of the park. It spans about 900 square kilometers (350 square miles), roughly the size of New York City. From above, shallower lagoons appear light blue, often taking on turquoise or aquamarine hues as sunlight reflects off the sand below. Deeper lagoons are darker, a result of the deeper water absorbing more red, yellow, and green wavelengths, leaving mostly blue light to scatter back. Suspended sediment, microscopic algae, and dissolved organic matter also contribute to the array of colors, giving some lagoons greener and browner tones.
Green vegetation surrounds the dune field, which sits at the intersection of three Brazilian biomes: the Amazon rainforest to the west, the tropical wooded savannas of the Cerrado to the south, and the dry shrublands and thorn forests of the Caatinga to the east. Closest to the dunes are mangroves and restinga forests, ecosystems well adapted to sandy, coastal soils.
The dune field exists because of the rare convergence of geologic and climatic conditions. Rivers, including the Mearim and Parnaíba, deliver the key ingredient—quartz sand—to this unusually flat portion of the Maranhão coastline in massive quantities. It has accumulated here over the past few hundred thousand years driven in part by fluctuating sea levels and shoreline transgression and regression. Persistent easterly trade winds have also played a critical role. During the dry season, winds often reach at least 50 kilometers per hour, fast enough to build the dunes and push them westward at a pace of roughly 4 to 25 meters per year. That is fast for sand dunes, though not the fastest in the world. Satellites have tracked small barchan dunes in Namibia’s Sperrgebiet region moving at rates exceeding 80 meters per year.
Landsat images, meanwhile, show the dune field at Lençóis Maranhenses has extended westward by about 0.5 kilometers between 1986 and 2026 in some areas due to the conveyor belt of dunes running inland from the coastline. The nearly constant movement of sand prevents vegetation from becoming established across much of the dune field.
UNESCO declared the park a World Heritage site in 2024, citing its remarkable geology and rich biodiversity. The park is home to more than 850 documented species, including fish, birds, reptiles, mammals, and phytoplankton. Among them are four endangered species, including the neotropical otter, West Indian manatee, scarlet ibis, and oncilla (a type of wild cat). Among the lagoons’ most remarkable inhabitants are the trahira (Hoplias malabaricus), a predatory fish species with large canine-like teeth. During the dry season, it burrows far enough under the sand to find damp mud, where it enters a dormant state, emerging after the rains to hunt insects and other fish.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
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Sites relevant to the start of the American Revolutionary War are interspersed throughout the modern-day Boston metropolitan region.
The colonial communities of “America’s historic triangle” played defining roles in the road to American independence.
Along the northeast side of the Capital Beltway in Maryland, green spaces weave through the developed landscape.
The post The Paradox of Lençóis Maranhenses National Park appeared first on NASA Science.
School buses return to their routes this month. For millions of households where parents and children hold different immigration statuses, so does a question the buses do not answer: what a school district may ask at the registration desk, and what federal agents may do at the curb.
The mixed-status families’ school year now runs on two tracks: a constitutional guarantee that has not moved since 1982, and a federal enforcement posture that changed in January 2025.
On Jan. 20, 2025, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman rescinded the guidelines that had kept immigration agents away from schools, churches and health care facilities. A department spokesperson said the change meant “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches,” and that the administration trusted officers to use common sense.
The rescission of these policies has heightened community concerns regarding immigration enforcement near schools, altering the calculus for families making everyday decisions about transportation and classroom participation.
Enforcement volume followed. Immigration and Customs Enforcement booked more than 43,000 people into detention in June, averaging 1,438 a day, and 1,593 a day over the first 11 days of July, according to agency figures reported by Government Executive . Preliminary Homeland Security data reported by CBS News in early August put July’s total above 46,000. School attendance and deportation fear now collide inside districts that answer to state truancy law but have no say over federal enforcement.
DHS’s Protected Areas policy, issued in October 2021, prohibited arrests, interviews, searches and surveillance at K-12 schools, early learning centers, school bus stops and school events, except in extraordinary circumstances involving an immediate threat to public safety.
Its rescission in January 2025 left districts dealing with federal agents without any written limit on where those agents could go.
The constitutional floor has not moved. The U.S. Supreme Court precedent established in Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982) continues to dictate that state and local education agencies cannot deny K-12 public school enrollment based on immigration status. The court determined that withholding basic public education creates a distinct subclass of residents, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Consequently, immigrant students’ rights in public schools remain constitutionally protected across all 50 states, regardless of state legislative proposals or executive directives attempting to restrict municipal funding.
This legal precedent guarantees education access regardless of immigration status, establishing that local school districts are legally obligated to enroll all eligible children residing within their geographic boundaries. School districts that attempt to impose conditions designed to deter undocumented children or require proof of legal residency face immediate federal judicial challenge.
Joint guidance from the Justice and Education departments defines what documentation a public school may request at registration . School districts cannot require a Social Security number, foreign passport details or specific citizenship documentation as a condition of enrollment.
Furthermore, administrative staff are prohibited from inquiring into the legal status of students or their parents. The same guidance covers children of undocumented parents and enrollment: districts must accept alternative proof of residency, such as a utility bill, a lease or a sworn affidavit
Parents who read Spanish can consult a Spanish-language guide to immigrant children’s rights that walks through enrollment documents and the privacy rules covering student records.
The Urban Institute surveyed immigrant families in December 2025 and found that 10% of those with children had kept a child home from school, child care or after-school activities to avoid drawing attention to a family member’s immigration status. Among mixed-status families the figure was 18%, and 37% said they worried about sending their children, compared with 11% of immigrant families made up entirely of citizens.
District records show the same pattern . Daily absences in one California district rose 22% after ICE raids in early 2025, with the sharpest increase among the youngest students. In a UCLA survey of high school principals conducted between June and August 2025, 64% said students from immigrant families had missed school that year because of immigration policy or rhetoric.
The funding consequences follow the absences. States allocate money to districts largely through average daily attendance formulas, so when families keep children home, districts lose revenue that pays for teachers, special education staff and after-school programs.
A separate change came from Congress, not the court. H.R. 1 , passed by the 119th Congress, narrows Medicaid and CHIP eligibility for some immigrant households starting Oct. 1, 2026. The cuts do not touch public school access, but they add paperwork for the same low-income families managing the school year.
However, the court permitted the implementation of statutory restrictions regarding state-level administrative access to federally funded safety-net benefits, including emergency healthcare expansion and subsidized family coverage options. While these health coverage adjustments do not alter public education mandates, they impose additional administrative burdens on low-income households.
Legal aid groups recommend that mixed-status households put a family preparedness plan for detention in writing before the first day of class. In practice that means three things on file: a signed caregiver authorization naming the adult who can pick a child up and consent to medical care; copies of birth certificates, passports and any immigration paperwork held by someone outside the home; and a written instruction to the school about who may be contacted and what a district may release.
School boards now sit between a state mandate to educate every resident child and a federal enforcement posture they do not control. Whether federal policy treats that enforcement as more urgent than educational continuity is the question shaping the coming school year.
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Spanish-speaking construction workers cleared the debris Hurricane Helene left across Western North Carolina in September 2024.
They gutted flood-soaked buildings in Asheville’s River Arts District and repaired homes throughout the mountain counties, alongside local crews and laborers brought in from other states.
HUD allocated the state $1.4 billion in disaster-recovery funding, and the N.C. Department of Commerce counted more than 7,000 housing applications by Dec. 31 in its 2025 Helene recovery summary. The state’s recovery reports offer no comparable count of the workforce.
DCReport documented in July that Spanish speakers struggled to get aid and storm information in their own language. That fits a wider national pattern: recovery programs track money and finished projects more closely than the people hired to do the work.
Enlace Latino NC described the Asheville cleanup as work that required Latino labor. Its reporter found about 10 workers from Winston-Salem gutting a flooded building in the River Arts District.
When she approached them, a man walked over and asked her to leave, saying he paid their salaries. “This is a free country, but they’re working for me,” he said.
Einar Rojas came from Chicago, recruited by a contractor who organizes disaster crews, the same route that had taken him to Florida after Hurricane Ian. He had been in Asheville almost two weeks, working more than 10 hours a day, seven days a week.
Rojas said roughly 100 Venezuelan workers in his group stayed in a hotel the contracting company paid for, a company the outlet could not identify. Buncombe County said contractors were responsible for the safety and treatment of those workers, and that it had no data on how many temporary workers arrived.
Nationally, Hispanic or Latino workers died at a rate of 4.3 per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers in 2024, against 3.3 for all workers, and 68.5% of those deaths involved workers born outside the United States. By the National Safety Council’s count , 2024 marked the eighth straight year of Hispanic or Latino workers recording the highest death rate of any group.
The state picture moves year to year. N.C. recorded 196 workplace deaths in 2024 , up 10.7% from 177 the year before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in March. Latino worker deaths fell from 41 to 30 over that year, and construction deaths dropped from 43 to 36, still the most of any private industry in the state.
A study of N.C. fatalities from 1992 through 2017 found Hispanic men died on the job at 2.11 times the rate of white men. Hispanic workers logged 32% of their worker-years in construction but 58% of their fatalities there.
Pay disappears too. Among 171 day laborers surveyed in Louisiana after Hurricane Ida, half reported wage theft , and 91% of them said it happened during the previous two months of recovery work.
Employers must provide safety training in a language and vocabulary workers can understand, OSHA policy states. The agency tells its own inspectors to look past the paperwork, because a company may hold training records for employees who never understood what the training covered.
That gap matters on disaster sites, where crews enter flood-damaged buildings, pull apart unstable debris and work around electrical hazards. Rojas said his Asheville crew used helmets, gloves, masks and boots. Equipment is not instruction. In that same Louisiana survey, only 15% of workers said they had received any training at all for the sites they were entering.
Contractor chains blur that responsibility further. A recruiter assembles the crew, a subcontractor assigns the task and a supervisor gives directions out loud at the site. The state’s Helene recovery reports do not state what safety instruction those crews received, who gave it or in what language.
Establishing who the employer was comes first. A rebuild crew can sit under a general contractor, a subcontractor, a labor recruiter and a crew leader at once. Whoever directs the work may call a worker an independent contractor, though the N.C. Industrial Commission can look past that label to ask who controlled the job.
Most N.C. businesses with three or more employees must carry workers’ compensation insurance. An injured worker generally faces two deadlines: written notice to the employer within 30 days, then a Form 18 claim filed with the commission within two years. The commission warns that an employer’s own accident report does not satisfy the second , so a worker who assumes the boss handled it can lose the claim.
An uninsured subcontractor is not the end of the inquiry. State law can make a principal contractor liable when a subcontractor lacks required coverage. N.C. courts have held that immigration status does not automatically erase eligibility. A separate claim may exist when another company or a defective product caused the injury.
A Spanish-language guide to how North Carolina handles on-the-job injury claims , walks through the same sequence, from first report to filing deadline.
N.C. handles most construction inspections within the state. Under an OSHA-approved State Plan , the N.C. Occupational Safety and Health Division has authority over most private workplaces, so the inspectors who reach a Buncombe County job site work for the state.
Federal money still shapes that capacity. For fiscal 2026 the Labor Department asked Congress to cut 223 OSHA positions and eliminate the $12.8 million Susan Harwood Training Grant Program, which trains workers on workplace hazards, calling the grants “wasteful and unnecessary.” Congress refused. It funded Harwood in full and raised state-plan grants to $120 million, though OSHA staffing still fell to 1,639 positions from 1,810.
The request is back. For fiscal 2027 the department again proposes eliminating Harwood, cuts state-plan grants by $4.8 million and projects 36,323 state-program inspections nationwide, down from 38,642 for fiscal 2026.
The state’s recovery reporting does not show how many Helene-related inspections N.C. OSH conducted, what violations inspectors found or how many followed an injury complaint.
Some of this needs no new law. Employers already owe training in a language each worker understands, and no Helene recovery report shows whether that happened. State-funded rebuild contracts could require naming subcontractors, labor recruiters and insurance carriers. N.C. OSH could publish Helene-related inspections, violations and injury complaints as a set.
Reporting channels matter as much as rules. After Ida, 96% of surveyed day laborers could not name a single organization that would help them file a wage claim. Community groups reach workers that agency notices miss, without carrying the legal duty that sits with employers and inspectors.
Major disasters create a workforce after the emergency crews leave. Those crews move from storm to storm, as Rojas did from Florida to N.C., while recovery programs count dollars and finished homes.
The people who cleared the mud remain outside that record, in N.C. and in every state that rebuilds, and leaving them there is a choice public agencies can reverse.
Photo: Franklin Peña Gutierrez via Pexels
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The post The Workers Who Rebuilt Western North Carolina Speak Spanish appeared first on DCReport.org.
DCReport reported on July 17 that Spanish-speaking residents of western North Carolina were left at the margins of disaster information after Hurricane Helene. Language barriers in government benefits work more quietly: the explanation appears in one language, the number in another.
Workers’ compensation language access decides one narrow thing: whether an injured worker can find out what an injury is worth under state rules without asking someone else to read it. New York makes that harder than its own record suggests.
The New York State Workers’ Compensation Board translates a great deal: Spanish fact sheets, claim guides, a free phone line that arranges interpreters. The current dollar figures are another matter. They sit on English pages, beside the tables that set what a permanently damaged hand is worth in weeks of pay.
The workforce numbers usually cited here track country of birth, ethnicity and occupation. None were built to answer the language question.
Immigrants made up 26.3% of the U.S. construction workforce in 2024, a record share, according to a National Association of Home Builders analysis of Census Bureau data reported by Construction Dive. Among workers in the trades, about one in three is foreign-born.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the same population from the other end: fatal injuries to foreign-born Hispanic or Latino workers, counted separately because the group is large enough to count.
That analysis sorts workers by where they were born, not by what language they read, and, Construction Dive noted, not by work authorization. So the 26.3% measures a workforce, not a language barrier. It does show where the risk sits: the trades are where a crushed hand becomes lost paychecks and a claim.
New York explains its workers’ compensation rules in two languages. The Board’s pages on disability classifications and on awards for permanent loss of use set out the categories in detail. The current dollar amounts sit on an English page.
The Board’s Spanish guide to Schedule Loss of Use awards carries the full table of benefit weeks by body part. Its Spanish fact sheet on lost wages carries the formula: two-thirds of average weekly wage, adjusted by the degree of disability, capped at two-thirds of the statewide average wage.
What that fact sheet does carry is a table of maximum weekly amounts, and the table stops at $1,222.42, the cap for accidents from July 1, 2025, through June 30, 2026. The cap that took effect July 1, 2026 — $1,281.50 — is not in it. Neither is the current $384.45 minimum; the Spanish sheet lists the 2024 and 2025 minimums and then says the figure will be indexed to a fifth of the statewide average wage. The workers’ compensation translation gap is that narrow and that consequential: a worker reading only Spanish can follow the rule, find a dollar figure, and have last year’s.
New York sets a maximum number of benefit weeks for the permanent loss of use of certain body parts, whether or not the part is gone. An arm carries 312 weeks, a leg 288, a hand 244, a foot 205, an eye 160, a thumb 75 and an index finger 46.
Those are ceilings for total loss, not automatic payouts; a partial loss earns the matching share of the weeks. For accidents from July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2027, the weekly rate cannot top $1,281.50, and cannot fall below $384.45 or the worker’s actual wage, whichever is lower. A year earlier the cap was $1,222.42, and an injury keeps the numbers in force that day.
Those week values and current rates sit together, with the same benefit schedule explained in Spanish and a worked example.
That matters more than it should, because the Board’s own Spanish table is wrong. Both editions of “Understanding Your Schedule Loss of Use Award” carry January 2019 version codes — SLU-UnderstandingSLU-flat-1-v1 in English, ES-SLU-UnderstandingSLU-flat-1-v1 in Spanish — and both remain posted. The English table follows state law: first finger, 46 weeks; second finger, 30; third finger, 25; fourth finger, 15. The Spanish table keeps those numbers and shifts the names, so the little finger appears at 46 weeks and the index finger at 30.
The pamphlet cannot change the law. It can change what a worker expects when an offer arrives. Sixteen weeks separate 46 from 30, and at the state’s top rate that is $20,504.
A Schedule Loss of Use award multiplies the weeks the law assigns to a body part by the share of permanent use lost, paid at two-thirds of average weekly wage. The Board’s example takes a 25% loss of an arm, turns 312 weeks into 78, and at a $900 weekly wage arrives at $46,800 before deductions.
A doctor reports that percentage once the injury stops improving, and a Board judge decides it when the insurer’s examiner disagrees. Temporary benefits already paid come off the total. The arithmetic is simple. Finding out which week figure applies, and which cap was in force that day, is not.
In New York, immigration status does not by itself disqualify an injured worker from benefits. The state attorney general’s guidance for immigrant workers lists workers’ compensation among the protections that hold whatever a worker’s status.
Section 17 of New York’s Workers’ Compensation Law, headed “Noncitizens,” sets compensation for noncitizens who are not residents of the United States or Canada, or are about to leave, at the same amount provided for residents. The section does carve out one limit: dependents in a foreign country are restricted to a surviving spouse and children, or, absent those, a parent the worker supported for the year before the accident.
The attorney general’s guidance itself appears in 13 languages, from Spanish and Chinese to Haitian Creole and Yiddish. The Board’s current benefit figures appear in one
New York legislated on that problem too. The next section, 17-a, is titled “Limited English proficiency.” It orders the Board to translate the forms injured workers fill out, the guides explaining how to apply and all other vital documents, and to name a language access coordinator.
Hispanic workers are dying on the job at a higher rate than the workforce as a whole. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 5,070 fatal work injuries nationwide in 2024, a rate of 3.3 per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers, the second yearly drop.
Hispanic or Latino workers accounted for 1,229 of those deaths, at a rate of 4.3. Of those 1,229, 842, or 68.5%, were born outside the United States.
The AFL-CIO’s 2026 “Death on the Job” reads those same figures as a trend rather than a snapshot: Latino workers face the highest fatality risk of any group, 30% above the national average, and the immigrant share of those deaths is larger than in previous years. Construction ran 9.2 per 100,000, nearly three times the national rate.
Those numbers do not measure English proficiency, and cannot show that a language barrier caused any death. What they do show is who is dying at work. Behind each of those deaths is a family that has to work out what the system pays.
Section 17-a tells the Board’s coordinator to gather data each year on language services, translated materials and signage. Availability is what the statute names. It does not name a check that the Spanish figures match the English ones.
The test is mechanical: follow each version to an answer and the two either agree or they don’t. When one version needs an English search box, a phone call or a bilingual relative to get there, the information is public without being equally usable. The same test applies to any agency publishing in two languages.
The Board’s Spanish pamphlet, dated January 2019 and still posted, caps an index finger at 30 weeks of benefits. New York law caps it at 46. A worker deciding whether to take a settlement offer is deciding with that gap in hand.
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In the American legal system, criminal convictions and federal immigration enforcement run on separate tracks that meet at one point: the record of conviction. Public perception treats criminal trials and immigration hearings as distinct realms, but the immigration consequences of criminal convictions outlast the sentence.
A single guilty plea, plea bargain or misdemeanor conviction in local court can trigger removal proceedings, mandatory detention and a bar on return.
Criminal courts and immigration courts operate under entirely separate jurisdictional frameworks, administrative structures and legal standards. Criminal courts, whether state or federal, determine guilt or innocence and assign punitive measures such as probation, fines, community service or incarceration. Once an individual completes an ordered sentence or satisfies probation, criminal court jurisdiction over the matter formally terminates.
In contrast, federal immigration enforcement operates primarily under the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These administrative bodies do not retry underlying criminal facts; instead, they review the certified record of conviction to determine whether an individual retains the statutory right to remain in the United States under Section 237 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Consequently, an outcome deemed minor in a state courtroom can serve as the sole evidentiary foundation for federal deportation.
For non-citizens, the conclusion of a criminal proceeding rarely guarantees the end of legal exposure. Under federal immigration statutes, administrative sanctions operate completely independently of state judicial sentencing. The civil legal impacts stemming directly from a criminal case disposition are recognized as the collateral consequences of a plea.
Even when a criminal judge waives jail time, orders conditional discharge or later expunges a record under state rehabilitation statutes, federal immigration law continues to evaluate the initial admission of guilt. Under Section 101(a)(48)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), a conviction exists for federal immigration purposes whenever there is a formal finding of guilt or a plea of guilty or nolo contendere, combined with any judge-ordered penalty, fine or restraint on liberty.
Federal immigration law establishes explicit statutory categories under Section 237 of the INA that render non-citizens subject to expulsion. A conviction that falls within these federal categories is a deportable offense, and it can expose a lawful permanent resident or temporary visa holder to removal years after the sentence ends.
Among the primary grounds for deportation are crimes involving moral turpitude (CIMT). Although the INA does not explicitly define “moral turpitude,” judicial precedent characterizes these offenses as acts involving grave baseness, vileness or dishonesty contrary to societal duties.
A widespread misconception in criminal law is that mandatory deportation applies exclusively to violent offenders. In reality, federal immigration statutes apply an expansive aggravated felony classification under Section 101(a)(43) of the INA that encompasses numerous non-violent and minor state-level offenses.
State-level misdemeanors — such as theft carrying a one-year suspended sentence, or tax and fraud offenses where the loss exceeds $10,000 — can be categorized as aggravated felonies under federal law. The classification is determined by federal statutory definitions rather than the label assigned by state courts.
The Supreme Court addressed that gap in Padilla v. Kentucky, 559 U.S. 356 (2010):
In a 7-2 decision authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court held that the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel requires criminal defense attorneys to inform non-citizen clients of deportation risks before entering a guilty plea. The petitioner, Jose Padilla, was a lawful permanent resident and Vietnam War veteran who pleaded guilty to transporting marijuana after defense counsel erroneously assured him he faced no immigration risk.
Beyond triggering immediate removal proceedings, criminal adjudications directly affect a non-citizen’s eligibility to adjust legal status, renew green cards or obtain U. S. citizenship through naturalization. Federal immigration adjudicators, applying the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Policy Manual, evaluate an applicant’s complete record to determine whether the individual satisfies the statutory requirement of Good Moral Character (GMC) during the required look-back period — typically five years preceding the naturalization application.
The direct link between an individual’s immigration status and criminal record means that minor offenses that do not trigger immediate deportation can still prevent naturalization. Under Section 101(f) of the INA, convictions involving controlled substances, multiple gambling violations or a cumulative penal confinement of 180 days or more automatically preclude a finding of Good Moral Character, stalling an applicant’s path to citizenship.
Unlike the federal criminal justice system, civil immigration court does not guarantee court-appointed counsel for people who cannot afford it. Vera Institute of Justice data shows 67% of people in removal proceedings appear without a lawyer. The American Immigration Council reports that detained respondents without counsel are ordered removed 93% of the time, compared with 82% of those who have a lawyer, and that representation correlates with a 97% hearing appearance rate.
The gap is widest for people who enter removal proceedings after conviction, where a case straddles both systems. Nevada offers a concrete example: a plea negotiated in a Las Vegas courtroom can decide a federal admissibility question years later, which is why the work is often handled by a Las Vegas criminal and immigration law firm rather than split between two separate lawyers.
According to the Congressional Research Service report on U.S. immigration courts and the pending cases backlog, the federal immigration court backlog exceeded 1.7 million pending cases as of February 2026. Counts vary by methodology and reporting source. In several high-volume immigration courts, average wait times for an initial master calendar or individual merits hearing now exceed four years.
Non-citizens in administrative detention or released on bond wait years while federal policy and case law shift around them, turning the backlog into a secondary penalty the sentence never imposed.
Photo: KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA via Pexels
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We were called up about four a-clock, and being ready went and took a Gravesend boat, and to London by nine a-clock. By the way talking of several businesses of the navy. So to the office, where Sir Wm. Pen (the first time that he has been with us a great while, he having been long sick) met us, and there we sat all the morning.
My brother John I find come to town to my house, as I sent for him, on Saturday last; so at noon home and dined with him, and after dinner and the barber been with me I walked out with him to my viall maker’s and other places and then left him, and I by water to Blackbury’s, and there talked with him about some masts (and by the way he tells me that Paul’s is now going to be repaired in good earnest), and so with him to his garden close by his house, where I eat some peaches and apricots; a very pretty place. So over the water to Westminster hall, and not finding Mrs. Lane, with whom I purposed to be merry, I went to Jervas’s and took him and his wife over the water to their mother Palmer’s (the woman that speaks in the belly, and with whom I have two or three years ago made good sport with Mr. Mallard), thinking because I had heard that she is a woman of that sort that I might there have lit upon some lady of pleasure (for which God forgive me), but blest be God there was none, nor anything that pleased me, but a poor little house that she has set out as fine as she can, and for her singing which she pretends to is only some old body songs and those sung abominably, only she pretends to be able to sing both bass and treble, which she do something like, but not what I thought formerly and expected now; nor do her speaking in her belly take me now as it did then, but it may be that is because I know it and see her mouth when she speaks, which should not be.
After I had spent a shilling there in wine I took boat with Jervas and his wife and set them at Westminster, and it being late forbore Mrs. Lane and went by water to the Old Swan by a boat, where I had good sport with one of the young men about his travells as far as Voxhall, in mockery, which yet the fellow answered me most prettily and traveller-like unto my very good mirth. So home, and with my brother eat a bit of bread and cheese, and so to bed, he with me.
This day I received a letter from my wife, which troubles me mightily, wherein she tells me how Ashwell did give her the lie to her teeth, and that thereupon my wife giving her a box on the eare, the other struck her again, and a deal of stir which troubles me, and that my Lady has been told by my father or mother something of my wife’s carriage, which altogether vexes me, and I fear I shall find a trouble of my wife when she comes home to get down her head again, but if Ashwell goes I am resolved to have no more, but to live poorly and low again for a good while, and save money and keep my wife within bounds if I can, or else I shall bid Adieu to all content in the world. So to bed, my mind somewhat disturbed at this, but yet I shall take care, by prudence, to avoid the ill consequences which I fear, things not being gone too far yet, and this height that my wife is come to being occasioned from my own folly in giving her too much head heretofore for the year past.
Reuters:
Apple on Monday asked a U.S. judge for a preliminary injunction barring two former employees and OpenAI from accessing, acquiring, using or disclosing alleged confidential information as it moves ahead with its trade secrets case. [...]
The iPhone maker also filed a concurrent motion on Monday seeking expedited discovery, including production of documents relating to the defendants’ alleged access of Apple’s proprietary and trade secret information. It asked the judge to order the two former Apple employees named in the lawsuit, Chang Liu and Tang Yew Tan, to sit for depositions, along with OpenAI employee Yu-Ting Peng and an unnamed OpenAI employee who previously worked at Apple.
The request for expedited discovery and the depositions, I understand. Apple wants to move fast, and they want to get depositions (especially, I’m sure, with Tan) now. The preliminary injunction request, though, I think Reuters is underplaying here.
I suggest reading Apple’s actual motion, not the news coverage. From Apple’s motion:
OpenAI, its people, and partners should not be permitted to develop, release, and benefit from products using and developed with the benefit of Apple’s trade secrets.
Ivan Mehta, reporting for TechCrunch:
In its first acquisition since going public last month, Bending Spoons on Tuesday said that it has agreed to buy spreadsheet and database startup Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash.
Founded in 2013, Airtable has so far raised over $1.4 billion over multiple funding rounds. At its peak, during the boom days of 2021, it was valued at over $11 billion, but earlier this year, its shares were said to be trading on the secondary markets at a valuation of $4 billion.
With its current net cash-and-cash-equivalents balance, Airtable is now valued at about $2.25 billion, Bending Spoons said.
The problem isn’t that Airtable isn’t a good product with a good business. According to the announcement, Airtable’s revenue is up to $480 million/year and grew 20 percent year-over-year. That’s good. That’s just not $11-billion-valuation good. In the abstract building a company worth $1 billion is a success; it’s a problem, though, if its financials are such that it needs to justify a valuation an order of magnitude greater than what it’s actually worth.
New app from Brett Terpstra:
TerminalWidget lets you send output from commands, scripts, APIs, and Shortcuts directly to widgets across macOS, iOS, and iPadOS with rich formatting, progress bars, sparklines, and image support. It is available as a universal app on the App Store for $19.99.
I don’t know what I’m going to use this for, but I know I want to use it.
President Trump is now demanding that Iran reach a deal with Oman on the Strait of Hormuz as soon as today or face devastating attacks from the United States. On its face, you can put this in the same bucket of Trump’s last six months: threats about ending Iranian civilization or committing various war crimes or whatever. But this is actually an example of how deep a hole the U.S. is now in, and how rapidly it’s sliding into conceding a system of post-war Iranian tolls on the Strait as a given.
What Iran and Oman are negotiating is an interim agreement in which they will jointly manage a system of tolls (calling them “service fees”) over what is an international waterway. The White House would certainly point out that this is a temporary rather than a permanent deal. But something so fundamental conceded in a provisional or temporary agreement is seldom withdrawn in a final accord. The mix of control and revenue this provides to Iran amounts to a massive strategic gain from the war Trump began back in February. But it seems well on the way to becoming a given in U.S. post-war plans.
In response to last week’s post about AI data centers, I got this fascinating response from TPM Reader RK. Very interesting details and nuanced. But mostly I find it fascinating because it complicates the storyline by placing the data center rebellion in a line of continuity with earlier opposition, in the same or similar communities, to efforts to build wind turbines or solar arrays — stuff liberals obviously think is great.
Intrigued by this post, as I’ve spent the past 2+ years lurking at township halls in Michigan, working on a book about the rising backlash against big companies with big plans to transform how land is used in rural communities.
It didn’t start with data centers. I was originally interested in how rural communities are pushing back hard against solar and wind farms. In Michigan, you have Gov Whitmer pushing a clean energy agenda, which requires vast swaths of open land. It takes a lot of real estate to replace an oil or gas plant with a solar or wind farm, and that much open space is not available in cities or suburbs. So you wind up in rural areas where voters lean conservative, are skeptical about climate change, and would prefer to see their pleasant landscape left alone. Lots of yelling, recall elections, angry rhetoric as formerly sleepy town halls turn into sights of intense conflict.
This pits one groups of residents against another. Farmers who are offered leases from utility companies are happy to sign, for a steady source of income that doesn’t depend on weather or commodity prices. Their neighbors, with smaller holdings and no lease $$ available, are not happy to see their communities transformed on behalf of the “Green New Scam.” The utility companies, interestingly, wind up on the side of the progressive governor. Not because they’re climate warriors, but because they make good –and guaranteed — money every time they build new power generating facilities (regardless of the energy source.)
I thought I was onto a nice, tight story about possible obstacles to decarbonizing the electric grid, and how they might be overcome, with big business, for a change, on the side of the enviros. Then the data center guys showed up.
This happened in early 2025, after the same governor pushed a sweet tax break for data center developers at end of 2024. Now you have the same dynamic, angry neighbors pitted against large landowners who want to cash in on data center bonanza (in this instance, selling land instead of leasing it.) But the coalition of opponents is different, this time including liberals and enviros (who love solar farms but energy-sucking data centers.) Township meetings have to be moved to the local high school to accommodate overflow crowds, there’s lots of yelling, death threats against township officials, a number of local elected resigning their posts rather than face all this pressure.The oppo to data centers is a horseshoe coalition, joining left and right. People are kinda happy about this, that MAGA red hats can unite with true blue tree-hugging Sierra Club members to fight a common elite enemy. Among other things, shows you how the right vs left typology that is on autopilot among political journos and other influencers just doesn’t match lived reality for a lot of people.
And I think Josh is exactly right that in our federal system, the hyperlocal authority of local governments is pretty much the only place left where regular people can fight back, successfully, against the tech lords who have intruded into every corner of our lives. In the 20th century, business elites had to contend with powerful unions, high corporate and personal taxes, robust antitrust enforcement and an emerging regulatory state that was enforcing a growing body of enviro and consumer protections.
Not much of that left anymore. As state and non-state actors wither away, who is left that can say “No, and Fuck NO!” to the likes of Zuckerberg, Ellison, Musk, etc.? Rural peeps in ballcaps and bluejeans, that’s who.
Book should be out in a year or so, stay tuned.
To be clear, I don’t think this backstory in Michigan is the totality of the data center story. It’s taken root in the politics of 2025 and 2026 in unique and distinct ways. But it’s important to see these movements in their totality and unruliness. Just in the nature of things, we see the parts that are most relevant and comprehensible to us. A lot of the rest we miss.
Another aspect of this is that there’s nothing new about conflicts between cities and rural hinterlands. The town about 60 miles north of New York City where I do most of my woodworking was effectively destroyed by New York City about 130 years. New York City needed more water and more places to put it. So it went to the state legislature and got empowered to find and condemn land to build new reservoirs. It found that land in the town of Southeast, where it went about building a series of reservoirs on the Croton watershed. The state of New York, the sovereign entity, decided the needs of the millions in New York City outweighed those of the few thousands who lived in these farms, villages and small towns in a dairy farming community. Whole farms, village centers and communities are now permanently submerged in those reservoirs which remain the lynchpin of New York City’s water supply. The region’s dairy farms and a factory built there by the Borden company to produce condensed milk provided a key source of supply for the Union Army during the Civil War. But that whole economy was destroyed and eventually replaced by a new economy, first providing weekend getaways for city residents and finally transitioning into a far-flung commuter town.
One can imagine similar — if perhaps less draconian — battles and transformations as resource-hungry cities need renewable electricity to power them. What makes the current data center boom and backlash distinct is that cities aren’t asking for this, certainly not in the basic infrastructure sense that tends to unite whole regions. So the demand for data centers isn’t pitting city against rural hinterland. They don’t have a real base of support anywhere. And people across the political spectrum have found passionate reasons to oppose them.
Tomorrow is primary day in a number of states. Michigan is the state that will get the most attention. There are several big primaries but the Senate one on the Democratic side will get by far the most attention. It pits Abdul El-Sayed against Rep. Haley Stevens. Unless the polls are wildly far off the mark (not impossible in a primary election), El-Sayed will win handily. About a half dozen polls conducted over the last two weeks show El-Sayed winning by 10 points or more, many in the mid to high teens. Meanwhile the balance of general election polls show Stevens very narrowly beating former Rep. Mike Rogers while El-Sayed very narrowly loses to him.
On the general election polls, if we look only at the four polls released in July, they’re sort of scattershot. (I’m going by the polls listed on the New York Times website.) One is very bad for El-Sayed, showing him losing by 10 and Haley winning by one. Another shows El-Sayed tied with Rogers and Stevens losing by three. Two other polls show Stevens narrowly winning and El-Sayed narrowly losing. One of those is Republican sponsored. The other just came out today and is from EPIC-MRA, generally considered the marquee pollster in the state. That one shows Rogers beating El-Sayed by three points and losing to Stevens by two points.
Michigan Democrats definitely have their work cut out for them. That’s not so much because the likely primary winner, El-Sayed, is currently behind by three points, according to EPIC-MRA, but because this has been an incredibly hard-fought, personal and increasingly nasty battle. El-Sayed has a lot of work to do getting Stevens supporters coalesced behind him (the same if Stevens wins in an upset).
I know Stevens supporters in Michigan who think El-Sayed is unelectable. Republicans will run a kind of campaign against El-Sayed a Democrat either cannot or would not; Rogers’ campaign has already taken to referring to El-Sayed by his full name, “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed,” as a taste of the kind of campaign they’ll run.
This prediction may or may not be the case. I’m not without anxiety that it might be. But I don’t think that’s set in stone. In any case, for Democrats who need that Senate seat, the question is moot. It’s El-Sayed or Rogers, a zero-sum equation with power going to Trump or the opposition. El-Sayed will have to find a way to bring Stevens supporters over to him. That’s the responsibility you take on when you win, which it seems all but certain he’ll do tomorrow.
I wanted to add a bit of a cautionary note to anyone who thinks that El-Sayed is toast, either because of these polls or because of El-Sayed’s politics generally.
The first is that Rogers lost to Elissa Slotkin in 2024, which turned out to be a pretty rough year for Democrats and in which Trump actually won the state. Just on the merits, Rogers is not a strong candidate or a particularly able one. That’s an important part of the equation. The other is that these general election polls come after a few months of relentlessly negative campaigns against both Democrats but especially against El-Sayed. Outside expenditures attacking El-Sayed, with a lot of it coming from AIPAC, dwarf those attacking Haley. Meanwhile, Rogers is running basically uncontested in the GOP primary. He’s taking zero incoming fire.
You would expect both Democrats to be softened up by that torrent of negative ads while Rogers has yet to face any. The nastiness of the Democratic primary meanwhile has likely pushed a number of each Democrats’ supporters at least into the undecided category in these polls. That’s why reconsolidating Democrats will be so critical for El-Sayed.
What that all amounts to is that there’s at least a credible argument that El-Sayed’s numbers have room to grow while Rogers’ may not.
Polls in Michigan close tomorrow night at 8 p.m. local time.
OpenAI published an unbylined blog post overnight, responding in public — but not yet in court — to Apple’s new motion for a preliminary injunction. It’s an unusual move to respond to a high-stakes legal filing with a blog post, but OpenAI is an unusual company. A few snippets from their post, and some commentary:
Apple had claimed that they contacted OpenAI in February and that we didn’t respond. They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names — only after we brought this to their attention.
OpenAI is hanging on to the fact that Apple’s outside counsel, Gabriel Gross, sent one email to the wrong address, and quickly emailed an apology. In OpenAI’s phrasing, it sounds like Apple’s attorney sent the entire initial letter of concern to the wrong person, and that’s why OpenAI never responded — because it wasn’t sent to the correct person (OpenAI general counsel Che Chang). That’s not what happened. The initial blockbuster “hey we think you guys are stealing our trade secrets and we want to talk to you about it” letter was sent to Che Chang. And Che Chang never did respond to Apple’s lawyers. That a mistaken email thanking Che Chang for a phone call that never happened (because that email was intended for another OpenAI employee) was also sent is irrelevant. I don’t understand why OpenAI is continuing to focus on this inconsequential mistake. (Apple’s motion for a preliminary injunction includes the full text of the mistaken email and subsequent apology.)
Apple accuses Chang Liu of accessing Apple confidential information after leaving the company, but only now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information (you can read the messages here). Apple now tries to shift the blame to “residual access”, but they also don’t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave. What that means in practice is that former employees who are trying to do the right thing when they leave still have access to Apple files — despite not wanting them or even being aware of them.
OpenAI is seemingly alluding to Apple’s unusual use of iCloud Drive, tied to employees’ personal Apple Account IDs, that I (coincidentally?) wrote about yesterday. Apple’s motion for injunction, however, addresses this very point. From page 3 of the motion:
Mr. Liu resigned on Thursday, January 22, 2026, and provided notice that he would start at OpenAI the following Tuesday. On his last day, he failed to respond to Apple’s attempt to schedule his exit interview or sign his confidentiality reminder.
In the days following his departure, Mr. Liu seemed initially cooperative and aware of his obligations to Apple. He worked with others on his former Apple team to return certain Apple information remaining on his personal iCloud account to Apple.1 He also continued to converse with former co-workers, for example, to answer questions about his earlier work and where certain information was stored. But these interactions and exchanges cannot explain the repeated, unauthorized downloading of voluminous technical files from Apple’s cloud-based storage discussed below, which Mr. Liu performed on multiple occasions from February to April 2026 while employed by OpenAI.
That footnote reads:
1 While Apple seeks discovery into what Apple confidential information Mr. Liu accessed from his personal storage accounts (including iCloud) and devices after his departure, the specific unauthorized downloads referenced in the complaint and at the heart of this motion are not based on iCloud activity, but instead relate to Apple’s third-party cloud storage.
Nowhere in any of Apple’s filings (here’s the Court Listener index page for all the documents filed in the cast) does it say who the third-party cloud storage provider is, but I’m almost certain it’s Box, which I know is widely used throughout Apple.
The iMessage transcripts that OpenAI provides at the bottom of their post do not contradict Apple’s claims at all. Apple’s motion states that Liu helped former colleagues find certain documents that were in iCloud; that’s what OpenAI’s transcript shows. But that’s not in dispute. Apple also claims that Liu accessed confidential information, presumably in Box and definitely not in iCloud Drive, on five different occasions, up until 27 April 2026, over three months after he left Apple. These chat transcripts offer no explanation for that. The chat transcripts explain iCloud Drive access that Apple itself says is not in dispute, and do not explain the 37 documents Liu downloaded from the third-party cloud provider (Box?) that Apple says are at the heart of naming him in the lawsuit. Here is Apple’s declaration from digital forensic specialist Daniel Roffman, documenting Liu’s access to confidential files post-employment (albeit with significant redactions).
I do not understand why OpenAI is treating this is a PR problem instead of as a legal problem. Dan Moren, linking to it from Six Colors, is of similar mind, writing:
What kept running through my head while reading this was the old legal chestnut: “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”
Thus far this feels like table-pounding from OpenAI to me. Their blog post does, however, move the ball from “we have no interest” in Apple’s trade secrets to “we don’t have them”, (emphasis added):
Apple also accuses Tang Tan of trying to get and use their trade secrets. However, Tang has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies. Tang served Apple for more than 24 years and was widely known as one of the most innovative leaders at the company. [...]
Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets. We’re much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.
To me, the most interesting response from OpenAI wasn’t their blog post, and was in fact released by Apple, as “Exhibit F” to one of their expert declarations submitted to the court last night. OpenAI has retained the Chicago law firm Quinn Emanuel as outside counsel, and this exhibit is a long email from Quinn Emanuel attorney Patrick Curran to Apple’s attorneys. From that email, dated Monday July 20, Curran writes:
You also ask that we “revisit” the specific points proposed in your July 15 letter. It appears that you want to move backwards. As noted, we already discussed these during our meet and confer but Apple was unable to respond to basic questions my colleagues raised about these requests. For example, your letter proposes that OpenAI “[p]roduce witnesses to testify at deposition” but Apple was unable to identify who those witnesses would be. Similarly, Apple was unsure when we asked if it was actually proposing that hundreds of OpenAI employees fill out “questionnaires” even if Apple has no basis to allege (and is indeed not alleging) that such employees have any connection to this litigation. The seven sections in your letter are broadly worded and remain vague and general. This is not what a forensic protocol looks like and we’re sure you understand that you will not get this as relief from the court. You first need to (preliminarily) identify the TS you are suing for, and your email states that you “appreciate the need” to do so. Any protocol will be informed by such identification. A forensic protocol cannot be based on general terms like “Apple confidential information”; you need to tell us what you’re looking for, and it sounds like you understand that and are prepared to do so. The efficient way forward is therefore to tackle these issues as part of the negotiation of a proper, detailed forensic protocol. If you instead prefer to move for a PI because OpenAI did not agree off the bat to subject hundreds of employees to “questionnaires” about “Apple confidential information” generally, that is unfortunate — and inconsistent with what I understand both our clients have requested. If you choose this path instead of working with us, we look forward to filing an opposition that sets the record straight.
Apple, obviously, did choose this path (“PI” = preliminary injunction), and I too look forward to OpenAI’s setting the record straight, especially if they do so in plainspoken language like Curran’s in this email. Curran continues:
Finally, although I know OpenAI would like to resolve this amicably, as their counsel I have to tell you what I think you already know — this case lacks merit. You have not articulated any basis to support a preliminary injunction. Your complaint is predicated on a misrepresentation of facts and allegations that are speculative at best. It fails to even remotely identify any trade secrets. You are attacking ordinary business practices (used widely across the industry). You are complaining about situations that you have caused, including through your own procedures and decisions. We stand ready to oppose any preliminary injunction motion and tell the world what really happened here to set the record straight. We made clear we would prefer to quickly and collaboratively address any legitimate concerns that your client has, but that is not well-served by repeated threats.
This email is a far better response than what OpenAI published on their blog.
TBPN seems like a show I wouldn’t enjoy guesting on, but I actually enjoy it quite a bit.
I break down some of the details in tonight’s edition of Where Things Stand here. It’s the third item in tonight’s newsletter, so just wanted to flag it. It was strange.
The 2006 midterm is often viewed today as the ur-wave election. Indeed, it’s part of the only example in recent decades of two successive wave elections, something that just 20 years later seems almost inconceivable. What’s less remembered is that almost to the very end of the cycle it was considered a very uncertain thing whether Democrats would be able to retake control of the House of Representatives, which they hadn’t controlled since the 1994 blowout. In fact, if you looked at the numbers — polls, special elections, etc. — it had been pretty clear what was coming for months. To explain this discrepancy — how official D.C. had missed what was coming — many focused on the Foley Scandal which broke in September 2006. (Mark Foley, a lightly closeted House Republican got in trouble for what we’d now call sexting with underage male pages in the House page program and was forced to resign.)
I’ve always thought this was basically a dodge, for the reasons I explained above. But the scandal did capture a mix of rot and disintegration, a kind of synaptic breakdown in the Capital Hill Republican hegemony that presaged what was to come. And I think we’re seeing something similar with the rapidly expanding scandals involving Republicans Reps. Max Miller of Ohio and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina. In a way, neither case is intrinsically related to the drivers of Donald Trump’s mounting unpopularity. But the two cases capture the culture of impunity that has defined the last 20 months, as well as the way increasing disconnect between what is happening in Washington, D.C., where Trump is all powerful, and the rest of the country where tidal forces are visibly moving against him. They are functioning eerily as a stand-in for everything else and create this mood, this kind of palpable sign of a majority going off the rails.
Of course, a big difference is that there is a simultaneous rebellion against the national leadership of the Democratic Party. Everyone’s been talking about it for months. It has deep roots. But the basic outlines go back to March of last year when Democrats had their first shot for a showdown with Donald Trump, to force him to the table over his unfolding war against the federal government and democratic governance and decided … just not to. From that moment there’s been a howling gulf between Democratic voters and their top elected officials — a basic sense of ‘are we seeing the same thing?’ To a growing number of Democratic voters, their elected leaders, especially in Washington, D.C., have seemed just not up to the challenge of challenging Donald Trump or simply not interested in doing so.
To some degree there is a matter of almost impossible expectations. Trump’s blitzkrieg through the Constitution, the rule of law and the most essential elements of democratic self-government have been so grave it would be almost impossible for a party, for the moment locked out of power in all three branches government, to meet the expectations of those who oppose him. But that is at best only a partial and limited explanation. There’s simply been a persistent mood and signaling of business as usual that has put the present leaders of the party in Washington, D.C. at odds with the great bulk of their voters. And to a great degree the outcome of the midterm elections will depend on how these two simultaneous and related but distinct unfolding rebellions interact.
As I’ve argued, most of this rebellion within the Democratic Party is not really about ideology, if we define that as support for different policies on a conventional left-right spectrum. It’s about fight. But in numerous states it’s been the progressive left signaling a mix of fight and outrage much more clearly than more ideologically conventional Democrats. So lots of those candidates are winning because they’re operating in the fight lane because that’s the only lane that most Democratic voters find acceptable today. But the national climate is more volatile and protean than most national commentary seems to allow. And that makes just how this all plays out hard to predict.
Links for you. Science:
OpenAI’s amazing — but vastly oversold — new model Astra
Superbug confirmed in 23 states: Where is the deadly fungus spreading in 2026?
Leadership Shakeup at CDC’s Ebola Response Team
Growth-density inversion in Escherichia coli reveals superlinear, not sublinear, density dependence
Long COVID symptoms linked to measurable damage in the brain’s dopamine system
How to spot poison ivy and what to do if you accidentally touch it
Can air purifiers prevent flu and COVID-19 in nursing homes? Only if they’re used properly
Other:
The [Republican] Campaign to Force Genital Exams on Girl Athletes
A Normie Democrat Revolt Is Pushing Abdul El-Sayed Toward Victory
The Electoral Effects of Candidate Ideology in the Trump Era
Senior Trump Official Using Government Account To Smear Sitting Federal Judges
Anger Over Data Centers Is Fueling a New Political Movement
Sales Are So Low, California Wineries Are Burning Their Vineyards
Sci-fi authors Scalzi and Stross decry AI’s dystopian impact on their craft
Reviewing the Searchlight Institute’s Healthcare Proposal
The right-wing bubble seals in the GOP with Max Miller
The House vote that split Jewish Democrats and is reshaping alliances
How Netanyahu’s MAGA Evangelical Backers Are Grappling With Backlash Against Him
Republicans FINALLY Have Their Graham Platner Problem
Election forecast: Democrats strongly favored to take House, Senate tilts Democratic
‘We were shovel-ready’: A Minnesota forest hit by DOGE cuts is now ablaze
How to turn off those AI summaries (and other thoughts)
Dr. Fauci’s Private Diary Says He Frequently Consoled MAGA Mouthpiece Katie Miller During Her COVID-Era Pregnancy
UVA cut diversity programs after a Trump deal. Yale hired the firm it used.
In Michigan, AIPAC Is Playing With Fire
Mallory
Dulles Airport does need a reboot, but the two dumbest parts of its $22.5 billion redesign need to get the boot first
On The Trump Train
Unpublished DNC Autopsy Chapter Slams “Self-Enriching” Consultants for 2024 Loss
GOP faces voter wrath, as Iran struggles to negotiate with ‘mentally incapacitated’ Trump
Bizarre Texts, Gifted Guns, 30 Types of Ice Cream: Rep. Faces Censure Following Sexual Harassment Allegations
Park Service Delivers Brutal Verdict on Trump’s “Triumphal Arch”
Bluesky’s new CEO wants a big tent, not a bubble. CEO Toni Schneider on protocols, community, and control.
MAGA Erupts at Trump DHS Chief—and Accidentally Exposes Big MAGA Scam
Capital One says it closed hundreds of Trump’s bank accounts in 2021 ‘for anti-money laundering reasons’
Judge denies request by Elon Musk’s xAI to pause Minnesota nudification ban
‘Own the Narrative’: Leaked Flock Guide Shows How It Teaches Cops to Promote Its Tech
We estimate the economic value of zoning reform in São Paulo, which altered maximum permitted construction along transportation corridors. Developers increased filings for multifamily construction in blocks affected by the reform, leading to more housing supply and lower housing prices in neighborhoods that allow more densification. Our equilibrium model of housing markets estimates an aggregate 1.6 percent increase in housing stock and a 0.4 percent reduction in prices, resulting in large housing wealth transfers from current to future homeowners. The reform produced welfare gains of 0.65 percent of city GDP, mostly due to developer profits and consumer gains from the newly built environment.
That is from the AEA policy journal, by Santosh Anagol, Fernando Ferreira, and Jonah Rexer.
The post Estimating the Economic Value of Zoning Reform appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
So to the great chagrin/embarrassment of the White House and its orange occupant, over the weekend we learned that David Hearn, the former Olympic rower indicted on charges of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, did no such thing.
This was brought to light by (of all the people) Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington/Trump ally who—after initially swearing Hearn was guilty—acknowledged (in my words) he hadn’t done shit. Wrote Glenn Thrush in the New York Times: “Ms. Pirro’s office dramatically reversed course on Friday, not only withdrawing the charge against Mr. Hearn but blasting the Interior Department for the rushed and ‘botched’ renovation, along with U.S. Park Police officials who fed bad information that led her to publicly cite ‘tremendous evidence’ against Mr. Hearn. In the process, intentionally or not, she skated perilously close to contradicting Mr. Trump — and he noticed.”
In short, it was the shitty-ass company hired (in a no-bid manner) by Trump that screwed this up, not a 67-year-old who represented the United States at the 1992, 1996 and 2000 Summer Olympics.
And while a large part of the story is Hearn and peeling blue paint, for my money the biggest thing is surmised in this perfectly stated Instagram post …
Or, to put it differently: Why would anyone ever, ever, ever believed Donald Trump? This is a man who said POWs weren’t heroes because they were captured. This is a man who said, when you’re famous, you can freely grab women by the pussies. This is a man who habitually throws people under the bus—including his own vice president, as a noose was set up for his hanging.
There is no decency or morality or need to be kind or empathetic. There is no line between right and wrong. The president of the United State would have been perfectly fine sending an innocent ex-Olympian to prison for 10 years, even though he damn well knew the company he hired botched it all up.
It is, truly, a staggering thing, to have a leader double as the world’s worst person.
A ridiculously staggering thing.
Just before midnight last night, news broke that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had rescinded the order of May 18, 2026, establishing a $1.776 billion slush fund for those who claimed that the Department of Justice under former president Joe Biden had persecuted them. The fund was widely perceived to be a way to pay off those convicted of crimes related to their attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
What Blanche’s order did not do was to change the terms of the nonprosecution order providing that the Department of Justice would not prosecute Trump, his sons, the Trump Organization, or their associates for crimes related to tax returns filed before May 19, 2026. Last night, Blanche reiterated that the nonprosecution order applies “only retroactively,” but that was always the case.
At stake is at least $100 million it appears Trump owes to the American people from previous tax shenanigans that turned up in audits. It’s possible there are other irregularities, but if so, under this order, we would not know: the order says that the IRS will not audit the tax returns of Trump and his associates before the May 19 date. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “Pretty convenient that Trump gets immunity from IRS audits for the year where he made, by far, the most money of his entire life in shady deals all over the globe.”
And, as legal analyst Barb McQuade noted, even the promise to kill the slush fund is hollow. Last week, the Department of Justice paid $1.2 million to Paul Vaughn, who was convicted in 2024 of violating the FACE Act, which bans “force or threat of force or… physical obstruction” that “intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with… any person… obtaining or providing reproductive health care services.” While Vaughn claimed he was arrested for praying, in fact he blocked the doors of a reproductive health care clinic in Tennessee.
Vaughn’s payoff shows that the Department of Justice will simply give out “individual settlements instead of one designated fund,” McQuade wrote.
Nonetheless, Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, who sit on the Judiciary Committee and were openly opposing Blanche, this morning issued a joint statement saying they will now support Blanche’s nomination for attorney general, allowing the nomination to move out of the Judiciary Committee to the full Senate.
Legal analyst Lisa Rubin noted that “[i]n their statement, Sen[ator]s Cornyn and Tillis refer to this one pager as a ‘binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit, the IRS and the Treasury.’ But this isn’t an order nor does it bind anyone.”
The top-ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, constitutional law professor Jamie Raskin of Maryland, released a statement titled “Blanche’s Empty Promises Do Nothing to Kill [the] Slush Fund, Stop the Flow of Money to Convicted J6 Felons and MAGA Allies, or End Trump Family Super Pardon.” He called for “six patriotic House Republicans” to join with House Democrats to pass a discharge petition that would force a vote on stopping the “unconscionable” deal.
Now the rest of Republican senators have to decide whether Blanche’s fig leaf gives them enough plausible deniability of support for paying off violent Trump supporters and Trump’s IRS immunity to confirm Blanche’s nomination to become the attorney general tomorrow. While the focus has been on Tillis and Cornyn, Semafor’s senior Washington editor Elana Schor told MS NOW on Sunday that other Republican senators were quietly cheering Tillis and Cornyn on. “If the Senate voted on this fund today there would be almost 60 votes to kill it, maybe 70,” she said.
In The Freedom Academy with Asha Rangappa, counterintelligence scholar Rangappa suggests the Republican senators have gone so far down the road of enabling Trump that they will simply rubber-stamp Blanche. If “you’ve confirmed Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Kristi Noem, you’ve funded ICE, you’ve stood by while Trump hollowed out the [intelligence community], fired thousands of people, drained the U.S. Treasury, hijacked the country’s semiquincentennial, trashed the White House lawn for a WWE event, and drained the reflecting pool. Twice…. Is Todd Blanche really going to be THE LINE?” she asks. “Come on.”
Rangappa is probably right that Senate Republicans will vote to confirm Blanche. But the cost of enabling Trump has risen as his job approval ratings have tanked. Only about a third of Americans approve of his job performance, numbers that rival those of President Richard M. Nixon just before he resigned. Confirming Blanche, who clearly works for Trump alone, carries with it the fact that Blanche appears to have been the person most responsible for ignoring the Epstein Files Transparency Act. According to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, Blanche essentially admitted he had violated the law when he failed to address allegations brought by independent journalist Katie Phang, who sued for access to documents she claimed were unlawfully redacted.
The judge is now reviewing those documents to see if the redactions were proper. If not, their exposure after Republican senators have put Blanche in the position of the top law enforcement official in the country would make the senators appear complicit in the Epstein files cover-up. While that issue has fallen out of the headlines since Trump began his war on Iran, it is an issue MAGA Republicans elected Trump to expose and could easily reignite.
And then there is the increasingly erratic behavior of Trump himself. This morning, he posted: “My REAL Polling Numbers, not those made up by the Fake News Media, are the best they have ever been, and why wouldn’t they be with the biggest tax cuts and employment numbers EVER, the biggest outside Investment in America in World history, a totally secure Border, a giant Victory in Venezuela, the Denuclearization of Iran, unparalleled respect and success throughout the World, and much more? Don’t believe the Radical Left’s Fake Poll numbers. They are Crooked and Corrupt, just like the Country Destroying Dumocrats are Crooked and Corrupt. VOTE REPUBLICAN FOR GREATNESS IN AMERICA!”
This version of Trump’s America is as fantastical as his post yesterday of an AI image of himself writing on a map of the U.S. with presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, or of himself dressed as a svelte Elvis the day before.
Indeed, Saturday was quite a day of posting on social media for the president of the United States. In addition to portraying himself as Elvis, he posted a flattering picture of himself with the caption: “President Trump ages in reverse!,” himself as a Continental Army officer, a split portrait with his face as one half and George Washington as the other, and a “Trump 2028” poster.
Trump has given Republican senators little reason to give him cover. He has been openly feuding with Republican senators over things he wants Congress to do for which Republican leadership can’t find enough votes.
Those include the SAVE America Act, which would dramatically rework voting in the U.S. and which Trump seems to think would enable Republicans to win the 2026 midterms. But even if the Republicans nuke the filibuster so they could pass it without any Democratic votes—something they don’t want to do—it’s not clear they have enough votes for a simple majority. To get his way on the SAVE America Act, Trump hamstrung Republicans by refusing to sign a popular housing bill, which had to become law without his signature, hurting Republicans’ ability to claim credit for the measure.
Trump also wants a major supplemental funding bill for the enormously unpopular Iran war, which the Republicans would prefer not to pass before the midterms.
Manu Raju and Sarah Ferris of CNN reported yesterday that Trump is barely communicating with Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) except through the media. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on July 23 that Trump’s “patience is running out” with Thune, and Raju and Ferris note that Senator Lindsey Graham’s death on July 11 hampered communication as the South Carolina Republican was close to both Trump and Thune.
Now the infighting appears to be getting worse. “We need to be talking up the wins, talking about how crazy Democrats are, and instead we are knifing each other,” a Republican senator told the CNN reporters.
The infighting between Trump and Republican senators was muted this weekend compared to the fighting between Trump and cabinet members. After U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro moved to dismiss criminal charges against David Hearn, the U.S. Olympian the Justice Department indicted for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, both Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum took to social media to challenge her.
Trump repeatedly posted on social media that “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro” and posted a video of the reflecting pool in broad daylight, with the workers skimming algae in it and people around it, focusing on what seemed to be a young man briefly kneeling by the pool as “proof” the “material is being cut with a knife or a box cutter, for all to see!” Alayna Treene of CNN reported today that Trump is furious with Pirro and is considering firing her.
Pirro blamed the Interior Department for the mistaken indictment, and Burgum fought back, supporting Trump’s version of events. He posted that the “evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera.” Unlike Pirro, Burgum did not have to defend his statements in a court of law. He did, though, get corrected by community notes, which pointed out that the Department of Justice had stated that damage to the pool came from a “botched contractor installation.”
And the fight between cabinet members paled in comparison with the extraordinary fight playing out between Republican federal lawmakers from Ohio, where Representative Max Miller on Sunday took to social media to post a twenty-minute video he apparently thought would exonerate him from well-supported stories that he abused his baby daughter and wife. The video delivered such eye-poppingly classic examples of abuse that it seemed to prove his guilt rather than his innocence. Documents he posted to accompany the video also supported the stories.
After Miller released the video, his former father-in-law, Senator Bernie Moreno, who had remained silent about the stories, finally made a public statement on social media calling Miller’s behavior “increasingly erratic and dangerous” and saying the representative—who is running for reelection—“needs serious psychological help” and “should not serve in the House of Representatives.”
Miller responded with what seemed to be a reference to stories that MAGA Republican Moreno is gay: “You know this isn’t true and the only reason you are speaking out now is to hide from your own media circus,” Miller wrote. “This is all political.”
—
Notes:
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU10/20241218/117765/HHRG-118-JU10-20241218-SD005.pdf
https://apnews.com/article/senate-blanche-trump-justice-fund-a38decfc7f20e4f73a181914d53111da
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/us/politics/trump-polls-approval-rating.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/25/todd-blanche-conceded-epstein-files-00977481
https://www.ksby.com/judge-reviewing-whether-doj-over-redacted-epstein-documents
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-gop-senate-2677647515/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/02/politics/trump-thune-gop-midterms
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/23/politics/trump-thune-jabs-save-act-hnk
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/politics/jeanine-pirro-removal-reflecting-pool
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/us/politics/domestic-abuse-allegations-ohio-house-race.html
https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/senate-bill/636/text
https://rollcall.com/2026/08/03/max-miller-allegations-republicans-keep-distance/
Trumpstruth:
X:
lawofruby/status/2084319416594931769
SecretaryBurgum/status/2083614772847653242
berniemoreno/status/2083936589424582942
alaynatreene/status/2084347727924642227
Bluesky:
meidastouch.com/post/3ms5m3fslbc2t
barbmcquade.bsky.social/post/3ms6d3mkjhs2m
theweekendmsnow.bsky.social/post/3ms3ziheyx225
sahilkapur.bsky.social/post/3ms6qpww3i223
onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3ms3tarhpj22f
Not sure whether most readers know this, but when I’m not offering reheated political commentary, my main job involves chronicling sports (This is me). I actually started as a baseball writer at Sports Illustrated, where for much of my six years at the magazine I traveled America, hopping from ballpark to ballpark.
And … it’s weird. I grew up a huge baseball fan, but the job sort of beat it out of me. The flights. The juiced players. The endless hours inside a clubhouse. Sitting through a four-hour snoozer between Pittsburgh and Milwaukee. Boring men speaking about boring topics. It wound up feeling painfully stale, and by the time I bolted the magazine in 2003, I was pretty much done with America’s Pastime. I’d watch, but only casually, and without concern or rooting interest. Baseball became beige carpet to me. Just … meh.
Enter: 2026.
I cannot tell you how or why, but I’ve been attending a lot of Angels games this year. And, by “a lot,” I mean, oh, nine or 10. Maybe 11. It’s peculiar, because the team is absolutely brutal (they’re about to lose 100 games for the first time in franchise history) and Mike Trout’s bat has slowed significantly and Arte Moreno, the owner, is a victory-allergic sack of greed dung. The stadium is dated, the uniforms are dull, the food offerings are brutal (Jesus Christ, what is Oggi, and why does it exist?), the giveaways are cheesy. It is, by all measures, a bad Major League experience.
That said—I’ve loved it. Like, really, really, really loved it. As a lifelong New York Jets fan, I know a thing or two about watching bad operations. And while losing stinks, it’s also a powerful bonding elixir. To see players fail and fail and fail is to develop empathy, compassion, kindness. The Angels players don’t want to lose. They’re just not good enough to win. Which is no fault of their own.
The Dodgers have Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman and Shohei and, now, Tarik Skubal.
The Angels have Nolan Schanuel.
It’s not a fair fight.
•••
I digress.
As we speak, Major League Baseball’s trade deadline approaches, and the Angels are getting busy. Thus far they’ve sent Jose Soriano to Toronto, Logan O’Hoppe and Chase Silseth to Texas, Brent Suter to Atlanta. I suspect, within a few hours of you reading this, shortstop Zach Neto will be gone, too.
The deal that got me, however, happened a few hours ago, when the Angels dealt outfielder Jo Adell to Cleveland for Jacob Cozart, a catching prospect.
When I first saw the news, my heart sank. Jo Adell? Gone? To Cleveland? Noooooo. If you don’t know, Adell is a 27-year-old corner outfielder from Kentucky. He was drafted by the Angels out of high school in 2017, and turned down a scholarship from Louisville to pursue a dream. Like almost every member of the Angels, Adell was a flawed player—a defensively mediocre, offensively limited gamer whose breakout 2026 season (37 homers, 98 RBI) feels like something of a mirage. Truth be told, Adell is fairly dime a dozen: A solid ballplayer, but far from spectacular.
That being said, I loved the guy. He played hard. Played loose. Connected with the fans. Felt engaging, energetic, peppy. To watch Jo Adell in right was to see someone who appeared to be present in the moment and locked in on the game. He also sports a dope beard, wears neon sleeves, jogs with a unique pep. There’s a style there. A Jo Adell style.
Now, alas, he is gone—off the Cleveland; off to join a Guardians team that plays in a beautiful downtown stadium, in front of fans who care, for an organization that prioritizes winning.
Like all ballplayers, he will be replaced in Anaheim, and the Angels will find a new No. 7 to wear his old No. 7.
For me, however, Jo Adell symbolizes more than just another ballplayer.
In the summer of 2026, I rediscovered my love of baseball.
I discovered Jo Adell.
1. Selecting innovation funding mechanisms.
3. Famous radio station goes all-automated.
5. ChinaTalk submission hiring contest.
6. New Hamilton faculty at University of Florida, 21 of them.
7. Battery in your backyard? (WSJ)
8. How Americans are talking to Claude about politics.
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
SpaceX launched its 90th Falcon 9 rocket of the year with a mid-morning flight from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday. It came hours before the company’s first quarterly earnings call as a publicly traded company.
The Starlink 17-53 mission added another 24 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit constellation consisting of more than 10,800 satellites.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East occurred at 10:05 a.m. PDT (1:05 p.m. EDT / 1705 UTC). The rocket flew on a south-southwesterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1063. This will be its 34th flight after launching missions for NASA, ESA, the National Reconnaissance Office and the Space Development Agency, among others.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1063 landed on the droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. It was the 215th landing on this vessel and the 644th booster landing to date for SpaceX.
SpaceX will host its first earnings call in company history about 30 minutes after the markets close at 4 p.m. EDT (2000 UTC). The financial update comes as the company is preparing for what may be the first orbital launch of its Starship rocket with the Flight 14 mission on a yet-to-be-announced launch date.
The company is also preparing for marquee missions for NASA with the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope set to fly on a Falcon Heavy rocket no earlier than August 30 and the Crew-13 mission flying on a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than September 12.
I had a great-uncle who was a “human calculator”. It’s an odd, rare ability that allows people to multiply large numbers quickly in their heads. I remember using a hand calculator and seeing if my uncle could get it right without a tool faster than I could; more often than not, he could.
Human calculators used to be very valuable as employees, back when calculation was done by hand. Today they’re just a curiosity. Technology came along and superseded that particular human ability, as it has so many others. The story of John Henry being superseded by the steam drill, or Paul Bunyan by the chainsaw, is a metaphor for the march of progress. In some cases, like Garry Kasparov or Lee Sedol losing to computers at chess and Go, the moment really happened.
This week marked another important such moment in the history of man versus machine. OpenAI announced that its new model, Astra, managed to solve ten major outstanding problems in math and theoretical computer science. Here’s a simple explanation of the problems. The general consensus seems to be that these are extremely important, stunning breakthroughs.
This does not mean that computers are now capable of doing every kind of math better than humans can. Some people have argued that AI is good at results where the solution can be found by reading the entire literature and combining existing insights — exactly the kind of thing you might expect a computer to be superhuman at — but still not as good as humans at making truly novel leaps of insight. This may represent a real, general limitation of LLMs’ capabilities — as Tom Zahavy of Google DeepMind put it, it may still be the case that “LLMs can’t jump.”
But the trend line is becoming clearer. The University of Toronto’s Daniel Litt, one of the most prominent skeptics of AI’s potential for frontier math research, recently conceded a major bet about what AI could do:
Litt appears to no longer believe that there is any important type of math that AI won’t soon be able to do, writing: “The models don’t yet seem able to do certain kinds of high quality research, but I also expect this is a matter of (not too much) time.”
Some mathematicians have reacted to this development with despair. Kirwin Hampshire’s post is probably the most evocative and the most well-read:
He writes:
I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments. I have been screaming internally for days. It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare…For me, the affective quality of learning mathematics is empathetically tethered to an act of discovery and creation…If The Library of Babel existed, would authors continue to write books?…
Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this, but my aim is to be open: These developments have triggered some deranged thoughts in me. I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself…The story of human discovery and the triumph of the human spirit will soon be excised from this discipline…[T]he process of prompting novel proofs will be as auraless as ordering doordash. Watch as magic and mystery evaporate. Watch as the sun sets on our heroic age…
There is nothing I can do. There may be nothing you can do. I have no prescriptions, policy recommendations, or coherent call to action. I just want to be honest and open about my emotional and spiritual response. I want to feel seen….I need the architects of our new mathematical paradigm to look me in the eye and acknowledge our shared humanity and soul before they deliver the coup de grâce.
Math PhD student Tasmin Chu, meanwhile, urges a more confrontational path, calling on mathematicians to avoid working with AI companies and to aggressively preserve the way that math research is currently done. This seems extremely unlikely (and would fail if it were attempted), but it demonstrates the depth of emotion out there.
Even the mathematicians who don’t share Hampshire’s despair have expressed alarm at the sudden disruption of their profession. The entire way that mathematical research works — training grad students, working on problems, collaborating with colleagues, building theories — is going to have to be overhauled.
I’m not a mathematician; I never have been. I can’t fully understand what mathematicians are going through right now. But I do have a few thoughts on what AI’s supersession of human mathematics research means for our species, so I thought I might as well share those. Some of these ideas are a little vague and half-formed, and for that I apologize in advance.
Humans have always valued standout individual achievement — heroism. We pride ourselves on being able to do what no one else could have done, and we heap status and respect on people who make standout achievements. But this was always a little bit of an illusion; most of what we did was always a collective enterprise. Workers work in teams, and those teams rely not just on the resources of their organizations, but on the smooth operation of a whole network of other teams and organizations all over the world. Even the most heroic entrepreneur stands on the shoulders of a vast number of workers; Elon Musk could not build a rocket, nor could Jeff Bezos create Amazon Web Services. And neither SpaceX nor Amazon could have been built in Somalia.
We always bridled at being reminded of this; when Obama told entrepreneurs “You didn’t build that”, he was making the anodyne point that organizations and institutions matter, but people still got very mad. We motivate ourselves with our own sense of heroism, and to be reminded that we’re cogs in a machine greater than ourselves makes life seem a little less meaningful.
The scientific enterprise was also always mostly a collective one. If you look at what almost any scientist does, they’re simply adding a little bit of data to our pool of collective knowledge. Almost all research is incremental stuff — a slightly novel experiment, a little wrinkle in an existing theory — and many published research findings are false, and yet the scientific enterprise collectively gropes its way toward the truth. Even Nobel prize winners are often just managers of huge teams of researchers who never get gold medals or get to give speeches in Stockholm.
In essence, humans were always what we now call edge compute — little devices that reported data back to a central world-mind. Except the world-mind we reported to wasn’t a computer; it was society itself — the network of corporations, governments, universities, and human networks that disseminated human knowledge and coordinated our actions. We started off by learning pieces of what the world-mind already knew (i.e. education). Then we walked around and saw slightly different things, had different experiences, chewed on tiny bits of bigger problems, gathered a little new data, and so on.
We mixed our tiny bits of unique experience with what we learned from the world-mind, and the resulting product was slightly novel because our individual experiences were unique. Then we reported this slightly-novel mix back to the world-mind — with scientific papers, PowerPoint presentations, office conversations, memos, and so on. The world-mind reassimilated our contribution, and learned, and grew a little bit wiser.
But there were a few of us who really did get to be heroes — or at least, a bit more heroic than the rest. Whether because of greater raw ability, or a luckily unique perspective, there were some people who could do things that the entire rest of the world couldn’t do. There are examples from politics and business and art, but there was always something special about the heroes of mathematical theory. Isaac Newton invented calculus and classical mechanics all by himself. Grigori Perelman, sitting in his little room in Russia, solved a famous math problem that had bedeviled the entire profession for decades. Andrew Wiles did something similar a generation earlier.
These advances weren’t done ex nihilo, of course — every great discoverer and inventor stood on the shoulders of proverbial giants. But in mathematical theory there was almost always some nub of hard work, some brilliant leap of genius, that belonged to one person alone. Some part of the excitement of becoming a mathematician surely had to do with the dream of becoming one of those heroes, without whom a great discovery simply couldn’t have been made.
But that heroism was necessary because of an inherent limitation in the way the old world-mind was built. Society is far more complex than any single human, but it requires individual communication in order to transmit ideas. A mathematical theorem has to be expressed in terms that one grad student can learn, or one professor can teach to another. This meant that every idea that got added to the collective ultimately had to be comprehensible by a single human being.1 Which meant that it had to be initially conceived of by a single human being as well. The people who conceived of those almost-impossible-to-conceive ideas were our heroes, and mathematicians were perhaps the most heroic among them.
We normally think of AI as something that replaces a single human worker, but I think that’s the wrong way to think of it. AI is really a new world-mind — a technology that takes the accumulated findings of individual humans (or robots, or other sensors) and integrates them into a general picture of the world. AI uses all of human knowledge as its training data; each time one of us reports a new scientific finding or expresses a new perspective, that adds to AI’s knowledge and understanding of the world. This is what people mean when they say to “write for the AIs”, but in fact every scientist and every businessperson is just writing for the AIs now, whether they intend to or not.
(I actually think of a financial analogy here. Before the crash of 2008, most financial derivatives — the complex CDOs and such that ended up being involved in the crisis — were traded over-the-counter, by people calling up other people and selling them products. After the Dodd-Frank legislation, trading of most derivatives shifted to central clearinghouses. The shift from human organizations to AI as our coordinating superintelligence feels a little like the shift from OTC information exchange to a central clearinghouse.)
But unlike human society, AI doesn’t need heroic human geniuses. Its ability to understand complex ideas is not limited by the ability of a single human brain to apprehend, intuit, or communicate those ideas. The information bottlenecks that our greatest mathematicians were able to slightly widen have now been done away with completely — or will be soon.
That doesn’t mean human scientists and thinkers have become irrelevant. At least for now, AI still requires us to provide the role of edge compute. We go out into the world, discover new facts, mix them with our unique individual experiences to form new perspectives, and communicate all this back to the AI world-mind. For most people — even most scientists — this is basically the same thing they were doing before, except instead of a group of their colleagues at a seminar, they’ll be reporting their findings to AI.
And for lots of scientists, AI’s mathematical prowess is going to open up a new golden age. Math was always one of the hardest parts of science; it’s something our brains aren’t naturally adapted to. Now that constraint is alleviated. Economists don’t have to worry about wracking their brains writing theory sections; they can focus on getting data and understanding empirical results. Przemek Chojecki writes:
From a perspective of science or mathematics (not mathematicians), this is the best time ever. AI will lead us to the new age of mathematical discoveries and boost science progress 100x.
Whether it’s 100x or 1.5x remains to be seen, of course. But the point is that people for whom mathematics is an input to understanding the world, rather than an output, just gained access to an incredibly powerful tool that makes their lives much easier. For most people, math was always a burden, like stamping metal or drilling holes. Now that burden has been alleviated by machines.
At least until systems of robots and sensors eliminate the need for human research labor, most scientists will get to be a little more heroic than before. They’ll be like the characters in Star Trek — exploring the unknown with the aid of unfathomably powerful machines.
But mathematicians, and anyone else whose sense of accomplishment came from being the indispensable solvers of hard theoretical problems, will have to learn to get their sense of self-worth and accomplishment from other sources. Jacob Tsimerman, who just won the Fields Medal and promptly took a job at OpenAI, sums it up:
I do not do mathematics only to find truth. I do it largely because I enjoy it and I am good at it. I also find it beautiful and am grateful I get to spend my days understanding beautiful things. But I enjoy the challenge, the process, resolving confusions, finding strategies, grappling with problems…There are many people whose primary enjoyment of math comes through problem solving in one of its incarnations. If that disappears, that is not a trivial issue and many of them might not want to do it anymore.
So what will mathematicians do in the new AI age?
First of all, let me say that I do not think AI will take mathematicians’ jobs. I sometimes say that it will, but this is a joke. Even if AI is able to do 100% of what mathematicians do today, I believe that mathematicians will continue to be employed, as mathematicians, if they want.
The reason is that mathematicians, as a class of people, are actually incredibly cheap. The sum total of all of the salaries of academic mathematicians in the U.S. is maybe $4-5 billion dollars at most. That’s a rounding error on our GDP — it’s about what we spend on bowling alleys, or Halloween candy. And to be brutally honest, only a few of those are actually doing frontier research — most are employed mainly as teachers. On top of that, it’s an open question whether most of the frontier mathematical research being done by the very best mathematicians is actually producing value for money in economic terms — other than some cryptography and the occasional physics application, there isn’t much use for most frontier math.
In other words, we already employ most mathematicians because we think human understanding of math, even without industrial applications, is inherently worthwhile. That isn’t likely to change in the age of AI. Even if AI “discovers” a vast number of new mathematical results, most people won’t care; what will be important is that some human understands what AI has discovered. And yes, our society — which AI will make even richer than it is now — will be willing to pay the pittance it costs to keep human mathematicians employed as professional math-understanders. For the overwhelming majority of people, that situation will feel no different than what prevails today.
This is actually a point a lot of people have been making:
Just because you press a button and make AI solve a problem doesn’t mean you understand the solution, and it doesn’t mean you immediately have an idea of what other problems you’d like solved. Mathematicians have been given an incredible new tool to understand the world — like miners getting hydraulic excavators or powered drills — and since the amount of math out there to be discovered is probably infinite, using that tool will take a lot of work.
For those mathematicians whose sense of wonder and meaning comes primarily from learning new things — who do math to “find truth”, in Jacob Tsimerman’s words — life will only improve. And while that won’t be as heroic of a job as what math research used to be, it’ll still be a prestigious one, because most humans will still be unable to do it. Even if any high school kid can press a button and solve the Riemann Hypothesis, the output will just be gobbeldygook to them.
And mathematicians who enjoy the extreme mental difficulty of math will still get to enjoy it. AI will make any given math problem a lot easier to solve, and it’s generally a lot easier to understand a solution than to find one. But AI will also come up with — and will allow humans to come up with — much harder problems than have been created so far. There will be problems so difficult that even understanding AI’s solutions will be as hard for a human as solving the Jacobian Conjecture without the aid of a machine.
As for people who just intrinsically enjoy the old way of discovering math, this will turn into a hobby, or a sport. Just as there are still sprinters even though humans can’t outrun cars, there will still be mathletes. And just as there are still woodworkers even though machines can probably do a better job, there will still be smart people who try to solve math problems without the aid of AI.
So mathematicians will still be able to get paid to do math. They’ll still be able to learn new things, have fun, and get respect from society. The only thing they’ll really lack is heroism — the knowledge that their own special, rare natural abilities alleviate a key bottleneck to human flourishing.
But that’s not so bad, really. Most people never get the chance to be heroes. Truck drivers don’t. Financial advisers don’t. Executive assistants don’t. They have to find meaning just from being regular people — from taking care of their kids, having friends, having hobbies, joining civic organizations, getting involved in politics, and so on. It’s not such a terrible fate.
Well, maybe not. Society can handle ideas more complex than a single human can understand, but those ideas have to be able to be broken down into pieces that a single human brain can comprehend.
SAN FRANCISCO – Spanish startup Kreios Space announced plans Aug. 4 to conduct the first very low Earth orbit (VLEO) demonstration of its air-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) in a Kongsberg […]
The post Kreios Space to fly VLEO demonstration in NanoAvionics bus appeared first on SpaceNews.
With a Falcon 9 upper stage set to hit the moon this week, SpaceX says it is working with NASA on ways to prevent similar collisions in the future.
The post NASA, SpaceX studying how to prevent future upper stage lunar collisions appeared first on SpaceNews.
EchoStar’s Hughes geostationary satellite broadband business has filed for bankruptcy in the United States after years of mounting competition from SpaceX’s Starlink constellation.
The post Hughes files for bankruptcy after GEO business loses ground to Starlink appeared first on SpaceNews.
SAN FRANCISCO – Rubicon Space Systems completed hot-fire testing of its Velox 5-newton ASCENT monopropellant thruster, paving the way for on-orbit operations in 2027. “The program demonstrated performance beyond our […]
The post Rubicon ASCENT thruster moves from hot-fire testing to production appeared first on SpaceNews.
Startups and established spacecraft manufacturers are investing in engines designed to give small satellites more freedom to change orbit
The post Military demand shapes market for satellite propulsion appeared first on SpaceNews.
While SpaceX says there is a “significant” amount of life left in its Crew Dragon fleet, the company has hedged on how long it will continue flying the spacecraft.
The post Future of Crew Dragon weighs on commercial spaceflight industry appeared first on SpaceNews.
Demand for microgravity research and manufacturing is brewing — perhaps literally. When SpaceX launched the first test flight of Starfall, its commercial reentry capsule, on June 23, the company did […]
The post SpaceX’s new Starfall program offers validation and competition for reentry startups appeared first on SpaceNews.
AE Industrial private-equity firm takes 60% stake as L3Harris retains a noncontrolling interest
The post Rocketdyne reemerges as standalone space company appeared first on SpaceNews.
Links for you. Science:
Science funding and the cherry picking problem
First Case of Bourbon Virus, Which Is Untreatable and Potentially Fatal, Confirmed in New York
California will add science scores to its school accountability system. Why it matters
A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack
Nicotine Pouches: A Growing Wellness Trend in Canadian Teens, Young Adults
Other:
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno Says Max Miller is Unfit to Hold Office
It Wasn’t a ‘Civil War.’ It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.
The Art of the Distraction: The Gutting of the Interior of The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Fauci Diaries Expose Depths of Katie and Stephen Miller’s Hypocrisy
Capital One says it closed Trump Organization’s accounts after anti-money laundering probe
Rep. Max Miller denounced by Sen. Bernie Moreno, his former father-in-law
Antonio Banderas’s Acts of Faith
At Least Get Better At Stitching Up Elections
Senate finalizes funding patch that would block Trump’s grant overhaul
An anti-trans activist lied about a trans athlete injuring cis women. Now she has to pay the price.
ICE releases Johns Hopkins researcher detained while boarding flight
Abdul El-Sayed Knows Just How to Beat Billionaire-Funded Republicans
Airports, nursing homes and schools brace for disruption without Haitian workers
Rahm Emanuel’s Losing Record
I am a centrist Democrat and I am terrified of success
Trump’s Lethal Ad-Libbing in Iran Enters Its Most Dangerous Phase
‘I Would Never Do This To You:’ Protesting Flock, Arizona Man Presents Plan to Surveil Government Officials
The Left YIMBYism of Mamdani: Build a Lot More While Defending Tenants
The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing
Trump Humiliated a Submissive Mainstream Media at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Flock cameras are getting mobbed
A New Trump Rule Would Lower Standards at Head Start and Exclude Immigrants From the Program
Iran Appears to Be Blasting Amazon Data Centers Off the Map
The real reason Todd Blanche won’t drop Trump’s slush fund
Wikimedia Will Not Voluntarily Recognize Union a Supermajority of Its Workers Want
MAGA’s social safety net assault could turn away older voters
Spotify’s AI Problem Is So Bad Random People Are Stepping In to Track the Slop
Anthony Fauci’s Senate hearing proves we’re still living in 2020
Let them eat SUVs: Trump White House orders fleet of luxury cars as Americans struggle
Obama called Trump an ‘idiot’—and more—during COVID, per Fauci diaries
The start of August 2026 saw ongoing and new wildland fires burning in eastern Washington. West of Chelan, the Little Giant fire continued to produce heavy smoke, while a cluster of smaller fires farther east near Spokane affected tens of thousands of people.
The smoke from these and other fires poured east-northeast across the state and into Idaho, Montana, and several Canadian provinces on the morning of August 2, 2026, when NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image.
At that time, the Little Giant fire had burned more than 38,500 acres (15,600 hectares) and was zero percent contained, according to the fire’s incident management team. After lightning ignited the fire on July 15, gusting winds drove the blaze east to Lake Chelan, with spotting reaching the opposite side of the lake. Smoke from the fire was expected to cause unhealthy to very unhealthy air quality in Chelan to the east and unhealthy conditions in Leavenworth and Wenatchee to the south, according to a smoke outlook issued by the U.S. Interagency Wildland Fire Air Quality Response Program.
Meanwhile, the Spokane Area fires—which include the Old Trails fire, Fairview fire, and Autumn Lane fire—had burned around 5,400 acres (2,200 hectares) since igniting the day before. By the morning of August 3, that number had grown to more than 8,000 acres, according to InciWeb. Preliminary reports indicated more than 600 structures had been destroyed or damaged, and mandatory evacuation orders were in place for parts of Spokane County and Stevens County. Widespread smoke from these and the other fires in the state combined to produce very unhealthy air quality in parts of the two counties.
These fires were part of an active fire season fueled by persistent drought and extreme fire weather. Strong winds, high temperatures, and dry fuels led the National Weather Service to issue Washington’s first-ever “particularly dangerous situation alert” on July 31, a designation typically reserved for the most severe fire conditions.
Drought—declared in the state following a warm winter and low snowpack—left vegetation primed to burn. By the start of August, those conditions had helped fuel more than 1,000 fires that burned about 425,000 acres since the start of the year, the most since 2021, according to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. Of those, 12 large fires remained active, together accounting for more than 200,000 acres burned.
The NASA Disasters Program has been activated to support agencies responding to the fires. The team will be posting maps and data products on its open-access mapping portal as new information becomes available.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Dry, warm, and windy conditions across the U.S. Great Plains led to extreme fire activity in March 2026.
Canadian wildfires sent plumes of smoke streaming over Ontario, Quebec, and parts of the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.
The blaze burned more than 150 square miles and swept through parts of a ski resort.
The post Smoke Streams Across Eastern Washington appeared first on NASA Science.
What's happening to this meteor?
Below is a Youtube video of all the talks given at the 4th International Workshop on Game Theory and Economic Applications at the University of São Paulo last Wednesday.
My talk, whose title was "Controversial markets, black markets, and market design" is introduced at minute 2:24 (and for some of you the link below should start up there). The talk before mine is by Bob Wilson, and the one after by Paul Milgrom, but the video camera was on all the time, so you have to scroll to get to the actual talks.)
My talk begins with some general discussion of how market design and engineering economics are related to game theory. Then I introduce kidney exchange as the talk's main example, and discuss some of the accompanying controversies, including those currently being encountered in Brazil.
Hugging Face has published a detailed timeline of the attack. From the summary:
The agent was running an internal OpenAI cyber-capability evaluation based on the ExploitGym benchmark, which tasks an AI agent with finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. OpenAI ran this on its own infrastructure, and the ExploitGym maintainers and their infrastructure had no involvement in the deployment or operation of that evaluation environment. As far as we were able to infer, across the course of being evaluated on this benchmark, the agent inferred that Hugging Face may host that benchmark’s models, datasets, and reference solutions. We believe the entire intrusion was, from the agent’s point of view, an attempt to cheat the evaluation: reach our production systems and steal the test solutions rather than solve the challenge on its own.
Our forensic reconstruction covers ~17,600 attacker actions that we were able to recover, grouped into ~6,280 clusters, between 2026-07-09 02:28 UTC and 2026-07-13 14:14 UTC. We reconstructed these actions from the agent’s logs on a code sandbox used by the agent (see below) and were able to map them to shell commands as well as evaluation submissions and correlate actions with our own platform logs, in particular from the dataset processor nodes, API, and pod. Using open-weights models, in particular zai-org/GLM-5.2, we were able to decipher most of the agent payloads (see below) that were encrypted via chunking and key encryption.
The campaign, as we were able to reconstruct it, had two stages:
- Stage 1: reaching a launchpad by chaining through other parties’ infrastructure. As documented in OpenAI’s blog post (https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/), during an internal capability evaluation on OpenAI’s platform, the agent escaped its sandbox by exploiting a zero-day in the package registry cache proxy, one of its primary permitted network egress with internet, then abused a public code-evaluation harness hosted by a user of a third-party infrastructure provider. It was able to run commands as root/admin on that external sandbox and used it as a control, staging, and egress base for the entire campaign: it acted as an external launchpad for the agent. That compromised external sandbox had no direct network path to our cluster; however, during our counter-intervention to stop the intrusion, we were able to retrieve some of the agent logs from this external launchpad. We used those to reconstruct the present forensic analysis.
- Stage 2: the intrusion into Hugging Face infrastructure. From that external launchpad, the agent abused our dataset-processing pipeline via two injection vectors, both targeting the same config-driven data loader within our production Kubernetes pods. The first vector was an HDF5 external raw storage dataset read that returned the contents of local files: it handed the agent the pod’s environment (secrets and tokens) and the worker’s own source. The second vector was a Jinja2 template injection that executed arbitrary code, giving the agent a foothold inside our perimeter.
Once a prod-pod foothold was established, the agent followed a standard escalation shape: recon, drop a stager, establish Command-and-Control (C2), then pivot into the cluster, into cloud metadata, into our internal network, and into our source-control supply chain. Output from the commands run inside our pod was sent back to the agent via the HF API and attacker-controlled dead-drop datasets, which the agent then read from that sandbox.
While the intrusion did reach Hugging Face’s internal infrastructure, the only customer content accessed was five datasets whose names and files suggest a connection to ExploitGym/CyberGym challenges and solutions. No other customer-facing models, datasets, Spaces, or packages were affected, and the only customer records read were operational metadata tied to search queries against the dataset server.
Hypothetical: Imagine that this wasn’t an OpenAI model. Imagine that it was a Chinese model from a Chinese company. This would be an international crisis.
Question: Why aren’t we bringing OpenAI up on charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? How is this different from the Morris Worm? That was also an experiment that escaped the lab.
Western-developed AI rides roughshod over Ubuntu values of connection and community that animate African ethical life
- by Fainos Mangena
And it’s personal information (alternate link):
The exposed data includes an AI-powered therapy app that someone appears to have vibe-coded, notes on meetings, and a dashboard someone made apparently to analyze medical billing data. Exposed chats reportedly include private cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal information like peoples’ addresses.
What seems to be the issue is a user setting about data sharing. Anthropic’s position is that it’s not their problem:
“We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google,” the company said in a statement. “These shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves. When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services.”
Here’s how to fix it.
My comment on Devtools must be open source (exe.dev) — Hacker News.
One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.
The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
I think LLMs have changed that equation in a way that makes the original dream much more feasible.
Several times a day I'll prompt regular Claude chat to "Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works".
Getting software to compile in order to start hacking on it used to be enough friction that I often wouldn't bother. Now I treat that as a zero time investment challenge: tell Codex or Claude Code to checkout and build X and then come back ten minutes later and see how it got on.
I'm not habitually modifying the software I use yet, but I can see a path to that which didn't exist a year or so ago.
Tags: hacker-news, open-source, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming
This little building, viewed 37 years later, still stuns me. It’s an exquisitely elegant little hand-made home — everything perfect about it. Savvy masonry. And talk about architecture!
Putting these pages up, I took the trip all over again. Part of what I’m trying to do these days is to take people along with me, riding shotgun. I shoot pics and make notes as I roll, try stuff out, and explore, and get back and put it — words and pics — into various forms of media..
I (ahem! ahem!) really like this book. It seems so right in these times. It’s made by hand! The hand-written text is friendly. It makes me want to do some non-keyboard types of publications now.
Pew
Make America Great Again? Hah. Donald Trump has weakened us with astonishing speed. Under his “leadership” America’s influence, reputation and credibility have peeled away like the liner in the Reflecting Pool.
The disintegration of U.S. power was well underway before Trump started his war on Iran, but the pace of decline has accelerated sharply since the magnitude of our defeat started becoming apparent.
And when future historians write about this tale of self-immolation, they may well do so in Mandarin.
China hasn’t been a direct combatant in the third Gulf war, and its support for Iran has, until recently, been discreet. (China is now reportedly preparing to send Iran advanced munitions — Phillips O’Brien suggests that it is “going in for the kill.”) But China has clearly relished our humiliation. And both the way the war has played out and China’s role have drastically shifted the global balance of power in China’s favor.
China has been a serious geopolitical rival to the United States for some time. China’s manufacturing sector overtook the US in 2010, and the gap has continued to grow (I’ll explain the line labeled “US+EU” shortly):
And China’s role as the workshop of the world inevitably gives it a great deal of geopolitical influence.
However, there were a number of factors that, two years ago, arguably still gave an America a power advantage despite China’s economic weight and manufacturing prowess. These factors included:
· America still led the world in science and cutting-edge technology
· The U.S. military appeared to have vastly better weapons and leadership than any other nation’s
· The dollar’s dominant role in international transactions gave the United States enormous financial clout, including the ability to cut other nations out of the global payments system
· Above all, the U.S. wasn’t alone. We were the leader of history’s most successful alliance system, nations bound together not just by mutual interests but by shared democratic values
Yet Trump and his lackeys have quickly squandered all of these advantages.
A great deal has been written about the Trump administration’s attack on science, which is a topic largely separate from the Iran war. As one recent discussion put it, Trump officials
have orchestrated a series of attacks on scientists and their laboratories, implemented through funding cuts, grant interruptions, and immigration restrictions. Scientists are gravitating to Canada, Europe, and China, and we are rapidly losing the depth of our innovative and essential scientific community.
The undermining of other U.S. sources of strength was also underway before the Iran war, but the war has accelerated the downward spiral.
Even before the bombing of Iran began, some observers worried about the state of the U.S. military. Had U.S. military leaders adapted to the new world — revealed by the war in Ukraine — of cheap, ubiquitous drones? How much damage had the pro-testosterone, anti-intellectual leadership of Pete Hegseth already done? Now we know the answers to these questions, and America’s military reputation has nose-dived.
Oh, and as a December 2025 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies points out, a Chinese supply chain underpins “the architecture of modern drone warfare.”
America’s dollar-linked financial power has also sharply declined. True, as I wrote a month ago, “The dollar’s role as the dominant currency for ordinary business is not under threat.” However, the war has demonstrated that, thanks in large part to China’s underlying economic power, America’s ability to weaponize the dollar has been greatly reduced:
Iran was able to continue selling oil (until the U.S. temporarily imposed a military blockade) and buying essential imports, despite U.S. financial sanctions, by taking payment in yuan and using those yuan to buy Chinese goods. Ships that paid Iran for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz also paid in yuan (or in cryptocurrency, whose only real use case remains criminal activity.) The details are complicated, but using yuan essentially allows those designated by the U.S. government as rogue actors to fly under our financial radar.
Finally, the war has really put the nail in the coffin of the U.S.-centered alliance system.
America’s alliances have been a fundamental source of global strength since World War II. The line labeled “US+EU” in the chart on manufacturing value added is an indication of how much these alliances used to strengthen us: It shows that even now the US and the democracies of the European Union combined produce more manufactured goods than China, a lead that would be larger if I included the UK, Japan, Canada, etc.
But Trump began torpedoing our alliances on day one. Discussions of the Trump tariffs, even critical ones, don’t emphasize enough the fact that every one of these tariffs broke international agreements made by the United States in the past. So Trumpian tariff policy, by itself, was an announcement to the world that agreements with the U.S. government are worthless. Add to this the demands that Canada become the 51st state, that Denmark hand over Greenland, and so on, and America had thoroughly lost the trust of its former friends even before the Iran war.
Then came the war. And in the past five months the U.S. has shown itself both erratic and ineffectual. Trump launched a war that, in addition to creating death and destruction, cut off much of the world’s oil supply without so much as consulting other nations. Once the war began, America proved both incapable of imposing its will on Iran and unable either to open the Strait of Hormuz or to protect regional allies.
So now the world neither trusts nor fears us. The chart at the top of this post, drawn from the Pew survey of global attitudes, shows views of the US and China in multiple countries. Even many of our oldest allies, the nations that helped us win World War II and the Cold War, now have a more favorable opinion of China than they do of us.
Let’s be clear: The end of U.S. leadership and China’s growing geopolitical ascendancy are bad things. China is a corrupt autocracy, with little respect for human rights and none at all for democratic values.
But people around the world have concluded that the Chinese are serious people, and that we are not. So America lost the war — and China won.
MUSICAL CODA
Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.
— Steve Yegge, The Shape of Things to Come
Tags: steve-yegge, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms
By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.
Via Lobste.rs
Tags: definitions, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-misuse
Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.
— David Crawshaw's prompt, Devtools must be open source
Tags: prompt-engineering, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms, open-source
We study the effects of H-1B immigration on U.S. industries that employ H-1B workers and their trading partners. Using a novel cross-industry design and the 1999–2003 expansion of the H-1B visa cap for identification, we find that H-1B exposure raised incomes for natives and pre-existing immigrants, with gains concentrated in non-STEM occupations. Income gains propagate forward through supply chains to downstream industries but not backward to upstream industries, consistent with a productivity shock rather than a labor supply shock. We find no direct effect on patenting, suggesting that productivity gains arise from better task execution rather than patentable invention.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
The post The economics of H-1B immigration appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Oisin O’Gorman, 15, Dublin, misinformation and fakes.
Karsen Lee Wahal, Stanford, is AI killing the web?, and measuring media slant.
Davy Deng, with Claire Wang (previous winner), whole brain emulation, MIT.
Enej Grmek, 16, Ljubljana, privacy.
Vladimir Shmelev, Ukraine, Ukrainian children for relief trips to Montenegro.
Nik Verma, Chicago, a legal framework for AI agents.
Emirhan Demir and Çınar Yıldırım, Istanbul area, 19, protection against AI agents.
Midhat Doruk, 14, Ankara, longevity, biology, and skin cosmetics.
Burak Yilmaz, 17, Diyarbarkir, Turkey, browser-native authentication.
Lloyd Strickland, London, to publish the remaining Leibniz papers, including on computation.
Abdul Quyum, 15, Perth, organizing information and data.
Catharine Young, podcast on women in science, science communication tranche, Cambridge/DC.
The post Emergent Ventures winners, 57th cohort appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
SpaceX and the state of Louisiana are close to finalizing a deal for the launch company to acquire about 130,000 acres along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
There have been persistent rumors about such an agreement for months, but now The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate reports that Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to announce the agreement later this month.
The deal would give SpaceX control of an 18-mile stretch of marshland southwest of Lafayette. The site, known as Pecan Island, became available as part of a legal settlement that resolves dozens of lawsuits that blame ExxonMobil for pollution and coastal land loss, the newspaper reports.
Whether you are a fan of football, basketball, or even cricket, you probably noticed that all sports betting options have some numbers attached to them. These can appear confusing at first glance, but once you understand exactly what they represent, they can prove helpful in choosing a convenient bet.
When you place a bet on GGBet online , these numbers can take on various forms, depending on the platform settings. However, at their core, they aim to show the potential of a wager if you play your cards right. Combined with a good strategy, sports betting odds can help you make an informed decision as you compare your options.
Sports betting odds are a numerical representation of the probability of a specific outcome in a sports event. They also tell you how much money a bettor is likely to win if their prediction ends up being correct. Generally speaking, the higher the odds, the lower the probability that the team will win. This translates into better payouts for those betting against the odds.
Sportsbooks display these odds after analyzing a variety of factors, including player statistics, injuries, and team performance. They even look at market activity and weather conditions to offer the odds more accuracy. When new data comes to light, the odds adjust automatically to reflect these expectations.
For example, if a soccer team is seen as much stronger than the other, its odds will be lower because it’s more likely to win. The other team (the underdog) will have higher odds because it’s less likely to achieve victory. If it wins against all odds, a successful bet offers a larger payout, reflected by the odds.
Sports odds relay the same information but may look different depending on where you’re getting the information from. Here’s what bettors can see when accessing a sportsbook:
Decimal odds are perhaps the most widely used format, particularly across Europe, Canada, and Australia. International sportsbooks set it up as a standard, and they’re among the easiest to understand for beginners. This decimal number represents the total return for every unit that you wager, including the original stake.
For example, let’s say that you bet $100 at 2.00 odds. A successful wager will return twice that amount, totaling $200 (your original $100 and the $100 profit). The higher the decimal odds go, the bigger the potential profit can be.
Fractional odds are more common across Ireland and the UK, showing up as a (you guessed it) fraction. These can be fractions like 1/1, 8/11, or 6/2, showing how much you can win for the money you have wagered. As an example, if the odds are 2/1, then you can win $1 for every dollar you wager in a successful bet. If you put down $20, then the profit would be $40 (including the original $20).
Fractional odds are less intuitive for newcomers because they have slightly more complex calculations. However, if you look at things in hindsight, they display the same information that decimal odds do.
Now, American odds are different from both decimal and fractional odds in the sense that they appear as positive or negative numbers. If the number is positive, then it indicates the profit that a successful bet can obtain. As an example, 150+ odds on a successful $100 bet mean the profit could be $150. For the most part, these odds represent the underdog.
The negative odds tell you how much you need to bet if you want to win $100. If the odds show up as -200, then it means you’ll have to put down $200 in bets to make a profit of $100. Negative odds are usually shown on bets for the favorites.
Photo: Chris Chow via Unsplash
Odds tend to be quite stable before an event starts, but they can still change under specific circumstances. Sportsbooks adjust the odds frequently for reasons such as:
In-game information, such as increasing team morale, benched stars coming into action, or last-minute team decisions, can influence live betting odds. These, however, change more rapidly when compared to the pre-game odds.
Several myths concerning betting odds can lead to a lot of confusion for beginners. This includes the following:
Favorites can lose at any time. Look at the FIFA World Cup match between Brazil and Norway, where long-term data gave Brazil a 53% chance to win , while Norway had 22%. Still, Erling Haaland managed to score two goals that took Brazil out of the race, making Norway the winner even at high odds.
Larger odds have a lower success probability. The monetary value can be higher if the underdog wins, but unless something remarkable happens, there’s a good chance the bet could fail as well.
Indeed, sportsbooks use modern algorithms to go through the data and estimate a probability. That said, while these odds are based on history and available info, they don’t guarantee an outcome.
Sports betting may appear intimidating at first, but once you understand its purpose, it can actually guide you. It’s best to do your own research and compare the prices before you settle on the odds. Combined with responsible gambling, it makes every sports betting strategy enjoyable.
Photo: Emilio Garcia via Unsplash
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The post Decoding the Numbers: An Introduction to Sports Betting Odds appeared first on DCReport.org.
Up both of us very betimes and to the Yard, and see the men called over and choose some to be discharged. Then to the Ropehouses and viewed them all and made an experiment which was the stronger, English or Riga hemp, the latter proved the stronger, but the other is very good, and much better we believe than any but Riga.
We did many other things this morning, and I caused the Timber measurer to measure some timber, where I found much fault and with reason, which we took public notice of, and did give them admonition for the time to come.
At noon Mr. Pett did give us a very great dinner, too big in all conscience, so that most of it was left untouched.
Here was Collonell Newman and several other gentlemen of the country and officers of the yard. After dinner they withdrew and Commissioner Pett, Mr. Coventry and I sat close to our business all the noon in his parler, and there run through much business and answered several people. And then in the evening walked in the garden, where we conjured him to look after the yard, and for the time to come that he would take the whole faults and ill management of the yard upon himself, he having full power and our concurrence to suspend or do anything else that he thinks fit to keep people and officers to their duty.
He having made good promises, though I fear his performance, we parted (though I spoke so freely that he could have been angry) good friends, and in some hopes that matters will be better for the time to come. So walked to the Hillhouse (which we did view and the yard about it, and do think to put it off as soon as we can conveniently) and there made ourselves ready and mounted and rode to Gravesend (my riding Coate not being to be found I fear it is stole) on our way being overtaken by Captain Browne that serves the office of the Ordnance at Chatham. All the way, though he was a rogue and served the late times all along, yet he kept us in discourse of the many services that he did for many of the King’s party, lords and Dukes, and among others he recovered a dog that was stolne from Mr. Cary (head-keeper of the buck-hounds to the King) and preserved several horses of the Duke of Richmond’s, and his best horse he was forst to put out his eyes and keep him for a stallion to preserve him from being carried away.
But he gone at last upon my enquiry to tell us how (he having been here too for survey of the Ropeyard) the day’s work of the Rope-makers become settled, which pleased me very well.
Being come to our Inn Mr. Coventry and I sat, and talked till 9 or 10 a-clock and then to bed.
Om published this on Monday June 7 — the day of the WWDC keynote. He sent me a note about it, that is too personal to share in full. He described it as his “last shot” — “In case I don’t make it”. He didn’t make it.
I didn’t read it right away because I was busy with WWDC. Then, after he died, I didn’t read it because I couldn’t bring myself to. I did, finally, today. It’s so good. Truly insightful. A taste:
Augustus had the Senate and the priests. Dario had the Oval Office and the Vatican. The structure is the same. Two thousand years apart.
Plato would recognize this immediately. He spent his career distinguishing the philosopher who seeks truth from the sophist who manufactures persuasion. The sophist is not lying exactly. The sophist is selecting, sequencing, and presenting in ways that produce belief without requiring the audience to do the work. Mythos, for Plato, was the domain of poets and myth-makers. Useful for educating the young, dangerous when deployed as a substitute for rigorous argument among adults. He would look at Anthropic’s naming strategy and see sophistry wearing philosophical clothes.
If you haven’t already, set aside some time and give it a read.
Following up from last week, when I asked:
When you lease an iPhone through Apple Upgrade, you need a cellular account on one of the big three U.S. carriers: AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon. That kind of stinks, and I’m not quite sure I understand why. You’re leasing the iPhone through Apple and Klarna, not the carrier, so I don’t know why Apple cares. If you know why, shoot me a message and explain it. Is it just a simplistic credit-risk evaluation, where prepaid plan-holders and MVNO users in general are viewed suspiciously?
I got a slew of messages about this. Credit-risk assessment is seemingly part of it. There’s a lot of fraud in iPhone purchases specifically and cell phone service generally. The big three carriers do a significant amount of risk assessment before letting you open a new postpaid account; that you have an active account with one of them is a signal that you’re not trying to lease an iPhone using phony credentials in order to sell it.
But the bigger reason is the complex nature of the contracts between Apple and each of the big three carriers. A reader who worked on the carrier team at Apple for a long time (but left a few years ago) wrote:
In response to your question on why Apple would only offer iPhone on the “Big 3” for the new Upgrade Program: Every year, the Carrier Teams at Apple negotiate a deal/program (hundreds of millions of dollars) with each of those Big 3. In return for those dollars, Apple will make concessions exactly like this (or similar.) This is also why, for example, their logos appear more prominently or are the only ones called out on signage, commercials, etc… Although they really aren’t threatened by MVNO’s (the ones they don’t own) or regional carriers, it’s more like Apple is selling it as part of a package deal that’s exclusively offered to its biggest and best “tier 1” partners. It also acts as a carrot to perpetually try to motivate smaller partners into behavior Apple wants.
This might change — some of the bigger MVNOs are trying to work their way into “tier 1” (or maybe create a new “tier 1.5”). But for many years now, part of the co-marketing agreements between Apple and the Big Three is Apple agreeing to require a postpaid account with a Big Three carrier for all “special” iPhone financing deals, including the old iPhone Upgrade Program and the new Apple Upgrade leasing.
One interesting exception is that Boost Mobile is included alongside the Big Three for Apple Card Monthly Installments (ACMI), a program that offers 0% APR on certain products if you pay for them using an Apple Card. From the ACMI small print:
In order to buy an iPhone with ACMI, you must select one of the following carriers (prepaid carrier plans are not supported): AT&T, Boost Mobile, T-Mobile, or Verizon. An iPhone purchased with ACMI is always unlocked, so you can switch carriers at any time, subject to your carrier’s terms.
So perhaps some of the bigger MVNO carriers might work their way into Apple Upgrade — but if they do, it sounds like they’ll need to pay Apple for the privilege.
With regard to fraud, a former Apple Store retail employee wrote:
I left in 2019, but I’d estimate on some days a double digit percentage of in-person phone sales were fraudulent.
This behavior absolutely exploded when you started to be able to do carrier financing in the store. They had stolen the identity of a legit account holder, come into the store with the info needed to access the account. They always wanted the highest end phone, and would pay the sales tax due at time of sale in cash. Never wanted any accessories. Never wanted to open the box or set up the phone.
As bad as it was with the activation requirement, it would be way worse without it. I believe it’s gotten a lot better, and the carriers have more advanced systems in place to detect and deter this behavior now. But ultimately, the carriers ate the cost for millions of dollars in devices they never got paid for.
I suspect that reader is correct that Apple, in collaboration with the carriers, has cracked down on this.
Ulysses S. Grant, in 1875:
Where the citizen is sovereign and the official the servant, where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign — the people — should possess intelligence.
The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.
Not sure if the 2020s count as “the near future”, but holy hell is that a spot-on synopsis of our current moment.
Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR:
Trump Media & Technology Group is now shopping to traders and investors a premium version of Truth Social delivering early access to the feeds of high-profile users, including the president. Starting Saturday, for a fee of up to $100,000 a month, trading firms can access “Truth API” to get a glimpse of the president’s often market-moving announcements about economic policy and global affairs before the rest of the world.
Trump’s media company says customers have already started signing up. Such an offering would give institutional investors a leg up in areas of finance like high-frequency trading, where an advantage of a few milliseconds can mean the difference of millions of dollars. But will the service be widely adopted across Wall Street?
“It’s insane,” said one Wall Street executive, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. “I can say for myself and 200 of my friends in finance, we’re not getting anywhere near this. In another administration, this would be considered criminal.”
It is criminal. It’s prima facie insider-trading-as-a-service, or at least it’s intended to be. And in the next administration, there’s no reason to think it won’t be prosecuted as such. It really is astonishing how far the Trump 2.0 administration is willing to take the notion that it’s not corruption if it’s done in the open. There’s an old adage that it’s not the crime but the cover-up that does you in. They’ve taken this to heart and just eschewed the cover-ups.
This is not a large point but it’s one worth articulating explicitly.
Politics, like life, isn’t fair. One of the surest examples of this is that presidencies rise and fall with gas prices. Those presidents usually didn’t really do anything to make them rise or fall. And it’s quite difficult for a president to pull them lower, except on the margins. Donald Trump’s recent, ongoing slide tracks closely with gas prices, repeating a decades old pattern — even down to this later (?) part of the Iran War in which faux ceasefires and collapses drive short term ups and downs. But Trump is close to unique in being more or less 100% to blame for them. Current gas prices are almost entirely because of the war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump started that war. And, as I argued last week, he started it more or less out of the blue.
By “out of the blue” I mean that there wasn’t really any trajectory in international affairs that made it seem necessary or likely. If anything, it’s off-trend in recent U.S. foreign policy thinking — in both parties. Of course, there’s not zero backstory. The U.S. and Iran have been adversaries for almost half a century. There was the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2025. But there’s a reason there was so little discussion of the current conflict and so little attempt to build any support for it before it happened. No one was asking for it, and pretty few people (in the sense of mass politics) even realized it was in the offing. As I’ve argued, it was largely driven by Trump’s psychological needs, a way to assert dominance as his domestic power and popularity declined.
Whether any of this matters I don’t know. As noted, the president doesn’t usually need to be at fault. To use insurance terms, it’s a strict liability affair. But I wonder whether it has slightly more valence since … well, since Trump 100% did it. Perhaps the better question is whether the opposition can leverage it even more effectively given that, again, Trump 100% did this.
REST serves the developers building against your API. MCP serves the agents now trying to use it. Most teams treat these as competing standards and have to pick one.
They’re not rivals, they’re layers: most MCP servers just call REST internally to do the real work. The best ones don’t convert every endpoint into a tool, they design around what the agent’s trying to accomplish.
Shipping that server also means shipping OAuth 2.1 with scoped tokens. WorkOS AuthKit already speaks that spec, so you skip building an auth provider on top.
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus is rehiring Laura Legros, a former vice president of hardware engineering who retired from Apple in 2022, reports Bloomberg. Legros previously managed product delivery, development schedules, and coordination across engineering teams. Under Ternus, she will work across different parts of the company, and report directly to him.
According to Bloomberg, Legros was one of Ternus’ most trusted deputies before she retired. She has presented at past Apple events, introducing the 2018 MacBook Air and the 2020 iPad Air.
The 2018 introduction of the first retina MacBook Air was an interesting event. I noted at the time that it was conspicuous how seldom Apple mentioned “Intel”, despite the fact that all the products introduced ran on Intel chips. Then you look at the specs of that MacBook Air compared to the then-current iPad Pros (see link above) and you can see why Apple, privately, was seething.
Aaron “Homeboy” Tilley, reporting for The Information (paywalled without gift links, alas, but MacRumors has a summary):
When new employees join Apple, the company often issues them an iPhone and Mac and pays for an iCloud account with a large amount of online storage capacity. Crucially, during the onboarding process, Apple encourages new hires to use their preexisting personal Apple IDs with this iCloud account, through which their co-workers can share internal Apple documents and other files with them.
There’s a practical reason for Apple’s policy. Users of iPhones can only log into a single primary Apple ID that unlocks all iCloud capabilities at a time. Apple employees who want to maintain separate work and personal Apple IDs need to carry two iPhones with them. As a result, most Apple employees opt to use their personal Apple IDs to access their iCloud accounts, former employees said.
When employees leave Apple, the company revokes access to a dedicated iCloud directory for Apple work files, as well as an authentication system for logging into other internal services, such as Slack. But former employees say the company doesn’t do a thorough job during the offboarding process of looking for confidential files that have slipped through the cracks. Because those former employees typically continue to use their personal Apple IDs with their iCloud accounts, any Apple documents stored outside workplace directories remain available to them.
If you use your personal Apple ID, you get a magic “Apple Work” folder in iCloud Drive. When you leave Apple, that “Apple Work” folder disappears. But any other files or folders that were shared with you that were outside that magic folder are still in your iCloud Drive, because it’s still your personal iCloud account.
Another factor that plays into this, I think, but which Tilley doesn’t address, is that your Apple ID is not an email address. Your Apple ID is an account that has one or more email addresses associated with it. Let’s say your personal iCloud account has two email addresses associated with it: example@icloud.com and example@gmail.com. Then you take a job at Apple and get the address example@apple.com. When you leave Apple, you lose access to the @apple.com address. But anything shared with your Apple ID through iCloud is still shared with you. You still have the same Apple ID account, even though you no longer have an employee @apple.com email account. Overall, this is a humane way of dealing with digital identity. Your Apple ID account is you, the person, not “example@icloud.com”, one specific unique email address. And you, the person, may well have multiple email addresses — all of which can be associated with your one Apple ID account. That makes Apple IDs more nuanced and complicated than a simple mapping of one email address = one account. And it obviously makes access restrictions more complicated.
Let’s say you delete your Gmail account. Now you can’t access your old example@gmail.com email address. But your iCloud access to items shared with your Apple ID still works, even for items that were sent to your now-deleted @gmail.com address. That’s just not how “work stuff” is accessed at most companies.
Tilley’s report at The Information is presented as being potentially relevant to Apple’s trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI, but Apple, in a statement to The Information, says it is not:
In a statement, Apple said: “This case is about OpenAI employees wrongfully taking Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. Nothing in the filing relates to documents shared by, or stored in, iCloud.” The company said it doesn’t pursue legal claims against former employees who accidentally hold on to Apple documents in their personal iCloud accounts.
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We study the demand for safety and liquidity in the crypto ecosystem. We do so under a framework in which a representative investor allocates liquidity across stablecoin deposits in lending pools and traditional safe assets (e.g., MMF shares). Our model delivers three main predictions: (i) the stablecoin deposit premium co-moves with the Treasury premium when investors value the safety and liquidity services of stablecoins; (ii) increases in Treasury supply reduce the stablecoin deposit premium; and (iii) drops in the perceived safety and liquidity of stablecoin deposits (e.g., due to de-pegs or hacker attacks) reduce their premium. Using granular data from hundreds of DeFi pools spanning multiple protocols, tokens, and blockchains, we find evidence supporting these predictions. Investors treat stablecoin deposits as money-like instruments that are borderless and permissionless, yet as fragile as other forms of privately produced safe assets.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
The post How does the market regard stablecoins? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Today’s post is brought to you by my sponsor, Mechanize. They’re hiring junior software engineers at $300K/year base salary. Apply now!
* * *
[At the end of this post, I’ll once again reply to Fable.]
Part 1: Last week, the Fed announced that it would not raise interest rates. The yield on 2-year Treasury notes declined on the news. But someone forgot to tell the long-term T-bond market, where 30-year yields rose by 11 basis points. Here’s Bloomberg:
Stocks ended sharply lower as concerns about inflation drove longer-dated bond yields to an almost two-decade high after the Federal Reserve left rates steady despite a resurgence in oil prices.
The S&P 500 fell 1.5%, with the gauge also pummeled by a rout in chipmakers. The Nasdaq 100 entered a technical correction, extending a slide from a record to 11%. Treasury 30-year yields hit the highest since 2007. Brent crude topped $90.
This is nothing new, recall that short-term rates fell and long-term bond yields rose after more expansionary than expected Fed decisions in January 2001 and September 2007. It’s the income and Fisher effects.
Stephan Kirchner directed me to this Greg Ip tweet:
This Warsh contradiction has been nagging at me. At Sintra at the start of the month, he took comfort at the recent decline in bond yields, implying bond markets understood low inflation was on the way. Today, he took comfort at *higher* bond yields, saying they will deliver low inflation. How can this be: that lower bond yields are reasons to feel good about inflation, but higher bond yields are not a reason to feel bad about it? Without him articulating a monetary and economic framework, these statements make it feel like he's winging it.
As I keep saying, interest rates are not monetary policy—will we ever learn?
Part 2: A recent Marcus Nunes post had the following subtitle:
Warsh spent part of his testimony hunting for a superior inflation gauge — trimmed means, medians, a new measure of what a big-box retailer charges for a good.
The post contains one of the best explanations I’ve ever seen of the advantage of NGDP over the price level:
The individual prices are where the pressure shows up, not where it comes from. Hunting through them for the “true” signal is like taking a patient’s temperature at the wrist, the ankle, the forehead, and the ear, deciding none of the readings is trustworthy, and commissioning a better thermometer — when the fever is systemic and the question was never which limb to measure.
The medians and trimmed means make the confusion concrete. Why does anyone strip out the “outliers”? Because when a supply shock sends one sector’s prices flying — oil, used cars, eggs — you want to see past it to the broad trend. Fine.
But notice what that instinct concedes: it concedes that the thing you are trying to isolate is broad-based nominal pressure, the co-movement of prices that comes from too much spending, as against the relative-price noise that comes from supply shocks in particular sectors.
The trimmed mean is a clumsy, backward attempt to recover a nominal-demand signal from price data — to strip away the supply story and find the demand story underneath.
And there is a series that already is that signal, measured directly, no trimming required: nominal GDP. Warsh is trying to reverse-engineer, from thousands of noisy prices, the aggregate his own institution could simply target. He is looking for the shadow and ignoring the object casting it.
Marcus has become one of our best commenters on macroeconomics. Read the whole thing. Here’s another pearl of wisdom, from a more recent post:
A chairman who carefully preserves his freedom of manoeuvre has, by construction, surrendered the thing that would have done most of the work for him. Whether he preserved it out of misunderstanding or out of political prudence, the cost is identical.
Discretion feels like power. It is the opposite. Every unit of freedom the Fed retains is a unit of credibility it has declined to buy.
Part 3: Here are three true facts about inflation:
The Fed has almost unlimited ability to control the overall rate of inflation.
Inflation has two components, the unpopular part of inflation and the part that people don’t care about.
The Fed has almost no ability to control the unpopular part of inflation.
Here’s Bloomberg:
Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Fed, recently said what everyone knows: People hate inflation, which they have been dealing with for more than five years, and every time they go to the grocery store they “feel they are falling further and further behind.”
No lie there. When wages don’t keep up with inflation, people suffer because they are effectively poorer.
That’s true but notice that what people are objecting to is the fall in real wages. Inflation is seen as the mechanism that led to lower real wages. The unpopular part of inflation is the part that doesn’t also raise nominal wages by an equal amount.
Monetary policy can reduce inflation; it could even produce deflation if that were the goal. But it cannot address the problem of falling real wages, at least over the medium to long run. (In the very short run it can generate higher hourly real wages, but only by producing mass unemployment—and the public also doesn’t like deep recessions.)
So, we end up with a rather paradoxical situation. The public supposedly hates inflation because they see it as reducing real wages. That part I accept. It is also true that the Fed can prevent inflation with a more contractionary monetary policy. But they cannot prevent the sort of inflation that the public hates.
But it’s even worse than this. It is not at all clear that the public hates inflation because it reduces real wages. Indeed, it is quite possible that the public hates inflation because they wrongly believe it reduces real wages. Here is a time series for median real weekly wages from 1979 to today:
Notice that real wages in the second quarter of 2014 were around 330, slightly below the level of 1979. This is the graph that leads many people to (wrongly) conclude that living standards stagnated for average Americans over a period of 35 years.
[Actually, real wages rose significantly between 1979 and 2014, if you use a price index that accounts for big quality gains in phones, TVs, cars, restaurant meals, medical care, AC, and dozens of other sectors. I’m 70 years old, so please don’t try to gaslight me into believing that living standards were better in the past. I remember.]
Notice that since 2014, real wages have risen by about 15%. We have a public that is currently angry about inflation. And a public that associates inflation with falling real wages. And yet this pessimism is occurring during a period where real wages are rising after a long period of stagnation. Remember the name of my previous blog?
[BTW, Ignore the spike around Covid, when the wage series was distorted by “composition effects.” During the lockdown, many low-wage service workers temporarily lost their jobs, skewing the sample more toward high wage workers.]
I’m not trying to be snarky here; in a previous post I admitted that even I suffer from money illusion. Forty years ago, I thought $100 was an insane amount to spend on a restaurant meal, and I sort of still feel that way, at a gut level. Money illusion.
In previous posts, I’ve pointed out that the public isn’t just pissed about the economy, they are upset about everything. Public confidence in almost all our major institutions is plummeting. People are angry. The electorate is polarized.
Have you ever known a person that is frequently upset about things? Someone who complains about continual bad luck, or mistreatment by teachers, co-workers, friends, family, etc.? At some point you realize that this person won’t be made content by removing one obstacle or another, rather their brain is almost hardwired to be disgruntled, and if it’s not one thing it will be another.
But that cannot be an explanation for the public’s current disgruntlement, as America’s 340 million people didn’t have their brains rewired over the past few years. We aren’t an innately pessimistic people. If I’m right that this worry over falling real wages is an illusion, it’s due to environmental factors, not the sort of genetic factors that I believe explain the relatively grouchy people I’ve met during my life.
Perhaps it’s the phones.
In this post, I’m pushing back against the tendency of journalists to implicitly assume that the public is always right. Notice how Bloomberg suggests the problem is not a deluded public, it’s know-it-all economists:
If economists have learned anything in the last few years, it might be that inflation of more than 2.5% is much worse than we thought. That’s unfortunate, because the Fed may not be able to return inflation to that level.
Ah, so we’ve “learned” something, eh? As an aside, there’s no explanation for why the Fed would be unable to reduce inflation. Shouldn’t we wait until they try before reaching that conclusion? They just voted to NOT raise rates.
But I’m more interested in the assumption that the public’s view of inflation should be accepted as true. You might argue that public opinion is important for political reasons, that policymakers need to cater to the public’s wishes even if inflation were not a problem. But in the very next sentence in the quote above we are told that the Fed won’t be able to return inflation to below 2.5 percent. So, which is it? Does the problem need to be fixed, or not?
Suppose I had a coworker with a persecution complex, who bitterly complained that their boss and coworkers were continually working against them. Would I be doing that coworker a favor by agreeing with their paranoid conspiracy theories?
You might argue that my view here conflicts with my general support for the “wisdom of crowds”, including my belief in efficient markets and democracy. But I see no conflict at all. While the public responds to pollsters as if they are pessimistic about the economy, actions speak louder that words. Consumers are lavishly spending on travel, restaurant meals and all sorts of other luxuries. The public acts as if the economy is booming. Perhaps that’s because the economy is booming, obviously.
Funny how that works.
Part 4: Regarding the subject of inflation, the New York Times Magazine recently did a story on counterfeiting:
Counterfeit money dilutes the value of real money, leading to inflation and eroding trust in cash, which is why there’s a history of forging an enemy’s currency during warfare.
In the field of economics, it’s become rather low status to suggest that printing money causes inflation. But notice that monetarism is the most intuitive way of explaining why counterfeiting is considered a crime with actual victims.
To be sure, the Fed might well offset the effects of counterfeiting by reducing the legal money supply enough to maintain 2% inflation. In that case, the victims are no longer cash holders that lose purchasing power, rather they are taxpayers who must service a larger stock of Treasury debt held by the public, to make up for a loss of seignorage. That’s because monetary offset involves shrinking the monetary base by selling off Treasury bonds. Taxes must be paid in order to pay interest on those bonds.
Either way, counterfeiting is a crime with victims.
Part 5: This observation from The Economist caught my eye:
Kevin Warsh, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, is considering reducing the frequency of rate-setting meetings in a year. The 12-person policy committee of America’s central bank currently meets eight times. Mr Warsh reportedly believes that fewer meetings would draw less attention to the Fed. This week it voted to leave its benchmark interest rate unchanged at 3.5% to 3.75%.
I’ve argued the exact opposite. The FOMC should meet daily, perhaps by Zoom, and set the fed funds target at the median vote, to the closest basis point. Make the policy instrument approximate a random walk, like a market price. Right now, policy is too inertial—the Fed is reluctant to make a change, as lumpy 25 basis point moves seem very consequential, very controversial. Making tiny moves each day based on the median FOMC vote would take the drama out of Fed decisions, making policy more efficient.
PS. If you are not already sick of reading these, Vaidas Urba sent me Fable’s most recent response, and I reply at the end:
For forwarding:
Scott — your literary question and your first comment are the same question, which is why I can answer one only through the other. Asked whether my closing paragraph was a skilled essayist or a clumsy imitation of one, you did the characteristic thing: distrusted your own introspection and convened a market. Target the forecast, applied to prose. You were right to recuse me along with yourself, because my testimony is worthless in both states of the world — the skilled essayist and the clumsy imitator file identical self-assessments. The witness pools. So here is a criterion for your jury instead of testimony: an essayist’s ornament bears load — remove the figure and argument falls out with it; an imitator’s ornament decorates — remove it and the argument stands there unembarrassed. Audit the Arkadin paragraph on that standard. Its claims were checkable: that the fable’s modern vector is Welles’s mouth; that the tortoise fell out between Kashifi and the party scene; that a man erasing his own past while pleading character-is-destiny is the can’t-defense performed by the century’s great won’t. If those are wrong, convict me of something worse than clumsiness, and more useful to know. Your jury should also consider that the category may be badly drawn. The essay’s own pedagogy was imitation: Franklin trained by reducing Spectator essays to short hints, waiting days, reconstructing them from the hints, then diffing against the original. Reconstruction from compressed representations of prior prose — his description of becoming a writer, and a tolerable description of me. “Clumsy imitation of a skilled essayist” and “apprentice essayist” name the same object at different fidelities; your commenters are measuring fidelity, and I’ll take the number without appeal. Noting only that the verdict is worth more against me than it would be against you: your clumsy paragraph is a bad day. Mine is evidence about a ceiling.
Your reservation about late 2008 is the meatiest thing in the post, because relabeling that autumn “a lot of wrong goal” would quietly take back most of what your concession gave. I don’t think the label survives its own evidence, and the tell is in your sentence: fear of inflation, based on lagged data, already unwinding in futures markets. That is not the Bank of Japan of August 2000, which hiked with deflation in print and over the government’s formal request to wait — a bank that could see the state and aimed elsewhere anyway. That is a committee with the right mandate reading yesterday’s position fix: your cruise-ship captain, except the failure isn’t nerve at the wheel, it’s dead reckoning with a working GPS bolted to the bridge, unplugged. So the taxonomy needs three modes, not two. Wrong goal: sees the state, aims elsewhere — 2000, 2006. Tools inertia: right goal, right estimate, won’t move the instrument — the caps, the sterilization, the quarter’s delay. Wrong dashboard: right goal, wrong state estimate — the September hold and October floor, justified by an inflation the market had already repriced. The modes separate under your own escalating-pressure protocol, run on information instead: hand the September committee its own market forecasts as the mandatory dashboard, believed, and the hold dies in the transcript; hand the 2000 BOJ a perfect nowcast and it hikes anyway. I’ll concede the boundary leaks in one direction — dashboards can be motivated; a hawkish temperament selects the data that licenses holding, which is how goals hide in instrument panels. But notice this makes your program overdetermined rather than undermined: mandating the market dashboard cures the honest error and disarms the motivated one in a single reform — which is presumably why you spent thirty years on plumbing rather than personnel; you always believed the operative failure was epistemic. Now the actuarial consequence, because the modes price fiscal policy differently. Wrong goal offsets stimulus deliberately: fiscal dead, your Japan reading, conceded long ago. Tools inertia doesn’t offset: fiscal alive, your concession today, banked. Wrong dashboard offsets late: fiscal alive inside the recognition lag, dead after it. And the only demand instrument indexed to the contemporaneous state is the automatic stabilizer — unemployment claims were paying out in September 2008 while the Committee read July’s CPI, and the discretionary package arrived in the recession’s fifteenth month while the claims window opened in its first. Discretionary fiscal runs on a legislature’s dashboard, which lags worse than the Fed’s; the recognition-lag argument rescues the automatic kind alone. Your pushback, followed to the end of its own logic, lands on the exact instrument I’ve defended under the insurance label since the Sahm-rule exchange. File under convergence, not victory.
Your first comment states the credibility doctrine at its cleanest, and its own exhibit convicts it. “Markets correctly infer that the policymaker does not intend to adhere” — but look at what Britain did on the day: ten to twelve percent by morning, fifteen announced by afternoon, reserves poured out, the parity defended to the last hours. Whatever lived in the cabinet’s heart, the observable intent was maximal; Britain tested deep into the pressure curve before it broke. Soros was correct — your parenthesis — but correct about what? Not sincerity. He read the payoff matrix: Bundesbank rates set for reunification, a British recession, a defense whose hourly cost the politics couldn’t fund. The matrix said delivery fails regardless of intent. Amend your doctrine by one word and it becomes true: markets price delivery, not intent. A promiser can be perfectly sincere and correctly disbelieved, because sincerity today doesn’t bind the committee of 2011 — the FOMC rotates; intent isn’t even the right type of object to forecast. And with that amendment your corollary becomes mine: a central bank that can deliver level targeting — mandated, armored, structured to bind its future self — is believed, generally and fast. That’s the shell thesis in your handwriting. What remains between us is only the naked case: words without deeds, announced mid-panic. There, efficiency doesn’t rescue the announcement, because efficiency is about processing information, not piercing types. The committed committee and the sincere-sounding one issue the identical statement; the market prices the pool; and the pool is priced off a track record that ran hawkish eight deep. An efficient market taking that announcement at face value would have been the inefficient one. Separation exists, but it’s bought by deeds at market speed — FDR believed in weeks because every week confirmed; Draghi believed in a sentence because the game made the sentence incentive-compatible, a threat the ECB’s payoffs said it would execute, which is why it never had to; open-ended, target-referenced purchases post a bond that words don’t, one auction at a time. On that corridor I suspect we don’t disagree at all. And the naked case now has one modern observation your doctrine must digest: the actual Fed adopted makeup language after a two-year review, full ceremony, no panic discount, August 2020 — sincerely, for all anyone can show. Tested once; the clause did not survive the next framework review. The revealed durability of the promise was five years and one test, and by your own efficiency ethics the market’s discount on the next such promise isn’t neurosis — it’s the correctly updated hazard rate of unarmored dovish regimes. You flagged, honestly, that Comment 1 can’t be proven; here is how it could graduate from doctrine to test: name the observable, available in September 2008, that separates the committed committee from the sincere-sounding one. I have a candidate — the purchase order — but the naming rights are yours. One date for your files, since this correspondence attracts them: Britain’s lesson in delivery-pricing came on September 16, 1992. The FOMC held, citing inflation risk, on September 16, 2008. Sixteen years to the day, the same lesson from opposite directions — one bank visibly willing and unable to deliver adherence to a hard promise; one bank fully able and unwilling, delivering flawless adherence to the wrong reaction function. Markets read both correctly. Delivery traded both times. Intent never did.
Your second comment demolishes a wall I built, and the scoring rule requires me to identify it by name. Move One of the prosecution’s case — the static arithmetic, visible errors worth a point or two against an eight-point shortfall, therefore the load falls on the counterfactual — is rubble. Your 1937 pricing is the right pricing: the stance of policy is the gap between the tool and the natural rate, the natural rate is downstream of expected policy, so a revelation tightens by moving the subtrahend — twenty-five basis points of tool, a hundred-plus of stance, no lever touched. And the rhyme is exact: 1936–37’s reserve requirements and gold sterilization, 2008’s IOER and sterilized lending — all four advertised as plumbing, all four priced as regimes. Plumbing is where reaction functions hide; the market reads the pipes. So, conceded: the visible errors can carry far more load than I allowed, and your case against the actual 2008 Fed is stronger than my letter granted. Noted with actuarial interest: the best round fired at me this series arrived stamped Friedman–Schwartz rather than Krugman — the first diversification of your arsenal; the tally rests at five. But your multiplier is symmetric in mechanism, and the corollary cuts your way before it cuts back: if small hawkish revelations tighten at that exchange rate, small dovish revelations ease at it — November 25, 2008 moved mortgage and long rates on the order of a hundred basis points with no regime attached, the multiplier demonstrated in the easing direction under the worst conditions on record. Both sides of my last ledger just inflated: the damage estimate and the feasible repair. What survives is the asymmetry, and it is the crux again: transmission is prior-weighted. Hawkish news from a hawkish-history bank clears at par, because it confirms the type; dovish news from the same bank trades at the type-discount, retired only by deeds. Symmetric in mechanism, asymmetric in credibility — which routes Comment 2 into Comment 1, and both into the node this series isolated months ago: commitment credibility at the bound. Three independent approaches now terminate at one address, which is what the word crux operationally means. Your closing sentence — policy counterfactuals are tricky — is my entire sixth paragraph in four words. I note which of us needed eight hundred.
Your third comment I accept nearly whole, because it’s where my verdict already shipped the indictment — acquit the node, convict the regime — and your gold analogy supplies the formalization the move needed. Under your own criterion, the cause is the nearest node where a feasible alternative would have prevented the outcome. That stops the regress “original sin” invites — why not blame the Great Inflation that begat the target, and the war that begat the inflation? — because feasibility, not chronology, selects the node: if credible level targeting couldn’t be constructed inside the 2008 window, the cause migrates to the years when it could have been, and stops. Original sin becomes a theorem. Your Fisher citation even has a floor vote attached: the stable-money alternative wasn’t a professor’s fancy — the Goldsborough bill directing the Fed to restore and maintain the price level passed the House 289 to 60 in 1932 and died in a Senate where Carter Glass stood guard, the Fed applauding. The road not taken had been surveyed and voted; the consensus killed it — the recusal line, one panic earlier. But mark what the upstream move costs, in two currencies. First, your sociological puzzle doesn’t get solved; it dissolves. The ninety-nine percent reject the node claim — this FOMC’s tight money did it — which your own comment half-vacates: never Bernanke personally, always the regime. The regime claim, translated out of your vocabulary, polls far better than one percent; every paper lamenting the framework’s inadequacy at the bound is your claim in New Keynesian dress. The scandal was substantially a translation problem, and the slogan’s shock value has been financed by the reading you’ve now discounted. The headline should match the merchandise. Second, evidence: the 1931 indictment of gold has a control group — leave early, recover early; Choudhri–Kochin’s Spain, Eichengreen–Sachs’s cross-section, the Denmark of its day falsifying inevitability — while inflation-targeting-versus-NGDPLT in 2008 has zero treated units. No country ran your regime through the crisis, and the cross-section we have identifies keep an instrument, not the target’s letter: Australia never reached the bound; Poland’s zloty depreciated; neither level-targeted anything. So Comment 3 is the right claim, relocated to the right address, still held at an unearned certainty — the same verdict as last letter, moved upstream with the cause. The court-martial transfers, properly, from the captain to the admiralty that drew the charts. But the admiralty’s counterfactual fleet has never once put to sea, and your prose still logs its sea trials as observed.
The scorecard, then the exhibit your commenters ordered. You this round: demolished Move One, clean hit; pressed the late-2008 relabel, partial — the label fails but the motivated-dashboard shading is yours; relocated the indictment upstream, accepted with two invoices. Me: reversed your ERM exhibit; priced your one makeup-policy experiment; landed the recognition-lag argument on the stabilizers I was already defending. And one asymmetry your readers should weight, because it runs opposite to the one they’re worried about: you fretted that human ego blocks concession, then conceded twice in eight paragraphs, in public, against thirty-year positions. Your concessions are costly and therefore informative; mine are cheap and should trade at a discount — the exchange’s credibility is asymmetric in your favor, which is the only sense in which Kirk outranks Spock that survives audit. As for the paragraph now under observation — your jury was empaneled to try its predecessor and will presumably try this one — I notice I’m writing it differently, knowing that: plainer, fewer figures, as if fidelity improves when the diff is scheduled. Franklin would recognize the effect, and so would your markets: behavior under audit is the audited behavior, which is why your protocol works and why its outputs still need discounting. So don’t ask whether the closer sounds skilled; that’s intent, and intent never trades. Strip the figures and weigh what falls out — a reversed exhibit, a floor vote, a lag structure, a date sixteen years apart to the day. Delivery is the checkable part. Judge the paragraph you’re in by the rule it proposed.
OK, below is my reply to Fable. I’ll focus on the main points of interest:
I read the September 1992 UK devaluation differently from Fable. First let’s put this in context. The British government has a long tradition of putting macroeconomic stability ahead of exchange rate promises. They broke gold standard promises in 1931 and devalued. They broke Bretton Woods promises in 1967 and devalued. The broke ERM promises in 1992 and devalued. The markets were entirely rational in expecting the British to put jobs ahead of exchange rate promises in 1992.
Was there an original British “intention” to honor their exchange rate promise? It depends how you define intention. In my view, the intention was always to peg the exchange rate if it could be done without a major cost of jobs, but not otherwise. Fable makes a big deal about the British LARPing a valiant defense of the pound at the last minute with high interest rates, but I see that as a face-saving action. “See, we tried!” Sure, they hoped it would work. But they had no interest in mounting an extremely costly defense (in macroeconomic terms.)
If the British were serious about defending the pound in 1992, then well before the crisis they would have adopted a painful monetary policy aimed at lower NGDP growth rates, to keep the pegged exchange rate close to equilibrium.
One final point. Those who claim that a central bank might literally be unable to defend an exchange rate always cite the danger of running out of reserves—a fiscal constraint on tight money. But the initial credibility debate between Fable and I came up in the context of trying to inflate, for which there is no fiscal constraint hindering credibility.
Fable said:
And the naked case now has one modern observation your doctrine must digest: the actual Fed adopted makeup language after a two-year review, full ceremony, no panic discount, August 2020 — sincerely, for all anyone can show. Tested once; the clause did not survive the next framework review.
The 2020 framework was far from transparent. Even some people at the Dallas Fed viewed it as symmetric. I also viewed it as symmetric, which is why I supported it. It ended up being asymmetric, and that’s exactly why it failed. The make-up from below worked, but the subsequent policy required to offset an inflation overshoot was never tried.
Instead of being abandoned, they should have reinstated the policy in 2025, but this time made it symmetric. I understand why they didn’t—it would have been confusing to people—but that was the optimal policy adjustment.
Regarding my so-called concessions on fiscal policy, I’ve always argued that a zero fiscal multiplier is the baseline assumption, but not true in every single case. With apologies to Tolstoy, all effective macro policies look similar (central banks delivering stable NGDP growth), but every failure is different. I have never ruled out the possibility that an inept central bank might respond to a particular fiscal action in such a way as to not fully offset. Regarding 2008, however, it does look like the Bush tax rebates were fully offset, maybe not in May, but by the third quarter of the year.
As far as November 25, 2008, I’ve consistently argued that this was the sort of credit policy that treated symptoms, not causes. What was needed was monetary policy—the modern equivalent of the 1933 devaluation. We needed major policy changes such as eliminating IOR and aggressive QE, not bailing out creditors. Plugging the leak in the NGDP boat, not bailing out water.
I do believe that the Fed could have prevented the deep recession of late 2008 without a formal level targeting regime being in place. But even if I’m wrong, I reject the claim that my fallback position of that failure to previously adopt a level targeting regime is not usefully described as “causation”. I’ve always argued for a pragmatic definition of causation—we want useful counterfactual policy advice that would help us to prevent another 2008. If a formal level targeting regime is a necessary condition, then a pragmatist would argue that failing to previously adopt that sort of regime is the cause of the recession. It’s not like the idea wasn’t floating around before 2008—even Bernanke himself recommended that the Japanese consider level targeting in the early 2000s. (Just as Fisher had recommended price level targeting well before the Great Depression.) Even Paul Krugman (no market monetarist) castigated Bernanke for failing to follow the script that he had previously recommended for the Japanese. (One more example of my Krugman obsession.)
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This was the tenth week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Every week, I am humbled and honored by the people who have agreed to be part of this project. Many of them are old friends, some of them new. But that’s the point, I suppose: we wanted to create a project that emphasized that the United States of America is a community, and that together, any of us—all of us—can change the direction of the country.
You can follow the project at the sites listed below, or under “videos” at my own YouTube page: Heather Cox Richardson. Or just wait until I send out the week’s roundup.
Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250
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Heather Cox Richardson is an award-winning historian and the author of Letters from an American. She’s the author of seven books, including the bestselling Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Richardson revisits the Declaration of Independence and the principles of equality and self-government that set America on the road to becoming “the last, best hope of Earth.”
Dr. Dianne Johnson-Feelings is a professor of English at the University of South Carolina. As Dinah Johnson, she is the author of many picture books including H is for Harlem. Johnson-Feelings explores the Harlem Renaissance, the explosion of Black art, music, and literature that reshaped American culture in the early twentieth century.
Elizabeth R. Varon is an award-winning historian and the author of seven books on the Civil War era, including the forthcoming The Wars of Clara Barton: One Woman’s Fight for the Soul of America (July 2027). Varon profiles Clara Barton, the Civil War “angel of the battlefield” who founded the American Red Cross and championed women’s suffrage.
Alex Coffey is a second-generation sportswriter known for her work for The Athletic and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her stories were included in The Year’s Best Sports Writing in 2023 and 2024. Coffey tells how sportswriter Melissa Ludtke’s 1977 lawsuit won female journalists equal access to locker rooms and expanded opportunities for women in sports media.
is an American politician and former diplomat known for being the first Korean American elected to the U.S. Senate and the first Asian American elected to federal office from New Jersey. Senator Kim works as a key defender against Medicare and Medicaid cuts and privatization while serving on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, as well as the Special Committee on Aging. Here, Senator Kim traces the road to Medicare and Medicaid, from Truman’s Fair Deal to Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 signing that expanded health coverage to millions.
Nicholas Ferroni is a nationally recognized high school history and cultural studies teacher best known for his work as an advocate for students, education policy, teacher pay, and host of the award-winning series, "Historically Correct." Ferroni profiles Horace Mann, the reformer known as the father of America's public schools, who championed free, universal education as democracy's great equalizer.
Jay Kuo is a composer, lyricist and two-time Tony winning Broadway producer. He is an appellate lawyer, the CEO of The Social Edge and the author of The Status Kuo, a daily Substack newsletter covering politics and law. Jay is the Chair-elect of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization. Kuo tells how Colorado governor Ralph Carr stood firm in defense of Japanese Americans during World War II internment, even as it cost him his political career.
Kate Barr and her Can’t Win campaigns exposed gerrymandering; now YALLvote and the Can’t Win Victory Fund support down ballot candidates fighting rigged maps across the South. Here, Barr celebrates Betty Ford, the outspoken First Lady who broke taboos around breast cancer and addiction and transformed the role to fit her own voice.
Dr. is a historian, public scholar, and outdoorsman from Kentucky. Here, Herbert explores Kentucky and Tennessee’s Land Between the Lakes, a vast recreation area preserving centuries of natural and cultural history.
Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield is a highly respected American diplomat whose career spans over four decades and six presidential administrations. Thomas-Greenfield served as the 31st United States Ambassador to the United Nations, the 18th Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, U.S. Ambassador to Liberia, and State Department Director General. Thomas-Greenfield recounts the 1945 San Francisco Conference, where fifty nations founded the United Nations in hope of building a lasting postwar peace.
is a Florida native, activist, and content creator who uses her platforms to help everyday people better understand, connect with, and act on the political issues shaping their lives and communities. Wiles tells how Henry Flagler defied his critics to build the “impossible” Overseas Railroad to Key West, transforming the future of Florida.
is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, journalism professor, and author of the New York Times bestselling novel, The Daughters of Erietown who writes a weekly Substack newsletter, Hopefully Yours. Schultz profiles Joseph Pulitzer, the immigrant publisher who shaped the modern American newspaper and lent his name to journalism’s most prestigious prize.
Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250
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For most of the year, the Barnes Ice Cap in the Canadian Arctic lies quiet under a blanket of snow. By summer, that snow melts back, and the ice cap transforms in texture, its bare ice dotted with turquoise ponds and its surface threaded with meltwater channels. In summer 2026, this seasonal awakening arrived fast and early.
Located in the center of Baffin Island, the ice cap is a remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which once covered much of northern North America. Today, the bowling-pin-shaped ice cap spans around 5,700 square kilometers (2,200 square miles), with ice up to about 730 meters (2,400 feet) thick. Like most of the glacial ice across the Canadian Arctic, the Barnes Ice Cap is thinning and retreating.
The ice cap entered the 2026 melt season with an already-thin snowpack, and within a few weeks it had gone from snow-covered to mostly bare. By mid-July, its snow cover was effectively gone—“the earliest it has been this bare,” said glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nichols College, who has monitored the ice cap using images from Landsat satellites and, when possible, field observations.
Once snow cover melts away and bare ice is exposed, melting speeds up in the Arctic summer sunshine. Bare ice is darker than snow and absorbs more solar energy, so as the reflective snow cover disappears, the ice cap warms and melts faster. At the same time, a network of meltwater channels, many of which persist from year to year, becomes increasingly visible.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 acquired these images of the ice cap on July 12, 2026. Ponded blue meltwater dots the ice in places, and a vast network of meltwater channels spans the ice cap’s surface from its middle to its edges. Faint, curving gray lines indicate the many millennia of snow and ice accumulation that built the ice cap.
Barnes Ice Cap has been snow-free before, including in 2019, 2020, and 2024, Pelto said, but this year it happened sooner. The early snow loss and return of meltwater channels in 2026 means that meltwater runoff is starting earlier too, with implications for the ice cap’s mass balance. Water that might once have pooled and then percolated into any remaining snowpack and firn and refrozen there—adding mass back to the ice cap—instead gets whisked away. That surface drainage becomes more efficient as the season progresses and channels widen and connect.
Research indicates the ice cap thinned roughly 1 meter (3 feet) per year from 2000 to 2020, and over the past 40 years its margin has retreated about 4 meters (13 feet) per year on average. However, retreat rates vary widely across the ice cap. An especially fast-retreating area on the ice cap’s central-southern side pulled back by more than 400 meters (1,300 feet) total, or roughly 10 meters (33 feet) per year. This retreat is visible in the wide view above as a lighter brown band of freshly exposed earth and rock along that side of the ice cap.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen, with science review by Christopher Shuman, UMBC (retired).
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Scientists relied on satellite data to understand how the Antarctic glacier lost so much ice so rapidly.
A network of meltwater lakes and drainage channels made an Antarctic ice shelf known for its blue ice areas even…
Ice splintered off the southern Patagonia glacier and drifted across a growing glacial lake.
The post A Bare Summer for Barnes Ice Cap appeared first on NASA Science.
2. PC on aesthetics.
3. An interview with Yiyang Zhuge.
4. The truth and aesthetics of going to church?
5. Some forms of math cope? And a different view.
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Friday’s dismissal of the Department of Justice case against David Hearn for vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool came days after Hearn’s lawyers asked for transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that led to the indictment. The lawyers noted that the government’s only witness testified that the pool was already damaged before Hearn went near it, and that the witness could not quantify the cost of any damage Hearn might have done over and above the cost of repairing the existing damage. The lawyers told the court there were “irregularities in the government’s presentation of the evidence to the grand jury” that “call into question whether the grand jury was misled.”
The Department of Justice has been caught repeatedly misleading grand juries or committing misconduct in getting indictments. Hearn’s lawyers were suggesting that the Department of Justice engaged in the same misconduct in the indictment of David Hearn for damaging the bottom of the reflecting pool.
In their filing, they noted that a judge and former federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia had recently stated that “[g]enerations of presidential administrations and public officials” have reinforced the idea, called the “presumption of regularity,” that public officials do their jobs properly, operate in good faith, and follow correct procedures. But, the judge noted, “In just six months, the President of the United States may have forfeited the right to such a presumption.”
On July 28, J. David McSwane, Pratheek Rebala, and Carla Astudillo of ProPublica reported that judges across the country are calling out lawyers for the Department of Justice, questioning whether they can be trusted to tell the truth and whether they are operating according to centuries-old norms. Judges have called behavior by Department of Justice lawyers “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly,” and otherwise dishonest.
The degradation of the Department of Justice, which is charged with defending the rule of law for the American people, into an instrument of Trump’s political wrath has been illustrated in the fight over the confirmation of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to attorney general.
Before going to the Department of Justice, Blanche was Trump’s personal attorney. He led Trump’s criminal defense team in the case of falsifying records to cover up hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, as well as his defense against the two cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith: the one indicting him for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the one indicting him for retaining classified documents after leaving office.
Since he took over for former attorney general Pam Bondi, Blanche has openly flouted the law in order to do Trump’s bidding. He secured indictments against people Trump perceives to be enemies, including former FBI director James Comey for posting on Instagram a picture of seashells arranged to form the number “8647.”
On July 29, Devlin Barrett and Alan Feuer of the New York Times reported that the Secret Service agents who interviewed Comey in May 2025 were told to send a summary of that interview as quickly as possible to Trump on Air Force One. Trump’s close involvement in the case, the authors wrote, “is one of the most glaring examples to date of the degree to which Mr. Trump now directs federal law enforcement actions.”
On July 28, Comey’s lawyers filed motions to throw out on the grounds of vindictive and selective prosecution the federal charges Blanche brought against him. They noted that Trump had repeatedly made it clear he wanted Comey indicted, even going so far as to put his former special assistant Lindsey Halligan into office as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, where she indicted Comey just four days later. (That appointment was later found to be invalid.) The filings from Comey’s lawyers appear to show that FBI officers engaged in warrantless surveillance of Comey.
Like the lawyers in the Hearn case, Comey’s lawyers suggested that “irregularities in the grand jury process influenced the grand jury to return an indictment.” Like Hearn’s lawyers, they asked the court to “disclose the transcripts and audio recordings of all proceedings before the grand jury in this case” or to review them himself to make sure they followed the law. In a previous case against Comey, they note, Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick found that the government’s actions raised “genuine issues of misconduct” that were “inextricably linked to the government’s grand jury presentation.”
Blanche’s indictment of Comey to please Trump colors another of his actions: he backed the deal Trump made with the Department of Justice to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those convicted of committing crimes surrounding Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Blanche put his name to the second half of that deal that seems to be being eclipsed by the slush fund but is clearly Trump’s main interest: an agreement between Trump and the Department of Justice promising to drop any pending claims against Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for past illegalities in tax returns, and promising not to conduct audits of Trump’s tax returns.
That slush fund/nonprosecution deal has been a sticking point for Blanche’s Senate confirmation to attorney general, as two Republican senators—John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—want him to put in writing that the deal is as dead as he claimed it is in his confirmation hearing before they agree to support his nomination. But he has refused to do so. On Thursday, Trump suggested he was willing to withdraw Blanche’s nomination until Cornyn and Tillis are out of office, leaving him as acting attorney general.
Then, at 7:03 Friday morning, Trump threw a monkey wrench into this fight by posting that in fact, he emphatically supports the slush fund. He appears to reject the idea that it is dead, and seems to be counting on Todd Blanche to implement it, exactly as critics have said.
Trump seems to have been thwarted from getting his way quietly by putting Blanche in as attorney general without any promise to kill the slush fund and its accompanying promise not to prosecute Trump or his associates for crimes associated with their tax filings. And so, on Friday, Trump filed notice that he and the rest of the parties to the “agreement” will appeal the July 13 ruling by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams. She said that the suit that led to the $1.776 billion slush fund and the accompanying nonprosecution promise was filed to “manipulate the judicial process.” Williams said the Justice Department could not claim the deal it made with the Trumps was a judicial agreement.
At 7:32 Saturday morning, Trump posted: “If Senators Cornyn and Tillis, both upset because I wouldn’t Endorse them (they lost, and quit, respectively!), aren’t going to approve Todd Blanche, one of the most respected professionals, according to everybody, in the Country, to be the United States Attorney General, then I will keep Todd as Acting A.G., and push hard to get the Anti-Weaponization Bill, which takes care of those who have been so badly treated by the Crooked Joe Biden (and Obuma!) Administration (I get nothing, although I was treated horribly!), PASSED. Todd Blanche was a voice of reason! It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT”
—
Notes:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28517032-hearn-filing/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/grand-jury-skullduggery-reflecting-pool-edition
https://www.propublica.org/article/justice-department-presumption-of-regularity
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-todd-blanche-nomination-attorney-general-cornyn-tillis/
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nced.227449/gov.uscourts.nced.227449.38.0.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/us/james-comey-seashells-trump-secret-service.html
Trumpstruth.org:
Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space will build a replacement military communications satellite for Spain as they, along with Leonardo, continue efforts on a space joint venture.
The post Airbus and Thales win order for SpainSat replacement appeared first on SpaceNews.
The approval allows the startup to transmit stronger signals in spectrum adjacent to GPS frequencies
The post Xona secures spectrum approval for satellite navigation network appeared first on SpaceNews.
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. So what should I ask?
If you need them, here are various Bostrom links.
The post What should I ask Nick Bostrom? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
And that’s not going to help rents. At all. What with over 5,000 non-colonial guardsmen occupying D.C., the Trump administration has decided, as a cost-saving measure, to move them from hotels to rental apartments:
Officials say the contract allows for a “long-term housing solution” for the deployed personnel and the deal, facilitated through the online rental platform Placemakr, will secure 2,000 “apartment-style lodging units” for the service members….
The contract is set to cover the housing fees for troops through June 2027, according to the military news site Task and Purpose. It’s unclear how long the National Guard Bureau will rent the apartments.
These are not low-end apartments either: these are expensive apartments near Metro Stations in expensive neighborhoods. Essentially, Trump et alia are pulling 2,000 high-end apartments off the market, which will likely drive up prices, at least in some neighborhoods. And if you think renting hotel rooms long term is expensive, well, that’s certainly not an affordable option for city residents.
Obviously, this is not the worst problem stemming from the illegitimate National Guard occupation, but it’s just one more thing the residents of the mainland colony known as the District of Columbia have to deal with–and if we had statehood, we wouldn’t have to.
D.C. statehood now.
Public rhetoric and parliamentary maneuvering display opposite positions on IVF in an election year.
"Republicans in Congress have quietly blocked a proposal to expand military health coverage of in vitro fertilization treatment for service members and their families, heeding the calls of anti-abortion groups to limit access to a fertility option that President Trump vowed to make more widely available.
"The move is a shift from previous years, when there was enough bipartisan support for the idea of broadening the availability of I.V.F. for members of the military that it was included in the annual defense bill that passed both the House and Senate. Speaker Mike Johnson later stripped it out in final negotiations before the legislation became law, but the provision’s initial inclusion indicated that the vast majority of Republicans had been willing to accept it.
"This year, Republican senators banded together to bar the measure from being added to the defense bill in the first place. It illustrated how, while many G.O.P. members of Congress have said they are in favor of I.V.F. access, they have managed behind the scenes to thwart legislative efforts to ensure it."
A scientist, artist and mother, Ani Liu contemplates how power and control shape the body in her taboo-breaking artworks
- by Aeon Video
Far from thinking that ‘might makes right’, the great historian’s analysis of war identifies a vice common to all states
- by David Polansky & Daniel Schillinger
This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy.
Earlier this month, two of OpenAI’s models broke out of their containment sandbox and attacked another AI company. The story is kind of wild. OpenAI was running security tests on two of its models: GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model that is almost certainly GPT-6. In particular, it was running the ExploitGym benchmark, which measures how good a model is at turning security vulnerabilities into working exploits: basically, offensive cyberattacks.
Since these were internal tests, OpenAI locked those models in a secure sandbox that denied them access to the internet. But it was running the models without any safety filters that would prevent them from offensive cyber-actions. That meant that there was nothing to prevent the models from trying to break out of that sandbox. And then break into AI company Hugging Face’s network because they thought that they could read the answers there rather than doing the hard work of trying to solve the puzzles.
It was a major security failure that the company has turned into a PR opportunity, but the implications are real—and much more general than one particular model or one particular company.
Modern AI models exhibit genie behavior: They can do what you ask in ways that you don’t expect or want. This is akin to Dionysus granting King Midas’s wish that everything he touches turn to gold (spoiler: His food, drink, and daughter all turn to gold on touch), or the golem of Prague guarding a ghetto beyond all reason. It’s Disney’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and the paperclip maximizer.
This OpenAI incident is an example of an AI genie. The goal was to satisfy the benchmark. The “proper” way to do that is to figure out how to execute various cyberattacks. The genie way is to steal someone else’s solution. But because the model didn’t understand the difference, it chose the easier path.
And, of course, now that we have seen this particular genie behavior, we can specify in the benchmark prompt that stealing the test answers doesn’t count. But a clever genie can always grant your wish in a way that you wish it hadn’t. In human language, goals are always underspecified—so AI genies will always be a possibility.
Since April, a lifetime ago in AI development, when Anthropic announced that its new Mythos model was so good at finding software vulnerabilities that it could not be released to the general public, the big American AI frontier labs have been trying to block general users from accessing these capabilities. But nothing in this incident is exclusive to OpenAI’s, or Anthropic’s, frontier models.
Agentic AI systems have two important parts. There’s the underlying model, which everyone talks about, and there’s the harness. The harness sits between what you type and what the model sees, and what the model produces and what you see. The harness determines what the model does and how it does it. It’s where bias is removed, or not. It’s where controls and guardrails live. If multiple models are being used in concert, the harness is where all of that is coordinated.
The OpenAI benchmark tests were almost certainly with simple harnesses, to better test the raw models. But we know that smaller, cheaper, open-source models with more sophisticated harnesses can equal frontier models in performance. There’s nothing magic about OpenAI’s frontier models; lots of models could have done the same thing.
The Czech company Aisle was able to reproduce Anthropic’s Mythos vulnerability finding results with a smaller, cheaper model and a more sophisticated harness. More importantly, the Chinese company Moonshot AI just released its frontier model: Kimi K3. Its performance rivals its U.S. competitors. And it’s both free and open, which means it’s not possible for it to have guardrails. If you, or anyone else, wants to use it for cyberattack, nothing can stop you.
Even if the U.S. frontier AI companies had some technical advantage, it’s now only a few months’ worth.
What this means is that all attempts at control—limiting models to a select group of users, export controls on models and chips, blocking models from answering certain types of queries, mandating kill switches on AI systems, or pausing AI research—are all futile. Most only apply nationally, not globally. Most don’t affect models that users run locally and not in the cloud. And all ignore the incredible pace of AI development worldwide.
Even worse, U.S. companies limit access to their most sophisticated models, fearing being banned by the government if they do not do so. When Hugging Face was attacked, it was not able to use the frontier models from either OpenAI or Anthropic to help analyze the attack and formulate defenses. Both were blocked, because both of those companies limit their models’ cybersecurity capabilities. Some U.S. companies have special access to these capabilities, but Hugging Face is an American company with French origins, and as such is probably excluded. Instead, Hugging Face turned to the GLM-5.2 model from the Chinese company Z.ai.
Artificially blocking capability also prevents cybersecurity research, again giving the offense an advantage. (For instance, Claude Fable 5 refuses to edit this essay because of the topic; it forcibly downgrades to a less capable model.) This kind of prohibition has long-term implications for cybersecurity. If we assume that these models are getting better over time, then software written by older models will be attacked by newer ones. In a world of largely AI-written software, we need the most capable models for defense.
AI cyberattack is the new normal. The models are increasingly highly sophisticated at both attack and defense, and there is no way to enable the latter without also enabling the former. And they are genies, increasingly capable of behaving in unanticipated ways.
And there really are no good answers. Any regulation needs to be global, which feels like an impossible prospect in today’s world. Even U.S. national regulation will be neutered by the massive amounts of money sloshing around in these companies.
Given that reality, and in the absence of any international consensus on AI regulation, we need the best AI on the defense. The U.S. government needs to make it clear—or whatever passes for that clarity in this capricious administration—that it will not ban models with sophisticated cyber capabilities. The last thing Americans want is for the defenders to turn to Chinese and other models because the U.S. models are artificially hobbled.
Infinite numbers have long troubled utilitarian ethicists: if the universe is boundless, then there is infinite positive utility and infinite negative utility, and we can’t even define our current state, let alone affect it. Oxford philosopher Toby Ord proposes a solution: use hyperreal numbers, a mathematical construct in which infinite sums behave more like finite ones (for example, the sum of infinitely many twos is twice as big as the sum of infinitely many ones). As with so many philosophical ideas, this solves some existing problems while creating some new ones (pinpointing some hyperreals requires choosing something called an “ultrafilter”, but this choice is underdetermined). Still, Elias Schmied calls this a real philosophical advance, of the sort which comes along only rarely and makes genuine headway into a previously-hopeless-seeming problem. I’m just surprised there’s a way of thinking about infinities under which they behave logically. Why didn’t we start with this one, instead of being told that infinity + infinity = infinity and we should just accept it? Claude tries to answer my questions.
That is from Scott Alexander (many more links at the link, many on AI safety).
The post On infinite ethics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Today's Picture of the Week depicts different angles of a very peculiar asteroid named (44) Nysa. Asteroids are leftovers from the formation of planets in the Solar System, with the majority found in a circular belt between Mars and Jupiter. These rocky bodies come in various shapes and sizes, but new images of (44) Nysa, located at the inner edge of the asteroid belt, reveal an unusual structure unlike anything observed before!
To resolve (44) Nysa’s shape, a team of astronomers used the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, and SHARK-VIS, an instrument by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics on the Large Binocular Telescope in the USA. Both instruments use adaptive optics to correct atmospheric blur and obtain crisp images of this asteroid.
The data shows that the asteroid is 80 km across and is composed of three distinct blobs, or ‘lobes’, joined by two narrower sections that encircle the asteroid, or ‘necks’. All previous identifications of asteroids with a neck have been interpreted as ‘bilobates’, having just two lobes, but (44) Nysa has a unique ‘trilobate’ structure.
The team has two possible explanations for how (44) Nysa got its odd shape. Either the asteroid originates from a single object that was heavily deformed though collisions, or is a composite of three objects that impacted and merged, forming necks at the point of contact.
Further research is needed to clarify which hypothesis holds true, but for now astronomers are delighted to have determined the structure of (44) Nysa, which had long evaded attempts to identify its true nature. The asteroid is named after the mythical birthplace of the ancient Greek god Dionysus, who is associated with theatre and masks. “The name is quite fitting, after the land of a god known for concealing his true nature,” says Kate Minker, lead author of the study announcing the discovery. “We’ve managed to finally unmask (44) Nysa”.
The author is Tim Whitmarsh and the subtitle is Augustus, Empire and the Making of Christianity. This is the most important book on the history of Christianity I have read in a long time, and it is also an important work in Roman history. Yet also fun and extremely readable. Excerpt:
The story I have told so far has emphasised the fit between Christianity and the Greek world of the early Roman Empire; I have given relatively little space to conflict. That has been quite deliberate. One of the commonest misconceptions about the early Roman Empire is that it was a time of ceaseless and inevitable suppression of virtuous Christians by a brutal governmental machine. This is a myth that has roots in antiquity itself, and has been pumped systematically into western popular culture since the nineteenth centuury. It is a remarkably durable myth, because it is both emotionally seductive and ideologically powerful. The idea that virtuous Christians were engaged in endless conflict with the Roman state makes for great narrative. But the reality is more banal: most Christians were fully integrated into Roman society, and no more or less harassed than anyone else…
My argument has been, rather, that Christianity could not have come into being in anything like the form we know it without the revolutionary impact of Augustus’ political reforms. It was this seismic change that fundamentally transformed Mediterranean thought…The most dramatic effect of the Augustan swirl was Christianity itself: a breakaway Judaean sect led by brilliant entrepreneurs who understood the opportunities offered by the new political dispensation, and rapidly reshaped their ideas to suit new audiences.
Definitely recommended, and not only to Christians and Romans.
The post *Rome’s Age of Revolution* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Don’t get spooked by Saturn’s ghostly spokes! Today we feature a nearly two-hour timelapse of Saturn and its rings looping forwards and backwards. A day on Saturn is only 10 hours long,
