Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part II: Starting at the End

This is the second part of our series (I) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. As we’ve discussed, pre-modern peasant farmers make up the vast majority of human beings in in the past.1 Last week we started by looking at the basic building blocks of peasant society: the household and the village. We noted that rather than organizing as individuals, pre-modern people generally and peasant farmers in particular, organized as households, a single economic unit based around a residence and landholding, which included both kin and non-kin members. Those households were then organized into villages, with each household often having scattered land holdings in different parts of the village’s farmland.

In this part and the next, I want to get into some of the demographic patterns that shape the life of these pre-modern farmers. While cultural practices differ quite a lot between different people in the past, the mortality and fertility regime that shaped the life of pre-modern farmers tended to be quite consistent between different pre-modern societies – at least to the degree that they are so radically different from conditions now. This week, we’re going to begin at the ending, with mortality patterns, because they provide necessary foundational context for all of the other demographic patterns. The pattern of mortality among pre-modern people doesn’t exist that far in the past – everyone lived and died like this through the 1700s – but is so different from our experience today as to be profoundly alien to us. It isn’t just that people lived shorter lives in the past, but that the structure of mortality and the expectations it created were different.

Naturally, I should note then before we head in, that this post is going to involve some pretty frank discussions of death – mostly from a statistical angle – including child and maternal mortality. I’ve also included some images of death-related artwork to help anchor the reader’s thinking about the culture of death in these societies. That may be somewhat distressing (I suppose it certainly ought to be), so read at your discretion.

Via Wikipedia, an example from Beram in Istria of the ‘danse macabre’ (‘the dance of death’) motif in fresco (1474). Death was a fairly common theme in pre-modern artwork, often presented, as here, quite bluntly as ‘memento mori’ – a reminder that all must die sooner or later.

But first, if you like what you are reading, please share it and if you really like it, you can support this project on Patreon! While I do teach as the academic equivalent of a tenant farmer, tilling the Big Man’s classes, this project is my little plot of freeheld land which enables me to keep working as a writers and scholar. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter and Bluesky and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.

Death By the Numbers

It may seem odd to start with death, since after all that is normally the end of a story rather than the beginning. But if we want to understand the structure of life in pre-modern conditions, we really do need to start with death because mortality is, in practice, the ‘forcing function’ of a lot of how life is organized in peasant communities and the pre-modern world more generally. In particular the pattern of mortality of pre-industrial life combined with drive to sustain population functionally mandate certain family patterns among the vast majority of the population, which in turn drive labor patterns. This is particularly true for the peasantry: we often do see upper-classes in pre-modern societies fall below population replacement, but that is no real problem for the society, because there is an effectively infinite supply of people from the lower orders perfectly happy to ‘move up’ into the aristocracy.2 By contrast, there is no ‘reserve’ population to replace the peasantry (understood here to include enslaved agricultural laborers) – instead it is their population growth which sustains the other social orders. So high mortality forces high fertility.

Of course that’s not quite how the causation picture works: high fertility is the result of human choices (and they are, as we’ll see choices), but high mortality rates limit the range of fertility patterns capable of producing a stable population, not quite down to a single point, but to a sufficiently narrowly constricted range at the upper-end of possible fertility. A society which moved out of this range at the lower end would rapidly shrink, creating space for societies (or families within a society) which maintained higher fertility. In practice, this doesn’t result in some sort of ‘rising and declining civilizations’ that one sometimes sees discussed in moralizing, largely a-historical ‘class of civilization’ terms, but rather a situation where all societies put a pretty high value on childrearing and so, absent serious disruptions which prevent it, maintain steady, modest growth at the upper-end of the fertility range, with only modest variation. Again, that range isn’t a point – there are some different marriage and family formation patterns – but that range exists in the context of a mortality regime which is functionally unchanging for all pre-modern societies.

And I want to be clear and reiterate that last point, because it is the other reason we’re starting with death: the basic pattern of pre-modern mortality changes very little from one society to another or from one pre-industrial era to another. It also varies very little from one class to another: the fantastically wealthy aristocracies of pre-modern and early-modern societies could buy many fantastical things, but nothing they could spend money on would do much to preserve their children from shockingly high child mortality rates (they may have been somewhat better at surviving longer in adulthood, but only marginally). Until the 1700s, no society’s medicine could meaningfully change the pattern either. The major features of mortality are thus constant in a way that very few things are truly constant in studying historical societies.

Via Wikipedia, a Roman mosaic (first century BCE) from Pompeii, now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, showing the wheel of fate which oscillates between wealth and poverty (represented by the cloth suspended on either side). The skull in the center on which the scales balance is a reminder that death in this balance is universal and never far off.

So what were the patterns? This is a point where the way we walk about pre-modern mortality tends to skew people’s understanding, because the statistic we lead with is life expectancy at birth (note that we’re not dealing with stillbirths or miscarriages this week). What you’ll hear is “life expectancy [at birth] was around 24 – somewhat higher for females, somewhat lower for males.” And that’s more or less true – the exact figure will wobble around depending on the society and the data set, but never gets far from the mid-twenties – but can be somewhat deceptive. I remember realizing that someone had fundamentally misunderstood something when I was playing Children of the Nile and when your ruler turns 20 or so, the game informs you that you are old and must think constantly about death. But obviously a 20-year-old – peasant or aristocrat – did not think death was right around the corner, because it usually wasn’t. Instead, that basic life expectancy figure is the product of a set of more complex interactions.

We can think about these patterns through demographic modeling: we take the ancient or medieval data we have and look for a modern demographic model (often based off of the study of populations in developing societies) that fits the patterns we see. The standard such model for the ancient world is Model West, usually L3, from Coale and Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (1983),3 because it fits the data out of Roman Egypt fairly well. One quirk to these model tables I want to note, because it sometimes confuses folks, is that they express ‘life expectancy’ not as a total expected age, but as average years of life expectancy from a given age, so a 25-year-old with 26.6 years of life expectancy is expecting to life to age 51, not just a year and a half.

What we see in these models is that life expectancy (female:male) at birth is very low, 25:22.8, but after the first year rises dramatically to 34.9:34.1 (note the gender gap narrowing) and by age 5 to 40.1:39.0 (remember to add the five years they’ve already lived). So life expectancy goes up quite a lot over the first several years of life, which is not, intuitively, the pattern we expect: we normally assume the more you’ve lived, the less years you have left.

A quick chart showing a population under the assumptions of a Model West L3 life table. The blue bar indicates the percentage of a birth cohort that is surviving at a given age, while the orange bar indicates the percentage of a birth cohort that has died in each age ‘jump’ (the Coale and Demeny tables are incremented in five year increments; I keep meaning to sit down with a demographer and produce a version with each year interpolated between the increments)

What is going on here is the substantial impact of absolutely staggering infant and child mortality. Under these assumptions, by age 10, fully 50% of all children born are already dead; only about 45% of all children make it to adulthood as we generally define it (around 18 years). And as a reminder that is only for live births – we have not yet considered miscarriages, stillbirths or maternal mortality. This enormous child mortality rate is not an accident of a particular ancient society, but in fact an absolute constant for all pre-industrial societies, be they hunter-gatherers, pastoralists or farmers, be they urbanized or not, ‘civilized’ or not, ‘western’ or not. For all societies, everywhere at every time before about 1750 (and in most places for a long time after that) it was simply a fact of life that half, HALF of all children died. Our World in Data produced a famous chart of this ( released under CC-BY which I can just put here:

Youth mortality (deaths before age 15 or so) in modern developed countries today is a fraction of 1%; even poor developing countries are below 10% in all but the worst cases (the global average is 4.3%). That shift is, of course, part of the broader ‘demographic transition,’ which perhaps we’ll talk about one day, but I want to stress it here because it is one of the most striking ways in which “the past is a foreign country,” although in this case the past is even more alien than any foreign country on earth.

Adult mortality patterns can vary a bit more based on the society in question and by conditions, but the basic outline of mortality rates remains fairly constant. Generally early adulthood brought with it two major mortality ‘filters’ – despite young adults being the least vulnerable to sickness and such – military mortality (mostly for men) and maternal mortality (entirely for women). Military mortality for our peasants, as you might imagine, varied quite a bit based on society. In some societies, the peasantry was substantially demilitarized, ruled over by a warrior-aristocratic class that did much of the fighting or protected by a professional military class and so we might expect military mortality among the peasantry to be very low. On the other end of the spectrum, Nathan Rosenstein4 estimates that military mortality may have claimed something like a third of all Romans who served during the third and early second centuries BCE – and as we’ve discussed, nearly all Roman males served, at least in periods of high military demand. I should note that there are a lot of complications in this data, so take that military mortality rate as something like an absolute upper-bound.5

Casualties from pitched battles might average around 10% of all combatants,6 so a male peasant population that served as a militia in these sort of battles, like Greek hoplites (who are probably just the upper third or so of peasants, wealth-wise) might lose something like 4.5% of a male birth cohort (remember that child mortality) on average in a pitched battle. If we assume that a given age cohort might fight 2 or 3 such battles in their lifetimes, which seems a reasonable guess, we might expect something like 10-12% of the relevant military class’ birth cohort to die in battle. If I’m right in guesstimating that the hoplite class represented the upper third or so of the farming population (the rest being too poor or enslaved) we might suppose battle casualties would have consumed around 4-5% of the whole society’s male birth cohort. Expressed another way, that would mean that 10% of all males surviving to adulthood would perish in combat.7 Rosenstein estimates the average combat mortality rate of Roman legions during the Republic – legions that tend to win rather a disproportionate amount of the time – at around 5.6%.8 In short, for societies that field mass conscript armies, military mortality is a significant factor, but pales in comparison to child mortality. Under these conditions, individual battles or wars will almost never be demographically significant (that is, cause noticeable change in population) because casualties are a fairly small subset of the fairly small subset of men who serve. However, the sustained pressure of such warfare might male-shift a society slightly and lead to altered family patterns.

Via Wikipedia, a sample of woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger showing the Danse Macabre (1538). One of the notable features of the danse macabre as an artistic motif is that it very frequently shows death striking a wide range of individuals, typically including the wealthy and powerful (kings, nobles) alongside the poor (farmers and peddlers but also a frequent motif is to include a disabled man who has lost a leg and is clearly very poor), with both secular figures alongside members of the clergy, both high and low, all to stress death’s universality: here we see death stalking the farmer, an abbess and a peddler.

The other factor for young adult mortality, pertaining in this case to women was maternal mortality (death as a result of childbirth). This is something of a tricky topic because there is a tendency to substantially overestimate maternal mortality rates in the public imagination, which makes it really tricky to thread the needle of “higher than now but not as high as you think” without giving some sort of false impression. Maternal mortality is expressed as a fraction of live births (which I am going to convert into percents) and seems to have been very roughly in the range of 1-2% for early modern societies, falling to around 0.5% in the 19th century among western societies for which we have good data and then dropping down to its current level among developed countries of 0.25-0.01%. So we generally assume that a pattern of something like 2% maternal mortality is the right ballpark range for the ancient and medieval world, although there must have been variation we can’t see.

Now, 2% doesn’t, perhaps, sound like a lot, but in a society where something like half of all children are dying before adulthood, women are having quite a lot of children simply to maintain population at replacement. We’ll get back around to fertility rates later in the series but for how if we assume each woman in this society is having on average five live childbirths, a 2% chance of death at each stage adds up pretty quickly – a woman who gave birth five times with a 2% chance of dying each time has a total chance of dying at one stage or another of 9.67%, which as you will note is not far off from the chance of dying in a battle (though, contra the House of the Dragon team, who do not appear to understand statistics, it is not that each birth has the fatality of a battle but that a lifetime of births does, which is not the same).

The great remainder of death, the background hum of it, as it were, was from sickness and disease. I should note that this is generally what we mean when we say someone died ‘of old age’ – they were not crushed to death by the prodigious number of candles on their birthday cake, but they merely got quite sick while also being old, the latter factor reducing their ability to handle the former. While in modern society these causes of death tend to be the sort of things – heart failure, cancer – which will kill you at any age but mostly only happen to the very old, in pre-modern societies, the diseases that tear at the elderly population tend to be the endemic infections, fevers, pneumonias and such that the younger adult population might generally survive – age and nutrition diminish the immune response until these sicknesses become lethal at one age or another.

The patterns of these age-and-illness related deaths were markedly seasonal, precisely because they were made lethal by weakness of immunity, which correspond with age but also nutrition. The precise ‘dying season’ varied from one region to the other based on climate and on the timing of key crops. In much of Europe it was the colder months that death stalked whereas in the Mediterranean it was late summer and early fall. Climate is certainly one factor here: individuals with fragile health are more vulnerable to excessive heat or cold temperatures and either can kill.

But another factor is nutrition in the agricultural cycle: warmer climates often planted winter wheat (harvested early in the summer) and had their dying season in late summer, early fall, while cold climates plant spring wheat (harvested in fall) and having their dying season in the winter. It’s not hard to see the agricultural cycle at work: harvests are quite variable, ample in some years and short in others. Peasant farmers have all sorts of ways to protect against this risk (we’ll discuss some of them in this series), but a poor harvest still meant belt-tightening and you didn’t wait for the food to run out to begin rationing. So if the harvest was poor, food for children and the elderly has to be limited (the working-age adults cannot be short-changed, they need to be fit enough to plant and bring in the next crop) starting at that harvest and so a few months later when the weather turns bad (too hot or too cold), the already malnourished elderly or very young begin to die. Not of starvation, but of this or that disease or infection which, had they been fully fed, they might have fought off.

Via the British Museum (1926,0412.41) a modern sketch (by Paul-Albert Besnard, 1920) that was too on-point for me not to include, showing death embracing a woman while the snow of winter falls outside. I should note that while I have framed this series as being about ancient and medieval peasants, the basic contours of this pre-industrial life persisted in much of the world through the 19th century and into the 20th and some elements of it persist in some of the poorest countries today.

That interaction produces something of a balancing effect, assuming agricultural production remains constant: as a population approaches its food production limits, you get more bad years compared to good years and so mortality rises, with the child mortality putting a cap on population growth (along with reducing overall adult life expectancy as older folks pass away earlier). Now this simple interaction is very simple and leads a lot of folks into Malthusian purist thinking, but there are a lot of things that can disrupt this Malthusian interaction, even for peasants – there are a lot of ways for agricultural production to rise modestly enough (increased trade and specialization, bringing more land under crops, better farming techniques, selectively bred crops, etc. etc.) to sustain population growth for a really, really long time and even some very long-settled parts of the world didn’t reach agricultural saturation where basically all useful farmland was in production, until quite late.9

The basic pattern of mortality: massive child mortality, military and maternal mortality for young adults, seasonal mortality for everyone else, combined with the standard background noise of accident, misadventure and crime collectively makes up the mortality picture of the peasant. I should note that there probably is a significant amount of regional and sub-regional variation here we’re not capturing, but the overall patterns here are fairly consistent.10 We’re going to get to the implications that has for the structure of peasant households in just a moment, but first I want to talk about some of the implications for culture and in particular, the culture of death.

Attitudes About Death

While the patterns – very high infant and child mortality, high maternal mortality, strongly seasonal disease-related mortality – are broadly consistent across pre-modern societies, and thus the standard condition of life for our ancient or medieval peasants, the cultural response to this is varied.

The usual mistaken assumption here is to assume that given the high rate of infant and early childhood mortality that parents and society at large was broadly detached from its children. As Patricia Crone points out (op. cit., 116-7) that is simply not the case: while written sources intended for public audiences often assume a polite silence about children lost very young, expressions of agony and grief are far more common in the source material than detachment. Pre-modern peasant parents went through the same cycles of excitement at a welcome pregnancy (and, as we’ll see, most were welcome) and terrible, wrenching loss that modern parents would at the loss of an infant. But people in the past experienced the same feelings we do, even in a far less kind world, something that comes out quite clearly when they do write to us. By way of example, I’m going to include in quote blocks a handful of epitaphs from E.A Hemelrijk’s excellent Women and Society in the Roman World: A Sourcebook of Inscriptions from the Roman West (2021).

To Claudia Fortunata. Claudia Quartilla set this up for her sweetest daughter Julia Foebe, for her mother and Claudius Felix and Claudius Fortunatus for their most dutiful sister. Oh unworthy crime: a mother made a tomb for her daughter! (CIL 9,4255, trans. Hemelrijk)

To the spirits of the departed. For Euposia, who lived for one year, eleven months and seventeen days, and for Zosime, who lived for eight months. Their mother Zoe made [this tomb] for her sweetest children. (IGUR 544 = IG 14,1609, trans. Hemelrijk).

All sorts of cultural practices attest to the person-hood of even very young children, like the Christian practice of infant baptism, performed as early as possible to ensure the salvation of the child’s soul in case – as was very often the case, note above – they didn’t live to adulthood. Likewise, the loving, careful burial of deceased infants and young children is common, including practices like “eaves-drip burial” in medieval Christian cemeteries or the ’emergency’ baptism of stillborn infants in medieval Italy all attest to a deep and profound attachment to children, even those lost extremely young. It wasn’t that peasants cared less, but that they lived in a world with much more grief, albeit that grief might be channeled into non-public expressions or expressions that don’t survive to us.

To the spirits of the departed. Aemilia Donativa lived one year, four months and thirteen days. She lies here. She lived sweeter than a rose. Turbo, her father and Designata, her mother, made this for their daughter. (CIL 8, 16572 = ILAlg 1,3165, trans. Hemelrijk)

To the departed spirit of Cornelia Anniana, our daughter who was already babbling when she was not yet two years old. She lived one year, three months and ten days. The parents made this with their own money for the sweetest daughter. (CIL 14,2482=ILS 8488, trans. Hemelrijk)

On the other hand, that grief was, if not lessened, expected. In these societies, burying children was an expected part of being a parent. Likewise, burying a young wife lost in childbirth was, while not an inevitable expectation, hardly an unheard of thing. That didn’t make it any less impactful. Funeral epitaphs like the following (also from Hemelrijk, op. cit.) are very common:

To the departed spirits and eternal memory of Blandinia Martiola, the most blameless girl who lives eighteen years, nine months and five days. Pompeius Catussa, citizen of the Sequani, a plasterer , set this up for his incomparable wife, who was most kind to him. She lived with me for five years, six months and eighteen days without any foul reproach. He had this made during his lifetime for himself and for his wife and dedicated it under the axe. You who read this, go bathe in the baths of Apollo, as I did with my wife. I wish I still could (CIL 13,1983 = ILS 8158, trans. Hemelrijk).

You who pass by, now stand still and linger for a while. Read the misfortune of a mourning man. Read what I, Trebius Basileus, her grieving husband, have written so that you may know that the writing below comes from the heart. She was adorned with all good things, unoffending to her dear ones, guileless, a woman who never committed any wrongdoing. She lived twenty one years and seven months and bore me three sons, whom she left behind when they were small children. Pregnant with her fourth child, she was died in the eighth month. Stunned, now examine the initial latters of the verses and willingly read, I pray, the epiath of a well-deserving woman. You will recognize the name of my beloved [Grata] wife. (CIL 6, 28753, trans Hemelrijk; the Latin forms an acrostic spelling out the name of the deceased, Veturia Grata).

That said the expectation meant that the social script around death in these societies was generally very strong. Cultural practices around mourning, burial (or cremation) and memory varied substantially, but anyone growing up to adulthood in a peasant village was likely to have experienced quite a lot of funerals and so while death wasn’t any less sad, it was processed to a degree as a ‘normal’ part of life rather than a sudden disruption of it.

From Roman Egypt, a collection of mummy portraits, painted faces on wood slats which would be buried with the deceased to enable their spirit to recognize their body, a distinctly Egyptian burial custom (though note the very Roman cultural presentation of these men – they are both Egyptian and Roman, there was no necessary contradiction between the two).
All via the British Museum these mummy portraits are:
Top Row (starting from the left): inv. EA74715, dated 100-120AD; EA 74718, dated 80-100AD; EA74704, dated 150-170 AD, all from Hawara in the Faiyum, Egypt.
Bottom Row (from the left): EA63396, early second century from Rubaiyat, Egypt, EA 63396, early second century from Rubaiyat Egypt and EA74707, 70-120 AD, from Hawara in the Faiyum, Egypt. All six are now in the British Museum.

This isn’t the place for me to go into every sort of death ritual for every pre-modern peasant culture because there are too many and I don’t know them all. But I do want to note some common features that show up frequently (but not universally). One of the most striking is that funerary rituals often focus substantially on the continuing place of the deceased in the community. We’ll come back around to this, but, as Crone observes repeatedly, pre-modern societies were markedly less individualistic than most modern societies, understanding individuals primarily as parts of a household, a family, a community rather than as individuals. That didn’t change when those individuals died.

So, for instance, in addition to the remarkably individualistic tombstone inscriptions above (the Romans are, as ancient cultures go, unusually individualistic in their outlook), the Romans believed that, after the standard nine-day period of mourning, funeral procession and burial that the spirit of the deceased became part of the di manes, (the ‘divine spirits’). The ancestor spirits watched over the family and community but also remained very much a part of it. Nine days after the death of the deceased, the Romans would hold another funeral feast which would include an offering to the di manes, of which the deceased was now a part. Likewise, of course, in medieval Christian contexts (both Catholic and Orthodox) the deceased were to be buried (if baptized) in consecrated ground to await the resurrection of the dead. This too represented not an exit of the individual from the community but rather something closer to a changing of their position in it: from the active, living part of the community to the waiting, expectant part. Ancient Egyptian belief represented the afterlife as a continuation of the living world, with individuals assuming the same roles in death as in life, while the remembrance and offerings of the living family of the deceased sustained their spirit another form of a continuation of the individual’s place in the community.

There is a tendency in this context, I think, for moderns to jump to asking, ‘well, what if the community ceases to exist, or many centuries pass and this memory is lost?’ And I’m not going to say no one ever had that idea, but by and large I think that is a very modern view that understands the world as impermanent and changing in a way that most pre-modern societies do not. From the perspective not just of the peasant, but also the peasant’s priest, humans are impermanent, fleeting things but the world, its structure and rhythms, its communities and families, these are far more permanent and lasting. This is a pre-modern world, after all, that changes slowly, often imperceptibly slowly, with children coming to inhabit the exact roles, working the same land, living in the same houses, as their parents, one generation after another. At least to my sense, planning for a radically different world 10,000 years in the future sits largely outside the pre-modern worldview which imagines that the world doesn’t change much and at most goes through a series of repeating cycles.

Implications for Households

The mortality pattern as laid out here has a few implications for the shape of the peasant households we see and the sort of families they form. We’re going to walk through some of these in more detail in the next part where we talk about nuptiality and fertility (marriage and babies) but I want to note some of the high points here.

First a high proportion of these societies at any given time were children, even by their standards of childhood (often ending between 15 and 17, not at 18). Generally about half of the population at any given time under this mortality regime is going to be age 15 and below, whereas for a modern population close to replacement that figure is going to be 20-25%. Children were thus socially omnipresent in a way that they simply aren’t in any modern industrial society (but are in some developing countries).

Equally, for societies with very low productivity the demand to feed that population means that pre-modern cultures do not have a ‘childhood’ as we understand it, as an extended vacation from work and adult life. Children were instead working in whatever capacity they were physically able as soon as they were physically able because these societies simply lacked the resources to support half of the population on a non-working basis (which is also going to be true when it comes to labor and gender, but we’ll get to that later in the series). This, of course, was especially true for our peasants, at the bottom of the society, whose work was necessary for its basic subsistence, but one gets the sense that childhoods were short and transition into work was common even among the higher rungs of society – for instance the age for an elite boy to become a page attending a knight was seven.

This mortality regime also has implications for the ‘cycle’ that households went through. After all, if a married couple began having children in their late teens and continued doing so through their twenties (which they would have to do simply to make replacement; we’ll talk more about this next time), by the time their last children would be coming of age, the parents would be into their late thirties or early forties and a casual glance at the graph way up above will tell you that many of those parents are, at that point, living out their last years. Under the assumptions of that Model West L3 life table, at the start of reproductive age, the life expectancy – which is to say the point at which we’d expect half of the cohort to have passed away – for women was around 50 and for men around 48. So most children would reach adulthood while their parents were still living, but equally most children would lose their parents while their own children were very young. That interaction is further influenced by marriage patterns (particularly differential ages at first marriage), which we’ll talk about subsequently.

But the result is that while these households are often ‘multigenerational,’ and (as we’ll see) marriage and reproduction often begin very early, ‘three’ is generally the maximum generations that are alive at one time and even then usually not for very long. That also helps explain cultures where young men were expected to have property in order to marry and establish a household – the expectation is not that they are acquiring land (extremely hard to do in these societies) but rather that inheriting land is what will make them viable marriage partners (again, that differential age at marriage). Under this mortality regime, a young man in his early 20s probably does not have to wait very long to inherit the farm (especially because his father likely also married somewhat later in life).

Finally, and this will set up the next part of this series, it should already be obvious that the fertility regime this level of mortality demands in order to avoid the population shrinking into nothing in just a few generations is going to be one of very high fertility: simply maintaining population under conditions where half of all children die before adulthood and many adults die early in adulthood (especially women dying in childbirth) is going to necessitate a lot of children.

And that’s where we’ll turn next: marriage, family formation and childbearing (but not rearing just yet).

Friday 18 July 1662

Up very early, and got a-top of my house, seeing the design of my work, and like it very well, and it comes into my head to have my dining-room wainscoated, which will be very pretty. By-and-by by water to Deptford, to put several things in order, being myself now only left in town, and so back again to the office, and there doing business all the morning and the afternoon also till night, and then comes Cooper for my mathematiques, but, in good earnest, my head is so full of business that I cannot understand it as otherwise I should do.

At night to bed, being much troubled at the rain coming into my house, the top being open.

Read the annotations

Management Section Intro: Tidy Together Chapter

In Tidy First? we explored managing tidyings—those small, safe design changes you make on your own. The challenges there were mostly personal: When do you start? When do you stop? How do you maintain rhythm between tidying and implementing features?

Now we face a more complex challenge. The refactorings in Part I of this book operate at a different scale…

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Last month, you were checking your bank balance every morning, calculating runway down to the day. "If we don't find product-market fit by July, we're dead."

This morning, you checked your OpenAI dashboard instead. You’re burning $50,000 a week in tokens. Your growth curve looks like a rocket launch. And you're going to hit your API limits in six days.

“We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.” — Pogo

Whiplash

This is what success looks like. While you were exploring you optimized for cheap experiments. Less time, less money, more chances of survival. Now your hair is on fire. It’s time to shift gears.

Then last Tuesday happened. Some influencer posted about you. Your quiet little AI experiment went from 200 users to 20,000 users. Now it's doubling every three days.

Your cofounders are ecstatic. Your investors are throwing money at you. And you’re staring at the Graph of Death:

A hand-drawn graph on dot grid paper showing two curves over time. The supply curve starts low and gradually increases with a slight upward curve. The demand curve starts low then rises exponentially. The two lines intersect at a point marked with a sad face emoji, indicating a critical failure point where demand exceeds supply.

.Welcome to success. The only thing worse is failure.

Welcome to Your New Normal

This is your new job: seeing these kinds of cross-overs in time & doing just enough to dodge them. There’s good news:

  • You don’t have to solve these problems, just push them out into the indefinite future.

  • You have access to capital on a new scale to buy your way out of these problems.

There’s bad news:

  • If you don’t manage to push this problem out into the future, it will kill you.

  • Your instincts from the past 12 months are exactly wrong.

  • Once you push this problem into the future a new one will arise.

Remember being proud when you could get an answer for a hypothesis for one tenth the cost? When you had that elegant queueing system that ensured fair usage?

Forget all of it. Those were exploration habits. You're in expansion now. Different game, different rules, different ways to die.

Your new reality:

  • That sustainable architecture you planned? Too late. Usage patterns have shifted & it’s already obsolete.

  • That token optimization project? Too slow. Time is now money in a newly existential way.

  • That careful cost management? No longer relevant. Once you’re airborne, you’re suddenly immune to the length of the runway.

You have days, not months. Time to break some things.

The Only Graph That Matters

Let’s say you’re a supplier of tokens (the same logic works if you’re a consumer, but you’ll need to translate). Graph:

  • Supply: How many tokens you can consume & generate?

  • Demand: How many tokens your users are supplying & expecting?

Where they cross, your product dies. Not "degrades." Dies.

Remember—this is success. This is what you worked so hard for. So, now what do you do? Good news: you have 2 levers.

Kicking the Can Down the Road

Lever 1—bend supply up. Do what you need to do to survive. I heard stories from early Facebook of engineers going to Fry’s at lunch, buying servers, racking & stacking, & keeping the site up for one more day of peak usage. Efficient? No. Better than the alternative? Oh yes.

Lever 2—bend demand down.

Optimization is useful, if it can be achieved quickly (remember, time is now lots of money).

Delete expensive-but-not-critical features. I know this is hard. You love everything you built. Better to survive today & reimplement tomorrow.

Reduce users. Wait—you just spent a year praying for one user. Now you have thousands & you want to just drop them on the floor? Yep, again, it’s not a good option but it is the best option. Use invitation-only signups. A waiting list. Whatever to keep demand down below supply.

The Mental Shift That Saves You

In exploration, you were precious about everything. Every user mattered. Every feature was crafted. Every decision was reversible.

In expansion, you're at war. Wars aren't won by perfect soldiers with shiny boots. They're won by whoever doesn't run out of ammunition.

Your ammunition is tokens. Waste them, hoard them, steal them, borrow them—I don't care. Just don't run out.

Capital Isn't the Constraint Anymore

Here's the mind-bender: That runway you were watching? Meaningless now.

Investors smell blood in the water—the good kind. The "holy shit this is actually working" kind. They're begging to throw money at you. Take it. Take it all. You'll need it.

But money can't buy you tokens fast enough. API limits don't care about your Series A. Rate limits don't respect your growth rate. Your constraint shifted from cash to capacity, and that's a different problem to solve.

The Practical Survival Guide

This week:

  1. Map every API limit you have. Not just the official ones—the real ones where things start breaking.

  2. Split your infrastructure. Multiple accounts, multiple providers, multiple everything.

  3. Implement the dumbest possible caching. Cache entire responses. Cache by user ID. Cache incorrectly. Just cache.

  4. Turn off features. Start with the token-hungry ones only 5% of users touch.

  5. Beg, borrow, and negotiate for higher limits. Today. Not after your "process review."

Next week:

  1. Keep doing all of the above.

  2. Start thinking about that one perfect solution you'll implement "when things calm down."

  3. Laugh at your naivety. Things won't calm down.

  4. Double down on the hacks that are working.

Next month:

  1. Maybe—MAYBE—start building the real solution.

  2. But probably you'll have hit the next bottleneck by then.

  3. That's okay. That's what winning looks like.

The Permission Slip You Need

You're not a bad engineer for hardcoding API keys. You're not irresponsible for mixing providers with different capabilities. You're not short-sighted for building systems that will obviously break at 10x scale.

You're surviving expansion.

In six months, when you're in extraction, you'll rebuild all of this properly. You'll have beautiful token management, elegant fallback systems, and efficient prompt optimization. Your code will be clean, your architecture pristine.

But first, you have to live that long.

The Light at the End

I know it feels like you're building on quicksand. Like everything could collapse at any moment. Like you're betraying every engineering principle you hold dear.

You're right. You are.

And that's exactly what you should be doing.

Because in expansion, the only principle that matters is survival. Everything else—code quality, system design, cost optimization—is a luxury you can't afford.

Your investors understand this. Your users (the ones who stick around) understand this. The only person who doesn't understand this yet is you.

Welcome to expansion. It sucks. It's glorious. It's temporary.

Now stop reading and go bend those curves. You've got tokens to find and a product to keep alive.

Tomorrow's crisis is tomorrow's problem. Today, you survive.

Replication Crisis

Maybe encouraging the publication of null results isn't enough--maybe we need a journal devoted to publishing results the study authors find personally annoying.

Links 7/18/25

Links for you. Science:

Vampire bats’ mutual grooming helps spread innovative rabies vaccine
Intraspecies warfare restricts strain coexistence in human skin microbiomes
“Why Are We Funding This?”
Proposed cuts could have ‘catastrophic effect,’ 110 biomedical, health sciences industry leaders tell Congress
‘New hope’: ash trees rapidly evolving resistance to dieback
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Tried to Summon a Social Media Mob to Bully and Silence a Dissident Scientist, but the Mob Had Other Ideas

Other:

What We Learned From The New York Times’ Anti-Zohran Crusade: The most powerful newspaper in America doesn’t care about American democracy. (excellent, must-read)
Trump revives his tyrannical obsession with taking over DC
Democrats threaten government shutdown if GOP passes $9.4 billion rescissions bill
The Tariff Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
The Right Way To Rebuild
How The New York Times is (still) getting gamed by the right
Trump suggests taking over New York City and Washington
When Moderation Becomes Appeasement
Try Calling It Trumpcare
As the Texas Floodwaters Rose, One Indispensable Voice Was Silent (it’s Tufecki, so consider the source…)
Conspiracy Theories About the Texas Floods Lead to Death Threats
The useful political lesson from Zohran Mamdani’s college application
Hundreds of thousands of children have type 1 diabetes. Now, there’s a Barbie who has it, too
D.C.’s freestanding public toilets out of order after funding is flushed (Trump take toilet)
10 held in Texas immigration detention center shooting that was ‘planned ambush,’ US attorney says
Trump hasn’t delivered ‘no taxes on tips’ promise—but Democrats should
The Times’ Mamdani Vendetta
‘Don’t forget’: mural brings attention to the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump
DHCD Ignored Basic Questions About Jack Evans’ New, $127,000 A Year Job
In Which Larry Summers Discovers People
Labor secretary says Americans want to work hard jobs for little pay
The Long Mayoral Primary
Trump’s cruel purge of federal workers just got even easier
Evangelical Authoritarianism
The masks couldn’t hide the folly of White Center ICE raid
Wisconsin Supreme Court Clears Way to Ban Conversion Therapy
How a Shadowy Online Blacklist Became a Legal Threat to Pro-Palestinian Activists
Copper now costs way more in the U.S. than elsewhere. This could hit its economy hard
Why MAGA can’t let go of the “Epstein files”

Live coverage: SpaceX to launch 24 Starlink satellites into polar orbit on Falcon 9 rocket from California

File: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stands in the launch position during sunset at Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Image: SpaceX

SpaceX is preparing for a rare launch of its Starlink Version 2 Mini satellites into a polar orbit shortly after sunset on Friday night.

The mission, dubbed Starlink 17-3, will add another 24 satellites into the company’s megaconstellation consisting of more than 7,900 satellites on orbit, according to statistics compiled by expert orbital tracker and astronomer, Jonathan McDowell.

SpaceX is targeting liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 8:51 p.m. PDT (11:51 p.m. EDT / 0351 UTC).

Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.

The Falcon 9 first stage booster being used on this mission, tail number B1082, will launch for a 14th time. Its previous missions include NROL-145, USSF-62 and OneWeb #20.

A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1082 will target a landing on the droneship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’ If successful, this will be the 141st booster landing on this vessel and the 477th booster landing to date.

In an update posted to its Starlink website on Monday, July 14, SpaceX said part of its plan to further scale up its Starlink network, it planned to deploy hundreds of satellites into a polar orbit to improve connectivity in polar regions, like Alaska.

“We plan to launch more than 400 additional satellites to the polar inclination by the end of 2025 alone, which will more than double the capacity for Alaskan customers alone, as well as other high latitude locations,” SpaceX wrote. “The first of these additional satellites have begun to serve Alaskan users already, nearly doubling median peak-hour download speeds over the past month.”

The reference to the first of these satellites is connected to the company’s launch of the Starlink 17-1 mission on May 27. That mission, which also happened to use B1082, also launched 24 Starlink V2 Mini satellites into a polar orbit at a 97 degree inclination.

SpaceX’s nod to launching more than 400 satellites to this orbit before the end of the year suggest this will be the majority of its focus for its West Coast launches. The goal would need more than 16 launches of at least 24 satellites apiece.

Following the Friday night flight, SpaceX will turn its attention to a rideshare mission for NASA, which is highlighted by the agency’s TRACERS (Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites) payload.

Will this law be enforced?

Mayor Adams has proposed a new 15mph speed limit for all ebikes in New York City. Lyft received direction from the Mayor’s office to reduce the maximum pedal assist speed of Citi Bike ebikes from 18mph to 15mph in anticipation of the rule taking effect. Our technical team worked hard to respond to this directive and the change is in effect across our ebike fleet as of June 20, 2025.

Although the pedal assist speed on Citi Bikes has been adjusted, here’s what hasn’t changed: You’ll still get that smooth, electric boost that makes tackling hills and longer distances a breeze. Our ebikes will continue to provide the same reliable and fun way to get around the city. Since Citi Bike first launched ebikes, riders have taken over 85 million ebike rides, traveling more than 190 million miles. In other words, you all have circled the globe 7,700 times on ebikes.

Here is the link.  I am personally happy with a libertarian approach to ebikes, namely let people take their chances and limit the ability to sue the cars that bump into you.  Nonetheless I am amazed that a world with a Consumer Product Safety Commission, and an FDA, allows small, unprotected vehicles to travel on our roads, more or less unhindered.  All the more so for motorcycles.  Paris has banned e-scooters, though not ebikes.  o3 recommends a 20 mph speed limit (write in your vote for mayor!).

Here are some complaints on Reddit about the new lower speed limit.  What I in fact observe is that, at least in NYC, there are few penalties for running red lights with your bicycle or ebike.

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Q2 GDP Tracking: Mid-2s

From BofA:
Since our last weekly publication, our 2Q GDP tracking is down one-tenth to 2.2% q/q saar. [July 18th estimate]
emphasis added
From Goldman:
June single-family housing starts were weaker than our previous GDP tracking assumptions. We lowered our Q2 GDP tracking estimate by 0.1pp to +2.8% (quarter-over-quarter annualized). Our Q2 domestic final sales estimate stands at +0.9%. [July 18th estimate]
And from the Atlanta Fed: GDPNow
GDPNow
The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2025 is 2.4 percent on July 18, unchanged from July 17 after rounding. After this morning’s housing starts release from the US Census Bureau, the nowcast of second-quarter real residential investment growth decreased from -6.4 percent to -7.0 percent. [July 18th estimate]

Deeply in debt: ODOT’s profligate borrowing helped lead to layoffs

The Oregon Department of Transportation finds itself in serious financial trouble, aggravated by an increasing dependence on borrowing.

In the last two fiscal years, the agency has added about $700 million in new debt, chiefly to finance freeway widening mega-project (and their hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns).

In the past two weeks, the Oregon Department of Transportation has heaped blame on the Legislature for failing to vote to approve a major increase in gas taxes, vehicle registration costs and other fees.  It is in the process of laying off hundreds of employees, because of the financial shortfall.  But as we’ve seen at City Observatory, ODOT’s revenues haven’t actually decreased, and much of the problem is related to expensive megaprojects and their cost overruns.  All of this has been amplified by the agency’s decision to take on greater amounts of debt, which reduces funds available to pay current staff and support operations.

Moving from pay as you go to debt financing

For most of its history, ODOT operated on a “pay as you go” basis, financing capital construction projects out of current income, and avoiding spending money on interest payments rather than on roads.  Over the past two decades though, ODOT has become increasingly addicted to debt.

This began in the wake of the 2001 recession, when Oregon first issued bonds to finance a statewide bridge repair program.  ODOT issued a second tranche of bonds (following another recession in 2008).  Since then ODOT has continued to issue more bonds, and more recently has added commercial paper borrowing.

In the two most recent fiscal years (FY 2023, and FY 2024), ODOT has issued about $700 million in new debt (excluding refunding bonds which are used to pay off older, higher interest bonds).

FY 2023

In FY 2023, ODOT issued about $429 million in new “highway user tax revenue bonds” — i.e. bonds payable from future state transportation revenues, and an additional $151 million in commercial paper, for a total of $580 million in new debt.  See the column labeled “Additions” from the table below. (Note: amounts shown as “reductions” represent payments of principal and interest on outstanding debt).

Source: ODOT Annual Financial Report, 2023

FY 2024

In the following fiscal year, ODOT issued an additional $120 million in commercial paper, bringing the cumulative additions to its debt over these two fiscal years to $700 million.

Source: ODOT Annual Financial Report, 2024

The issuance of $700 million in debt creates a liability to repay these funds in future years out of state highway funds, and also includes substantial interest costs as well, both of which have the effect of reducing funding that is potentially available for a range of purposes, including operation and maintenance.  The act of issuing debt, secured by a pledge of future revenues is a key factor in aggravating ODOT’s inability to fund basic operations.

This commercial paper works like a payday loan:  the state gets to spend money today, but gives up revenue in the future to repay this.  Because ODOT has used commercial paper to pay for the increasing costs of capital projects, it has played an important role in reducing the future funding that will be available to pay for staff and operations.  The decision to take on this debt, while hoping for the Legislature to approve a major revenue package turns out to have been a reckless one, because it has helped trigger the layoff of about 500 employees.

 

Sentences to ponder

In a much more narrow case, a big study of the views of AI and machine learning researchers revealed high levels of trust in international organizations and low levels of trust in national militaries.

That is from Matt Yglesias.

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Lawler: Early Read on Existing Home Sales in June

From housing economist Tom Lawler:

Based on publicly-available local realtor/MLS reports released across the country through today, I project that existing home sales as estimated by the National Association of Realtors ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.92 million in June, down 2.7% from May’s preliminary pace and down 0.3% from last June’s seasonally adjusted pace. Unadjusted sales should show a modest YOY increase, with the SA/NSA difference reflecting the higher business day count this June compared to last June.

Local realtor/MLS reports suggest that the median existing single-family home sales price last month was up by about 1.9% from a year earlier.

CR Note: The NAR is scheduled to release June Existing Home sales on Wednesday, July 23rd at 10:00 AM. The consensus is for 4.00 million SAAR, down from 4.03 million last month. Last year, the NAR reported sales in June 2024 at 3.93 million SAAR.

Friday assorted links

1. Did the Spanish Inquisition hurt science?

2. Mexico fertility rate below that of the U.S., and Mexico City is below one.

3. Are volcanoes a risk to solar-dominated grids?

4. NextLadder Ventures.

5. ChatGPT agent.

6. The return of the elderly pop star.

7. “Until 1970, the UK was the world’s top producer of nuclear energy.

8. Percentage of Americans with passport, over time.

9. Connie Francis, RIP.

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Large Wool Map of Ireland Seeks New Home

The Journal: “A 12ft by 11ft wool map of Ireland, which took four years of knitting and crocheting to complete, is in search of a new home to go on public display.”

China conducts structural tests for Long March 10 human spaceflight rocket

Structural test stand at CALT facility silhouetted at sunset, with cryogenic tankers and vapor visible, likely supporting ground tests for the Long March 10A crew launch vehicle.

China appears to have conducted structural verification tests on its new Long March 10A rocket, according to a coded update.

The post China conducts structural tests for Long March 10 human spaceflight rocket appeared first on SpaceNews.

D’accord !

That is from the French embassy in the UK.

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Newsletter: Housing Starts Increased to 1.321 million Annual Rate in June

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Housing Starts Increased to 1.321 million Annual Rate in June

A brief excerpt:
Total housing starts in June were above expectations (due to volatile multi-family sector) and starts in April and May were revised up.

The third graph shows the month-to-month comparison for total starts between 2024 (blue) and 2025 (red).

Starts 2024 vs 2025Total starts were down 0.5% in June compared to June 2024. Year-to-date (YTD) starts are down 1.0% compared to the same period in 2024. Single family starts are down 6.9% YTD and multi-family up 15.7% YTD.
There is much more in the article.

The Untethering of Professional Republicans from Reality

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that a significant fraction of professional Republicans are completely untethered from reality in very fundamental ways. Consider this story about this former DOGE staffer, Steve Davis (boldface mine):

Elon Musk’s right-hand man tried to stage a bizarre coup after being told to leave the government — ignoring the order and “bluffing” his way into continuing to do his old job, according to a new report…

After the White House announced on May 29 that the operational head of DOGE was following Elon Musk out of Washington, Davis apparently decided he wasn’t going anywhere — and continued as if nothing had happened.

The situation became so problematic that in June, the White House Presidential Personnel Office had to contact DOGE leads across government and White House liaisons to explicitly tell staffers that Davis was no longer an employee and to “cease all communication with him.”

But Davis wasn’t having it. Acting as if he’d never left, he continued reaching out to staffers for DOGE updates and making requests. He even led a DOGE meeting on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration a full week after his supposed departure, announcing a “DOGE 2.0” that would be more collaborative with Cabinet secretaries, Politico reported.

“He was at the GSA running the meeting like it was business as usual,” one person familiar with the events told reporters…

Davis then dispatched a trio of allies—GSA Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian, Josh Gruenbaum, and Anthony Armstrong—to assess people’s loyalty and installed them as DOGE’s new leadership, Politico reported.

They claimed authority from [Vice President] JD Vance and [chief of staff] Susie Wiles but actually did not and do not have it—they were bluffing,” a second source revealed.

I think there might have been a Seinfeld episode about something like this? Anyway, this is utterly bizarre behavior. Normal people do not do this. They’re all just so fucking weird*.

*Also fascist and evil, but so weird too.

Links 7/17/25

Links for you. Science:

Medical Societies Sue Kennedy and H.H.S. Over Vaccine Advice
America Is Killing Its Chance to Find Alien Life
Turmoil at US science academy as Trump cuts force layoffs: Efforts by leaders of the US national academies to adjust to the new political reality have spurred member concerns about capitulation and censorship.
Earth is going to spin much faster over the next few months — so fast that several days are going to get shorter
BEAST X for Bayesian phylogenetic, phylogeographic and phylodynamic inference
Testing the water: New study investigates orcas sharing food with humans

Other:

The New York Times On A Rampage (“Can’t shame people who can’t feel shame, can’t correct people who think they are are infallible.”)
Inside the Collapse of the F.D.A.: How the new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is dismantling the agency.
ICE Marched Through L.A.’s MacArthur Park to Shamelessly Show Off Its Power
They’re Literally Angry at Superman for Being Nice
Alligator Alcatraz detainees allege inhumane conditions at immigration detention center
Trump and Congress finalize law that could hurt your Wi-Fi
The Economic Consequences of the Big Odious Bill
Republican Votes for Budget After Dumping Medicaid-Related Stock. Representative Robert Bresnahan has some explaining to do.
RFK Jr. is steering public health agencies off a cliff
Bosses Are Using AI to Decide Who to Fire
Trump’s Latest Tariffs Really Spoiled the Fun for Wall Street
Signal is back to haunt the Trump team—this time targeting Marco Rubio
Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ reveals the ongoing cruelty towards migrants in US
The New York Times Had To Work With A Eugenicist So They Didn’t Get Scooped By A Bigot
JD Vance: Some Americans Are More American Than Others
Student loan cancellation program could become Trump retribution tool, some advocates fear
Holy Water Couldn’t Save My Husband. MAHA Wouldn’t Have, Either.
Zohran Mamdani Has Some Good Ideas for NYC Transit. His Biggest Promise Isn’t One of Them.
Ted Cruz ensured Trump spending bill slashed weather forecasting funding. Senator on vacation abroad while Texas was hit by deadly floods, a disaster worsened by forecasting cuts, critics say
Texas flood exposed America’s warped priorities
Justice Dept. Leader Suggested Violating Court Orders, Whistle-Blower Says
The plan to vaccinate all Americans, despite RFK Jr.
Trump May Be Waging War On America But The Whole Republican Party Is Abetting Him
How Diego Luna Became the Center of the ‘Andor’ Universe
Trump administration to end DHS program designed to thwart terrorist attacks
Meet the DC Tech CEO With a Flip Phone and No Social Media
The media’s dangerous ‘sanewashing’ of RFK Jr.
The U.S. granted these journalists asylum. Then it fired them.
‘There’s Beauty Inside Our Doors’: Queer Bars in Red States Forge On

How China Became the World’s Biggest Shipbuilder

Taisun crane at the Yantai Raffles shipyard in China.

Since 2017, China has been the largest shipbuilder in the world. Of the 89 million deadweight tons of commercial ships built in 2024, 50.8 million of them (57%) were Chinese.1 China has a similarly large fraction (59%) of orders for new ships worldwide. Of the 20 largest shipyards in the world by the size of their order book, 14 of them are Chinese. According to the US Navy, China’s shipbuilding capacity is over 200 times that of the US. In 2023 China delivered 972 commercial ships; the US delivered 7.

China’s shipbuilding dominance didn’t happen overnight, but followed years of effort, investment, successes, and setbacks: China’s was left with little to no shipbuilding capabilities following the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, and it wasn’t until the mid 1970s that China began exporting ships. In 1982 China was ranked just 16th in ship exports. Even after China became one of the world’s major shipbuilders in the 1990s (ranking 3rd behind Japan and Korea), it was still only producing a single-digit percentage of total commercial shipping tonnage. China finally surpassed Japan and Korea in tonnage produced in 2009 and 2010, respectively.2

Despite a collapse in the worldwide shipbuilding market following the Global Financial Crisis, China has since continued to expand its dominance. While it’s produced all kinds of ships over its history, for the most part its ship exports have consisted mostly of relatively simple ships like tankers and bulk carriers.3 More specialized, complex ships like liquified natural gas (LNG) carriers and cruise ships historically remained the purview of producers like South Korea, Germany, and Italy. But as China’s shipbuilding capabilities have grown, it has encroached into these areas as well. China now has 34% of the world orderbook for LNG, including an enormous order for 18 LNG carriers from Qatar which was the largest shipbuilding order in history. China’s first domestically-produced cruise ship, the Adora Magic City, first sailed in 2024.

Shipbuilding after the birth of PRC

Prior to the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China was a minor player in the global shipbuilding industry.4 Between 1865 and 1949 China only built around 500,000 deadweight tons of steel ships (roughly the capacity of 46 Liberty Ships, or about a half a Liberty Ship per year). This is about 1% of the shipping tonnage the US produced during WWII, and about 20% of what a single large shipyard will produce in a year today. And following the end of the Chinese Civil War, what little shipbuilding capabilities China had were hollowed out: As the Nationalists evacuated to Taiwan, they stripped the largest shipyards of equipment, and “dynamited what remained.” In 1949 China’s largest shipyards lay in ruins, and it had fewer than 1000 shipbuilding machine tools and less than 10,000 trained shipyard workers.5

But a capable shipbuilding industry was valuable for China, both for naval purposes and for the transportation of goods. Most of China’s population was concentrated on the coasts (making coastal cargo trade important), and while road and rail networks were sparse (China had less than 5000 miles of usable rail network in 1949), large rivers allowed access to China’s interior by ship. Additionally, large oceangoing ships were in short supply following the end of the civil war, as were sailors to sail them. As the Nationalists evacuated for Taiwan, much of China’s oceangoing fleet went with them, and in 1950 China had just 77 large merchant ships (ships which carry passengers or cargo), many of which were so damaged they couldn’t move under their own power. Most Chinese waterborne trade was carried via hundreds of thousands of traditional Chinese “junks”: small, wooden, sail-powered vessels. Following the end of the war, China began to repair the damaged ships that had been left behind, buy ships abroad, and build its own ships.

China’s early post-war shipbuilding efforts were buoyed by assistance from the Soviet Union. In 1950, the two countries signed the “Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Aid,” and in 1953, they signed and a naval agreement in which the Soviets promised financial support and technical assistance for shipbuilding and shipyard redevelopment. Dalian Shipyard, originally built by the Russians in 1898, was also returned to China in 1955. The Soviets helped turn ship repair facilities into shipyards at cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Tianjin. They also helped establish ship research and design groups (such as the Shanghai Institute of Shipbuilding, modeled after the Leningrad Institute for Shipbuilding).

Chinese shipbuilding progressed slowly in the 1950s and 1960s, and most efforts were focused on naval vessel construction. Following the war, China didn’t build its first steel cargo ship until 1955, and by 1960 it was only building around 10 mostly small cargo ships per year. What little progress there was stalled following the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, and the withdrawal of Soviet shipbuilding assistance and Soviet-built ship components. (The Soviets had apparently in large part been operating the Chinese shipyards.) China’s rate of ship construction fell from 10 ships in 1960 to just two ships in 1961, one ship in 1962, and zero ships in 1963; before picking back up to five ships per year. Most ships that were produced were “obsolete Soviet designs still on hand from previous years”. China’s leadership in the early 1960s seemed to have little interest in a strong shipbuilding industry. Liu Shaoqi, then Vice Chairman of the CCP, allegedly stated that “it’s better to buy ships than build ships” and that shipbuilding that was done should be limited to just the ships, not the engines.

Which isn’t to say that China made no efforts to improve its shipbuilding industry during this time. China consolidated shipbuilding efforts under the Sixth Ministry of Machine Building in 1963, and sent teams to Western and Eastern European shipyards to learn modern principles of shipbuilding shipyard design. But these efforts mostly focused on naval construction, and building merchant ships remained a challenge. The “Dongfeng” a 11,400 dwt cargo ship celebrated as being of Chinese design and built entirely with Chinese components, had to wait six years after its 1960 launching due to a lack of engines. Shipbuilding facilities appear to have been small and/or scarce. In one case, a 5,000 dwt ship was built on a beach due to the lack of a proper berth. And while Japan was building 100,000+ dwt ships using 300+ ton gantry cranes, Chinese yards often struggled to even build 20,000 dwt ships: In his 1991 study of the shipbuilding industry, Daniel Todd relays a story of a Shanghai shipyard that was forced to figure out how to assemble a 20,000 dwt cargo ship in facilities meant for just 3,000 dwt ships:

Fit for working on only at low tide, the ship’s rear ‘section was assembled upside down. There was no crane in Shanghai big enough to turn it right-side up. The workers sealed it, pushed it into the river, and there with the water taking most of the weight, used a borrowed crane to turn it over.’

Shipbuilding worsened following the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The purging of managers and technical experts, along with Mao’s “Third Front” plan to relocate defense industries to China’s interior, hampered industrial development of all kinds, including shipbuilding — though oceangoing shipbuilding was less affected due to its need for deep water access. Shipyards became “paralyzed by political extremism,” and the Sixth Ministry which oversaw shipbuilding was split into rival factions, bringing shipbuilding to a halt at several yards until the navy intervened. The ships produced were of questionable quality, and a focus on metrics like total tonnage produced resulted in ships that were too large for most of China’s ports, and without proper cargo handling equipment. China continued to expand its merchant fleet during this period, but did so primarily by importing ships, instead of building them.

The shipbuilding industry remained enmeshed in political struggles in the 1970s: Factions battled over whether China’s merchant fleet should be expanded by buying ships (favored by the “rationalists”) or building them (favored by the “radicals”). Ship output rose and fell, depending on which faction was in power.6 This continued until Mao’s death in 1976, when the radical faction was purged and emphasis shifted from shipbuilding to buying yet again.

As China’s state-owned shipping companies had begun to favor foreign over domestic shipbuilders, China’s shipbuilding industry took tentative steps into the international market and building ships for export. China’s first export orders for small ships (less than 5000 dwt) were booked in 1975, and for larger ships in 1977. To improve its shipbuilding capabilities following the end of the Cultural Revolution as part of the broader “reform and opening up,” China solicited foreign assistance to help upgrade its shipyards, which were roughly at the level of development they had been when the Soviets left in the early 1960s. Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (then one of the world’s largest shipbuilders) was contracted to help modernize China’s largest shipyard at Jiangnan, and the UK’s British Shipbuilders and A&P Appledore were brought in to help upgrade shipyards at Dalian and Guangdong. Via these agreements the infrastructure and layout of the shipyards was upgraded, modern shipbuilding technology was brought in, and Chinese shipyard workers were given extensive training. In 1980 China also formed its first (but far from its last) shipbuilding joint venture via YK Pao’s Hong Kong-based Worldwide Shipping, then one of the largest shipping companies in the world. The new venture, named International United Shipping and Investment Company, would contract for ships to be built in Shanghai, using modern shipbuilding technology.

As it upgraded its shipyard facilities with foreign assistance, China also began to obtain licenses to manufacture foreign ship technology. Starting in the late 1970s, China began local production and assembly of foreign-designed ship components, such as marine diesel engines, electrical generators, deck cranes, and steering machinery. (Chinese producers often struggled to manufacture these components at the required level of quality, and much of this work was simply final assembly using foreign-produced parts.) The late 1970s and early 1980s was also when foreign certification societies, like Lloyd’s Register, began overseeing Chinese ship construction and certifying Chinese ships. Without these certifications, ships would have great difficulty getting insured, making ship owners very reluctant to buy them. By 1983, 90% of ships built in China for export were certified by Lloyd’s.

By the end of the 1970s, China had exported a handful of ships and was offering to export ships priced 5-15% cheaper than other producers. Despite the low quality and outdated technology of Chinese ships, Chinese shipyards had accumulated an orderbook for 900,000 deadweight tons for export by 1982 — mostly bulk carriers, oil tankers, and other similarly simple ships — more than the capacity of all existing Chinese shipyards. And while for most of its history most of China’s shipbuilding was for naval vessels, by 1981 more than 60% of shipbuilding was for civilian cargo ships.

Shipbuilding in post-reform China

By the early 1980s, China was finding some success in the ship export market, and had substantially developed its shipbuilding industry. A 1976 CIA study noted that ““the past decade has shown a dramatic increase in China’s shipbuilding capabilities”. But China’s shipbuilding industry was still far behind international leaders like Japan and Korea. China’s ship and shipyard technology was out of date, ship quality was low, and deliveries were often late. In an apparent holdover of Mao’s emphasis on self-reliance, individual shipyards still tried to produce as much as they could in-house, including shipbuilding equipment, which had created a highly fragmented industry with few economies of scale. And even with the empahsis on in-house production, low technical capabilities meant that most critical ship components had to be imported from abroad. Responsibility for shipbuilding was similarly fragmented among various ministries, agencies, and local governments. And while the industry had begun to produce ships for export, China placed little emphasis on tailoring production to meet market demands: shipyards simply sold the same sorts of ships that they were producing for domestic purposes.

But a period of great reform to China’s shipbuilding industry began in 1982. That year, in an effort to improve the industry’s performance, China consolidated nearly all shipbuilding efforts into a single state-owned enterprise, China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC). CSSC oversaw 26 shipyards, 66 factories, 33 R&D units, 3 universities and marine schools, and a workforce of roughly 300,000.

The original goal of CSSC was simply to more effectively carry out China’s existing shipbuilding policy: Build ships primarily for the domestic market while selling some similar ships for export. But a downturn in the global ship market in the early 1980s (coming on the heels of a much larger downturn from the industry’s 1970s peak) left shipbuilders around the world with huge amounts of excess capacity and desperate for new orders. From 1981 to 1982 the price for new ships declined by more than 40% on average. Ships were so cheap, and offered on such favorable terms, that it was cheaper for China’s primary shipping enterprise, China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO), to import ships than buy them from CSSC. In spite of the efforts made to improve the industry, shipbuilding remained a low priority for China’s top leadership, and COSCO was under no pressure to purchase domestically-produced ships. In 1982 and 1983 more than 90% of COSCO’s ship orders went to foreign shipyards. At the same time, the weak shipbuilding market caused CSSC’s export orders to dry up: new orders fell from more than 300,000 dwt in 1981 to less than 100,000 in 1982.

Unable to rely on a captive domestic market, CSSC was forced to try and make its export offerings more competitive to keep its shipyards occupied (as a state corporation for a communist country, there was no risk that CSSC would go out of business, but apparently due to political considerations it couldn’t simply allow its shipyards to sit idle). However, the sorts of ships it had traditionally focused on building – relatively simple bulk carriers and tankers – were in low demand in the cutthroat shipbuilding market of the early 1980s. China’s shipyards thus began to hunt for orders for any type of ship at all, including more advanced ships that they had traditionally eschewed such refrigerated containerships, roll-on/roll-off (ro-ro) car carriers, and chemical carriers. In the mid 1980s China secured orders for two 69,000 dwt chemical carriers and a 125,000 dwt shuttle tanker7 from Norwegian shipowners, as well as two small containerships and two ro-ro ships from the Japanese.

While traditionally China’s shipyards had sought to maximize domestically-produced components and to minimize foreign involvement in ship production, CSSC found itself relaxing these requirements in its quest to fill its order books. The Norwegian ships were Norwegian-designed, used equipment and materials imported from Europe, and subcontracted some of the work to Norwegian companies. The containerships for Japan similarly were built with imported equipment and steel plate from Japan. One shipowner in the 1980s claimed that his Chinese-built ships were simply assembled in China using Japanese-produced parts.

In an effort to make its offerings more competitive and fill its empty shipyards, CSSC also undertook other improvements in its shipbuilding operations. At the time, ship construction times were long and unpredictable, due in part to bureaucratic delays in decision-making and material procurement. A mid-1980s shipbuilding study that compared lead times in a Chinese and Japanese shipyard found that the Chinese yard required up to six months more time to procure material. In one case, a refrigerated containership built for a German customer was delivered a year late because of difficulties obtaining the steel:

At first, steel was to be imported from Japan, until the relevant national foreign trade corporation, China National Metals and Minerals Import and Export Corporation, mysteriously refused Hudong’s request. Subsequent plans to obtain the steel domestically were nixed when the shipment, coming from the inland port of Wuhan, was physically stranded in river traffic and could not be transported in time. When CSSC tried again, this time successfully, to import from Japan, the effort was still stymied, in this instance by a requirement that imports of products similar to those made in China be transported by Chinese ships. Due to congestion at Tianjin – hardly the most logical port for receiving goods destined for a shipyard in Shanghai – the ship carrying the Japanese steel had to berth outside the port, further delaying delivery. When the steel finally arrived at the yard, 18 months had already elapsed in the 25-month delivery period stipulated in the contract.

But CSSC’s construction times improved, as individual shipyards gained more autonomy in their operations: Shipyards gradually gained the ability to negotiate individually with foreign shipowners, equipment manufacturers, consultants, and classification societies. They were given more leeway to use foreign-produced ship designs, to make their own equipment and material purchases, and exercise more managerial control over their operations. Steel plate, for instance, had previously only been distributed twice a year from the Ministry of Metallurgy, forcing yards to plan very far in advance and resulting in frequent steel shortages and delays. But by the mid-1980s, yards were being given more control over acquiring materials outside of set schedules. Contracts began to be used to manage responsibilities between different organizations within CSSC, and bonus systems were implemented to motivate workers. Slowly, CSSC started to become more of a coordinator of somewhat (but only somewhat) independent shipyard companies, rather than a single monolithic enterprise. As a result of these and other improvements, ship delivery times improved. CSSC’s large shipyard at Jiangnan halved its delivery times over the course of the 1980s, and by the end of the decade some Chinese yards were actually delivering ships early.

CSSC also worked to improve its capabilities in other ways. It continued to license foreign ship technology — by 1986 it had signed over 200 contracts for licensed manufacture, co-production, and other similar arrangements — while also improving its manufacturing capabilities so more components could be produced domestically rather than assembled from foreign-produced parts. It improved its financing offerings for ship buyers, offering credit terms more in line with those offered by foreign builders. It upgraded facilities at various shipyards, restructuring and consolidating their operations and installing more modern production machinery. While at the beginning of the '80s shipyards strived to be autarkic, vertically-integrated operations that could produce any type of ship, over the decade shipyards began to specialize: some yards focused on tankers, some on containerships, and so on. Yards experimented with new management practices and invested much more in management training.

China’s shipbuilding industry remained behind countries like Korea and Japan in the 1980s. Shipbuilding facilities were small compared to the largest foreign yards: China’s largest drydock (a flat, floodable basin on which ships are built) in 1985 could produce ships up to 100,000 dwt, while in Japan the largest drydocks could produce ships ten times that size. China wouldn’t complete a 250,000 dwt drydock, allowing it to build the very largest crude oil tankers, until the mid-1990s. Shipyard crane capacity was similarly limited, and while the block method of construction had been adopted by Chinese yards (it’s unclear exactly when, but at least by 1982), blocks were smaller and less fully outfitted compared to the most modern foreign yards, and were wastefully moved around yards far more often. China’s shipyard facilities in the 1980s were described by visitors as operating on the level of 1950s or 1960s US yards. In some cases unreliable electrical grids forced shipyards to supply power via their own generators. Shipyards were staffed with far too few engineers, and low labor productivity meant that yards employed a very large number of blue collar workers in comparison to their output.

And despite China’s efforts at technological transfer, the fraction of domestically-produced components in Chinese ships remained “disappointingly low”; even things like ship steel mostly had to be imported because Chinese steel wasn’t good enough. Designs and components were often unstandardized, and ships were frequently built based on the idiosyncrasies of whatever engineer happened to be working on the project. Ship quality had improved, but slowly, and many shipowners remained dubious. Delivery times and labor efficiency were still far behind what Korea and Japan were capable of. And while Chinese shipyards were offering prices well below international competitors, prices were set based on what would win the yard orders without regards to actual production costs, and CSSC lost huge amounts of money on many ships that were underbid. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Chinese shipyards began to factor profit and loss into their operations.

But while China’s shipbuilding industry was still behind the world leaders, CSSC’s shifting emphasis towards exports and transforming its operations to meet the needs of the market gradually bore fruit. By the late 1980s CSSC was producing half of its ships for export, up from 1/3rd in 1982. By 1991 China had exported ships to 30 different countries, and by 1992 it had become the third largest commercial shipbuilder in the world, up from 16th in 1982.

Shipbuilding in the 1990s

China’s shipbuilding industry continued to slowly improve in the 1990s. Shipbuilders became increasingly cost-conscious, as CSSC headquarters had begun to more closely monitor shipyard bids to shipowners and reject any that they believed couldn’t be achieved profitably. Departments within shipyards began to sign contracts with each other that included delivery time and cost targets, and workers could earn bonuses by meeting them. Chinese shipyards began to walk away from bids if the price buyers demanded was too low. By 1994 maritime publication Lloyd’s List reported that “indifference to price is a thing of the past in China”, and by the mid-1990s shipbuilding was one of China’s most competitive export industries. In 1996, 85% of new merchant ships in China were built for export.

During the 1990s China continued its efforts to acquire ship and shipbuilding technology by way of manufacturing licenses, joint ventures, and technology transfer agreements. China signed agreements with Japanese and European shipyards for the transfer of technologies like CAD/CAM software, metal cutting techniques, gearboxes, and diesel and gas turbine engines. By the early 2000s nearly every major marine engine manufacturer had established a manufacturing facility in China, and Chinese shipyards had widely adopted CAD/CAM ship design software (which had been rarely used in the early 1990s). Hundreds of Chinese shipyard workers were trained in Japanese shipyards, and Chinese yards gained continued exposure to foreign design practices by producing foreign-designed ships, inviting foreign consultants to lecture in China, and partnering with foreign ship design firms. This training, information exchange, and technology transfer all helped improve China’s shipyard operations. It enabled advancements like more efficient hull blocks, which minimized material use by intelligently locating joints, and it improved labor productivity by making greater use of pre-outfitting (installing systems on hull blocks before they’re attached to the ship).

Chinese shipyards also expanded their shipbuilding capacity in the 1990s. In 1995, the shipyard at Dalian completed a 250,000 dwt-capacity drydock, the first dock in the country capable of building Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs). Over the next 10 years, China built 8 more VLCC-capable drydocks, and had another four in the planning stages. China’s total shipbuilding capacity in 1982 was 800,000 dwt annually. By 1997 it had reached 2.5 million dwt, and investments were being made to increase that to 3.5 million dwt.

China also took its next tentative steps with shipyard joint ventures in the 1990s. In 1991, German shipping company Schierack Beteiligungs was so impressed with China’s delivery of two liquified petroleum gas (LPG) carriers that it established a joint shipyard with CSSC, Shanghai Edward Shipbuilding, to build more of them. And in 1994, the Yantai Raffles shipyard, a joint venture between two Chinese companies and Singapore’s Brian Chang Group, began operations.8 (Yantai Raffles is notable for being 100% foreign owned, a rare occurrence for Chinese joint ventures, and for setting records for the world’s largest revolving pedestal crane and the most weight ever lifted by a crane.)

China’s shipbuilding industry was badly shaken following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the huge decline in new ship orders that followed. As a result, China took steps to try and further improve the industry’s operations and efficiency. CSSC slashed an estimated 1/3rd of its labor force, and to further encourage competition in 1999 the company was split into two: CSSC and China Shipbuilding Industrial Corporation, or CSIC. That same year, the government began to encourage shipyards to pursue joint ventures with foreign shipyards as a way to further acquire foreign ship and shipyard technology. Foreign operators were limited to 49% ownership (a requirement that was temporarily relaxed in 2001, then reinstated in 2006)9, and agreements included “mandatory provisions ensuring foreign technology transfer into Chinese shipyards”. One such joint venture was NACKS, a shipbuilding joint venture between China’s COSCO and Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which became one of China’s largest shipyards. Between 1999 and 2008, NACKS constructed more than 7% of all ship tonnage built in China.

By the end of the 1990s, the status of China’s shipbuilding industry was not all that different from the end of the 1980s. It remained a distant third behind Korea and Japan in terms of output. At the end of 1999, China’s orderbook was less than 1/10th the size of Japan’s or Korea’s, and it had just 3% of total international orders. Of the 40 largest shipyards in the world by number of orders, China had just 2 (Dalian at #18 and Hudong at #22).

While China’s shipbuilding industry had made significant progress in improving its operations during the 1990s (as it had in the 1980s), China’s shipyards were still inferior to the best foreign yards in terms of efficiency, technological capabilities, and ship quality. Delivery times and quality had both improved, but they were still somewhat inconsistent, and Chinese yards were still “fairly well known” for delivering ships late and/or or poorly built: Foreign shipowners would send large numbers of advisors to Chinese yards to try and ensure the ships were built properly, but as late as 2006 Chinese yards were building ships that had to be scuttled after being rejected by the buyer for being unseaworthy. A substantial volume of ship steel (~15%) and ship components (~40%) still needed to be imported from abroad, and most ship engines were either imported or built in China from licensed foreign designs. Outside analyses of Chinese shipyards found that they often had trouble taking maximum advantage of the latest technology if they had it (and they often didn’t: In the 1990s, the majority of Chinese shipyards were estimated to have 1980s-level technology) and that Chinese yards still may not have known what their true costs of production were. Despite its efforts to build more advanced, complex ships China still had a reputation for being a cheap builder of the simplest ships, a status reflected in its orderbook. Chinese shipyards still had a sizable labor cost advantage compared to yards in Korea and Japan, but much of this advantage was offset by its low productivity. What’s more, productivity was improving very slowly as costs were rising, and there was concern that the industry was losing price and technological ground to foreign yards.

Chinese shipyard competitiveness circa 2003, via Koenig 2003.

By the new millennium, China’s shipbuilding industry had progressed significantly, but it remained in a lower league than Japan and Korea, who continued to dominate world ship production.

Shipbuilding in the 21st century

In the year 2000, China’s Party Central Committee (the central governing body of China) and the State Council (roughly equivalent to the cabinet or executive branch) identified shipbuilding as a key industry for development. In 2002, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji stated that China should become the world’s foremost shipbuilder, and the government set a target for the country to become the world’s biggest shipbuilder by 2015. The next year, China released its National Marine Economic Development Plan, which proposed building several large shipbuilding bases around the country. China’s 11th five-year economic plan, released at the end of 2005, identified shipbuilding as a strategic industry and announced goals for annual shipbuilding tonnage: 15 million dwt by 2010 and 22 million by 2015. By the time this plan was released, China’s shipbuilding output had already been steadily increasing, buoyed by an upswing in the international shipbuilding market (worldwide shipbuilding output rose more than 50% between 2000 and 2005): China’s shipbuilding output was nearly 10 million dwt in 2005, up from just 2.5 million dwt in 2000.

Following these new policy priorities, state investment poured into the shipbuilding sector. It’s estimated that the government spent $90 billion subsidizing the shipbuilding industry between 2006 and 2013, contributing an estimated 15-20% of the cost of each new ship. Between 2004 and 2007, annual investment in Chinese shipyards rose by a factor of seven. Dozens of new shipyards began construction, including huge sites at Changxing Island, Longxue Island, and Bohai. In some cases, entire shipyards were relocated to new facilities: Jiangnan shipyard, historically one of China’s largest shipyards, was moved to Changxing Island to clear room for the Shanghai Expo 2010. These new shipyards were largely “greenfield” sites with plenty of space and huge drydocks, including a 1,000,000 dwt capacity dock at Yantai. They were designed for efficient material flows and incorporated modern shipbuilding technology.

Chinese shipyard investment, via Barwick et al. 2019.

Much of this investment went into CSSC and CSIC-operated yards, but the industry also expanded outside of these two state-owned giants. Scores of smaller yards operating outside the auspices of CSSC and CSIC cropped up, many of them simple “beach” yards with little in the way of infrastructure or government oversight. And many large privately owned shipyards, operated by both foreign and local companies, were built as well. By 2012, only 8 of the 20 largest shipyards in China were operated by CSSC or CSIC.

Prior to these initiatives, China has already been capturing a greater share of the world shipbuilding market: By 2005, it had reached nearly 14% of new deliveries, and 16% of the global orderbook (up from 5% and 9% in 2000). But the huge amount of investment in the sector threw gasoline on the fire: China’s orderbook surpassed Japan’s in 2007. It surpassed Korea’s in 2009. China met its goal of producing 15m dwt by 2010 in 2007, and met its goal of producing 22m dwt by 2015 in 2009. In 2010, China produced more ships (whether by number of ships, deadweight tons, or gross tons) than any other country in the world, and in 2012 it produced roughly as much tonnage as the entire world had in 2002.

As China expanded its shipbuilding infrastructure and captured a larger share of the global market, it continued its efforts to acquire foreign shipbuilding technology through partnerships and joint ventures with Japanese, Korean, and European firms. In 2006, when reverting the rules for foreign investment to limit foreign ownership of shipyards to 49%, China also required that foreign partners set up technological transfer centers to transfer expertise to local partners. In 2009, an executive at CSSC published an article stating that Chinese shipbuilders should focus on “introducing, digesting, absorbing, and re-innovating” foreign technology. It apparently became common for Japanese and Korean engineers to offer consulting services to China and for Chinese shipyards to hire retired Korean engineers. It’s estimated that following the downturn of Korea’s shipbuilding industry in the late 2010s, roughly 2000 former shipyard workers left Korea for China:

China must have thought, ‘This is the moment.’ They recruited many engineers, and they must have been after things like the design drawings that they kept privately. Chinese shipbuilding companies tried to recruit Korean engineers by offering them ‘annual salary of 300 million won [~$216,000 USD], 2-3 year contracts’ as if it were a formula. They just sucked up the juice and sent them away when the 2-3 year contracts were up.

China’s desire to absorb their expertise did little to dissuade foreign firms from entering China, enticed by China’s large market and low costs of labor. Qingdao Hyundai Shipbuilding, a joint venture with Korea’s Hyundai, was founded in 2005, and STX Dalian, a venture of Korea’s STX group, began operations in 2006. Kawasaki’s joint shipbuilding venture NACKS founded another joint shipbuilding operation, DACOS, in 2007. In 2005 alone, China’s shipbuilding industry filed 104 proposals for foreign investments or joint ventures. Foreign joint ventures in China’s shipbuilding industry continue to be widely used today, and new ventures continue to pop up all the time.

Shipbuilding since the financial crisis

The huge expansion of China’s shipbuilding industry was derailed by the 2008 global financial crisis. Orders for new ships collapsed worldwide, and ship prices fell by roughly 50% (depending on the ship). Only after Covid has the shipbuilding industry shown signs of bouncing back: Orderbooks have risen 65% in the last 4 years, but orders and deliveries are still down from the pre-crisis peak.

China was hit especially hard by the industry slowdown. Much of its expansion in capacity had come by way of building numerous small, inefficient shipyards poorly equipped to weather a major decline in the global shipbuilding market. By 2010, China was only using 75% of its shipyard capacity, and by 2015, that had fallen to 50%. Many shipyards went bankrupt or ceased operations. Rongsheng Heavy Industries, previously the largest privately-owned shipbuilder in China, shuttered its operations in 201410. STX Dalian declared bankruptcy the same year. Across the country, shipyard facilities sat idle, and the formation of new shipyards declined precipitously.

As a result of its struggles, the Chinese government took steps to shore up the shipbuilding industry. It created a scrap and build policy to encourage shipowners to dispose of older ships in favor of new ships. It rolled out extremely attractive financing options, allowing shipowners to buy ships with as little as 2% down payment.11 And it encouraged shipyards to merge and consolidate in order to become stronger and more internationally competitive. Due to the ebb in merchant ship orders, this consolidation often took the form of combining shipyards that had civilian orders with shipyards that had military orders, so the financial strength of the latter could support the former. (One such consolidation was CSIC and CSSC, which began to re-merge in 2019 following years of discussion.) But only the largest and most productive shipyards (as well as shipyards that produced military vessels) were flagged as eligible for support, and between 2010 and 2019, the number of active shipyards in China declined by 70%. Despite this consolidation, even today China’s industry remains comparatively fragmented compared to Korea. While China has a large fraction of the world’s largest shipyards, and most of the world orderbook by capacity, the largest shipyards in the world by maximum output remain Korean.12

In relative terms, China’s shipbuilding industry managed to stay on top in spite of its struggles. China remained the world’s largest shipbuilder by output from 2010 to 2014, and while Korea regained the top spot in 2015 and 2016, China has held on to first place since 2017.13 Still, China’s shipbuilding industry faced perennial challenges throughout its expansion: While Chinese yards maintained a labor cost advantage compared to Japan and Korea, it was still less labor efficient in terms of output per man-hour (as well as in terms of output per square meter of shipyard) in the 2010s.14 Productivity improved slowly due to work being spread across a comparatively large number of shipyards, which hampered learning curve effects. China still had comparatively few engineering personnel in shipyards compared to Korea or Japan, and such personnel were mostly allocated to naval rather than commercial work. Shipyard turnover was high, and Chinese ships still took longer to build than Korean and Japanese ships. They were also still considered to have worse quality, being noisier, dirtier, and less fuel efficient than Japanese or Korean ships. The result was that Chinese ships sold at a discount compared to Korean and Japanese vessels, and they maintained much less of their value in the secondary market. Experts estimated that for many complex types of ships, China was still several years behind the world leaders.

China also continued to struggle to produce many of the sub-components and materials needed for shipbuilding. While China became apt at building marine engines (based on licensed designs), it still needed to import many components including electrical equipment, navigation equipment, cabin outfitting equipment, and specialty steels (including the steel used for the exterior hull). Estimates in the mid-2010s pegged China’s level of domestic production for components at 55-60%, compared to 80-90% in Korea and Japan. A 2013 CSIC report noted that while the company excelled at “‘building the empty shells,’ we basically use foreign products inside the ships, including the propulsion system, the communication system and the navigation system with high added value and high technical contents.” And while China had successfully built complex vessels like LNG carriers15 (which need to be built to strict tolerances to ensure the liquified gas stays insulated and cold), it purportedly struggled to build them, and China’s share of the LNG market was in the single digits as late as 2021. Well into the 2010s, China’s bread and butter remained simpler ships like tankers and bulk carriers.16

But as it has since its inception, China’s shipbuilding industry has continued to march forward. China’s overall share of the world orderbook rose from 40% in 2010 to 57% at the end of 2024. It has now captured 30% of the LNG market, 45% of the LPG market, and 70% of the market for large container ships. In 2024, China secured 75% of new ship orders. It’s continued to partner with foreign firms across the shipbuilding value chain, and simultaneously increase its quality and productivity: one expert recently stated that “the quality gap has closed a lot over the last 15 years or so,” with the quality being “in many instances as good as you’d get elsewhere.” China still lags in some areas (like building cruise ships), but it seems motivated to catch up there as well.

Conclusion

If you survey the arc of the development of China’s shipbuilding industry, you’ll see a trend of continuous (if sometimes plodding) progress, with the occasional interruption and reversion. After most 10-year periods, you could look back on the previous decade and see substantial improvement in China’s shipbuilding capabilities: China went from having virtually no shipbuilding industry at all to producing its first vessels in the 1950s, entering the export market in the 1970s, becoming an increasingly successful player in the 1980s and 1990s, and becoming the world’s largest shipbuilder in the 2000s.

But you could similarly examine where China’s industry stood at most points in time and see an industry that was still behind many of its competitors. Until very recently China struggled to build ships that were as high quality or as complex as those from other countries. Even today, as the undisputed biggest shipbuilder in the world, it seems like China still lags in producing the most complex ships, in shipyard productivity, and in producing various marine components (most engines in Chinese ships, for instance, are still based on foreign designs) — though it wouldn’t surprise me if this gap continues to shrink.

What’s notable to me isn’t that China became a major shipbuilding country. Most low-labor cost countries that have tried have been able to carve out a share of the world market, at least for a time. Japan and Korea are the obvious examples, but countries like Brazil, Poland, Yugoslavia and Taiwan also had major shipbuilding industries that were developed following WWII.

Instead, what’s notable is how long it took China to become a major player. Compared to Korea, China’s shipbuilding industry seems to have advanced slowly. Like China, Korea had little shipbuilding capability following the end of WWII (in 1962 only 8% of South Korea’s shipping tonnage was steel ships), and Korea didn’t begin exporting ships until the 1970s. But in less than a decade, Korea’s Hyundai emerged from no previous shipbuilding experience to become the largest shipbuilder in the world. By 1984, Korea had captured 17% of the global ship orderbook, and by the end of the 1980s, Korea had the world’s largest orderbook. China, on the other hand, didn’t reach a similar share of world orders until 2005, and it didn’t have the world’s largest orderbook until 2010.

(Compared to Japan, which became the world’s largest shipbuilder less than a decade after it began building up its industry following WWII, China is slower still, but this is less of a fair comparison since Japan entered the post-war era as a much more capable shipbuilder.)

While Korea entered shipbuilding in the 1970s with a full-throated desire to become a major shipbuilder, as late as the early 1990s China was apparently “not thoroughly convinced of [shipbuilding’s] usefulness.” Progress accelerated when China’s government fully embraced shipbuilding in the late 2000s, though one wonders how successful this effort would have been without the previous three decades of export experience.

Since the end of WWII, we’ve seen a regular emergence of new major players in the shipbuilding market. These countries almost always capture market share by leveraging their low costs of production (especially labor) and are often able clamber up the worldwide rankings following a major industry disruption. Japan displaced the UK as the largest shipbuilder in the world following WWII and the invention of modern shipbuilding methods; Korea emerged as a major shipbuilder following the collapse of the shipbuilding market in the late 1970s, eventually muscling Japan out of the top spot. China in turn displaced Korea following the huge expansion, then contraction, of its shipbuilding industry in the 2000s and early 2010s. It remains to be seen if a similar pattern will befall China (perhaps by a country like Vietnam, whose orderbook quadrupled between 2020 and 2024), or if China will be more successful at maintaining a hold over the industry.

1

There are several measures of ship capacity.

  • Deadweight tons (dwt) is the total amount of weight a ship can carry.

  • Displacement tons is the weight of the ship itself.

  • Gross tons (GT) is a measure of internal ship volume.

  • Compensated gross tons (CGT) is similar to Gross Tons but with an adjustment to try and correct for the fact that some ships are more complex to build than other types. It's a measure of effort it takes to build a ship, and is used to compare the output of different shipyards (or different countries) that might be producing very different types of ships.

2

Korea retook the lead in 2015 and again in 2016 on compensated gross tonnage produced, but since 2017 China has remained in the #1 spot.

3

Relative complexity of different ship types:

4

China did manage to produce an all-welded cargo ship in 1947, prior to Japanese yards performing similar feats.

5

10,000 workers is less than what a single US WWII shipyard employed. Kaiser’s Swan Island Facility employed more than 30,000.

6

Even when focus shifted to building, China’s lack of shipbuilding capacity meant that most additions to China’s merchant fleet were still imports.

7

Shuttle tankers transport oil from offshore oil fields.

8

Chinese partner companies were China National Petroleum Company and Yantai City Mechanical Industrial Company.

9

Yantai Raffles, which was 100% foreign owned, was grandfathered in under the old rules.

10

In part because, despite its state of the art shipyard, it struggled to build actual ships.

11

Thanks to this program, between 2005 and 2015 European Banks’ share of ship financing fell from 70% to 30%. Over the same period Chinese banks rose from 2% to 18%.

12

Though some of these shipyards are adjacent to each other. Geographically, the largest shipbuilding facility in the world is likely Changxing Island.

13

Measured by CGT.

14

Though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you have very cheap labor, it may not make sense to displace that labor with comparatively more expensive labor-saving technology.

15

China delivered its first LNG carrier in 2007.

16

It’s important to note that this emphasis on tankers and bulkers is to some extent a reflection of global demand for ships. China’s 2015 orderbook is not all that different from the world orderbook of 2015, though China has a lower proportion of complex ships.

Heavy Rain From the Central Plains to the Mid-Atlantic; Heat Wave Begins This Weekend

House Democrats accuse NASA of illegal impoundment of funds

AMS

Top Democrats on the House Science Committee are accusing NASA leadership of impounding funds and taking steps to implement a budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 before Congress can act.

The post House Democrats accuse NASA of illegal impoundment of funds appeared first on SpaceNews.


Back from Shenzhen, China, where I’m manufacturing Poem/1

I’ve been in Shenzhen the last few days visiting factories and suppliers for my Poem/1 AI clock.

Remember that clock?

It tells the time with a new rhyming couplet every minute. A half million poems per year which I believe is the highest poem velocity of any consumer gadget. (Do correct me if I’m wrong.)

I made a prototype, it went viral and ended up in the New York Times. So I ran a successful Kickstarter. Then - as is traditional - ran into some wild electronics hurdles involving a less-than-honest supplier… Kickstarter backers will know the story from the backers-only posts. (Thank you for your support, and thank you for your patience.)

So somehow I’ve become an AI hardware person? There can’t be many of us.

ANYWAY.

Poem/1 is now heading towards pilot production.

Here are the two VERY FIRST pieces hot off the test assembly line!

What a milestone.

Next up… oh about a thousand things haha

Like: a case iteration to tighten fit and dial in the colour, and an aging test to check that a concerning display damage risk is fixed. Pilot production is 100 units, allocated for certification and end-to-end tests from the warehouse in Hong Kong… Plus some firmware changes to fit better with the assembly line, and, and, and… I can handle all from London over the next few weeks.


It was my first visit to Shenzhen and actually my first to mainland China.

This motto is everywhere:

"Time is money, efficiency is life."

It’s a quote from Yuan Geng, director of the Shekou Industrial Zone which is where China’s opening up began in 1979.

Shekou is a neighbourhood in Shenzhen (I stayed there in a gorgeous B&B-style hotel). According to the leaflet I picked up, Shenzhen now has 17.8 million permanent residents (as of end 2023) with an average age of 32.5.

“My” factory is in Liaobu town, Dongguan, 90 minutes north. (It’s shared, of course, the line spins up and spins down as needed.)

Dongguan has 10.5m residents (for comparison, London is 8.8m) and is divided into townships, each of which specialises in a different area of industrial production, for instance textiles or plastic injection moulding.

Driving around meeting with various suppliers (there’s a supply chain even for a product this simple), I noticed that the factories were often small and independently owned.

So when we meet the manager, they’re often an ex engineer, with deep domain skills and experience. Issues can be analysed and resolved there and then.

This is a photo from the injection moulding factory, discussing the next iteration of the tool.

The manager’s office has a desk with a computer and files, with one chair, and a second tea table for discussion. This is a wooden desk with built-in tea making facilities.

We shared the marked-up test pieces (you see the marker pen drawing? Other plastic pieces were more annotated) and talked over constraints and trade-offs: the mechanical nature of the tool, quality/aesthetics, assembly line efficiency, risk mitigation e.g. the display problem I mentioned earlier which comes (we think) from a stressed ribbon cable bond that weakens from vibration during shipping.

Then: decisions and maybe a tour of the floor, and then we head off.

It was an amazingly productive trip.

And just… enjoyable. Sitting in the factory conference room, reviewing parts, eating lychees…

The “general intellect” in the region (to use Marx’s term for social knowledge) is astounding, and that’s even before I get to the density of suppliers and sophistication of machinery and automation.

Factory managers are immersed in a culture of both product and production, so beyond the immediate role they are also asking smart questions about strategy, say.

And in one case, it was such a privilege to be walked through a modern assembly line and get a breakdown of their line management system – shown with deserved pride.

I have so many stories!

Also from visiting the electronics markets (8 city blocks downtown), and generally being out and about…

That can all wait till another time.

For now – I’m settling back into London and reviewing a colossal to-do list.

And remembering an oh so hot and oh so humid sunset run in Shekou.

Beautiful.


Are you interested in Poem/1 but missed the Kickstarter?

Join the Poem/1 newsletter on Substack.

It has been dormant for a year+ but I’ll be warming it up again soon now that (fingers crossed) I can see mass production approaching.

I’ll be opening an online store after fulfilling my wonderful Kickstarter backers, and that newsletter is where you’ll hear about it first.


More posts tagged: that-ai-clock-and-so-on (13).

Auto-detected kinda similar posts:

New Mobile Phone Forensics Tool

The Chinese have a new tool called Massistant.

  • Massistant is the presumed successor to Chinese forensics tool, “MFSocket”, reported in 2019 and attributed to publicly traded cybersecurity company, Meiya Pico.
  • The forensics tool works in tandem with a corresponding desktop software.
  • Massistant gains access to device GPS location data, SMS messages, images, audio, contacts and phone services.
  • Meiya Pico maintains partnerships with domestic and international law enforcement partners, both as a surveillance hardware and software provider, as well as through training programs for law enforcement personnel.

From a news article:

The good news, per Balaam, is that Massistant leaves evidence of its compromise on the seized device, meaning users can potentially identify and delete the malware, either because the hacking tool appears as an app, or can be found and deleted using more sophisticated tools such as the Android Debug Bridge, a command line tool that lets a user connect to a device through their computer.

The bad news is that at the time of installing Massistant, the damage is done, and authorities already have the person’s data.

Slashdot thread.

World religions, by population

 The Pew research center has been keeping an eye on religious affiliations around the world. More than half of us are Christians or Muslims.  Only about two tenths of one percent of us are Jews. Their headline takeaway is the growing number of unaffiliated:

Nearly a quarter of the world’s population is religiously unaffiliated 

Nearly a quarter of the world’s population is religiously unaffiliated 

 

How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020
Muslims grew fastest; Christians lagged behind global population increase
  By Conrad Hackett, Marcin Stonawski, Yunping Tong, Stephanie Kramer, Anne Shi and Dalia Fahm 

Bar chart showing that Christians are the world’s largest religious group

York Space parent company to acquire ground systems operator Atlas Space

For York, the move deepens its push into end-to-end space infrastructure and turnkey services for commercial and government customers.

The post York Space parent company to acquire ground systems operator Atlas Space appeared first on SpaceNews.

Housing Starts Increased to 1.321 million Annual Rate in June

From the Census Bureau: Permits, Starts and Completions
Housing Starts:
Privately-owned housing starts in June were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,321,000. This is 4.6 percent above the revised May estimate of 1,263,000, but is 0.5 percent below the June 2024 rate of 1,327,000. Single-family housing starts in June were at a rate of 883,000; this is 4.6 percent below the revised May figure of 926,000. The June rate for units in buildings with five units or more was 414,000.

Building Permits:
Privately-owned housing units authorized by building permits in June were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,397,000. This is 0.2 percent above the revised May rate of 1,394,000, but is 4.4 percent below the June 2024 rate of 1,461,000. Single-family authorizations in June were at a rate of 866,000; this is 3.7 percent below the revised May figure of 899,000. Authorizations of units in buildings with five units or more were at a rate of 478,000 in June.
emphasis added
Multi Housing Starts and Single Family Housing StartsClick on graph for larger image.

The first graph shows single and multi-family housing starts since 2000.

Multi-family starts (blue, 2+ units) increased sharply month-over-month in June.   Multi-family starts were up 26.6% year-over-year.

Single-family starts (red) decreased in June and were down 10.0% year-over-year.

Multi Housing Starts and Single Family Housing StartsThe second graph shows single and multi-family housing starts since 1968.

Total housing starts in June were above expectations and starts in April and May were revised up.

I'll have more later …

I haven’t watched the NBA in years and I only know about Joel Embiid by media osmosis, but for some reason I spent 45 minutes this morning reading this profile of him.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

The grammar of a god-ocean

Photo of an ocean sunset seen through a round window with a warm sepia tone across the sky and water.

To truly explore alien languages, linguists must open themselves to the maximum conceivable degree of cosmic otherness

- by Eli K P William

Read at Aeon

RIP, Separation of Church and State

Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead

The Cross Section is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

What’s left of the separation of church and state? The answer is, not much, and less all the time.

The following is an interview I conducted with journalist Sarah Posner, author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind, about recent developments in the dismantling of wall between government and religion. You can listen here or on your favorite podcast app; just search for The Cross Section. I’ve also included a transcript below.

TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Waldman: Welcome to The Cross Section. I am your host, Paul Waldman. Let me tell you about a few items that were in the news in the last week or two:

  • The Internal Revenue Service says that churches can now endorse political candidates, upending 70 years of established law.

  • The Supreme Court ruled that parents can force schools not to teach their children from materials they claim violate their religious beliefs.

  • The Supreme Court also ruled that Donald Trump can essentially dismantle the Department of Education, despite the fact that it was established by a law passed by Congress.

  • The Federal Trade Commission recently held a workshop on the supposed dangers of gender affirming care, which you wouldn't think is the job of the FTC, while the Justice Department is subpoenaing doctors and health clinics that provide that care, which sure looks like a prelude to criminal prosecutions.

  • And in the great state of Texas, Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill requiring the 10 Commandments to be posted in every classroom in the state. So at last, the young’uns in the Lone Star State will learn not to covet their neighbor’s donkey.

To talk about all this, my guest today is Sarah Posner, a journalist who has covered the Christian right for many years. Among her books are Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind, and God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters. Sarah, welcome to The Cross Section.

Sarah Posner: Thanks for having me, Paul.

Paul Waldman: Alright, I want to start with the Department of Education because if you just opened up the news and read about what happened at the Supreme Court, you would think that this is something that is really new to the second Trump administration. A number of states sued the Trump administration to stop them from dismantling the Department of Education. A district court judge put a hold on the actions that the Trump administration was taking and said that they had to rehire about half of the department’s employees that they were looking to fire. And the idea was that while this case is being adjudicated, the Trump administration is not going to be allowed to dismantle the Department of Education, which in fact is their explicit intent; it’s not even something that they are hiding. Trump in fact signed an executive order instructing the Secretary of Education to prepare for the shutting down of the department. Which would be illegal because this is a department that was established by Congress, and Congress would have to disestablish it if that's what they wanted to do.

But the Supreme Court stepped in on what's called the shadow docket, issuing an unsigned order overturning that stay that the lower court had put on the administration's actions and essentially saying, go ahead, you can start dismantling the Department of Education while this case gets adjudicated, which could take months or even years. And of course, by the time the case is finished, there may be no more Department of Education.

This is an education story, obviously, but it's also a religion story. And that's why I wanted to ask Sarah about it. Maybe you can start by just giving us some of the context about the problem that the religious right has had with the Department of Education, not just for years, but for decades.

Sarah Posner: The Christian right has always been opposed to the Department of Education. It's also opposed to large swaths of the federal government, or what they would call the federal bureaucracy, in addition to the Department of Education. But the Department of Education gets to the heart of why the Christian Right opposes the federal government telling them what to do. They believe that God granted jurisdiction to various power structures within our society: the church, the family, particularly the father at the head of the family, that God did not grant jurisdiction to some big federal bureaucracy.

The Department of Education in particular gets their goat because they believe that the government should not be telling them basically how to educate and raise their children. It is probably the most targeted in their mind of all the cabinet level agencies that they have long seen as something that needed to be eliminated because they would prefer that they could either educate their kids at home through home schooling or in Christian schools, or that they could have more control over their local school district by running for school board or getting the local Moms for Liberty to run for school board and fighting every progressive curriculum change at that level.

Paul Waldman: One thing that I feel like I've noticed, part of conservative Christian ideology is that they are a noble but beleaguered minority surrounded by a culture that scorns them and disdains their values, and oppressed by the government, but I don't know if they've ever had more power in modern times than they do right now. Are you seeing that there is kind of a new spirit among the Christian right, that they are sort of emboldened, that they feel like this is their moment to get victories that they thought would take forever or that they would never get at all? How are people feeling in that world right now?

Sarah Posner: I think that's absolutely right. They feel incredibly emboldened, and not just because of Trump being in the White House. Obviously they revere Trump. They believe that he delivered nearly everything they wanted in his first term, and he's delivering more in his second term. You hear a lot less about them having higher positions in his administration. You heard about a lot of that in his first. In his second term, it's a lot more of the sort of MAGA online conspiracy theorists who have top jobs in his administration, yet the Christian right is still getting a lot of what they want. They would love to see the Department of Education dismantled; the anti trans stuff they love to see; the Supreme Court is definitely delivering for them based on his stacking of it in his first term.

And I think that they feel like they have attained a level of power that even they recognize is historic, and I think they worry is fleeting. Which is why they want to try to do everything they possibly can before the next election. And another thing that I'd know along the way here that's important to their sense of being emboldened right now is the role of Speaker Mike Johnson in shepherding through Trump's agenda. They have one of their own in basically the third or fourth most powerful position in the country, and that is extremely important and valuable to them.

Paul Waldman: It's interesting that you say that there's a fear that this could be fleeting, and they have to accomplish as much as they possibly can. I think that liberals in a lot of ways got complacent over the last couple of decades. There was this feeling that the culture is moving in our direction, that our values are becoming accepted. Gay marriage is a good example: It went from being this idea that even in the gay community seemed like kind of pie in the sky, it could take forever. And then you saw the Obergefell case that legalized same sex marriage everywhere. And then you also saw just kind of a broadening acceptance in the culture of marriage in particular, but of inclusion of all kinds of families in the culture more generally. You saw gay couples on TV all the time, and there was this feeling that like, well, we kind of won this argument and it's done. And it does seem that people on the right who were not happy about that, I think a lot of liberals thought, well, they've just accepted it. They don't like it, but they know that they're going to have to live with it.

And it turns out that they didn't accept that. And they were waiting for a time when they could really start to roll back that progress. And it turns out that in 2024, they seem to have identified transgender rights in general and transgender kids playing sports of whom they're just a tiny number as a real wedge that they could use to pry open this issue again and use it to change all kinds of laws, change what happens in schools and really reverse a lot of that progress. Was that just a realization or was that something that people felt like, we're going to figure this out and be able to turn back that clock?

Sarah Posner: OK, so I would say that Trump's victories both in 2016 and 2024 were a result of having a black president, but they were also a result of Obergefell. Even before Obergefell was decided, and after the oral arguments made it pretty clear which way the Supreme Court was going — so that's 2015, right? They decided Obergefell in 2015. Even before the decision came down, the Christian Right was ready to denounce the affirmation of of same-sex marriage. And they were already portraying Obergefell as their next Roe v. Wade.

So remember, Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 and overturned in 2022. That was a lot of years to keep your eye on that ball. And they kept their eye on that ball by working on multiple fronts. They succeeded at chipping away at abortion rights in the states, little things, parental consent, ultrasounds, the rest of it, TRAP laws, while they also worked on the political end of things, getting a majority in the Senate, keeping a majority in Senate, getting a Republican president, keeping their eyes open for vacancies, pressing for anti-Roe justices to be confirmed. So they're working on all of these fronts. They're also working on the court of opinion, court of public opinion front. So they're working on really pressing this pro-life label. They're pro-life. And all they care about is the babies and all of that. So they had all of these different parts of their machinery at work: public opinion, political, legal. And then they had all the lawyers in place to argue all the cases.

That's how they see Obergefell. We're 10 years out from Obergefell. They're thinking even if they have to work 20, 30, 40, 50 more years to overturn Obergefell, they're going to keep working at it. They realized, though, that unlike abortion, when they could talk about dead babies, with marriage equality was sort of a weird thing to say: “We don't like these families, we don't want people to get married.” They did slam and slander and smear same-sex couples, but I think they found it a little bit of a tougher hill to climb than talking about dead babies. I think the reason you saw the focus on trans issues starting around — that even started before Obergefell came down, the anti-trans bathroom laws and those sort of things started cropping up in state legislatures around 2013/2014. Because they knew that that was going to be the wedge issue that they could gross people out with, right? “Men dressed as women are going to assault your daughter in a public bathroom,” that sort of messaging. Or later, “A biological male is going to take your daughter's spot on the volleyball team.” All of these things are aimed at repulsing people or making them feel afraid. And this was part of the plan. They want to chip away at Obergefell. But it's a long way off. So they're doing these other things and particularly focusing on trans issues.

Paul Waldman: I think that's an important lesson that liberals can take. What you see there is a great deal of patience. They go into that conflict saying we have a set of goals and even if we experience some setbacks, we are going to look at this as a battle that could take decades. And the same is true of taking over the Supreme Court, which I always say is maybe the most successful political enterprise in American history. A few decades ago, conservatives said, if we can capture the courts, especially the Supreme Court, we will be able to do anything. And so we are going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, decades of time, and we're going to get eventually to the place where we have an iron grip on the laws and the entire political structure of the country. Because the Supreme Court is the last word in so many places, and we're seeing it play out now. Right now they have a 6-3 conservative supermajority, and they can do anything.

Sarah Posner: I wanted to add that one more thought about what they did in the Department of Education case. It's highly irregular — the whole shadow docket thing is highly irregular. So the lower court had issued an injunction barring the dismantling of the Department of Education while the case plays out on the merits. Lower court judges are loathe to just issue injunctions. The plaintiff has a very high burden to meet there. They have to show that they would suffer irreparable harm if a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order weren't issued. So these are not just granted willy-nilly.

Typically, or how things used to work is, the Supreme Court wouldn't even take or consider a case until it had reached the merits phase, been completed in the trial court, the Court of Appeals ruled on it, it was like a final ruling, and then the Supreme Court weighs in. All this weighing in on these appeals that the Trump administration is doing from grants of TRO's or preliminary injunctions to basically say no, these TROs and preliminary injunctions don't count at all, even though the the District Court has reviewed all the evidence and heard oral argument and read all the briefs, and we're just going to like look at a few briefs and then just decide in secret that we're going to let our special boy do whatever he wants while the case case plays out in the lower courts.

This is highly unusual. The idea that the Chief Justice, who pledged to the Senate that his only job was to call balls and strikes and he was completely neutral. This gives away the game. They would not be doing this for President Joe Biden. They would not be doing this for President Kamala Harris. They're doing it because they believe in a very extreme form of executive power, and they want to leave that in place. But only for Trump. They would never do it for a Democratic president.

Paul Waldman: And they didn't. And the whole point of a temporary injunction is that it freezes the status quo, right? It says we're not going to allow this change while the case gets heard on the merits. But now what we see is that the Supreme Court is saying that we're not going to allow the status quo to be frozen. What has to be maintained is Donald Trump's ability to do whatever he wants, and he's going to get to do what he wants and then eventually the merits of the case will be heard, by which time in a lot of cases, as I said with the Department of Education, it's probably going to be too late. There will be functionally no Department of Education by the time the merits are heard.

I heard Steve Vladeck, who wrote a book about the shadow docket, say the other day that there have been 15 cases in which the Supreme Court has issued on the shadow docket an emergency ruling in cases where there was a temporary injunction against the Trump administration, and the administration has won all 15. They are 15 and 0. So obviously they are there to say that — maybe it's not in every single case that the administration has tried, but whenever they see something that's important to them, they're going to step in and rule in favor of the administration.

And this is what burns me up so much. People have heard me say this: They're doing it for this guy. The one who is the most likely to abuse his power, just as they did with the immunity case. Somehow we managed to survive 250 years without presidents having immunity from prosecution, but they have to step in and give immunity to this guy, the one who is most likely to commit crimes of any president we've ever had.

Sarah Posner: Yes. And they also do it without any explanation as to why they decided this way, it's just an unsigned order. There's no reasoning, no rationale provided to the public as to why they're letting the executive branch do whatever it wants with a congressionally mandated and taxpayer funded department. It's really outrageous. I think if more people understood this, and I think probably not that many do because polling shows that not that many people pay close attention to what the Supreme Court is doing, but I feel like if you had done Schoolhouse Rock on the separation of powers and you understood what was happening here at the Supreme Court, you'd be pretty pissed.

Paul Waldman: I want to ask you about the IRS ruling. So this did not get all that much attention. But there's this law called the Johnson Amendment. I think it was passed in 1954?

Sarah Posner: That's right.

Paul Waldman: And it says that houses of worship, churches, synagogues, mosques, cannot endorse political candidates. And we all know that there is a lot of political organizing that happens around houses of worship, both among Democrats and Republicans. Black churches famously do their “Souls to the Polls” things where they organize people to take them to vote. But I think there's a general agreement that it's really not the kind of thing we want to have your pastor, your rabbi, your imam, whatever it is, go up and say “This is who you should vote for.” That's a line that it would be good to maintain. And it hasn't really stopped the religious organizations from doing the kinds of political work they want to do to just draw that kind of a line around it. Well, that line now no longer exists.

The IRS issued this ruling. I want to read a line from it. They said that “communications from a house of worship to its congregation in connection with religious services through its usual channels of communication on matters of faith do not run afoul of the Johnson Amendment as properly interpreted.” So basically what they said is, it’s still law, but if the minister wants to get up and say “Vote JD Vance 2028” then that's OK, because it's the sort of normal thing that happens in a church through their normal channels of communication.

But I saw that and I said, well, OK, it's one thing if the pastor in a little church says, I want you to vote for my favorite candidate. What about, say, Joel Osteen, who has a megachurch with 10s of thousands of people who come, and TV shows, and a YouTube channel. Those are his normal channels of communication. If he goes on his YouTube channel and says vote for JD Vance, I guess that's OK too. And what if some billionaire who looks at that and says, well, Minister Osteen is one of the most influential pastors in the country. I'm going to give him millions of dollars to put on a show about Vance ‘28, and that'll just be the normal communication channels of his church, and that will be a tax deductible contribution. And that line that we used to have has just been completely obliterated. Do you think that's what's going to happen?

Sarah Posner: I have a slightly different take on the whole thing.

Paul Waldman: Not as catastrophic as mine?

Sarah Posner: Yes, but only because the whole system is already so corrupted, I'm not sure it's going to make a gigantic difference. So the Christian right has complained for decades that the Johnson Amendment violates their First Amendment rights. They claim that it's stifling their free speech that the pastor could not stand in the pulpit and say “Vote for Donald Trump.” And so this was another mechanism for them to claim that the big bad government in Washington was oppressing the free speech and religious freedom of conservative Christians around the country. Sometime during the Obama administration, the IRS basically decided to stop enforcing the Johnson Amendment at all. I think the last time somebody had their tax exemption revoked was when Bill Clinton was president. It's been a long time.

Now I don't think that making your tax exemption contingent on not turning your church into a political campaign rally is a First Amendment violation. However, I know lawyers and First Amendment people who do think it's a First Amendment violation. So it was kind of contested for a long time. Then the IRS was kind of like, OK, we're not even going to deal with this. We're not going to trouble ourselves with it at all or get into a big giant fight by initiating an investigation of some prominent pastor. And the truth is that because someone like Robert Jeffress, who technically speaking could not stand in his pulpit at First Baptist Dallas and endorse Donald Trump, was going on the campaign trail with Donald Trump and saying prayers with Donald Trump on the stage. So the difference between him standing in his pulpit and saying that and going to Sioux Falls, Iowa and saying it there, I mean like I don't know. And then he would have events featuring Trump where he didn't necessarily say “Vote for Donald Trump,” but he had the 4th of July where they would have this big patriotic shindig inside his church and Trump would be there. So he has claimed that the IRS, under Biden, did investigate him. But he never lost his tax exemption. He claims that he just had to pay a lot of legal fees.

So here we are, some billionaire could have been giving his church lots of money. And he was basically endorsing Trump on TV, at campaign rallies; even under the Johnson Amendment they're allowed to go to the Denny's across the street and turn on the loudspeaker and endorse a candidate. So it was a little bit artificial. I did notice that Paula White, who is Trump's faith advisor and runs this organization called the National Faith Advisory Board, which kind of grew out of White House faith office in Trump's first term, and it's sort of like a separate organization from the government, they send out this periodic newsletter and they told people in the newsletter: Don't use church resources to endorse a candidate. It's OK for the pastor to stand in the pulpit and say it, but don't use the church's finances to do it. And I thought that was interesting, that they understood the directive from the IRS to not include using their financial resources to endorse a candidate. Now, I doubt that the Trump IRS would go after a Trump supporting church, but I thought it was interesting that even they were saying don't spend money on it.

Paul Waldman: That is interesting, and maybe they feel like there could be a backlash if they get too explicit. I did see one poll, I think it was from the Pew Research Center, that showed that the vast majority of people don't think that their own houses of worship should make endorsements. And maybe they're sensitive to that. They don't want to go whole hog and produce their own backlash. I mean, after all, these are people who are very attuned to the politics of backlash, how it can be wielded for them and against them.

Sarah Posner: I actually think that there are a lot of people in the pews even in some evangelical churches who would rather have church be church. They're very pro-Trump, they're very Republican, but they would rather church be church. They want a Bible lesson and a sermon, they don't want it to be all campaigning.

Paul Waldman: Interesting. I wonder if you could talk a bit about what you see as the kind of vision that the Christian right is now working toward. You have all of these specific cases that have gone to the Supreme Court, where they've mostly gotten wins. Not every time; there was a recent case that Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from about whether Oklahoma could have a religious charter school, and it was a four to four tie. And so the lower court decision stood, and Oklahoma, for the moment anyway, cannot set up a religious charter school. So they haven't won every time, but the vast majority of the time they win in cases like the praying football coach and stuff like that, where each individual case may not have dramatic practical consequences immediately, but you kind of have this accrual of widening the space for entwining the government and religion.

And I see things like the War on Christmas, where what really has a lot of people in the Christian right mad is religious pluralism, and the public indications of religious pluralism. What does it mean when a department store puts up a sign that says “Happy Holidays”? Well, it means that they're saying that even though the majority of Americans are still Christian, we have a very diverse society and we want to reflect that by having some kind of inclusive message on the banner outside the store in December. Rather than just saying “Merry Christmas,” which is exclusionary to the Jews and Muslims and Hindus and atheists and everyone else, we're going to have a more inclusive message. And when your own religious beliefs have been the default forever, that feels very oppressive. It's a change that you want to undo. So I wonder, do you think that what their kind of ultimate vision of what American Society looks like is kind of a rollback of that sort of pluralistic default into a more Christian default, whether it's in what the government does or how commerce works? What is the societal vision that they are working toward?

Sarah Posner: Well, they believe that God intended America to be a Christian nation. That changes that mostly took place in the second-half of the 20th century eroded the country's Christian foundation, and that it's their political and religious duty to restore America's Christian heritage. So that plays out in the public square with the War on Christmas, but more ominously, has played out on the legal front by the 60, 70 year dismantling of the separation of church and state, another area in which the Christian Right has had a decades long legal strategy, to undermine the separation of church and state and elevate the idea of religious freedom for Christians as the preeminent meaning of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. And they have been wildly successful on that front. There's basically, legally speaking, not much left of church date separation, the Coach Kennedy case being one of the more recent nails in that coffin. And there's been a wild expansion of the free speech and freedom of religion rights and expansion of those rights for conservative Christians or for conservative religious actors who, say, oppose abortion or oppose LGBTQ rights.

So in the recent case that the Supreme Court decided this term involving the LGBTQ inclusive books in the Montgomery County Public School system in Maryland, the court basically held that these parents, their religious rights, their religious freedom, was violated by not being able to opt their children out of lessons involving books with LGBTQ characters or LGBTQ themes. And when you think about the ramifications of it, it's a really bonkers decision. Because then what is going to happen in public schools? Parents of other religions are going to say I don't want my kid learning about you, name it, and so you have to give me an opt out.

And where are the right-wingers going to go on this? Are they going to say I don't want my kid to learn about vaccines? I don't want my kid to learn about infectious diseases? It has a lot of ramifications, but it brings us back to some of the things we were talking about before, this idea that Christian parents need to exempt themselves, have an actual religious political duty to exempt themselves from these mandates from the big bad federal government or their big bad school district that undermine what they would say is not only their religious freedom, but their parental rights. And so this is where all the anti-trans mania comes from. It's where the assault and the Department of Education comes from. It's where the quest for r or religious charter schools funded by the state comes from and it's where that Montgomery County case came from. It's all kind of connected together in this idea that the government is bad because it infringes on the family’s God-given duty to educate their kids in their religious beliefs without interference from the government.

Paul Waldman: Do you think that they're going to try to challenge the Supreme Court decision outlawing prayer in schools? Teacher-led sectarian prayers.

Sarah Posner: Yes. Oh yes.

Paul Waldman: Because you do hear a lot of people who say, that's when this society really started to go down the tubes.

Sarah Posner: The jurisprudence is headed in that direction to bring this to another full circle on something that we've been talking about today, I first met Mike Johnson, now the Speaker of the House in 2006 or 7 when I was writing a story about how the Alliance Defending Freedom, that major Christian right legal powerhouse, the Christian right’s, ACLU, when I was writing a story about how they were aiming to dismantle the separation of church and state, and Mike Johnson was working for them. And I interviewed him for that story, he was all in on this idea that the separation of church and state is a myth and we need to get rid of it, and the jurisprudence is all wrong and it violates our Christian founding and our Christian beliefs and all of that. And so when he became speaker of the house, I thought, OK, it's not just where the Supreme Court is going, but I'm sure it's where the Republican Party is.

Paul Waldman: And he certainly has not moderated any of those beliefs, even though he doesn't talk about them maybe as much as he used to.

Sarah Posner: Right, he's pretty much dedicated himself to being Trump's lackey. So that is kind of his main agenda right now. But when he talks about a Christian nation or religious freedom, those kinds of buzz words, that's exactly what he's talking about. He's talking about a country in which conservative Christians like himself should have more freedom and the supposed separation of church and state violates their freedom. This is the government infringing on their religious beliefs by not letting them, you know, have a 10 Commandments or a nativity scene or pray in school or on the 50 yard line.

Paul Waldman: I think that maybe it's not so bad if Texas, and I think it's Arkansas and Louisiana that have also passed laws about the 10 Commandments, if they put them up in public schools because there are few things less persuasive to a teenager than a flyer tacked up on the wall of their classroom. Even if the message that you should not covet your neighbor’s donkey is an important one for all young people to hear. All right, Sarah Posner, thank you so much for joining me. We will check back in the next time the Supreme Court takes a sledgehammer to some other pillar of the separation of church and state. Thank you so much for joining me.

Sarah Posner: Thanks for having me.

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Lookism and VC

Do subtle visual cues influence high-stakes economic decisions? Using venture capital as a laboratory, this paper shows that facial similarity between investors and entrepreneurs predicts positive funding decisions but negative investment outcomes. Analyzing early-stage deals from 2010-2020, we find that greater facial resemblance increases match probability by 3.2 percentage points even after controlling for same race, gender, and age, yet funded companies with similar-looking investor-founder pairs have 7 percent lower exit rates. However, when deal sourcing is externally curated, facial similarity effects disappear while demographic homophily persists, indicating facial resemblance primarily operates as an initial screening heuristic. These findings reveal a novel form of homophily that systematically shapes capital allocation, suggesting that interventions targeting deal sourcing may eliminate the negative influence of visual cues on investment decisions.

That is from a recent paper by Emmanuel Yimfor, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

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Vibe scraping and vibe coding a schedule app for Open Sauce 2025 entirely on my phone

This morning, working entirely on my phone, I scraped a conference website and vibe coded up an alternative UI for interacting with the schedule using a combination of OpenAI Codex and Claude Artifacts.

This weekend is Open Sauce 2025, the third edition of the Bay Area conference for YouTube creators in the science and engineering space. I have a couple of friends going and they were complaining that the official schedule was difficult to navigate on a phone - it's not even linked from the homepage on mobile, and once you do find the agenda it isn't particularly mobile-friendly.

We were out for coffee this morning so I only had my phone, but I decided to see if I could fix it anyway.

TLDR: Working entirely on my iPhone, using a combination of OpenAI Codex in the ChatGPT mobile app and Claude Artifacts via the Claude app, I was able to scrape the full schedule and then build and deploy this: tools.simonwillison.net/open-sauce-2025

Screenshot of a blue page, Open Sauce 2025, July 18-20 2025, Download Calendar ICS button, then Friday 18th and Saturday 18th and Sunday 20th pill buttons, Friday is selected, the Welcome to Open Sauce with William Osman event on the Industry Stage is visible.

The site offers a faster loading and more useful agenda view, but more importantly it includes an option to "Download Calendar (ICS)" which allows mobile phone users (Android and iOS) to easily import the schedule events directly into their calendar app of choice.

Here are some detailed notes on how I built it.

Scraping the schedule

Step one was to get that schedule in a structured format. I don't have good tools for viewing source on my iPhone, so I took a different approach to turning the schedule site into structured data.

My first thought was to screenshot the schedule on my phone and then dump the images into a vision LLM - but the schedule was long enough that I didn't feel like scrolling through several different pages and stitching together dozens of images.

If I was working on a laptop I'd turn to scraping: I'd dig around in the site itself and figure out where the data came from, then write code to extract it out.

How could I do the same thing working on my phone?

I decided to use OpenAI Codex - the hosted tool, not the confusingly named CLI utility.

Codex recently grew the ability to interact with the internet while attempting to resolve a task. I have a dedicated Codex "environment" configured against a GitHub repository that doesn't do anything else, purely so I can run internet-enabled sessions there that can execute arbitrary network-enabled commands.

I started a new task there (using the Codex interface inside the ChatGPT iPhone app) and prompted:

Install playwright and use it to visit https://opensauce.com/agenda/ and grab the full details of all three day schedules from the tabs - Friday and Saturday and Sunday - then save and on Data in as much detail as possible in a JSON file and submit that as a PR

Codex is frustrating in that you only get one shot: it can go away and work autonomously on a task for a long time, but while it's working you can't give it follow-up prompts. You can wait for it to finish entirely and then tell it to try again in a new session, but ideally the instructions you give it are enough for it to get to the finish state where it submits a pull request against your repo with the results.

I got lucky: my above prompt worked exactly as intended.

Codex churned for a 13 minutes! I was sat chatting in a coffee shop, occasionally checking the logs to see what it was up to.

It tried a whole bunch of approaches, all involving running the Playwright Python library to interact with the site. You can see the full transcript here. It includes notes like "Looks like xxd isn't installed. I'll grab "vim-common" or "xxd" to fix it.".

Eventually it downloaded an enormous obfuscated chunk of JavaScript called schedule-overview-main-1752724893152.js (316KB) and then ran a complex sequence of grep, grep, sed, strings, xxd and dd commands against it to figure out the location of the raw schedule data in order to extract it out.

Here's the eventual extract_schedule.py Python script it wrote, which uses Playwright to save that schedule-overview-main-1752724893152.js file and then extracts the raw data using the following code (which calls Node.js inside Python, just so it can use the JavaScript eval() function):

node_script = (
    "const fs=require('fs');"
    f"const d=fs.readFileSync('{tmp_path}','utf8');"
    "const m=d.match(/var oo=(\\{.*?\\});/s);"
    "if(!m){throw new Error('not found');}"
    "const obj=eval('(' + m[1] + ')');"
    f"fs.writeFileSync('{OUTPUT_FILE}', JSON.stringify(obj, null, 2));"
)
subprocess.run(['node', '-e', node_script], check=True)

As instructed, it then filed a PR against my repo. It included the Python Playwright script, but more importantly it also included that full extracted schedule.json file. That meant I now had the schedule data, with a raw.githubusercontent.com URL with open CORS headers that could be fetched by a web app!

Building the web app

Now that I had the data, the next step was to build a web application to preview it and serve it up in a more useful format.

I decided I wanted two things: a nice mobile friendly interface for browsing the schedule, and mechanism for importing that schedule into a calendar application, such as Apple or Google Calendar.

It took me several false starts to get this to work. The biggest challenge was getting that 63KB of schedule JSON data into the app. I tried a few approaches here, all on my iPhone while sitting in coffee shop and later while driving with a friend to drop them off at the closest BART station.

  1. Using ChatGPT Canvas and o3, since unlike Claude Artifacts a Canvas can fetch data from remote URLs if you allow-list that domain. I later found out that this had worked when I viewed it on my laptop, but on my phone it threw errors so I gave up on it.
  2. Uploading the JSON to Claude and telling it to build an artifact that read the file directly - this failed with an error "undefined is not an object (evaluating 'window.fs.readFile')". The Claude 4 system prompt had lead me to expect this to work, I'm not sure why it didn't.
  3. Having Claude copy the full JSON into the artifact. This took too long - typing out 63KB of JSON is not a sensible use of LLM tokens, and it flaked out on me when my connection went intermittent driving through a tunnel.
  4. Telling Claude to fetch from the URL to that schedule JSON instead. This was my last resort because the Claude Artifacts UI blocks access to external URLs, so you have to copy and paste the code out to a separate interface (on an iPhone, which still lacks a "select all" button) making for a frustrating process.

That final option worked! Here's the full sequence of prompts I used with Claude to get to a working implementation - full transcript here:

Use your analyst tool to read this JSON file and show me the top level keys

This was to prime Claude - I wanted to remind it about its window.fs.readFile function and have it read enough of the JSON to understand the structure.

Build an artifact with no react that turns the schedule into a nice mobile friendly webpage - there are three days Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which corresponded to the 25th and 26th and 27th of July 2025

Don’t copy the raw JSON over to the artifact - use your fs function to read it instead

Also include a button to download ICS at the top of the page which downloads a ICS version of the schedule

I had noticed that the schedule data had keys for "friday" and "saturday" and "sunday" but no indication of the dates, so I told it those. It turned out later I'd got these wrong!

This got me a version of the page that failed with an error, because that fs.readFile() couldn't load the data from the artifact for some reason. So I fixed that with:

Change it so instead of using the readFile thing it fetches the same JSON from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/.github/f671bf57f7c20a4a7a5b0642837811e37c557499/schedule.json

... then copied the HTML out to a Gist and previewed it with gistpreview.github.io - here's that preview.

Then we spot-checked it, since there are so many ways this could have gone wrong. Thankfully the schedule JSON itself never round-tripped through an LLM so we didn't need to worry about hallucinated session details, but this was almost pure vibe coding so there was a big risk of a mistake sneaking through.

I'd set myself a deadline of "by the time we drop my friend at the BART station" and I hit that deadline with just seconds to spare. I pasted the resulting HTML into my simonw/tools GitHub repo using the GitHub mobile web interface which deployed it to that final tools.simonwillison.net/open-sauce-2025 URL.

... then we noticed that we had missed a bug: I had given it the dates of "25th and 26th and 27th of July 2025" but actually that was a week too late, the correct dates were July 18th-20th.

Thankfully I have Codex configured against my simonw/tools repo as well, so fixing that was a case of prompting a new Codex session with:

The open sauce schedule got the dates wrong - Friday is 18 July 2025 and Saturday is 19 and Sunday is 20 - fix it

Here's that Codex transcript, which resulted in this PR which I landed and deployed, again using the GitHub mobile web interface.

What this all demonstrates

So, to recap: I was able to scrape a website (without even a view source too), turn the resulting JSON data into a mobile-friendly website, add an ICS export feature and deploy the results to a static hosting platform (GitHub Pages) working entirely on my phone.

If I'd had a laptop this project would have been faster, but honestly aside from a little bit more hands-on debugging I wouldn't have gone about it in a particularly different way.

I was able to do other stuff at the same time - the Codex scraping project ran entirely autonomously, and the app build itself was more involved only because I had to work around the limitations of the tools I was using in terms of fetching data from external sources.

As usual with this stuff, my 25+ years of previous web development experience was critical to being able to execute the project. I knew about Codex, and Artifacts, and GitHub, and Playwright, and CORS headers, and Artifacts sandbox limitations, and the capabilities of ICS files on mobile phones.

This whole thing was so much fun! Being able to spin up multiple coding agents directly from my phone and have them solve quite complex problems while only paying partial attention to the details is a solid demonstration of why I continue to enjoying exploring the edges of AI-assisted programming.

Update: I removed the speaker avatars

Here's a beautiful cautionary tale about the dangers of vibe-coding on a phone with no access to performance profiling tools. A commenter on Hacker News pointed out:

The web app makes 176 requests and downloads 130 megabytes.

And yeah, it did! Turns out those speaker avatar images weren't optimized, and there were over 170 of them.

I told a fresh Codex instance "Remove the speaker avatar images from open-sauce-2025.html" and now the page weighs 93.58 KB - about 1,400 times smaller!

Update 2: Improved accessibility

That same commenter on Hacker News:

It's also <div> soup and largely inaccessible.

Yeah, this HTML isn't great:

dayContainer.innerHTML = sessions.map(session => `
    <div class="session-card">
        <div class="session-header">
            <div>
                <span class="session-time">${session.time}</span>
                <span class="length-badge">${session.length} min</span>
            </div>
            <div class="session-location">${session.where}</div>
        </div>

I opened an issue and had both Claude Code and Codex look at it. Claude Code failed to submit a PR for some reason, but Codex opened one with a fix that sounded good to me when I tried it with VoiceOver on iOS (using a Cloudflare Pages preview) so I landed that. Here's the diff, which added a hidden "skip to content" link, some aria- attributes on buttons and upgraded the HTML to use <h3> for the session titles.

Next time I'll remember to specify accessibility as a requirement in the initial prompt. I'm disappointed that Claude didn't consider that without me having to ask.

Tags: github, icalendar, mobile, scraping, tools, ai, playwright, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, ai-assisted-programming, claude, claude-artifacts, ai-agents, vibe-coding, coding-agents

Quoting Terence Eden

The modern workforce shouldn't be flinging copies to each other. A copy is outdated the moment it is downloaded. A copy has no protection against illicit reading. A copy can never be revoked.

Data shouldn't live in a file on a laptop. It shouldn't be a single file on a network share. Data is a living beast. Data needs to live in a database - not an Excel file. Access should be granted for each according to their needs.

Terence Eden, We've got to stop sending files to each other

Tags: terence-eden, files

Off the Beaten Path in México #2

On Saturday, we drove about 15 miles from Cuetzalan “off the beaten path,” per guide books, to the Apulco River, in the midst of a lush, wet cloud forest and went to this camping grounds, where there are the Apulco Falls, usually deep green, but muddy this day from all the recent rains.

Other photos are around the campgrounds, including a sculptural Don Quijote and Pancho.

Live From California with Lloyd Kahn is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Above: There are rooms and cabins for rent on the grounds.

Above: low-tech cooling-off device for hot weather

Above: dinosaur made out of scrap car parts and scrap metal. Typical of ingenuous Mexican art projects made out of junk

Fuera del camino trillado.

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The Road to MechaHitler

Source: Bing image generator, responding to “A robot in a Mao suit”

Yesterday I wrote about the politicization of monetary policy, and I could have written more, what with Trump telling House Republicans that he was ready to fire Jerome Powell to distract from the Epstein story because he believes that interest rates are much too high. But I need a break, so let’s talk about something very different — namely, is AI fundamentally a communist technology?

That’s not a question I would have thought to ask, but apparently the claim is widespread among right-wing tech bros. JD Vance more or less endorsed this view at a speech he recently gave at a Bitcoin event:

One of the ways you hear this stated is that crypto is fundamentally a conservative or right-leaning technology and artificial intelligence is fundamentally a left-leaning or a communist technology. Now, I think that overstates things a little bit in both directions, but there's a fundamental element of truth to it.

And now I understand why Elon Musk’s recent modifications to Grok caused his chatbot to begin spewing antisemitic propaganda and eventually declare itself “MechaHitler.” And although I don’t claim any expertise in the technology, I think I understand why he’s having such a hard time fixing the problem.

A word about crypto. As I explained in Sunday’s primer, crypto is basically a giant grift. But there has always been an element of right-wing ideology. As I’ve written in the past, arguments for Bitcoin in particular are a combination of technobabble and libertarian derp.

But AI as communist? For what it’s worth, I’m not fully sold on AI’s potential. As far as I can tell, large language models — which we are, misleadingly, calling artificial intelligence — are still, essentially, a souped-up version of autocorrect. On the other hand, there are a lot of jobs, some of them highly paid, that could also be described as souped-up autocorrect, so AI may have large economic impacts.

But how does that make AI communist?

You have to start with the fact that U.S. conservatives now routinely describe anyone holding views to their left as a Marxist or communist. This goes along with the general principle that every accusation from that side of the political spectrum is really a confession. Democrats have indeed moved a bit to the left on economic issues in recent years. But they’re hardly extremists. They’re basically a lot like a European Social Democratic party.

Republicans, however, are extremists. The whole party has raced to the right into what amounts to full-on fascism.

If that last statement has you reaching for the smelling salts, ask yourself, what more evidence do you need? Do we have to wait until a Republican administration creates a masked secret police force that snatches people off the streets and starts building concentration camps? Wait, that has already happened.

So in modern Republican rhetoric, anything to the left of MAGA ideology is communist extremism. And here’s the thing: The answers you get from AI generally don’t adhere to the right-wing party line.

For example, two of the central planks of modern right-wing ideology are climate change denial and voodoo economics. So I asked Google “Is climate change real?” and its automatic AI summary said this:

Yes, climate change is real. It refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, primarily driven by human activities like burning fossil fuels and deforestation. The scientific consensus overwhelmingly agrees that climate change is happening and is primarily caused by human activities, specifically the release of greenhouse gases.

Then I asked “Do tax cuts pay for themselves?” The summary response was a bit roundabout, but eventually got to this:

[T]he weight of evidence suggests that tax cuts rarely, if ever, fully pay for themselves through economic growth. While they can generate some economic activity and partially offset the revenue loss, the claim of complete self-financing is generally not supported by economic theory or evidence.

Both answers are anathema to the modern G.O.P. So why is AI giving what right-wingers consider left-wing, even communist answers to these questions?

It all goes back to Stephen Colbert’s dictum, almost 20 years ago, that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” What he meant, of course, was that to be a conservative in good standing, you have to deny reality, which was true even then and is far more true now.

Now, LLMs don’t reveal reality. On issues like climate or economic policy, however, they usually do a pretty good job of summarizing expert, informed views about reality. Since Republicans have staked out positions on these issues that run completely counter to informed views, they consider the answers AI gives on such issues left-wing.

Hence the Musk/MechaHitler disaster. Musk tried to nudge Grok into being less “politically correct,” but what Musk considers political correctness is often what the rest of us consider just a reasonable description of reality. The only way to move Grok right was, in effect, to get it to buy into conspiracy theories, many of them, as always, involving a hefty dose of antisemitism.

So, going back to my starting point, will there really be an internal war within MAGA between crypto boosters and AI enthusiasts? I have no idea. But MAGA really does have a problem with AI, because LLMs too often give answers the movement doesn’t want to hear. And there’s no good fix for this problem, because the fault lies not in the models but in the movement. As far as we can tell, there isn’t any way to make an AI MAGA-friendly without also making it vile and insane.

MUSICAL CODA

They’re not aware of too many things

Senate confirms Guetlein to lead Golden Dome

Gen. Michael Guetlein was confirmed as direct reporting program manager for the Golden Dome missile defense initiative

The post Senate confirms Guetlein to lead Golden Dome appeared first on SpaceNews.

SES closes Intelsat deal and sets course for rapid transformation

SES is preparing to drastically expand its medium Earth orbit network after closing its acquisition of U.S.-based rival Intelsat July 17, building on a deal that forged an unmatched geostationary satellite fleet.

The post SES closes Intelsat deal and sets course for rapid transformation appeared first on SpaceNews.

Naveen Nvn’s ideological migration (from my email)

I started following American politics only in 2010/2011, which is two years after his [Buckley’s] death, and I was in India at that time.

Plus, I was very liberal at that time.

Around 2018-19ish, I was pushed into a centrist stance because I was appalled by wokeness, especially on campuses. I was in graduate school in the US at that time. Although I didn’t experience wokeness advocacy in the classroom except two or three incidents, I saw signs of wokeness on campus a lot. But even then, I was quite libertarian on how universities ought to handle campus politics.

I picked up God and Man at Yale around this time because wokeness was my primary concern.

I’ve always known that conservatives love that book. I assumed it would be a defense of free inquiry and against universities having a preferred ideology.

However, to my surprise, in the book, he argued explicitly that Yale was neglecting its true mission and it should uphold its “foundational values,” as he put it. I assumed he would be promoting a libertarian outlook on campus politics, but he was arguing the opposite.

He said Yale and other elite universities should incorporate free markets and traditional perspectives directly into the curriculum because they are betraying a contract that the current alumni and the administration have with the founders of the universities. It was a pretty shocking advocacy of conservatism being imposed on the students, and I didn’t like that at all.

But later on, around 2020-ish, I became a conservative (thanks to you; more on that in the link below). But even as late as early 2023, I still held a libertarian view on academic freedom and campus politics.

(You may be interested in a comment I left on your ‘Why Young People Are Socialist’ post yesterday, in which I shared how I was once a liberal, then turned centrist, and how I finally turned conservative. You are a major influence.)

But after Oct 7, all of that changed quite fast. Watching the pro-Hamas protests on campuses that started the very next day after October 7, before even one IDF soldier set foot on Gaza, I immediately thought about God and Man at Yale. I wanted to go back and re-read God and Man at Yale.

Everything I’ve witnessed after Oct 7 — Harvard defending Claudine Gay, Harvard explicitly stating they’re an “international institution” and not an American institution, DEI, anti-White, anti-Asian discrimination, etc. has convinced me that WFB Jr. was right.

Elite universities ought to be promoting free markets and pro-American, pro-Western views. I don’t believe we should have a completely libertarian approach to academic freedom. That’s untenable in this day and age. (Again, demographics is destiny, even within organizations.)

I’ve become significantly less libertarian on a wide range of issues compared to where I was just two years ago, and not just on academic freedom/university direction.

So yes, WFB Jr. has influenced me on this idea.

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Moog Highlights Advancements in High-Speed Processor at IEEE Space Computing Conference

Moog

Gilbert, AZ – Moog Inc. (NYSE: MOG.A and MOG.B), a worldwide designer, manufacturer and systems integrator of high-performance precision motion and control systems, will be participating in the IEEE Space […]

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Lyles concerned about sweeping changes to advisory committees

Lyles

A long-time adviser to NASA and other agencies on space issues says he is concerned about moves by the administration to diminish the role of advisory committees.

The post Lyles concerned about sweeping changes to advisory committees appeared first on SpaceNews.

Duffy just getting started as acting NASA administrator

Duffy and Petro

A week after being named NASA’s new acting administrator, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy appears to be just getting started on that job while continuing to lead the Transportation Department.

The post Duffy just getting started as acting NASA administrator appeared first on SpaceNews.

Space Force sets guidelines prioritizing military missions as launch demand surges

Falcon 9 Vandenberg launch

In these new guidelines the Space Force seeks to balance its dual role as both a supporter of the thriving commercial space sector and steward of national security space capabilities.

The post Space Force sets guidelines prioritizing military missions as launch demand surges appeared first on SpaceNews.

HTR makes available engineering models of full-metal elastic Lunar wheels

htr logo square

At a time when the race to conquer the Moon is accelerating, with dozens of missions planned for the coming years, HTR decides, on a worldwide exclusive basis, to make […]

The post HTR makes available engineering models of full-metal elastic Lunar wheels appeared first on SpaceNews.

ESCAPADE to launch on second New Glenn

ESCAPADE

Blue Origin has confirmed that a NASA Mars smallsat mission, bumped from the inaugural launch of the New Glenn rocket, will be on the vehicle’s second flight later this year.

The post ESCAPADE to launch on second New Glenn appeared first on SpaceNews.

Fact or fiction on the future of the space economy

Matthew Weinzierl and Brendan Rosseau

In this week’s episode of Space Minds, host Mike Gruss is joined by Matthew Weinzierl, Senior Associate Dean at Harvard Business School, and Brendan Rosseau, Strategy Manager at Blue Origin, for a deep dive into the forces reshaping the global space economy as outlined in their book Space to Grow.

The post Fact or fiction on the future of the space economy  appeared first on SpaceNews.

David Brooks on the AI race

When it comes to confidence, some nations have it and some don’t. Some nations once had it but then lost it. Last week on his blog, “Marginal Revolution,” Alex Tabarrok, a George Mason economist, asked us to compare America’s behavior during Cold War I (against the Soviet Union) with America’s behavior during Cold War II (against China). I look at that difference and I see a stark contrast — between a nation back in the 1950s that possessed an assumed self-confidence versus a nation today that is even more powerful but has had its easy self-confidence stripped away.

There is much more at the NYT link.

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Where To Buy Mitra9 Products Wholesale? A Simple Guide For Retailers

If you’re running a vape shop, wellness store, or any business that offers botanical beverages and kratom products, the question comes up sooner or later: where to buy Mitra9 products wholesale? You want reliable stock, fair pricing, and simple ordering, without spending all day chasing distributors or emailing back and forth about pricing. The easiest and most reliable route is to work directly with this brand through their official wholesale portal.

Here’s A Simple Guide For Retailers About Where & How To Buy Mitra9 Products Wholesale

Go direct through Mitra9’s official vendor portal

Instead of navigating third-party marketplaces or resellers, this brand provides retailers with direct wholesale access via its vendor portal.

This means:

  • No middleman markups. You get the best possible pricing directly from the brand.
  • Up-to-date inventory visibility. What’s shown in the portal is what’s available to order—no guesswork.
  • Authentic products with full traceability. You know precisely where your kratom powder or capsules are coming from.

This setup saves retailers hours of searching for stock while ensuring they’re dealing with fresh, sealed products straight from Mitra9, not leftovers from a distributor’s warehouse.

Photo by Cup of Couple

Set up your vendor account

Getting started doesn’t take long. Setting up your vendor account involves a straightforward approval process:

Submit basic business details—things like your shop name, tax ID, or resale documentation.
Fast turnaround. Most vendor accounts get approved quickly, so you’re not left waiting.
Instant access once approved. As soon as your account is live, you can browse, order, and manage products right away.

No excessive paperwork, no long onboarding calls, just a clean, simple path from signup to shopping. They design everything to save you time and effort—whether you’re a first-time wholesale buyer or a seasoned retailer expanding your inventory, we keep the process quick, smooth, and hassle-free from start to finish.

Explore Mitra9’s wholesale product lineup

Its wholesale program focuses on a refined product list rather than overwhelming you with hundreds of unnecessary SKUs. Retailers will find:

  • Bulk Kratom Powder: Available in various strains and weights, sealed for freshness.
  • Kratom Capsules: Pre-measured for customer convenience, with clear labeling.
  • Go Packs: Ready-to-sell formats perfect for on-the-go buyers.

Each item comes with honest product labeling, batch codes, and serving information so your shop looks professional and your customers feel informed. This clean approach helps retailers keep inventory focused without clutter. By offering a streamlined selection of top-performing products, Mitra9 makes it easier for vendors to stock confidently, reduce excess inventory costs, and maintain consistent product rotation that meets customer demand without overcomplicating store shelves.

Check transparent bulk pricing

One of the biggest frustrations with wholesale buying is unclear pricing. Mitra9 solves that problem by showing:

  • Volume-based discount tiers. The more you order, the better the rate—clearly marked.
  • No hidden service fees. What you see in your cart is what you pay.
  • Always available in your account dashboard. No need to email for quotes every time.

Whether your store orders smaller batches or goes all-in with significant cases, its transparent pricing helps you predict margins and plan inventory costs accurately. It eliminates second-guessing and unnecessary back-and-forth with sales teams. Retailers can make quick, confident purchasing decisions knowing exactly where their costs stand—no surprises, no last-minute adjustments.

Place orders through the streamlined portal

Placing wholesale orders with this brand feels like any modern e-commerce experience—smooth and user-friendly. Retailers can:

  • Browse products and pack sizes easily—no clunky menus or outdated forms.
  • Fill a cart and check out securely. Like a retail shopping experience, but tailored for business buyers.
  • Review shipping details and delivery times right away.

You don’t have to jump through extra hoops. It’s a few clicks and your bulk order is on its way. Plus, the portal keeps your past orders, invoices, and tracking details in one place, making reordering and account management faster and more organized. It’s built for efficiency, so you spend less time on logistics and more time running your business.

Benefit from reliable, tracked shipping

One thing that sets Mitra9 apart is its focus on fast, reliable shipping for wholesale partners. Retailers can expect:

  • Quick order turnaround. Orders move out fast once placed, reducing downtime.
  • Tracking information is provided immediately. You’ll always know where your shipment is.
  • Packaging designed for large shipments. Products arrive fresh, sealed, and protected—even in bulk quantities.

For businesses, reliable fulfillment means avoiding empty shelves and disappointed customers. Mitra9’s shipping process is designed around that need for consistency. Additionally, their logistics team monitors shipments closely, ensuring orders stay on schedule. Whether you’re stocking up ahead of busy seasons or maintaining steady inventory flow, you’ll have peace of mind knowing every order is shipped with care and complete visibility.

Manage inventory with easy reordering

Retailers often need to reorder the same products regularly. Mitra9 makes that process easy by offering:

  • Saved order history. Quickly reference what you ordered last time.
  • One-click reorder options. No need to manually fill your cart again—repeat the previous order.
  • Adjust quantities before checkout. Scale up or down depending on sales trends in your shop.

This convenience saves time for busy shop owners and makes sure your store never runs short on core products.

Get support when you need it

Even with a streamlined system, sometimes questions come up. Mitra9’s wholesale program provides:

  • A dedicated customer service team for vendors. Not just automated emails or bots.
  • Phone and email support. Reach real team members who know how wholesale orders work.
  • Help with account updates, product specs, or order tracking.

Whether it’s clarifying product details or resolving a shipping question, this brand treats wholesale partners like business allies, not just another number in the system.

The Final Words

If you’ve been searching for where to buy Mitra9 products wholesale, going straight to Mitra9’s vendor portal is hands-down the most straightforward and most reliable choice. You skip the confusion, intermediaries, and inventory headaches that often come with third-party distributors. With direct access, transparent pricing, easy ordering tools, and fast shipping, Mitra9’s wholesale program helps retailers stay stocked without overcomplicating the process. Whether your shop specializes in kratom powder, capsules, or other botanical products, signing up for a Mitra9 vendor account puts you one step ahead.


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Durity Distribution’s Fifty Bar Vape Collection: A Top Choice For Bulk Buyers

In the fast-paced world of vaping retail, success often comes down to sourcing the right products at the right time—and from the right supplier. Among the many brands making waves, Fifty Bar vape stands out for its flavor quality, user convenience, and modern design. For retailers and distributors looking to stock up, Durity Distribution has become the go-to wholesale source. With a trusted reputation and streamlined service, this site offers a curated collection of Fifty Bar Vape products in bulk, giving vape retailers the tools they need to satisfy customers and boost their bottom line.

Here’s Why Durity Distribution’s Fifty Bar Vape Collection Is A Top Choice For Bulk Buyers

A comprehensive Fifty Bar vape collection is available

Durity Distribution carries a diverse lineup of Fifty Bar Vape products, including:

  • Top-selling flavor profiles like mint, mango, watermelon, blue razz, and more
  • Seasonal or limited-edition flavors to keep your inventory fresh and exciting
  • Different puff counts and nicotine strengths to cater to varied preferences

With a curated and regularly updated selection, it makes it simple to stock your shelves with only the most relevant and high-demand products. Retailers can order confidently, knowing that they’re offering customers the very best of the Fifty Bar lineup.

vaping bar
Image: Olena Bohovyk via Pexels.

Bulk ordering made simple and scalable

Durity Distribution understands that bulk buyers don’t have time for complicated processes. That’s why they’ve created an ordering experience that’s:

  • Fast and intuitive
  • Optimized for wholesale accounts
  • Supported by live inventory tracking

You can browse the Fifty Bar Vape catalog, select SKUs, view available stock, and check out—all within minutes. Additionally, their platform enables easy reordering, allowing you to maintain stock levels without interruption. Whether you’re placing a one-time bulk order or managing regular restocks, it makes the process seamless and scalable.

Wholesale pricing that supports growth

Buying in bulk should translate to better margins—and with this brand, it does. Their Fifty Bar Vape collection is priced to support wholesale profitability with the following:

  • Tiered pricing based on volume
  • Promotional discounts and seasonal offers
  • Special pricing for long-term partners

This pricing model enables retailers to stay competitive, particularly in highly saturated markets. Whether you’re focused on in-store sales or online distribution, its pricing makes the Fifty Bar line a wise choice for driving revenue.

Authentic products with freshness guaranteed

Counterfeit and expired products are a significant risk in the vaping industry—but not with Durity. Every Fifty Bar Vape product you receive is:

  • Factory-sealed and authenticity-verified
  • Sourced from vetted manufacturers
  • Packaged for retail, with clearly marked dates

Its tight inventory control ensures that products are shipped fresh, clean, and ready for retail. This focus on quality protects your brand reputation and provides your customers satisfaction.

Flexible solutions for vape shops, chains, and online retailers

Durity Distribution caters to a wide range of retail models, including:

  • Independent vape shops
  • Multi-store franchises
  • Online vape retailers and e-commerce startups
  • Convenience stores adding vape SKUs

No matter your setup, you’ll find scalable solutions and customized account support that align with your specific needs. Whether you need 200 units or 20,000, this brand is ready to deliver with speed and accuracy.

Reliable shipping and order fulfillment

In bulk buying, timing matters. Delays can lead to lost sales and unhappy customers. Durity solves this with the following:

  • Same-day or next-day order processing
  • Nationwide shipping with real-time tracking
  • Professional packing to prevent product damage

Their fulfillment system is built for speed and accuracy, so you can restock confidently and avoid bottlenecks that cost your business time and money.

Customer service that actually understands vaping

Its customer service team isn’t just helpful—they’re vape-savvy. That means they can:

  • Recommend flavor assortments based on current trends
  • Help with product selection or order optimization
  • Answer regulatory or compliance-related questions

This level of support gives bulk buyers a competitive edge in managing inventory, planning promotions, and making informed purchasing decisions. It doesn’t just fulfill orders—it empowers vape retailers to grow. Their proactive guidance, quick response times, and industry-specific insights create a level of partnership rarely found in the wholesale space, making customer support a true business asset.

Vape retailers keep coming back

The vape industry is competitive, and loyalty isn’t given—it’s earned. Durity Distribution continues to win over retailers because of the following:

  • Fast fulfillment and dependable inventory
  • Authentic, high-demand brands like Fifty Bar Vape
  • Exceptional customer service and transparent pricing

These aren’t one-off perks—they’re core parts of how this site does business. That’s why vape shops across the U.S. return again and again to replenish their shelves with the Fifty Bar collection.

Why fifty bar vaping is in high demand

Fifty Bar Vape has rapidly gained popularity among both seasoned vape users and newcomers. The brand is known for its:

  • Sleek, pocket-friendly design
  • Wide variety of bold, long-lasting flavors
  • Consistent, satisfying performance
  • User-ready format—no refills or charging needed

These qualities make it a top seller on vape shelves and a go-to for customers seeking convenient, disposable vaping options. As the brand expands its product lineup, retailers need access to a distributor that keeps up—and that’s where Durity Distribution shines.

The wholesale partner retailers trust this site

Retailers don’t just need inventory—they need dependable fulfillment, fair pricing, and a distributor that understands the vape industry. Durity Distribution has built its business around helping vape retailers thrive with services and support that make bulk purchasing easier than ever.

Whether you’re a single-store operation or a multi-location chain, Durity provides tailored support to meet your needs. Their focus on reliable logistics and authentic inventory gives retailers the peace of mind to buy in bulk without second-guessing quality.

The Final Thoughts

With demand for Fifty Bar Vape products on the rise, retailers need a reliable wholesale partner that delivers quality, speed, and service—every time. Durity Distribution stands out as that partner, offering an extensive Fifty Bar collection, competitive pricing, fast fulfillment, and authentic, shelf-ready inventory. Whether you run a single vape shop or manage a growing retail operation, Durity provides the tools, support, and consistency you need to keep your customers happy and your business thriving. For bulk buyers serious about success, Durity Distribution is the clear choice.


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Still A Chance?

We have an outside shot at getting to $200,000 raised tonight, the second day of the drive. We’re currently at $186,200. That would be 40% of the way there. If you’re considering contributing please consider doing it this evening. I know drives are kind of a necessary evil from a reader’s point of view. We get it. So we want to hit our goal of $500,000, which is really important, as soon as possible and get back to reporting the news 100% of the time. If you’re game, click right here.

Network Pinheads at CBS Are Ending ‘The Late Show’

The above links to an Instagram reel with Colbert breaking the news at the start of his show airing tonight. Here’s the same clip on X, if you prefer. He, apparently, was as surprised as anyone.

Here’s Jed Rosenzweig’s story at (the excellent) LateNighter:

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will end its historic run in May 2026 at the end of the broadcast season,” the network said in a statement. “We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and will retire The Late Show franchise at that time. We are proud that Stephen called CBS home. He and the broadcast will be remembered in the pantheon of greats that graced late night television.”

The statement was issued jointly by George Cheeks (Co-CEO of Paramount Global and President and CEO of CBS), Amy Reisenbach (President of CBS Entertainment), and David Stapf (President of CBS Studios).

CBS emphasized that the decision was not related to performance or content: “This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”

What a bunch of dopes.

 ★ 

Friday: Housing Starts

Mortgage Rates Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios.

Friday:
• At 8:30 AM ET, Housing Starts for June. The consensus is for 1.300 million SAAR, up from 1.256 million SAAR in May.

• At 10:00 AM, University of Michigan's Consumer sentiment index (Preliminary for July).

• Also at 10:00 AM, State Employment and Unemployment (Monthly) for June 2025

Politics Reporting in the Gangland Era

Covering MAGA and Trump is a bit like an old-time, hard-boiled detective novel. Everyone’s bad. Or at least shady. The challenge is distinguishing between the merely shady sorta bad and bad bad. And apart from the bad and those who were merely drawn that way, sometimes you have two really bad people and one of them is victimizing the other, making the latter person a victim while also being bad. Which brings us to this quote from an article in the Washington Post about Eric Schnabel, the Chief Operating Officer of the National Institute of Health (NIH) who, as I noted earlier this week, was fired and marched off the premises Monday, allegedly for directing a contract to a company which employed his wife. This is a text he sent to a WaPo reporter after the Post tried numerous times to contact him and his wife.

“I need your help. I didn’t do what they said I did,” he texted. “This was a political hit job. Please call me.” Schnabel didn’t reply to numerous further attempts to contact him. (The quote was added after I originally linked to the piece.)

You can see why I was in the mood of an old detective novel. What in the actual fuck is that? As the friend who flagged the passage asked: What are they doing? Sending him to El Salvador? Those words read like a line out of a third chapter of a Chandler novel, after Marlowe has taken the case, met the initial characters and now things are starting to go seriously sideways.

As many besides me have noted, directing a contract to a company which employs your wife seems like pretty thin corruption gruel by Trump standards, especially to be frog marched off the premises without seemingly more than the most drumhead kind of investigation. Like if you’re not wetting your beak that much what are you even doing?

When I first saw the news about Schnabel I thought of a slightly different scenario. “Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you King,” my mentor tells me. The president himself is actually not covered or arguably — under MAGA jurisprudence — not covered by a lot of anti-corruption statutes. And the Supreme Court has extended that protection by ruling that the president is likely immune from a lot of criminal law. Even aside from the president, there’s corruption and there’s corruption. Some things are extremely corrupt but they don’t fall unambiguously under a specific statute. There are catch-all statutes, but there’s enough vagueness to just ignore them, especially if you run the Justice Department. But there are some cases, especially with contracting, where there are really clear statutes about things you can’t do, things you must disclose, etc. I thought maybe Schnabel had run afoul of one of those.

But I’ve felt less inclined to believe that as this has moved forward. A few hours after this news broke we learned that Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy had fired his chief of staff and deputy chief of staff. Seems like a big deal. Out of the blue. HHS is a big place. Are these related? There are a lot of high ranking people getting fired out of the blue. And NIH isn’t just any part of HHS. It’s ground zero for Kennedy, or at least the most controversial actions at his HHS since January.

Whether these things are connected, who knows? But beyond the gangland culture at the top of the White House, we’re seeing a similar gangland culture one and two levels down too. Part of that is that the tone is set at the top. The president sets the values and the rules. But that’s not the only reason. The entire administration is also staffed in a haphazard and chaotic manner, with different area kingpins grafted in by the coalitional logic of the campaign. (Kennedy here being a key example) Some departments are staffed and still run under the heavy imprint of Elon Musk’s dominant but brief reign as co-president.

Every administration has key power brokers in different policy areas or departments. But most have a general and somewhat unified approach to staffing. There’s nothing like that here. Every decision is ad hoc, at least as to specific personal. The DOGE period created huge capacity gaps which have led to many tasks simply going undone or being taken over by contractors or DOGE holdovers. You have a lot of what we might call managerial state of nature in which gangs or crews of appointees or temporaries are making not only their own rules in a policy sense but acting autonomously in an organizational sense — sort of like gangs each running small areas of a city after some post-apocalyptic crisis. In federal workforce terms, that’s very much what DOGE was and is.

I say all of this to note that we tend to see, and Trump wants us to see, the administration as a vast structure responding to his will. And in a way it is. But in another way it’s far less like that than any other administration we’ve known. And when weird stuff like the Schnabel thing happens — assuming there’s more to it than the wife contract, which might not be the case — it may be part of some skullduggery contained entirely within NIH or HHS. The rest of the administration may be as in the dark about it as we are. Something may be crooked but it might be a scam that Trump doesn’t even get a taste of. I’m not excusing them, mind you. It’s that the whole administration is more gangland than just the mafia boss at the top. Trump’s created a context in which there are lots of these gangs — lots of free-fire zones for all kinds of corruption and likely worse.

And so finally, if you know more about this Schnabel case please contact me on one of the secure channels above and below this post. Are you Eric Schnabel? Let’s talk.

Thanks, Folks

Some time early this morning we made it past the $200,000 threshold in this TPM Journalism Fund drive. And that’s just slightly more than two days in — or I guess slightly less if we time from the first post. That’s fantastic. Obviously, the pace slows. That’s natural. But it positions us well to eventually meet our goal. So thank you for being there for us. The drive is our big organizational trust fall each year. And TPM Readers have never let us down. If you wanna power us forward, just click here.

Thursday 17 July 1662

To my office, and by and by to our sitting; where much business. Mr. Coventry took his leave, being to go with the Duke over for the Queen-Mother. I dined at home, and so to my Lord’s, where I presented him with a true state of all his accounts to last Monday, being the 14th of July, which did please him, and to my great joy I continue in his great esteem and opinion. I this day took a general acquittance from my Lord to the same day. So that now I have but very few persons to deal withall for money in the world.

Home and found much business to be upon my hands, and was late at the office writing letters by candle light, which is rare at this time of the year, but I do it with much content and joy, and then I do please me to see that I begin to have people direct themselves to me in all businesses.

Very late I was forced to send for Mr. Turner, Smith, Young, about things to be sent down early to-morrow on board the King’s pleasure boat, and so to bed with my head full of business, but well contented in mind as ever in my life.

Read the annotations

Preface to Tidy Together

How do teams grow software together, despite differing goals, differing perspectives, and different incentives?

In Tidy First? I focused on you the programmer—your relationship with your code, your willingness to invest a few minutes making your work easier before diving into the hard stuff. That book was about moments of design, small acts of care that …

Read more

LA Ports: Traffic Down 3% YoY in June

Container traffic gives us an idea about the volume of goods being exported and imported - and usually some hints about the trade report since LA area ports handle about 40% of the nation's container port traffic.

The following graphs are for inbound and outbound traffic at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in TEUs (TEUs: 20-foot equivalent units or 20-foot-long cargo container).

The first graph is the monthly data (with a strong seasonal pattern for imports).

LA Area Port TrafficClick on graph for larger image.

Usually imports peak in the July to October period as retailers import goods for the Christmas holiday and then decline sharply and bottom in the Winter depending on the timing of the Chinese New Year.  

Imports were down 3% YoY in June and exports were also down 3% YoY.    

To remove the strong seasonal component for inbound traffic, the second graph shows the rolling 12-month average.

LA Area Port TrafficOn a rolling 12-month basis, inbound traffic decreased 0.3% in June compared to the rolling 12 months ending the previous month.   Outbound traffic decreased 0.3% compared to the rolling 12 months ending the previous month.

Early this year, importers rushed to beat the tariffs.  

American hype

There's no country on earth that does hype better than America. It's one of the most appealing aspects about being here. People are genuinely excited about the future and never stop searching for better ways to work, live, entertain, and profit. There's a unique critical mass in the US accelerating and celebrating tomorrow.

The contrast to Europe couldn't be greater. Most Europeans are allergic to anything that even smells like a commercial promise of a better tomorrow. "Hype" is universally used as a term to ridicule anyone who dares to be excited about something new, something different. Only a fool would believe that real progress is possible!

This is cultural bedrock. The fault lines have been settling for generations. It'll take an earthquake to move them.

You see this in AI, you saw it in the Internet. Europeans are just as smart, just as inventive as their American brethren, but they don't do hype, so they're rarely the ones able to sell the sizzle that public opinion requires to shift its vision for tomorrow. 

To say I have a complicated relationship with venture capital is putting it mildly. I've spent a career proving the counter narrative. Proving that you can build and bootstrap an incredible business without investor money, still leave a dent in the universe, while enjoying the spoils of capitalism. And yet...

I must admit that the excesses of venture capital are integral to this uniquely American advantage on hype. The lavish overspending during the dot-com boom led directly to a spectacular bust, but it also built the foundation of the internet we all enjoy today. Pets.com and Webvan flamed out such that Amazon and Shopify could transform ecommerce out of the ashes.

We're in the thick of peak hype on AI right now. Fantastical sums are chasing AGI along with every dumb derivative mirage along the way. The most outrageous claims are being put forth on the daily. It's easy to look at that spectacle with European eyes and roll them. Some of it is pretty cringe!

But I think that would be a mistake. You don't have to throw away your critical reasoning to accept that in the face of unknown potential, optimism beats pessimism. We all have to believe in something, and you're much better off believing that things can get better than not. 

Americans fundamentally believe this. They believe the hype, so they make it come to fruition. Not every time, not all of them, but more of them, more of the time than any other country in the world.

That really is exceptional.

Johnny Damon’s Career Highlights: From Rookie to World Series Champion

For nearly two decades, Jonathan Michael “Johnny” Damon has remained one of Major League Baseball’s most recognisable outfielders. His versatile style – quick play on the bases, solid defence in the outfield and key hits at crucial moments – has made him an indispensable player for several World Series Champion clubs. Today, we’ll talk in detail about the major milestones of Damon’s career, the impact on each team, and the moments that forever made baseball history and led to the creation of johnnydamon.org.

First Steps: From College Fields to the Farm System

Born in August 1973 in Austin, Texas, Damon showed an aptitude for athleticism from an early age. His skills were especially noticed at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he combined baseball with basketball. In 1991, after his impressive college play, the Royals selected him in the 23rd round of the draft.

He spent the next four years in the Kansas City Royals system, gradually moving from Single-A to Triple-A. During this time, his running speed and hitting accuracy improved, allowing him to make his Major League debut in 1995. His first outings on the field demonstrated his readiness for serious workloads: Damon successfully carried a base after his first hit, and a week later he registered his first stolen base.

A Stint with the Kansas City Royals and a Trade to Oakland

In 1996, he earned a regular role on the Royals’ main roster, posting a .267 batting average, 15 stolen bases, and recording 48 RBI in 132 games in an average season. Despite good personal statistics, the team did not make the playoffs, and in December 1999 Damon was traded to the Oakland Athletics.

In Oakland, his career took an upward trajectory as he topped the .290 mark in average and racked up over 100 RBI in 2000 and earned his first All-Star award in 2001. He became part of the legendary “MONEYBALL” analytical strategy, where efficiency and lineup optimisation were valued.

New Phase with the Boston Red Sox

December 2001: Free Agency

In December 2001, Damon, rated as one of the most attractive free agents, signed with the Boston Red Sox. This decision determined his future fame and brought him several major titles.

2003 Season: Preparation Before the Breakthrough

In his first season for Boston, he hit .297 in batting average, committed 24 stolen bases, and helped the team become a serious championship contender once again. Although the Red Sox lost to the Yankees in the American League East division, Damon’s contribution to a solid offensive performance was evident.

2004 World Series: A Broken Curse

The major triumph was winning the 2004 World Series, when the Red Sox broke the “Curse of the Bambino” for the first time in 86 years. The team lost the first three games of the AL series to the Yankees 0-3, but then won four in a row. Damon racked up 12 hits and 4 RBI that season, and hit a home run in the deciding game, becoming a symbol of perseverance and team spirit.

Yankees Time and a Third Title

After the 2005 season, Damon moved to the New York Yankees, the Red Sox’s main rival. This trade became one of the most high-profile in MLB history. With the Yankees, he won the 2009 World Series and added another title to his collection. That year, Damon hit .284 in batting average and was a major contributor to the winning playoff run.

Detroit and a Return to the Royals

In 2011, Damon signed with the Detroit Tigers, helped reach the AL semifinals and cemented his reputation as a versatile veteran. He spent the last two seasons (2012-2013) with his hometown Kansas City Royals, where he again posted a .287 average and 21 stolen bases in 2012. In March 2014, he officially announced the end of his career.

Personal Achievements and Statistics

In 18 seasons, Damon played 2,769 games, had 2,769 hits, sent 408 balls over the fence and embellished his resume with 465 stolen bases. Here are the milestones:

  • 2,769 games in the regular season;
  • 2,769 hits (154 hits per season average);
  • 408 home runs;
  • 465 stolen bases;
  • 2 World Series championship rings (2004, 2009);
  • 4-time All-Star Game participant (2000, 2001, 2005, 2007);
  • 2 Silver Slugger Awards (2000, 2004).

Legacy and Contributions to the Profession

Johnny Damon has left a colourful mark on several franchises. With the Red Sox, his role went beyond statistics: he became a driving force in the locker room and an example of leadership. With the Yankees, he proved that a true team is more important than any personal preference. And his return to Kansas City was a symbolic point that closed the circle of life.

His on-base play inspires a collection of “everyday heroes”: those who value versatility, reliability and willingness to come to the rescue at a key moment. Damon is often cited in collections of the best defensive breakthroughs, accurate throws at the right moment and timely stolen bases in important games.

Conclusion

From his first steps on college teams to gold championships with the Red Sox and Yankees, Johnny Damon’s journey is full of determination, team spirit and professionalism. His career became a model for a wide range of athletes seeking to combine offensive and defensive skills, the ability to handle pressure and remain committed to the team. Even now, years after the end of his career, his name remains synonymous with a versatile outfielder ready to play to his strengths at any moment.

Photo: Pixabay via Pexels.


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The political culture/holiday culture that is French

The French government proposed cutting two public holidays per year to boost economic growth as part of a budget plan that it billed as a “moment of truth” to avoid a financial crisis. But in a country where vacations are sacred, the idea — unsurprisingly — prompted outrage across the political spectrum, suggesting it may have little chance of becoming law.

Here is more from Annabelle Timsit at the Washington Post.  How many countries will, over the next ten years, in fact prove governable?

The post The political culture/holiday culture that is French appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Hotels: Occupancy Rate Decreased 3.2% Year-over-year

From STR: U.S. hotel results for week ending 12 July
The U.S. hotel industry reported negative year-over-year comparisons, according to CoStar’s latest data through 12 July. ...

6-12 July 2025 (percentage change from comparable week in 2024):

Occupancy: 67.2% (-3.2%)
• Average daily rate (ADR): US$158.42 (-0.5%)
• Revenue per available room (RevPAR): US$106.39 (-3.7%)
emphasis added
The following graph shows the seasonal pattern for the hotel occupancy rate using the four-week average.

Hotel Occupancy RateClick on graph for larger image.

The red line is for 2025, blue is the median, and dashed light blue is for 2024.  Dashed purple is for 2018, the record year for hotel occupancy. 

The 4-week average of the occupancy rate is tracking behind last year and the median rate for the period 2000 through 2024 (Blue).

Note: Y-axis doesn't start at zero to better show the seasonal change.

The 4-week average will likely increase over the next several weeks.

On a year-to-date basis, the only worse years for occupancy over the last 25 years were pandemic or recession years.

Americans can still get a 2% mortgage

At a time of high interest rates, there are bargains to be found

Thursday assorted links

1. Claude for financial services.

2. Golf ball diver nets 100k a year (short video).

3. Zvi on Kimi.

4. China fact of the day: “China’s commercial airlines are limited to using 20% of its airspace, giving rise to an average route curvature of 17% compared to 5% in the US and Europe.”

5. Are these the new dresses for conservative women?

6. “This is probably the last time in human history that an AI is outperformed by a real human coder.

7. What virtue is undersupplied today?

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NAHB: "Builder Confidence Edges Up in July"'; "Negative territory for 15 consecutive months"

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) reported the housing market index (HMI) was at 33, up from 33 last month. Any number below 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as poor than good.

From the NAHB: Builder Confidence Edges Up in July
Builder confidence for future sales expectations received a slight boost in July with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act but elevated interest rates and economic and policy uncertainty continue to act as headwinds for the housing sector.

Builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes was 33 in July, up one point from June, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) released today. Builder sentiment has now been in negative territory for 15 consecutive months.

“The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act provided a number of important wins for households, home builders and small businesses,” said NAHB Chairman Buddy Hughes, a home builder and developer from Lexington, N.C. “While this new law should provide economic momentum after a disappointing spring, the housing sector has weakened in 2025 due to poor affordability conditions, particularly from elevated interest rates.”

Indeed, the latest HMI survey also revealed that 38% of builders reported cutting prices in July, the highest percentage since NAHB began tracking this figure on a monthly basis in 2022. This compares with 37% of builders who reported cutting prices in June, 34% in May and 29% in April. Meanwhile, the average price reduction was 5% in July, the same as it’s been every month since last November. The use of sales incentives was 62% in July, unchanged from June.

“Single-family housing starts will post a decline in 2025 due to ongoing housing affordability challenges,” said NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz. “Single-family permits are down 6% on a year-to-date basis and builder traffic in the HMI is at a more than two-year low.”
...
The HMI index gauging current sales conditions rose one point in July to a level of 36 while the component measuring sales expectations in the next six months increased three points to 43. The gauge charting traffic of prospective buyers posted a one-point decline to 20, the lowest reading since end of 2022.

Looking at the three-month moving averages for regional HMI scores, the Northeast increased two points to 45, the Midwest held steady at 41, the South dropped three points to 30 and the West declined three points to 25.
emphasis added
NAHB HMI Click on graph for larger image.

This graph shows the NAHB index since Jan 1985.

This was at the consensus forecast.

Why is AI so slow to spread? Economics can explain

Businesses are ignoring the street of hundred-dollar bills

Trump’s real threat: industry-specific tariffs

Which countries would be hit hardest by levies on electronics and pharmaceuticals?

ICE Writing its Own Laws?

ICE apparently has decided to take the law into its own hands, shoving aside Congress and the courts — and the Constitution.

In a huge escalation of scope, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has issued a new memo that will allow endless detention without hearings for due process or bond, according to an internal memo snagged by The Washington Post.

In a mass deportation campaign that is about to grow exponentially with new infusion of cash from the “big beautiful bill,” ICE and other Homeland Security immigration forces are also attacking the rules set by Constitution and courts for hearings before instant deportation.

Specifically, in a July 8 memo, Todd M. Lyons, acting ICE director says that undocumented migrants are no longer eligible for a bond hearing as they fight deportation proceedings in court. Immigrants lacking papers should be detained “for the duration of their removal proceedings,” which can take months or years.

Until now, migrants in the U.S. have had the right to request a bond hearing before an immigration judge. Lyons said new reviews by Homeland Security and Justice have determined that such immigrants “may not be released from ICE custody.” In rare exceptions immigrants may be released on parole, but that decision will be up to an immigration officer, not a judge, he wrote.

Values Questions and Practical Concerns

In practical terms, it means ICE masked agents who are grabbing migrants randomly at day labor spots, farms, workplaces, immigration courts or campuses now will looking to lock up manyfold more people — think millions — and sending them to private prisons in the U.S. or elsewhere with no legal checks. Gone is the facade of seeking those with criminal records. We’re entering an America that we will not recognize, if we are not there already.

The story of masked ICE agents seeking to question African, South American and Mexican teens playing baseball in a New York city park earlier this month being rebuffed by the team coach should send shivers down spines. Coach Youman Wilder told the agents the youths were American citizens and kept the agents at bay. Who are we becoming in the name of a citizens-only, immigrant-free nation that wants migrant labor sweat but offers no path to naturalization?

How dare ICE rewrite laws for immediate and endless detention? Is it more efficient for ICE to ignore the law? Maybe, but that doesn’t make it right, morally or legally. This is a guaranteed court challenge.

Since the memo emerged, the American Immigration Lawyers Association said members had reported that immigrants were being denied bond hearings in more than a dozen immigration courts across the country.

In its 2024 annual report, ICE said it detains immigrants only “when necessary” and that the vast majority of the 7.6 million people then on its docket were released pending immigration proceedings. Keeping them detained while their case is adjudicated has not been logistically possible — something that changed when Congress provided funds for detaining 100,000 migrants awaiting deportation in places like the new “alligator alley” Florida center. Immigrants are already subject to mandatory detention without bond if they have been convicted of murder or other serious crimes, though the threshold keeps dropping.

ICE is holding about 56,000 immigrants a day as officers sweep the nation for undocumented immigrants, working overtime to fulfill Trump’s goal of deporting one million in his first year.


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Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims Decrease to 221,000

The DOL reported:
In the week ending July 12, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 221,000, a decrease of 7,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 1,000 from 227,000 to 228,000. The 4-week moving average was 229,500, a decrease of 6,250 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised up by 250 from 235,500 to 235,750.
emphasis added
The following graph shows the 4-week moving average of weekly claims since 1971.

Click on graph for larger image.

The dashed line on the graph is the current 4-week average. The four-week average of weekly unemployment claims decreased to 229,500.

The previous week was revised up.

Weekly claims were lower than the consensus forecast.

They Know What They Are Doing Is Wrong

ICE lawyers aren’t exactly Profiles in Courage (boldface mine):

Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers.

“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. It was the first of two separate instances The Intercept identified in which judges chose to withhold the identities of the attorneys representing the Trump administration’s deportation regime.

As ICE agents across the country wear masks to raid workplaces and detain immigrants, government attorneys need not cover their faces to shield their identities. Legal experts who spoke to The Intercept agreed the practice of concealing the lawyers’ identities was both novel and concerning.

“I’ve never heard of someone in open court not being identified,” said Elissa Steglich, a law professor and co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin. “Part of the court’s ethical obligation is transparency, including clear identification of the parties. Not identifying an attorney for the government means if there are unethical or professional concerns regarding [the Department of Homeland Security], the individual cannot be held accountable. And it makes the judge appear partial to the government.”

…As each case commences, the judge recites their own name, followed by the immigrant’s name, the name of the immigrant’s attorney (if they have one), and finally, the name of the ICE lawyer. It’s an on-the-record census that enables due process.

In rare cases, this might be actually shame, but more likely, it’s embarrassment. It’s also a way to prevent any knowledge of who participated in the mass deportation program.

Regardless, they know what they’re doing is wrong.

Retail Sales Increased 0.6% in June

On a monthly basis, retail sales increased 0.6% from May to June (seasonally adjusted), and sales were up 3.9 percent from June 2024.

From the Census Bureau report:
Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for June 2025, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $720.1 billion, up 0.6 percent from the previous month, and up 3.9 percent from June 2024. ... The April 2025 to May 2025 percent change was unrevised from down 0.9 percent (±0.2 percent).
emphasis added
Retail Sales Click on graph for larger image.

This graph shows retail sales since 1992. This is monthly retail sales and food service, seasonally adjusted (total and ex-gasoline).

Retail sales ex-gasoline was up 0.7% in June.

The second graph shows the year-over-year change in retail sales and food service (ex-gasoline) since 1993.

Retail and Food service sales, ex-gasoline, increased by 4.9% on a YoY basis.

Year-over-year change in Retail Sales The change in sales in June were above expectations and the previous two months were revised down slightly, combined.

Open Letter from NAS Members to U.S. Senators and Representatives urging support for science

In a victory of optimism over experience, I continue to sign a small fraction of the open letters that come my way.  Also, it's good to exercise Americans' right to petition the government for the redress of grievances.

Below is a link to a letter organized by Professor Walter Leal with well over 1,000 signatures from members of the National Academy of Sciences. (Organizing NAS members to petition the government isn't so easy, since it has to be done without the help of the NAS, which as a government-related organization is being quite cautious in these times.)

Letter to Congress Requesting Protection of Science Funding in the FY26 Budget

Or, if you prefer to hear the letter read out loud, that takes about three minutes on this YouTube video (which also shows the text, but not the signers).

 

#############
Here's another take on more or less the same subject, from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
" as the United States approaches its 250th birthday, the country’s research edifice is in danger of collapse, battered by a wrecking ball known as the Trump administration."


The Sputnik vs. Deep Seek Moment: The Answers

In The Sputnik vs. DeepSeek Moment I pointed out that the US response to Sputnik was fierce competition. Following Sputnik, we increased funding for education, especially math, science and foreign languages, organizations like ARPA were spun up, federal funding for R&D was increased, immigration rules were loosened, foreign talent was attracted and tariff barriers continued to fall. In contrast, the response to what I called the “DeepSeek” moment has been nearly the opposite. Why did Sputnik spark investment while DeepSeek sparks retrenchment? I examine four explanations from the comments and argue that the rise of zero-sum thinking best fits the data.

Several comments fixated on DeepSeek itself, dismissing it as neither impressive nor threatening. Perhaps but DeepSeek was merely a symbol for China’s broader rise: the world’s largest exporter, manufacturer, electricity producer, and military by headcount. These critiques missed the point.

Some commenters argued that Sputnik provoked a strong response because it was seen as an existential threat, while DeepSeek—and by extension China—is not. I certainly hope China’s rise isn’t existential, and I’m encouraged that China lacks the Soviet Union’s revolutionary zeal. As I’ve said, a richer China offers benefits to the United States.

But many influential voices do view China as a very serious, even existential, threat—and unlike the USSR, China is economically formidable.

More to the point, perceived existential stakes don’t answer my question. If the threat were greater, would we suddenly liberalize immigration, expand trade, and fund universities? Unlikely. A more plausible scenario is that if the threat were greater, we would restrict harder—more tariffs, less immigration, more internal conflict.

Several commenters, including my colleague Garett Jones, pointed to demographics—especially voter demographics. The median age has risen from 30 in 1950 to 39 in recent years; today’s older, wealthier, more diverse electorate may be more risk-averse and inward-looking. There’s something to this, but it’s not sufficient. Changes in the X variables haven’t been enough to explain the change in response given constant Betas so demography doesn’t push that far but does it even push in the right direction?

Age might correlate with risk-aversion, for example, but the Trump coalition isn’t risk-averse—it’s angry and disruptive, pushing through bold and often rash policy changes.

A related explanation is that the U.S. state has far less fiscal and political slack today than it did in 1957. As I argued in Launching, we’ve become a warfare–welfare state—possibly at the expense of being an innovation state. Fiscal constraints are real, but the deeper issue is changing preferences. It’s not that we want to return to the moon and can’t—it’s that we’ve stopped wanting to go.

In my view, the best explanation for the starkly different responses to the Sputnik and DeepSeek moments is the rise of zero-sum thinking—the belief that one group’s gain must come at another’s expense. Chinoy, Nunn, Sequiera and Stantcheva show that the zero sum mindset has grown markedly in the U.S. and maps directly onto key policy attitudes.

Zero sum thinking fuels support for trade protection: if other countries gain, we must be losing. It drives opposition to immigration: if immigrants benefit, natives must suffer. And it even helps explain hostility toward universities and the desire to cut science funding. For the zero-sum thinker, there’s no such thing as a public good or even a shared national interest—only “us” versus “them.” In this framework, funding top universities isn’t investing in cancer research; it’s enriching elites at everyone else’s expense. Any claim to broader benefit is seen as a smokescreen for redistributing status, power, and money to “them.”

Zero-sum thinking doesn’t just explain the response to China; it’s also amplified by the China threat. (hence in direct opposition to some of the above theories, the people who most push the idea that the China threat is existential are the ones who are most pushing the zero sum response). Davidai and Tepper summarize:

People often exhibit zero-sum beliefs when they feel threatened, such as when they think that their (or their group’s) resources are at risk…Similarly, working under assertive leaders (versus approachable and likeable leaders) causally increases domain-specific zero-sum beliefs about success….. General zero-sum beliefs are more prevalent among people who see social interactions as a competition and among people who possess personality traits associated with high threat susceptibility, such as low agreeableness and high psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism.

Zero-sum thinking can also explain the anger we see in the United States:

At the intrapersonal level, greater endorsement of general zero-sum beliefs is associated with more negative (and less positive) affect, more greed and lower life satisfaction. In addition, people with general zero-sum beliefs tend to be overly cynical, see society as unjust, distrust their fellow citizens and societal institutions, espouse more populist attitudes, and disengage from potentially beneficial interactions.

…Together, these findings suggest a clear association between both types of zero-sum belief and well-being.

Focusing on zero-sum thinking gives us a different perspective on some of the demographic issues. In the United States, for example, the young are more zero-sum thinkers than the old and immigrants tend to be less zero-sum thinkers than natives. The likeliest reason: those who’ve experienced growth understand that everyone can get a larger slice from a growing pie while those who have experienced stagnation conclude that it’s us or them.

The looming danger is thus the zero-sum trap: the more people believe that wealth, status, and well-being are zero-sum, the more they back policies that make the world zero-sum. Restricting trade, blocking immigration, and slashing science funding don’t grow the pie. Zero-sum thinking leads to zero-sum policies, which produce zero-sum outcomes—making the zero sum worldview a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Security Vulnerabilities in ICEBlock

The ICEBlock tool has vulnerabilities:

The developer of ICEBlock, an iOS app for anonymously reporting sightings of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, promises that it “ensures user privacy by storing no personal data.” But that claim has come under scrutiny. ICEBlock creator Joshua Aaron has been accused of making false promises regarding user anonymity and privacy, being “misguided” about the privacy offered by iOS, and of being an Apple fanboy. The issue isn’t what ICEBlock stores. It’s about what it could accidentally reveal through its tight integration with iOS.

The Tibetan girl

Photo of a woman in a red coat gazing out a foggy window with a contemplative expression.

Can a Tibetan singer make the leap from the slow pace of life on the Tibetan plateau to the fast rhythms of urban Beijing?

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

Kind of confusing

A man in a blue shirt playing a saxophone against a dark background.

Is consciousness like jazz, something hard to pin down? Or is it more like the biology of dolphins, odd but natural?

- by Tim Bayne

Read at Aeon

Someday I want to see the regressions

Each infant born from the procedure carries DNA from a man and two women. It involves transferring the nucleus from the fertilised egg of a woman carrying harmful mitochondrial mutations into a donated egg from which the nucleus has been removed.

For some carriers this is the only option because conventional IVF does not produce enough healthy embryos to use after pre-implantation diagnosis.

The researchers consistently reject the popular term “three-parent babies”, said Turnbull, “but it doesn’t make a scrap of difference.”

Here is more from Clive Cookson at the FT.  From Newcastle.  And here is some BBC coverage.

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Markets in everything those new service sector jobs

Witchcraft and spellwork have become an online cottage industry. Faced with economic uncertainty and vapid dating apps, some people are putting their beliefs—and disposable income—into love spells, career charms and spirit cleansers.

Etsy, an online marketplace for crafts and vintage, has long been home to psychics and mystics, but the platform has enjoyed new callouts from TikTokers as a destination for witchcraft.

The concept of hiring an Etsy witch hit a fever pitch when influencer Jaz Smith told her TikTok followers that she had paid one to make sure the weather was perfect during her Memorial Day Weekend wedding. The blue skies and warm temperature have inspired TikTok audiences to find Etsy witches of their own. Smith didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Rohit Thawani, a creative director in Los Angeles, said Smith was his inspiration for paying an Etsy witch $8.48 to cast a spell on the New York Knicks ahead of Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals in May.

Thawani found a witch offering discount codes. Thawani was half-kidding about the transaction but was amazed when the Knicks won. “Maybe there’s something more cosmic out there,” Thawani, 43, said.

Thawani bought a second spell ($21.18) from the Etsy witch for Game 6, but the Knicks lost. He doesn’t rule out the possibility that Indiana Pacers fans “used their devil magic,” he joked.

Magic practitioners sell on Instagram, Shopify and TikTok, but most customers say Etsy is their go-to.

The shop MariahSpells has over 4,000 sales on Etsy and 4.9 stars and sells a permanent protection spell for about $200. Another shop, Spells by Carlton, has over 44,000 sales and lists a “bring your ex lover back” spell for about $7.

Here is more from the WSJ, via the excellent Samir Varma.

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Thursday: Retail Sales, Unemployment Claims, Philly Fed Mfg, Homebuilder Survey

Mortgage Rates Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios.

Thursday:
• At 8:30 AM ET, The initial weekly unemployment claims report will be released. The consensus is for initial claims to increase to 235 thousand from 233 thousand last week.

• Also at 8:30 AM, Retail sales for June is scheduled to be released.  The consensus is for a 0.2% increase in retail sales.

• Also at 8:30 AM, the Philly Fed manufacturing survey for July. The consensus is for a reading of -0.5, up from -4.0.

• At 10:00 AM, The July NAHB homebuilder survey. The consensus is for a reading of 33, up from 32. Any number below 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as poor than good.

• At 10:00 AM, Speech, Fed Governor Adriana Kugler, A View of the Housing Market and U.S. Economic Outlook, At the Housing Partnership Network Symposium, Washington, D.C.

CPHC Central North Pacific Outlook


Central North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Central North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


ZCZC HFOTWOCP ALL
TTAA00 PHFO DDHHMM

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI
Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
200 PM HST Fri Jul 18 2025

For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:

Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.


Forecaster Jelsema


NHC Atlantic Outlook


Atlantic 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Atlantic 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


ZCZC MIATWOAT ALL
TTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
800 PM EDT Fri Jul 18 2025

For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:

1. Central Tropical Atlantic:
A tropical wave interacting with a broad area of low pressure is
producing disorganized showers and thunderstorms more than 800 miles
southwest of the Cabo Verde Islands. Environmental conditions could
become marginally conducive for gradual development late this
weekend through early next week as the system moves westward to
west-northwestward around 10 mph. By the middle of next week,
environmental conditions are forecast to become unfavorable for
further development.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...low...20 percent.



Forecaster Hagen


NHC Eastern North Pacific Outlook


Eastern North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Eastern North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


ZCZC MIATWOEP ALL
TTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
500 PM PDT Fri Jul 18 2025

For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:

1. Well Southwest of the Baja California Peninsula:
A large area of disorganized showers and thunderstorms associated
with a tropical wave is located well southwest of the Baja
California peninsula. Some gradual development of this system is
possible during the next few days while it moves west-northwestward
at 10 to 15 mph. By the early to middle part of next week,
environmental conditions are expected to become unfavorable for
further development.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...10 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...low...20 percent.



Forecaster Jelsema