SpaceX’s next Starship vehicle was destroyed in a catastrophic explosion shortly after 11 p.m. CT (0400 UTC) Wednesday as it was being readied for a static fire test at the company’s Massey facility, near Starbase, Texas.
The bullet-shaped, stainless-steel Ship 36 was ripped apart in a giant fireball as liquid methane and liquid oxygen were being loaded for an expected test firing of the vehicle’s six Raptor rocket engines. It was unclear how much damage was inflicted to the test stand and other facilities at the Massey site.
“The Starship preparing for the tenth flight test experienced a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase,” SpaceX said in a social media post. “A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for. Our Starbase team is actively working to safe the test site and the immediate surrounding area in conjunction with local officials.”
SpaceX said there were no hazards to residents in nearby communities but urged people to stay away while it worked to safe the test site.
Airspace warnings, issued by the Federal Aviation Administration prior to Wednesday’s failure, suggested SpaceX was targeting June 29 for the tenth test flight of the full Starship vehicle with its Super Heavy Booster first stage.
SpaceX had performed a single-engine test fire for Ship 36 on June 16 and fired up the 33 Raptor engines of the Super Heavy Booster for the mission on June 6.
The dramatic failure follows three unsuccessful test flights of the Starship upper stage earlier this year. Flights 7 and 8 both ended with an explosion of the Ship upper stage during the climb to space. After a successful ascent on Flight 9 on May 27, the Starship upper stage suffered a loss of attitude control and was destroyed during reentry without accomplishing most of the planned in-space test activities.
Starship plays a vital role in NASA’s Artemis program to return humans to the Moon. The Human Landing System variant of Starship is supposed to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface on the Artemis 3 mission, currently scheduled for 2027.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk has touted Starship for the colonization of Mars, and in a recent presentation, he suggested the craft could make multiple flights to the Red Planet as soon as 2026.
Excavation sites can be hazardous places, with heavy machinery, deep trenches, and uneven terrain all posing risks to workers and passersby. One of the most significant dangers on excavation sites is the risk of vehicle collisions, which can have catastrophic consequences.
Whether it’s a dump truck, a crane, or a passenger vehicle, the impact of a collision on an excavation site can result in severe injuries, fatalities, and extensive property damage.
Excavation safety training educates workers on excavation risks and best mitigation practices. This training ensures workers know their environment, equipment in use, and potential hazards. Safety training empowers workers with the knowledge to reduce vehicle collision likelihood during operations.
Excavation safety training is important for mitigating the inherent risks associated with trenching and excavation activities. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), trench collapses pose the greatest risk to workers’ lives during excavation projects. When conducted safely, trenching operations can reduce worker exposure to other potential hazards, including falls, falling loads, hazardous atmospheres, and incidents involving mobile equipment.
Excavation projects pose various risks that can lead to vehicle collisions, including limited visibility from deep trenches and uneven terrain, unstable ground causing vehicles to lose control, and the movement of heavy machinery needing careful coordination.
For instance, in 2022, New Jersey reported 116 fatal occupational injuries, an increase from 110 the previous year. The construction sector, which includes excavation activities, consistently ranks among the highest for workplace fatalities in the state. Pedestrian traffic from workers increases accident risks, especially if they are unaware of vehicle blind spots.
Additionally, improper signage can cause confusion and miscommunication. Understanding these hazards through excavation safety training helps workers and operators develop proactive strategies to avoid accidents and ensure a safer work environment.
Training programs equip workers with the skills and knowledge necessary to work safely on excavation sites. Some key aspects of excavation safety training that help prevent vehicle collisions include:
Excavation safety training helps workers and drivers recognize potential dangers before accidents happen. Through hands-on practice and classroom learning, employees learn how to identify hazards such as unstable ground, high-traffic areas, and restricted zones.
When drivers and equipment operators understand these dangers, they can take preventive measures to avoid collisions.
Many accidents occur due to improper handling of excavation equipment and vehicles. Training programs teach operators:
By mastering these skills, workers can reduce the risk of accidents and ensure safer vehicle operations at excavation sites.
Communication is paramount for preventing vehicle collisions. Safety training emphasizes the importance of using hand signals, radios, and spotters to direct vehicle movement. When workers and drivers can communicate effectively, they reduce the chance of misunderstandings that could lead to crashes.
Training programs enforce safety measures such as:
These procedures help create a controlled environment where vehicles can operate without the risk of accidental collisions.
Excavation safety training instills a culture of safety among workers. When employees are educated on the risks and best practices, they become more vigilant and proactive in preventing accidents. A safety-first mindset reduces carelessness and promotes adherence to established safety protocols.
Vehicle collisions at excavation sites can have devastating consequences, resulting in injuries or fatalities to workers, drivers, and pedestrians, as well as damage to vehicles and equipment, delays in construction projects, and significant legal and financial liabilities for companies. Injured parties often face substantial medical bills, lost wages, and other damages, making it essential to seek compensation.
A notable New Jersey case highlighted the importance of excavation safety after a worker was fatally crushed between a reversing backhoe and a forklift. The incident led to an $18.85 million settlement, one of the largest in state history, emphasizing the need for stringent safety protocols.
If you’ve been involved in an excavation-related accident, consult with a reputable NJ injury attorney, such as from Rosengard Law Group, based in Cherry Hill, NJ (496 Kings Highway North Suite 220B, 08034) for expert support and guidance. They can help guide victims through the complexities of the legal process, ensuring they receive appropriate compensation for their injuries and damages suffered.
Employers must provide proper training, update safety protocols, conduct audits, and equip vehicles with safety features to ensure excavation site safety and prevent accidents. Furthermore, employers must comply with OSHA’s standards, which mandate providing workplaces free of recognized hazards, including adhering to the trenching and excavation requirements outlined in 29 CFR 1926.651 and 1926.652.
These regulations detail necessary precautions and protective systems to ensure worker safety during excavation activities. By prioritizing training and enforcing these safety measures, employers can significantly reduce vehicle collisions on excavation sites.
To prevent vehicle collisions at excavation sites, companies have the responsibility to prioritize safety. This can be achieved by providing comprehensive training to all workers, including regular updates on new equipment and procedures. Additionally, leveraging technology such as backup cameras, proximity sensors, and GPS tracking can help operators avoid collisions.
Regular inspections of equipment, signage, and traffic control measures are also essential, along with fostering a safety culture that encourages workers to report hazards and rewards safe behavior.
Vehicle collisions on excavation sites are a serious hazard that can have devastating consequences. However, by providing workers with excavation safety training, employers can help prevent these accidents and keep their workers safe.
Remember, safety is everyone’s responsibility on the job site. By working together, we can create a safer, healthier work environment for all.
Photo: Ikbal Alahmad via Pexels.
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Millions of Americans rely on safe medications, but some drugs turn out to be dangerous or defective, causing serious harm. When pharmaceutical companies rush drugs to market or hide side effects, innocent people suffer severe injuries, disabilities, or even death. Victims have legal rights and can fight back against negligent drug manufacturers.
Seeking compensation for medical bills, lost income, and suffering can feel overwhelming, but understanding your options and taking the right steps can help. With proper legal guidance, you can hold responsible companies accountable and pursue the compensation you deserve.
Defective drugs cause harm due to design, manufacturing, or marketing flaws. These cases go beyond allergic reactions or known side effects, they involve inherently dangerous medications or failure to warn about serious risks. Design defects make a drug unsafe, manufacturing defects result in contaminated or improperly made pills, and marketing defects involve inadequate warnings for patients and doctors.
Product liability laws protect victims, holding companies responsible for harm. Unlike negligence cases, defective drug claims often rely on strict liability, meaning you only need to prove the drug was defective and caused injury.
When searching for legal representation to help you evaluate these options, injury lawyer directories like ServeTheInjured.com can help you find experienced attorneys who specialize in defective drug cases and can explain which approach might be best for your specific situation. Your attorney will consider factors like the severity of your injuries, the strength of your evidence, and whether other similar cases are already being pursued.
If you’ve suffered harm from a defective or dangerous drug, you may be eligible to recover multiple forms of compensation. These address both financial losses and the personal toll of your injuries. Here are the key types of compensation:
Seeking compensation for medical expenses is important in defective drug cases. This includes costs for doctor visits, hospital stays, prescriptions, medical tests, and other healthcare expenses. Keeping detailed records strengthens your claim. Future medical costs matter too—many injuries require ongoing treatment, monitoring, or lifelong care, including surgeries, therapy, and specialized equipment. Medical experts help estimate long-term care costs, ensuring your compensation covers future needs. An experienced attorney can work with experts to secure fair compensation for both current and future medical expenses.
Defective drug injuries can severely impact your ability to work and earn money. If you’ve missed work due to your injuries, you may be entitled to compensation for lost wages, including salary, overtime, bonuses, and benefits. More serious cases involve permanent disabilities, reducing future earning capacity, or forcing career changes.
Calculating these losses requires expert analysis of your work history, education, and skills. Economic experts assess career trajectory to determine long-term financial impact, ensuring victims receive fair compensation for their losses.
Defective drug injuries go beyond financial costs, causing physical pain, emotional distress, and reduced quality of life. Compensation for pain and suffering helps offset the physical and emotional toll of these injuries. Factors considered include chronic pain, anxiety, depression, loss of enjoyment in activities, and strain on relationships.
Severe or permanent injuries can lead to quality-of-life damages, recognizing how an injury fundamentally alters daily life. If you can no longer engage in hobbies, sports, or social activities, these impacts deserve financial compensation.
To successfully pursue a defective drug claim, you’ll need clear evidence that proves the medication caused harm. This includes expert testimony and official records that support your case. These are the key elements:
Medical expert testimony is essential in defective drug cases, helping prove the medication caused specific injuries. Experts review medical records, examine patients, and provide professional opinions on the drug’s effects. Pharmacologists explain how drugs interact with the body, treating physicians testify about injuries and treatment, and toxicologists assess contamination or manufacturing defects.
Attorneys collaborate with these experts to present clear, compelling evidence to judges and juries. Strong expert testimony can be the deciding factor in proving causation and securing compensation.
The FDA keeps detailed records on drug approvals, safety warnings, and adverse event reports, which can serve as critical evidence in defective drug cases. If reports show a company knew about risks but failed to warn patients, it strengthens your claim. Adverse event reports document similar injuries, proving your case isn’t isolated.
Checking for FDA safety communications, black box warnings, or drug recalls can reveal known dangers. If warnings were issued after your injury, it suggests the company should have acted sooner.
Seeking compensation for a defective drug requires a thorough understanding of the legal process and a strong case. By gathering evidence, consulting with a lawyer, and filing a lawsuit, victims of defective drugs can get the justice they deserve. Remember, pharmaceutical companies have a responsibility to ensure their products are safe for consumers. If they’ve failed to do so, they should be held accountable.
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Searching for the best reverse osmosis water filter under sink? You might feel overwhelmed with choices. But after testing the SimPure T1-400 ALK UV tankless reverse osmosis system with remineralization, I can say that it is more than one-step ahead. Here’s my review after using it for a few weeks.
One of the first things that really impressed me was the tankless design. Unlike other reverse osmosis systems that have large storage tanks, this one provides clean water immediately without hogging room under your sink. That means no more waiting for a tank to fill up and no mess in your kitchen. It’s ideal for small spaces or for anyone who likes a clean, minimalist appearance.
Most RO systems remove minerals that create the natural taste of water. The SimPure T1-400 ALK UV features an alkaline filter that reinstates those good minerals, such as calcium and magnesium. The result? Fresh and balanced-tasting water with a pH level greater than 7.5. After several days, I could see my water felt smoother and more refreshing, certainly not the flat, bland water some RO systems create.
Water safety is always a top concern. This system uses UV light to kill any bacteria or viruses that might get past the filters. It’s like having an invisible shield protecting your water at all times. Knowing this gave me extra peace of mind, especially in today’s world when clean water can’t be taken for granted.
With the filtration capacity of 400 gallons a day, this system easily caters to a family’s water needs on a daily basis. I conducted a test on the water purity with and without filtration using a TDS meter, and the readings were astounding—nearly zero TDS, which translates to ultra-pure water. Additionally, due to remineralization, the water still tasted full of life and healthy minerals.
I appreciated the integrated pressure gauge that reminds you when it’s filter-replacement time. No more guesswork or calendar tracking. The filters themselves twist in and out quickly, so replacements are easy with no mess or leaks. Such a considerate design reveals just how easy-to-use the SimPure system is.
Hooking up the system was relatively easy. Just remember, if you need to connect it to an ice maker or refrigerator, you’ll need a separate pressure tank, which can be purchased separately. It’s a minor added step, but good to know ahead of time.
Overall, the SimPure T1-400 ALK UV tankless reverse osmosis system with remineralization is a fantastic choice if you want clean, mineral-balanced, and safe water without sacrificing space or convenience. It’s probably one of the best reverse osmosis water filter under sink options out there, especially for those who care about taste and health as much as purity.
If you desire a space-saving system that provides immediate clean water and replenishes healthy minerals, this is an excellent option. To me, it made water filtration a pleasure that I now look forward to using daily.
Photo: Steve Johnson via Pexels.
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The company secured a Federal Aviation Administration five-year reentry license that allows unlimited landings in Australia
The post Varda to launch its first in-house built spacecraft for on-orbit manufacturing appeared first on SpaceNews.
In 1962, the world stood on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What saved us wasn’t just luck — it was the hotline hastily established between […]
The post Learning from the past: How history can guide space and cyber rules today appeared first on SpaceNews.
Array Labs, based in Palo Alto, California, is developing a 3D radar imaging constellation designed to operate in clusters
The post Maxar partners with Array Labs to expand 3D imaging technology appeared first on SpaceNews.
Venturi Space, a company working with Astrolab on lunar rover concepts, unveiled an all-European rover design it hopes to offer to European space agencies.
The post Venturi Space announces European lunar rover design appeared first on SpaceNews.
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Chris discuss how Beijing and Shanghai reveal different forms of authoritarian control through urban design, why Seoul’s functional dysfunction makes it more appealing than Tokyo’s efficiency, favorite McDonald’s locations around the world, the dimensions for properly assessing a city’s walkability, what Chris packs for long urban jaunts, why he’s not interested in walking the countryside, what travel has taught him about people and culture, what makes the Faroe Islands and El Paso so special, where he has no desire to go, the good and bad of working on Wall Street, the role of pigeons and snapping turtles in his life, finding his 1,000 true fans on Substack, whether museums are interesting, what set him on this current journey, and more.
COWEN: That’s okay. What’s your nomination for the least walkable city?
ARNADE: Phoenix is pretty bad. In the rest of the world, what was the lowest ranked of mine?
COWEN: I think Dakar is your lowest ranked.
ARNADE: Dakar is low.
COWEN: I don’t find that so bad.
ARNADE: [laughs] It was partially the heat. Also, there was a safety issue, which is not actual violence. It’s just the risk of a miscommunication going very badly because when you’re in a neighborhood where they have a slum basically, where you’re one of few white people, it’s not that I feel threatened by being robbed. I feel threatened that there can be miscommunication, like, “Why are you here? What are you doing here?” That can spiral out of control if you don’t speak the language. Dakar was really tough. Kampala was really tough to walk.
COWEN: Why’s that? I’ve never been there.
ARNADE: Again, these are cities that are not meant to be walked. Locals don’t walk them. People would look at me like I’m crazy. Part of the reason, first of all, you can jump on a hack bus, so why would you walk? The boda-bodas, which are . . . you just jump on the back of a motorcycle, which I won’t do. I did it once, and I’m like, “I’m not doing this. This is a really dumb risk.”
COWEN: Yes, I wouldn’t do that.
ARNADE: I almost got killed the first time I did it, but they do it. Consequently, there’s no walking infrastructure and when you do walk, you’re at risk of being hit by a boda-boda. People will walk out of necessity but there’s just no infrastructure. Absolutely none. Then you can get hit by a car. You can get hit by a car or a motorcycle.
COWEN: Rio, for me, would be the least walkable. It’s very dangerous but on top of that, there are so many places where walks end. There’re mountains, there’re tunnels.
And this:
COWEN: What is it you think you learn least well traveling the way you do?
ARNADE: It’s interesting. I used to be a macro-type trader. I used to be very top-down. I think I, in some sense, have thrown too much of that away. I’ve gone in too blind. I could do a little bit more background reading in terms of the political situation.
One of the things I’ve learned from my project is, most people don’t talk about politics. It’s because I only talk about what other people want to talk about. No one talks about politics. Being in Beijing and Shanghai — maybe it’s not the best example because people would say there’s a reason they don’t want to talk about it. I don’t think that’s it.
COWEN: No, I agree. Most of the world. Even Idaho.
ARNADE: Yes, 98 percent of the people aren’t political and they don’t talk about politics. I got beat up on social media when people were talking about, “Oh my God, Trump’s going to be elected. The world hates us.” No, they don’t. [laughs] When that person said that, I was actually in a bar in Kampala with a woman telling me how much she loved Trump. That was a rare political conversation. Most people don’t talk about politics.
In that sense, I could probably do more reading outside of the conversations about politics because I go to a lot of these countries, I don’t know what’s going on politically because people don’t talk about it.
COWEN: What other macro views of the world have you revised due to your walking, visiting, traveling? Obviously, particular views about any individual place, but on the whole, humanity.
And I am very happy to recommend Chris’s Substack, which covers his fascinating travels around the world.
The post My Conversation with the excellent Chris Arnade appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The nomination, submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee, elevates Guetlein from his current role as vice chief of space operations
The post Trump officially nominates Space Force Gen. Guetlein to lead ‘Golden Dome’ appeared first on SpaceNews.
Firefly Aerospace says it plans to offer a commercial lunar imaging service for use by governments and companies, one that could supplement or replace an existing, but aging, NASA orbiter.
The post Firefly announces commercial lunar imagery service appeared first on SpaceNews.
Local regulators have approved Ukrainian telco Kyivstar’s plans to start testing space-enabled texting services this summer using SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, targeting areas crippled by Russian strikes and other terrestrial coverage gaps.
The post Regulators clear Starlink-enabled texting trial in war-torn Ukraine appeared first on SpaceNews.
The variations seem to be endless. Here’s a fake ghostwriting scam that seems to be making boatloads of money.
This is a big story about scams being run from Texas and Pakistan estimated to run into tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, viciously defrauding Americans with false hopes of publishing bestseller books (a scam you’d not think many people would fall for but is surprisingly huge). In January, three people were charged with defrauding elderly authors across the United States of almost $44 million by “convincing the victims that publishers and filmmakers wanted to turn their books into blockbusters.”
Joshua Kosman, in his On a Pacific Aisle newsletter, celebrates Esa-Pekka Salonen's final concerts with the San Francisco Symphony but cannot ignore the stench of incompetence that emanates from the orchestra's administrative offices: "Even after Salonen is gone, the Symphony will still be in the hands of those who drove him out. The choice of the next music director will be left to the very people who thought Salonen was dispensable; how much faith do you have in their judgment? Patrons will be asked to step up their support for an organization that will now offer them less reason to feel excited about or committed to what is happening in Davies Symphony Hall. And keep your eye on the orchestral personnel — on the vacancies that go unfilled and the high-profile departures that occur because San Francisco is no longer perceived as a good career investment. Angry? You’re goddam right I’m angry."
Salonen himself said from the stage, with typical pith: "You’ve heard what you have in this city. This amazing orchestra, this amazing chorus. So take good care of them.”
Up early; and after reading a little in Cicero, I made me ready and to my office, where all the morning very busy. At noon Mr. Creed came to me about business, and he and I walked as far as Lincoln’s Inn Fields together. After a turn or two in the walks we parted, and I to my Lord Crew’s and dined with him; where I hear the courage of Sir H. Vane at his death is talked on every where as a miracle.
Thence to Somerset House to Sir J. Winter’s chamber by appointment, and met Mr. Pett, where he and I read over his last contract with the King for the Forest of Dean, whereof I took notes because of this new one that he is now in making. That done he and I walked to Lilly’s, the painter’s, where we saw among other rare things, the Duchess of York, her whole body, sitting instate in a chair, in white sattin, and another of the King, that is not finished; most rare things. I did give the fellow something that showed them us, and promised to come some other time, and he would show me Lady Castlemaine’s, which I could not then see, it being locked up! Thence to Wright’s, the painter’s: but, Lord! the difference that is between their two works. Thence to the Temple, and there spoke with my cozen Roger, who gives me little hopes in the business between my Uncle Tom and us. So Mr. Pett (who staid at his son’s chamber) and I by coach to the old Exchange, and there parted, and I home and at the office till night. My windows at my office are made clean to-day and a casement in my closet. So home, and after some merry discourse in the kitchen with my wife and maids as I now-a-days often do, I being well pleased with both my maids, to bed.
An experimental reusable rocket developed by the research and development arm of Honda Motor Company flew to an altitude of nearly 900 feet Tuesday, then landed with pinpoint precision at the carmaker's test facility in northern Japan.
The accomplishment may not sound like much, but it's important to put it into perspective. Honda's hopper is the first prototype rocket outside of the United States and China to complete a flight of this kind, demonstrating vertical takeoff and vertical landing technology that could underpin the development of a reusable launch vehicle.
While Tuesday's announcement by Honda was unexpected, the company has talked about rockets before. In 2021, Honda officials revealed they had been working on a rocket engine for at least two years. At the time, officials said a small satellite launch vehicle was part of Honda's roadmap.
I’m seeing a lot of articles about Trump’s turn on Iran, how it’s in response to pressure from Israel, his evolving views. I think these are all either overblown or irrelevant. As I noted earlier, what’s driving Trump here is the hunger to get in on a “win.” It might be best to see it as a typical Trumpian branding exercise. Israel has got a product ready to go to market and they’ve offered Trump the opportunity to slap the Trump name on it. But even beyond all that there’s something more. The U.S. has wanted to get rid of the Iranian nuclear program for a very long time. We’ve used coercive sanctions. We’ve engaged in espionage and sabotage. Barack Obama spent a huge amount of time putting together a diplomatic agreement to restrict it.
What has always kept the U.S. at bay are the risks involved in ending the program or shattering its progress by force. Big strategic bombers are vulnerable. They have to make multiple runs to drop bombs that will tear into the side of a mountain. There was Hezbollah, the various Iranian proxies in Iraq, the Assad regime in Syria, Hamas which had limited capacities but could wreak havoc in Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas have been shattered in terms of offensive capacity. The Syrian regime is gone. Now Israel appears to have complete dominance in the skies over all the militarily important parts of Iran.
What that all adds up to is that the U.S. has the capacity to destroy Iran’s critical nuclear facilities in a way that in the short run is basically risk free. They can fly bombing missions over Iran with all its air defenses down. Again, in the near term, it’s basically risk free.
Obviously wars are unpredictable. They don’t necessarily end when you want them to. Consider the fact that October 7th 2023, a shattering defeat for Israel, now from the vantage point of mid-2025 was an unmitigated catastrophe for Iran. It set in process a chain of events which shattered the “axis of resistance” which was the wellspring of its regional power, and it now stands at the mercy of the U.S. and Israel. You don’t know how wars will play out. But right now, Israel has created the circumstances which allow Donald Trump a risk-free “win” of immense magnitude. That is the issue here. Set aside whether or not doing this is wise. I’m talking about why we’re suddenly here. Why two or three days ago the White House was clear they weren’t getting involved and suddenly it all changed. The evolution here is that the Israelis have created an opportunity Trump simply cannot resist. A big, big win with very little risk in the short term. All the force is on one side of the question and nothing is pushing back in the opposite direction. It’s less an evolution of views than simple physics.
Of course, there’s more than the short term. But that’s not how Trump thinks.
You may recall from my “Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber” piece back in January that the Dickinson Public Schools District in North Dakota had the rather unfortunate nickname the “Midgets”. Back in March, the school district announced they’d be retiring the nickname, after nearly a century. Last month they announced their new name: the Mavericks. I’m going to call this the best rebranding of the year.
We still have the Estherville, Iowa Midgets to cheer for. But even better: the Yuma Criminals in Arizona. Now that’s a nickname.
TPM Reader MO shares his thoughts after PT’s …
I want to present a third view on the question of what will determine Trump’s decision on Iran. I suggest that the key factor will be what MbS and the other Middle Eastern leaders tell him they want. Ultimately Trump’s interest is in what will enrich him most and here Saudi Arabia and the others have by far the most to offer. For Trump, there is no money to be made in Israel or in regime change in Iran. Corruption overrides everything for him.
I agree with PT that Trump is concerned to recapture the spotlight. He will draw out his decision in any case. And I agree with you that a fundamental desire on his part is to be perceived as winning in this case. But the key here is “perceived”—he doesn’t care about whether it is an actual long-term victory for him or the US (as you maintain as well). My point is that his aim will be only to *spin* whatever happens here as a win for him. The reality of the situation is irrelevant.
I know that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are wary of Iran and are open to better relations with Israel. But will they be comfortable with a world in which Israel is far and away the dominant player in the Middle East? I doubt it, though I really don’t know enough to make a definitive claim here.
So my firm prediction is that it is the wishes of MbS et al. (whatever those wishes are) that will be the deciding factor here. We can only imagine what bribes they will be willing to offer Trump. My somewhat less firm prediction is based on a belief about what those Arab leaders will want. Since I believe that they they will urge Trump not to join with Israel in the attack, my second prediction is that US military forces will not ultimately be involved.
I guess we will all find out soon enough.
It is worth noting that the response to all of this from the Gulf and other parts of the Middle East remains quite muted. Perhaps even more so now that Trump has shoved his way in.
TPM Reader PT has a counterpoint to my post from last night on the offer Trump can’t resist. I’m not sure whether I agree with me or with him. If nothing else PT hits key elements of Trump’s MO …
I’m going to lay down a marker here: the US is not going to join the attacks on Iran. I say this because I think that Trump’s being driven by an entirely different dynamic than his desire to stamp his name on what looks increasingly like an “easy win.”
Let’s consider the context: just 3 days ago, Trump’s military parade was a bust and left him a laughingstock. Meanwhile, something like 2% of the population of the US turned out to protest his policies and his Presidency.
I think that Trump needed to be back to being the center of attention, to recapture the spotlight. I mean, it seems clear that his Presidency is all about watching shows about himself on Fox News, right? So he needed something that could chase the parade and the protests off the front page and put him back in a way that was not humiliating to him. Voila! He changed his tune on Iran.
Having done that, of course, he’s now doing what he learned to do from reality TV: he’s tuning his daily messages on the topic to keep it front-and-center, and this is accomplished by teasing the final decision for as long as possible, keeping everyone on the edges of our seats while we wait to see what he’s going to do.
Given his motivations, though, the last thing he wants to do is to actually send in US military forces. Why?
Because then he stops being the center of the story! The center of the story becomes the actual US military forces that are carrying out operations, the actual state of the fight in Iran, etc. Plus: it would let Netanyahu preen as the guy who was so powerful he coerced Donald Trump into supporting Israel’s fight against Iran. In other words, once he does that, he sets the stage for Netanyahu to be the big hero in the media, not Trump.
Given that background, Trump simply has to snub Netanyahu and avoid moving the actual military into the center of attention.
Links for you. Science:
The Bethesda Declaration: A Call for NIH and HHS Leadership to Deliver on Promises of Academic Freedom and Scientific Excellence
3,500-year-old graves reveal secrets that rewrite bronze age history
The Silent Virus Behind Mono Is Now a Prime Suspect in Major Diseases
Caffeine Has a Weird Effect on Your Brain While You’re Asleep
Health secretary RFK Jr. abruptly fires CDC vaccine advisory panel
An Ominous Combination: A New COVID Variant and the Waning Will to Fight It
Other:
You’re a Bunch of Cowards! We’re all laughing at you.
This Is What Autocracy Looks Like
Game It Out
This Reminds Me Of The Time Sarah Huckabee Sanders Was Politely Asked To Leave A Restaurant
DOGE employees are ‘being pushed out’ without Musk to protect them (The Night of the Long Spork)
The military response to protest and the law
Make America Hate Again: MAHA Institute director has a history of promoting antisemitic conspiracies.
The Protest Dilemma
Trump lied about LA protests to deploy the National Guard. He wants violence. (this is what I mean when I write/poast on Bluesky that narcissism can be adaptive in some situations)
Stolen pride
A Letter to Home from a Weary ICE Agent
Trump’s Endless Flip-Flops Reveal His Recklessness
DOGE Is on a Recruiting Spree
Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence
The Bully’s Pulpit Comes Home. We know about the TACO principle abroad. What about on American soil?
Digging Into Trump’s Attack on the State of California
Never Forget What They’ve Done
The WorldPride Parade Blanketed the City in Queer Excellence
CYA, we’re all gonna die
Donald Trump vs. California (and everywhere else): What happened in California this weekend was another facet of the president’s effort to quash critics.
Your call is important to us… The effectual truth of AI
Democratic governors blast Trump’s illegal invasion of California
Photos: WorldPride weekend in D.C.
Jobs at the Port of Los Angeles are down by half, executive director says
White House budget request slashes funding for tribal colleges and universities
DC report touting benefits of new Commanders stadium could suffer from ‘shiny object bias,’ U.Md. expert says
Homeland Security agent charged with production of child porn
The Bleach Community Is Ready for RFK Jr. to Make Their Dreams Come True. Online communities dedicated to the use of a toxic bleach solution to treat everything from cancer to autism believe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is interested in their cause.
Although swings in net exports have affected the data, recent indicators suggest that economic activity has continued to expand at a solid pace. The unemployment rate remains low, and labor market conditions remain solid. Inflation remains somewhat elevated.
The Committee seeks to achieve maximum employment and inflation at the rate of 2 percent over the longer run. Uncertainty about the economic outlook has diminished but remains elevated. The Committee is attentive to the risks to both sides of its dual mandate.
In support of its goals, the Committee decided to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 4-1/4 to 4-1/2 percent. In considering the extent and timing of additional adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the Committee will carefully assess incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks. The Committee will continue reducing its holdings of Treasury securities and agency debt and agency mortgage‑backed securities. The Committee is strongly committed to supporting maximum employment and returning inflation to its 2 percent objective.
In assessing the appropriate stance of monetary policy, the Committee will continue to monitor the implications of incoming information for the economic outlook. The Committee would be prepared to adjust the stance of monetary policy as appropriate if risks emerge that could impede the attainment of the Committee's goals. The Committee's assessments will take into account a wide range of information, including readings on labor market conditions, inflation pressures and inflation expectations, and financial and international developments.
Voting for the monetary policy action were Jerome H. Powell, Chair; John C. Williams, Vice Chair; Michael S. Barr; Michelle W. Bowman; Susan M. Collins; Lisa D. Cook; Austan D. Goolsbee; Philip N. Jefferson; Adriana D. Kugler; Alberto G. Musalem; Jeffrey R. Schmid; and Christopher J. Waller.
emphasis added
The modest uptick in the AIA/Deltek Architecture Billings Index (ABI) score to 47.2 for the month means that fewer firms reported a decrease than in April. In addition, inquiries into new work increased this month for the first time since January, reflecting the modest degree of stabilization in the economy recently. However, the value of new signed design contracts continued to decline, indicating that while clients are starting to explore new projects, they remain hesitant to sign a contract committing to them.• Northeast (43.6); Midwest (43.5); South (49.2); West (44.3)
Business conditions remained soft at firms in all regions of the country in May, although firms located in the South came close to reporting growth. The pace of the decline in that region has slowed over recent months, and firms in that region may be the first to experience growth again. However, firms of all specializations reported declining billings this month, although the pace of the decline slowed at firms with a multifamily residential specialization. Firms specializing in that type of work, as well as in institutional work, look like they’ll be the first ones to turn the corner to growth when conditions start to improve.
...
The ABI score is a leading economic indicator of construction activity, providing an approximately nine-to-twelve-month glimpse into the future of nonresidential construction spending activity. The score is derived from a monthly survey of architecture firms that measures the change in the number of services provided to clients.
emphasis added
GDP projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Change in Real GDP1 | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Projection Date | 2025 | 2026 | 2027 | |
Jun 2025 | 1.2 to 1.5 | 1.5 to 1.8 | 1.7 to 2.0 | |
Mar 2025 | 1.5 to 1.9 | 1.6 to 1.9 | 1.6 to 2.0 |
Unemployment projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Unemployment Rate2 | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Projection Date | 2025 | 2026 | 2027 | |
Jun 2025 | 4.4 to 4.5 | 4.3 to 4.6 | 4.2 to 4.6 | |
Mar 2025 | 4.3 to 4.4 | 4.2 to 4.5 | 4.1 to 4.4 |
Inflation projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, PCE Inflation1 | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Projection Date | 2025 | 2026 | 2027 | |
Jun 2025 | 2.8 to 3.2 | 2.3-2.6 | 2.0 to 2.2 | |
Mar 2025 | 2.6 to 2.9 | 2.1 to 2.3 | 2.0 to 2.1 |
Core Inflation projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Core Inflation1 | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Projection Date | 2025 | 2026 | 2027 | |
Jun 2025 | 2.9 to 3.4 | 2.3-2.6 | 2.0 to 2.2 | |
Mar 2025 | 2.7 to 3.0 | 2.1 to 2.4 | 2.0 to 2.1 |
Wet rain a neural classifier to spot AI-generated Python functions in 80 million GitHub commits (2018–2024) by 200,000 developers and track how fast—and where—these tools take hold. By December 2024, AI wrote an estimated 30.1% of Python functions from U.S. contributors, versus 24.3% in Germany, 23.2%in France, 21.6% in India,15.4% in Russia and 11.7% in China. Newer GitHub users use AI more than veterans, while male and female developers adopt at similar rates. Within-developer fixed-effects models show that moving to 30% AI use raises quarterly commits by 2.4%. Coupling this effect with occupational task and wage data puts the annual value of AI-assisted coding in the United States at $9.6–$14.4 billion, rising to $64–$96 billion if we assume higher estimates of productivity effects reported by randomized control trials. Moreover, generative AI prompts learning and innovation, leading to increases in the number of new libraries and library combinations that programmers use. In short, AI usage is already widespread but highly uneven, and the intensity of use, not only access, drives measurable gains in output and exploration.
That is from a new research paper by Simone Daniotti, Johannes Wachs, Xiangnan Feng and Frank Neffke. I am surprised that China does not do better.
The post Who is using AI and how much? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The Red Sox have a 10-5 record in the month of June, with five of those 10 victories against the Yankees.
June 7: Red Sox 10, MFY 7
June 8: Red Sox 11, MFY 7
June 13: Red Sox 2, MFY 1 (10)
June 14: Red Sox 4, MFY 3
June 15: Red Sox 2, MFY 0
The 2-0 shutout on Father's Day turned the MFY bats into wet noodles. With subsequent losses to the Angels, 1-0 (11) and 4-0, the Yankees have not scored a run in their last 29 innings. As you can see below, that's a grand total of four runs in their last five games (all losses, of course), covering 48 innings. Also, in all five games, the MFY were unable to score a run in the first six innings.
000 000 001 0 000 000 201 000 000 000 000 000 000 00 000 000 000
- by Aeon Video
1. The cultural decline of literary fiction.
2. Fellowships to be placed inside Tanzania businesses.
3. Chicago school thinking on juries.
4. Refrigerator restoration as a job?
5. Behavioral economics guide 2025.
6. On Spain’s productivity gap.
7. Barry Eichengreen against stablecoins (NYT). And the Senate passes the bill (NYT).
8. Revisionist take on the origins of basketball (NYT; and also Cowen’s 17th law).
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In the week ending June 14, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 245,000, a decrease of 5,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 2,000 from 248,000 to 250,000. The 4-week moving average was 245,500, an increase of 4,750 from the previous week's revised average. This is the highest level for this average since August 19, 2023 when it was 246,000. The previous week's average was revised up by 500 from 240,250 to 240,750.The following graph shows the 4-week moving average of weekly claims since 1971.
emphasis added
Brian Beutler makes a very good point about the current crop of Democratic advisors:
Yes, media has changed in the ensuing years, but so too have Democrats. They have lost all confidence in their ability to persuade the masses of anything. In their despondency, they have devalued what is true and stopped even articulating what they want the public to believe. They have replaced storytelling rooted in facts with a defeatist sense that public sentiment is fixed, and that they must conform to it.
It’s so frustrating to see that too many Democrats just don’t think they can change people’s minds. It’s made all the harder by a media environment that is unfriendly (to say the least) to Democrats. On that latter topic, there are two things that professional Democrats need to do.
First, they need to learn how to cede some power. There are a whole bunch of Democrats who are willing to spread Democratic messages–and messages somewhat aligned with Democrats (these aren’t the same thing–for free. But the unwillingness of most Democrats to truly engage rank-and-file supporters (as opposed to bombarding them with emails shrieking about THE CRISIS and then asking for a donation) just alienates them. Essentially, they need to decide if they are willing to cede some of the agenda to other people, or if the Iron Law of Institutions will prevail.
Second, they need to figure out a way to buy media outlets. Probably not explicitly, but donors would be far better off if there were way to take over media outlets in swing states, both print and television. At the very least, just not having rightwingers running and owning them would be an improvement. And the money is there: as a thought experiment, imagine if there were a twenty percent tax on donations that went to a media acquisition fund. I would argue that roughly $500 million spent this way is vastly superior to buying ads from media outlets that, too often, are biased against Democrats.
It wouldn’t need to be Fox News either: just the occasional op-ed and coverage biased in a way that’s more friendly–or at least, less antagonistic–to Democrats.
But these strategies both require that you believe you can change people’s minds, and the Democratic establishment seems to have given up on that.
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him, this time at the 92nd St. Y in NYC.
You may recall I have an earlier CWT with David, held at GMU in 2018.
So what should I ask him? Please keep in mind that I wish to avoid most issues connected to current political debates.
The post What should I ask David Brooks? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Total housing starts in May were below expectations; however, starts in March and April were revised up, combined.There is much more in the article.
The third graph shows the month-to-month comparison for total starts between 2024 (blue) and 2025 (red).
Total starts were down 4.6% in May compared to May 2024. Year-to-date (YTD) starts are down 1.5% compared to the same period in 2024. Single family starts are down 7.1% YTD and multi-family up 14.5% YTD.
Housing Starts:
Privately-owned housing starts in May were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,256,000. This is 9.8 percent below the revised April estimate of 1,392,000 and is 4.6 percent below the May 2024 rate of 1,316,000. Single-family housing starts in May were at a rate of 924,000; this is 0.4 percent above the revised April figure of 920,000. The May rate for units in buildings with five units or more was 316,000.
Building Permits:
Privately-owned housing units authorized by building permits in May were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,393,000. This is 2.0 percent below the revised April rate of 1,422,000 and is 1.0 percent below the May 2024 rate of 1,407,000. Single-family authorizations in May were at a rate of 898,000; this is 2.7 percent below the revised April figure of 923,000. Authorizations of units in buildings with five units or more were at a rate of 444,000 in May.
emphasis added
Firefly Aerospace is preparing for its next mission to the Moon and it hopes to, once again, make history, but this time, even before it reaches the lunar surface.
On Wednesday, the company unveiled what it calls Ocula, a lunar imaging service, which will capture high-resolution imagery of the Moon. Firefly Aerospace said it will become the first company to offer this type of capability in lunar orbit from a commercial provider.
“It was always a thought, even before the Blue Ghost Mission 1 landing, that getting more imagery of the lunar surface, as well as looking for previous minerals or understanding activity on the Moon or even looking away from the Moon’s surface and doing space domain awareness, those were all things that we were always exploring,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace.
“So, we had an idea that something like Ocula would be beneficial to NASA, the science, the commercial and the national security missions out there, but having this orbiter that’s going to fly tandem with the Blue Ghost 2 lunar lander, afforded an opportunity to actually make this happen.”
Like many parts of Firefly Aerospace’s hardware and software, this new imaging service also pays homage to the movie Serenity, a sequel to the sci-fi series, Firefly. Ocula is the name of one type of spaceship in the film.
“I think Ocula is just a great name for a mission as game-changing as this. It’s a great coincidence that it has a lineage there, but you know, it’s fitting for the mission that we’re doing,” Kim said. “It’s the first of a kind. It’s going to be the first commercial mission to do this imaging and mapping and space domain awareness around the Moon.
“It’s a cool name, so I hope it catches on and more and more people find out about it.”
Unlike Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed on the Earth-facing side of the Moon in early March, Blue Ghost Mission 2 will perform a landing on the far side. Prior to its landing attempt, it will deploy the Elytra spacecraft with Ocula onboard.
“I think the purpose of this first Ocula mission is to provide an affordable means to be a ride share, to demonstrate the feasibility of this mission and the capabilities of this mission,” Kim said. “We’re going to learn a lot from actually performing this mission and we’re going to have another opportunity with Blue Ghost 3 as well. That will have a tandem orbiter as well.”
Ocula’s telescope is able to capture up to 0.2-meter resolution of the surface of the Moon at an altitude of 50 km (31 mi). Kim said Firefly will announce more details, like the planned operating orbit for Elytra and Ocula’s first mission in the coming months.
Kim said the goal is to develop a constellation in lunar orbit that can offer a high revisit rate to a variety of parties. He said that Firetly is “getting a lot of demand/interest” in accessing the data that will be gathered by Ocula, but said they’re not ready to announce potential customers at this time.
“Between understanding the demand and understanding the physics of orbiting and operating around the Moon and looking at different geographic features of the lunar surface and really groundbreaking and opening up new categories with this mission, we’re going to be able to formulate what the future constellation is going to look like,” Kim said.
Firefly Aerospace is developing the Ocula technology in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Kim said that came in part from a long-standing relationship.
“I think they do a lot of important things for the Department of Energy for our nation. A while back they were able to develop a very compact, high-performance imaging sensor and they’ve, over the years, upgraded it and developed flight versions of it and flown versions of it,” Kim said.
“They’ve got a lot of flight heritage and they continue to tech refresh that capability.”
In addition to Blue Ghost Mission 2, Firefly plans to fly Ocula on the Elytra 3 vehicle, which will be in support of a Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) Sinequone Project no earlier than 2027. That will be a responsive space domain awareness mission.
Blue Ghost Mission 2 meanwhile is targeting a launch in 2026. The mission passed its critical design review in 2024 and teams are now in the process of integration and testing.
“We’re really excited about all the great mission capabilities that are going to be part of that mission. Not only just the Ocula mission, but going to the far side of the Moon and being able to do the LuSEE-Night mission and look at signals from millions of years ago,” Kim said. “That’s going to be very exciting for us. And as you know, we also are carrying a rover on that mission as well that we announced a couple months ago.”
And as Firefly Aerospace continues to develop and deploy the various versions of its Elytra spacecraft, referred to as Dawn, Dusk and Dark, Kim said they’re also looking towards the possibility of deploying the Ocula technology in future Mars exploration missions as well.
“[Elytra] is able to host a lot of different, diverse payloads and its got a lot of size, weight and power accommodations for that. So, it’s kind of a perfect mix of not too small, not too large of a spacecraft, but able to carry a lot of fuel to do a lot of different delta V, intensive, dynamic space operations and it can hold a lot of different mission payloads as well,” Kim said.
“So that’s a long way of saying if there’s a need from NASA or other customers for orbiting Mars and imaging it or providing long haul communications, really Elytra is a perfect system and platform to perform that kind of mission.”
This article is part of “Flint Unfiltered: Stories from An American Water Crisis,” a project that DCReport has partnered on with the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. Eight of their enterprising students delved into the story of Flint, Michigan, the site of one of the country’s worst public health crises. As part of our mentoring program, we’re amplifying their efforts by sharing the amazing work produced by their students, as well as personal essays from Flint residents and stakeholders. Please visit the project’s website HERE.
FLINT – Adorned in her usual Sunday hairnet and ruby red kitchen apron, Aurora Sauceda eagerly waved at each family that packed into the bustling San Juan Diego Activity Center following 9 a.m. Spanish Mass.
“I just feel the warmth. . . . Here, everybody comes together,” Sauceda said with a bright smile, surrounded by steaming plates of pupusas and Nopales con Huevo. Amid the giggles of young children in their Sunday best, this is a community that has supported its members despite a water crisis response that failed and continues to fail them.
With roots in Flint, Texas and Mexico, Sauceda serves as the community coordinator and driving force for Latinos United for Flint, or LUF. Formed in 2016, LUF was born out of the water crisis to assist the Hispanic community – both documented and undocumented – with health services, immigration concerns, nutrition and housing. And while it’s been more than 10 years since polluted water flowed through the pipes of this mid-sized city in southern Michigan, the after-effects of what was billed as the state’s worst public health disaster are still felt in the small but tight community of Hispanic residents, many of whom did not speak fluent English at the time. And many of whom continue to feel marginalized by a local government that seems to overlook them.
“They were more vulnerable. It makes me wonder how they are faring now,” said Karen Weaver in a recent interview about the city’s Hispanic community, then and now. She was Flint’s mayor from 2015 to 2019. “Those are some stories that we don’t know if anybody has heard. I haven’t heard them, and I’m right here. So – who has heard their stories?”
On April 25, 2014, the city of Flint switched the city’s water source from Lake Huron, as supplied by the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department, to the Flint River.
Engineers determined at the time that the city would have to spend $50 million to get the local 1950s-era water treatment plant up to code to make the water safe. Instead, facing a financial crisis, city managers invested only $4 million. The result: Millions of gallons of water with unacceptable levels of sodium, lead and other contaminants were pumped for about 18 months into the homes and businesses of thousands of residents.
While people complained about dirty water and illnesses almost immediately, the state, under former Gov. Rick Snyder, didn’t declare a state of emergency until Jan. 5, 2016. Afterward, in an attempt to mitigate the damage and deliver water to thousands of ailing and angry residents, water distribution centers were set up.
But to ensure “it was just Flint people that were getting services,” a form of state-issued identification was required to obtain water, said Jim Ananich, former minority leader of the Michigan Senate and current board member of the International Center of Greater Flint, an organization that offers support services to Flint’s cultural communities.
This decision marked one of the first blows to the Hispanic, non-English-speaking and undocumented population in Flint, Ananich said, as it illustrated a disregard for their welfare.
The first problem was many of these residents were afraid to present their IDs for fear of being detained and deported. So, they couldn’t collect water at the centers.
Secondly, more than 270 Guardsmen along with the American Red Cross and local law enforcement delivered water and filters to over 22,000 homes. Despite good intentions, aid-canvassing while dressed in military garb and badges did not serve as an effective response. For the undocumented community especially, this emergency response again generated fear.
“It’s unsettling to have this military presence coming up to your door, or law enforcement coming up to your door, when there’s just that whole history for people of color in the country,” said Asa Zuccaro, a Flint local and executive director of the Latinx Technology and Community Center on the city’s eastside.
These fears fell against the backdrop of the Obama administration that had already deported millions of people from the U.S. In fact, just two weekends before, the administration announced a nationwide, concerted effort for the deportation of Central American immigrant families, including mothers and children.
When two weeks later Michigan Guardsmen arrived at the doorsteps of immigrant families with a knock and carrying cases of water, “some of them would not answer the door. . . . They were afraid,” Sauceda said.
Because of these factors, an entire segment of the population “that just is under the radar and also needs it” was largely missed, Ananich said.
Recent U.S. Census numbers put Hispanics in Flint at 4.5% of the population, or about 3,600 people. If water was the crisis point for them a decade ago, today’s fears, like so many across the nation, center on government hostility and neglect for their welfare.
In the absence of trusting government for help and protection, many among Flint’s Hispanic population have turned away from official channels to community centers such as Our Lady of Guadelupe Catholic Church and the Latinx Center. For example, in 2018, when the state-funded water distribution centers were closed down, local foundations such as the Community Foundation of Greater Flint sponsored water hubs. And in 2019, Our Lady of Guadalupe received $10,000 from the United Way to purchase and distribute water to the Hispanic community on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 4 to 6 p.m. On one day alone that summer, Our Lady dispensed 486 24-packs of water to 133 families.
The larger community was not always supportive of targeted efforts such as these. “People found out and they said we were discriminating because we were not handing out water to other community people,” Sauceda said. “They were making comments that it was just because ‘we’re not Hispanic and we don’t speak Spanish.’ . . . Can you believe that?”
Beyond concerns over deportation and water distribution sites themselves, the Hispanic community was facing another issue: the barrier of language accessibility. Nearly all public communications related to the crisis at the time were delivered in English.
“Our Spanish-speaking and undocumented communities were really in the dark for a long time before they found out about the water crisis,” said Sauceda. “The English speakers were aware of it, but the Spanish speakers weren’t aware of it because they didn’t know what was going on. We had a case of a young lady who was pregnant while that happened. And her baby was affected by it.”
Some did not learn of the potentially lethal water contamination until April of 2016, two years after the switch from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River and three months following Snyder’s declaration of a State of Emergency.
“There was no policy maker that was concerned about, ‘do we need to translate things into Spanish?’ That all had to happen through grassroots advocacy,” said Emily Feuerherm, a linguistics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint. “This idea that this city is American, this city is English-speaking with some white people. It totally erased this entire other population and group of those with an immigrant background, multilingual background.”
Beyond the Hispanic community, 2.9% of Genesee County speaks languages other than English and Spanish in the home, such as Asian and Pacific Islander, Indo-European and other languages.
The language barrier persisted past the Hispanic community’s discovery of the crisis, as there was an additional burden in receiving financial benefits from the state.
On Feb. 24, 2016, Snyder announced the Michigan State Legislature’s approval of a $30 million aid package that included a provision to pay back a portion of people’s water bills, as well as pay back for the significant cost of buying water for drinking, cooking and bathing. But once again, residents only received information about applying for these mitigations as part of their utility bills. Those instructions were only explained in English.
“They would have to call in and leave a message and because they were leaving a Spanish-speaking message, they didn’t understand it [in the office], so nobody would get back to them,” Sauceda said.
Similarly, a month later, seven affected families filed a class action lawsuit, claiming that government officials were aware of the increasingly dangerous levels of lead in the water. Following defendants’ attempts to dismiss the suit, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in July of 2021 that plaintiffs could continue with the litigation. This culminated in an approval of a $626.25 million settlement in November 2021 with more than 90,000 claims within the city of Flint.
In order to become a claimant of the settlement, residents had to apply with supporting documentation by June 30, 2022.
However, “all the applications were in English,” Sauceda said. “So, they didn’t know how to fill them out. . . . I would say that hardly any of our undocumented, our Spanish people, got to even apply for the lawsuit.”
And again, the same happened with applications for the Flint Registry, a community tool created to connect those affected by the water crisis to necessary resources. Applications were in English. An interested participant had to call the registry to request a Spanish version.
“And I will be very honest, a lot of that is a funding situation in that sending a letter with all of the translations is a significant weight,” said Felicia Eshragh, program manager of the Flint Registry. “If you would like it to be translated, we can go from there.”
Of the 22,259 registrants within the program as of January 2025, 4.4% or an approximate 979 identify as Latinx or Hispanic, marking a potential impression upon the community but certainly not in its entirety.
Also, English as a Second Language (ESL) services within the city reflect what some call dwindling attention and indifference. In 2015, Feuerherm spearheaded an ESL mapping project of the county, documenting a total of nine ESL programs within and around Flint. Of those nine, four no longer offer programs.
“There was absolute invisibility,” said Feuerherm, who is also a member of the International Center of Greater Flint. After conducting the assessment, Feuerherm came to understand first-hand the neglect people feel.
“People would come up to me [and say] ‘Thank you so much for talking to me. I have wanted to share ideas but haven’t ever had the opportunity,’” she repeated. “’Nobody seems interested.’”
There has been good news too. The city of Flint now has four “navigators” in the Office of Public Health who are tasked with bilingual services. This mitigation was established in 2020.
“The public health navigator position was established within the city of Flint’s Office of Public Health as a direct response to the multifaceted challenges that emerged from the Flint water crisis,” said Shana Rowser, communications manager for the city, in an email. She went on to acknowledge that the Hispanic community faced “unique challenges” during the crisis when “language barriers and fears related to immigration status led to reduced access to vital information and resources.” The new navigators are all fluent in Spanish to help with official communications. Also, the city no longer requires documentation to access resources as a way to assure residents they can ask for help “without fear,” said Rowser.
Despite this effort, Spanish speakers are still skeptical of their government and instead have redirected their focus to within their own community.
“Systems will fail you, they can fail you,” Zuccaro said. “Instead of waiting for a system to understand how to service and learn how to service, maybe we’ll do better. Just by serving ourselves and trying to create our own systems.”
And this is just what Zuccaro and his colleagues at Latinx strive to do.
On March 14, the Latinx Center broke ground on its Bilingual Early Education Center while its first interpreter training program (TICT) session kicked off on April 14. Just last year, the center translated over 268 hours of material and 169,604 words while also distributing 14,252 gallons of water to the culturally diverse Latin community that visits.
Beyond translational services, last year, the center oversaw 34 new LLCs from the Hispanic community and over 68 people became fully employed. “I think the exciting part is not only maybe staying in that labor force but now taking agency and becoming the business owner in that labor force,” Zuccaro said.
A spot of pride for the center is the over 20 competitive applications they have received for the Youth Leadership program, which enlists local youth to beautify the east side, encouraging reinvestment within the Hispanic and immigrant communities.
And that revitalization takes shape in the form of new arrivals, as the city’s east side now crackles with sanguinity these 10 years later. In the face of the general population’s 1.6% decline in 2021, Genesee County’s immigrant population jumped to approximately 11,269 with most journeying from Cuba, Mexico, India, Iraq and Venezuela. Much of the community is attracted to the low property values and cost of living within the county and specifically in Flint, which is a remnant of the crisis.
“When they come here, it’s warm for them. They feel like family members too,” said Devianise Padilla Borgos, the advancement coordinator for the Latinx Center. “If they’re new in the community, they know this is the first spot.”
A similar thread of communal ambition and advancement dances about the mosaics of stained glass and the worn wooden pews of Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church.
For long-time Flint resident and one of the hands who helped build this Latin church from the ground, 84 year-old Lucia Pacheco sees attending as a matter of survival.
“The church is keeping the Mexican, the Spanish-speaking people together. Otherwise, we wouldn’t see, we wouldn’t see a thing,” said Pacheco with a contagious force in her voice. Despite her diagnosis with stiff person syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that causes intense muscle spasms, she and her husband Vincent walk through the doors of the church every Sunday.
Even more than 10 years on, the halls of the San Juan Diego Activity Center are still overflowing with food donations and volunteers continue to distribute free bananas, milk and most importantly, cases of water to a sidelined but tenacious community.
“I just feel that we all have a purpose in life,” Sauceda said, her face softening at the sound of a beautiful mélange of Spanish and English. “And it can’t be just sitting on your hands and doing nothing.”
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post Translating A Crisis appeared first on DCReport.org.
The Economics of Slavery
Probing the incentives and institutions that kept slavery alive can help us value what freedom means, by Roland Fryer
"Learning what slavery entailed is enough to horrify us; understanding why it endured demands economics. Moral repulsion at reducing people to property can—and must—coexist with the need to explain how such barbarism flourished in a nation that proclaimed “all men are created equal.” Only by probing the incentives and institutions that kept slavery alive can we fully appreciate what freedom means.
...
"Slavery endured not only because society condoned it but also because, for slaveholders, it paid. Fogel and Engerman overturned the then-fashionable view that bondage was an economically backward form of racist exploitation, manned by an idle workforce that dragged the South down. Their data revealed a colder truth: For those who owned people, slavery was the most profitable and therefore most rational labor system on offer. Recognizing the profit calculus behind slavery doesn’t dilute its moral horror—it sharpens it. It exposes how market incentives can entrench inhumanity and how the lure of profit can eclipse compassion.
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"Teaching that slavery was simply racial exploitation differs from showing that it was capitalism run amok, an incentive-driven system that targeted black people because doing so maximized profit. Both interpretations acknowledge slavery’s brutality, but the economic framing sheds light on how incentives can be reshaped, pointing to concrete ways the future can be brighter."
This article is part of “Flint Unfiltered: Stories from An American Water Crisis,” a project that DCReport has partnered on with the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. Eight of their enterprising students delved into the story of Flint, Michigan, the site of one of the country’s worst public health crises. As part of our mentoring program, we’re amplifying their efforts by sharing the amazing work produced by their students, as well as personal essays from Flint residents and stakeholders. Please visit the project’s website HERE.
FLINT – The water crisis didn’t just poison bodies. It rerouted lives, upended routines and redefined identities. It turned parents into protesters. Scientists into whistleblowers. Neighbors into warriors. Artists into organizers. Flint is not just a story about contamination, it’s a story about adaptation.
The crisis began in 2014, when Flint’s drinking water source was switched from Detroit’s system to the Flint River in a cost-cutting move while the city was under state-appointed emergency management. The river water wasn’t properly treated, allowing lead from aging pipes to leach into the community’s drinking water. Residents quickly noticed the difference – brown water, rashes, strange smells – but for over a year, officials dismissed their concerns. By the time the government acknowledged the problem, thousands of people had been exposed to lead and other contaminants. Trust in public institutions collapsed and, in its place, a network of ordinary people stepped up to do what officials would not.
The following roles don’t define the people who took them on, but they reveal new dimensions of them. For some, it meant filing FOIAs, collecting samples and raising the alarm. For others, it meant listening harder, asking questions, refusing to be reassured. When trust in the system dissolved, what emerged was something fierce and unrelenting. Not because people wanted to be watchdogs – but because they didn’t have a choice.
Some people never stopped focusing on the water itself. Whether tracking what comes out of the tap, pushing for better infrastructure, or continuing to ask basic questions about safety, for them the water crisis didn’t end, even when it stopped being news.
Elin Betanzo is a water engineer with firsthand knowledge of what happens when corrosive water is pumped through old lead pipes. A former EPA official, she lived through the Washington, D.C. lead crisis in the early 2000s, where thousands of residents were exposed to dangerous lead levels due to similar regulatory failures. So when Flint made the decision in 2014 to switch its water supply to the Flint River without implementing proper corrosion control, Betanzo recognized the risk immediately.
“The second they switched the water in Flint is when I thought – there’s potential for a problem.”
But she wasn’t in Flint. At the time, Betanzo was living on the other end of the state, watching from afar as warning signs appeared and were dismissed. She reconnected with her old friend Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a Flint pediatrician, and encouraged her to analyze blood-lead data in children.
“Everything I experienced was as an outsider, with enough knowledge to know what’s happening, but no connections. Just completely frustrated. What can I do to make someone pay attention to the tragedy unfolding here?”
In the years since, Betanzo has dedicated herself to national reform efforts, advocating for stronger federal rules and helping cities build the technical capacity to safely replace lead lines. Flint may have ignited a national conversation but, as she emphasizes, technical fixes alone aren’t enough. The crisis was as much about governance as it was about infrastructure.
As the water plant supervisor in Flint, Scott Dungee lived through the crisis from the inside. He was there when the city, under a state-appointed emergency manager, switched its water supply in 2014 from Detroit’s Lake Huron-fed system to the long-defunct Flint River plant, a facility that had sat idle for years and required at least $50 million in upgrades to be safely operational. Instead, the state allocated just $4 million. The plant reopened anyway.
Dungee and his team were given 30 days to begin delivering water from a source that was known to be chemically unstable and they were largely untrained for what they were being asked to do.
“It’s heart-dropping. When you know you’ve got to make water in 30 days, and you’re scared to, but you’ve got no choice. So, you either quit… or you make the water.”
What followed became the national scandal: improperly treated water corroded aging pipes, leaching lead into thousands of homes. Trust in the water system collapsed. Now, years later, Dungee is still at the plant, helping to rebuild both the infrastructure and the public’s faith. His team continues work to recoat and restore damaged pipes, and he’s personally led efforts to bring residents back into the process.
“A lot of them still don’t trust us, but at least try. Ever since 2017 we put that open door policy out there… I’ve had a few that totally don’t trust it and within a year’s time I’ve tested their water four or five times and they’re on my side now. So I have made some headway.”
Karen Weaver became mayor of Flint in 2015, at the height of the water crisis. A clinical psychologist by training, Weaver had no political background, but ran on a platform of transparency and accountability and won, becoming the first woman to hold the office. One of her top priorities was replacing the city’s lead service lines. But for Weaver, the work that needed to be done was a chance to repair trust with the community.
“The first $30 million that we got, we hired three companies. Two were from Flint, one was from Genesee County… It was 2016, you know, Flint is a predominantly Black city—and it was the first time that a Black company had ever gotten a multimillion-dollar contract from the city of Flint.”
To Weaver, rebuilding the water system meant ensuring that the people most affected by the crisis had a role in repairing the damage. Her administration launched the Fast Start program, aimed at jumpstarting pipe replacement efforts quickly while hiring local contractors and workers.
“We said we need to hire people right from Flint, we need to see people that we know doing this and give people in Flint an opportunity, because that was going to be part of our healing too was taking care of ourselves.”
In the long aftermath of the water crisis, some people found themselves stepping into the spotlight – giving testimony, leading protests and grabbing headlines. For others, the response was more local and constant. Neighbors who stayed, city workers who held the line and teachers who kept things going, experiencing the crisis at home but still showing up for their community.
Their work held the community together, and when the cameras packed up and moved on, this strength didn’t fade, it remained relentless.
For Claudia Perkins, leader of the bargaining unit of the United All Workers organization for nearly 30 years, fighting for justice isn’t new. So when the Flint water crisis began, she didn’t wait to act.
“We had rashes in our face, on our legs, hair falling out, all of those things. And so we knew we had to do something. So we all came together and we met and we talked and we formed the group, Democracy Defense League.”
The Democracy Defense League quickly became one of the loudest grassroots voices holding officials accountable. Made up of local residents and labor organizers, the group’s members organized protests, attended public hearings and ensured that Flint stayed in the national spotlight.
“I’m not missing one court hearing. We’re there in full force… we go, we listen, if we have to testify, we do that. We fight to win.”
The Flint water crisis exposed more than 30,000 children to elevated levels of lead, a neurotoxin that can cause developmental delays, learning disabilities, behavioral issues and problems with memory and attention. Researchers have documented spikes in special education enrollment and a rise in anxiety and emotional dysregulation among Flint’s youth in the years following the switch to contaminated water. Like many educators in the city, Lily Wilson carries the weight of a crisis that began outside the classroom but shows up inside it every day.
“When the kids come to school and they have an issue, we’re there to help in any way, shape or form. And what we can’t do, we go to the next person that can help. So it’s all about outreach and stretching and making sure that the need is met.”
Wilson says her role goes far beyond teaching, supporting students not just academically but emotionally and physically. The community’s trust in institutions was shaken, but schools remained one of the few reliable spaces where families could turn for help.
“It shifted the identity of the community…it takes a village to raise that kind of hope back to get it back to where it needs to be and to bring something new…I feel like I became much more resilient.”
For Christian Perkins, a firefighter and safety training officer with the Flint Fire Department, the water crisis reshaped every aspect of life.
“I’m dealing with the water crisis personally. And then I go to work and it is the biggest thing – not fires, not EMS costs – the biggest thing that we were dealing with at that point was the water crisis.”
Fires and medical calls didn’t change much, but as lead levels in the water became a national scandal, the fire stations transformed into logistical hubs for emergency response. The city’s firehouses were repurposed as water distribution centers, and local firefighters were asked to help coordinate with outside agencies to serve thousands of residents in urgent need of clean water. During the peak of the crisis, when federal resources were deployed to assist in distributing bottled water and filters, the fire stations became key access points for that effort.
“They brought in the National Guard and the National Guard used our stations as a point of delivery to the citizens. Go outside and you’d have hundreds of cars lined up to come and get water.”
And when the aid left and the cameras turned away, it was Flint residents like Firefighter Perkins who continued to carry the community forward.
“It felt like everybody just packed up their tents and left. And we were left to deal with it as we’ve always had to deal with things – just trying to come together as a community and work it out amongst ourselves.”
As advisors and advocates, the crisis pushed some outward, turning local pain into national purpose.
For Amber Hasan, an artist and advocate, the crisis changed her work and focus.
“When the water crisis happened, it opened my eyes to so many of the environmental injustices and how they intersect with race and gender and socioeconomics. How easy it is in the first world to end up without the resources necessary to live just a regular life. And it happened to my community. My eyes were opened to how it was happening in so many other communities in the United States.”
As she watched the fallout unfold, Hasan began drawing connections between Flint and other-income communities across the U.S. where water access, environmental neglect and institutional failure often collided. Her response was to create and to organize. In 2016, Hasan co-founded The Sister Tour, a traveling artist collective and media platform dedicated to connecting and lifting up the stories of marginalized women and communities through performance, workshops, mutual aid and digital storytelling. What started as a creative collaboration quickly evolved into a national network of artists and organizers, using art to speak truth and build solidarity across geographies.
“I think that the role of artists is to tell the truth…you use whatever tools you have” … for us with the sister tour, it is our network. It’s the people that we know and who know us and who trust us to do the work that we do. It is being able to have a voice through being an artist and being able to speak to people in a different way.”
The Flint water crisis became a turning point in how the country talks about drinking water. Since her role in exposing the crisis, Elin Betanzo has become a leading voice in national water policy and lead line replacement efforts.
“It’s changed the fundamental conversation…it’s the first time ever we have $15 billion to fund replacement of lead service lines, under the Biden administration that was the first time a single dollar had been allocated for getting rid of lead service lines. So from that perspective Flint has changed everything about how we talk about prioritizing the issue of lead and drinking water.”
But while the funding is a big step forward, implementation remains a challenge. An estimated 9 million lead service lines are still in use across the United States, many of them concentrated in older, low-income and majority-minority communities. Replacing them is a massive logistical and financial undertaking. The Environmental Protection Agency has set a goal of removing all lead service lines within 10 years, but many experts and advocates believe that without stronger oversight and coordination, the timeline could stretch much longer.
“Collaborations and partnerships are critical to making any progress with this, ‘cause there is no way to fight against the establishment alone…we are up against the industry, we are up against the whole establishment of those who are supposed to be providing public health and protection and are fighting against it every day.”
Even after leaving office in 2019, Weaver has remained a vocal advocate.
“The story of Flint needs to stay in the national spotlight, because this is bigger than Flint.”
What happened in Flint can, and does, happen elsewhere. And the most powerful tool communities have, she says, is their voice.
“We’re fighters and we’re proud of it…our voice has been our greatest asset because we don’t go away and we continue to talk about it.”
Sometimes waiting for things to be fixed isn’t an option or takes too long. For many in Flint, they kept building anyway. Painting murals. Opening studios. Starting businesses. They’re not denying what happened, they’re just refusing to let that be the only story.
For Kelly Martin, a tattoo artist who recently opened a studio in downtown Flint, her city is so much more than the water crisis.
“Anywhere I go that’s the only thing they want to talk about. There’s just, how’s the water? Is it kind of like, are you kidding? We’re like, ‘no, it’s not fixed.’ It’s broken here, we’re all, like, still struggling. But that’s just one thing out of the, like, things that’s happened…I’m more like, look at this city rising…that’s what’s really important to us”
Her friend and fellow artist, Pauly Everett, agrees.
Everett, a Flint-born street artist and muralist, has been painting long before the water crisis. His work, often vibrant and community-focused, is part of a broader creative movement that’s taken root in Flint over the past two decades: artists reclaiming walls, alleys and abandoned spaces to tell a different story about their city.
“We all just get together and help each other out…People look out for each other and we both do tough times and help each other out.”
As a street artist, Pauly was active before, during and after the water crisis.
“When Flint comes up in a conversation, we want them to think of the art we’re making. You know, I mean, the cool thing we’re doing, the creative things we’re doing. Yeah. From rocking to throwing gallery shows. I mean, we’re traveling the world and making art.”
James Moore, a Flint resident and entrepreneur, sees opportunity where others see decline. His message is simple: don’t wait for someone else to fix it – build it yourself.
“I’m an entrepreneur. I really stress on we have to make things happen for ourselves.”
For Moore, revitalization doesn’t depend on looking back and wishing the past had gone differently, it’s about building a new future with what the community has now.
“If the big companies won’t come, then we got to do grassroots and go Fortune 500 from within. We can’t hide behind excuses on why we can’t do it. We got to come up there. We can do it. We used to build carriages and wagons here and we started building cars and trucks and we’re moving on even more into the future. So we got to do more thinking outside of the box on things that we can do.”
Flint never disappeared. It’s just been underestimated.
“A lot people say Flint will never come back. I said, Flint never left. It is always here. We didn’t cut the lights off.”
The story of Flint is not over. In a city where trust was broken, what endures is not just resilience, but reinvention and people who refuse to let one disaster define them. The stories are not neat and are not resolved, but they demonstrate what happens when ordinary people are asked to carry extraordinary weight and how, in the face of failure, they keep finding ways to build, to push and to stay. In Flint, the future is still unfolding – in classrooms, on sidewalks, in council chambers and tattoo shops – one conversation, one mural, one water test at a time.
The post The People Flint Made appeared first on DCReport.org.
Mortgage applications decreased 2.6 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending June 13, 2025.
The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, decreased 2.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index decreased 4 percent compared with the previous week. The Refinance Index decreased 2 percent from the previous week and was 25 percent higher than the same week one year ago. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index decreased 3 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index decreased 5 percent compared with the previous week and was 14 percent higher than the same week one year ago.
“Mortgage rates decreased last week, driven by financial market volatility caused by current geopolitical conflict and ongoing tariff uncertainties. The 30-year fixed rate decreased to 6.84 percent, its lowest level since April,” said Joel Kan, MBA’s Vice President and Deputy Chief Economist. “Even with lower average mortgage rates, applications declined over the week as ongoing economic uncertainty weighed on potential homebuyers’ purchase decisions.”
Added Kan, “Refinance activity declined for both conventional and government borrowers. VA applications, however, bucked the trend with a 2 percent increase in purchase applications and a slight increase in refinance applications. Additionally, the overall average loan size at $380,200, was the lowest since January 2025.”
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The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($806,500 or less) decreased to 6.84 percent from 6.93 percent, with points increasing to 0.66 from 0.64 (including the origination fee) for 80 percent loan-to-value ratio (LTV) loans.
emphasis added
President Trump has effectively declared war on America’s cities. This may not be much of a surprise given his history and the fact that he is always eager to find lines of division between Americans that he can widen, but it does demand some exploration if we are to understand what is happening right now.
Trump wants to cast this conflict he has created as one in which America is on one side and our cities are on the other. But here’s the truth: America’s cities are America.
Liberals are sometimes reluctant to say so, in part because they’re less attracted to mindless flag-waving than conservatives are, and in part because they may have internalized the relentless propaganda telling us that the true heart of our nation lies in dirt roads and fields of grain. But it’s time we shifted our view.
We begin with this statement from Trump over the weekend, announcing his order for law enforcement to descend on American cities:
The logic runs like this: Most undocumented immigrants are in cities (true); most cities are run by Democrats (true); cities are therefore the nexus of election fraud (false), the overuse of government benefits (false), and the theft of both benefits and jobs from real Americans (false); they are also “crime-ridden” (false) and the source of strange and threatening perversion (“Transgender for Everybody,” whatever that means). Therefore, Trump is justified in ordering a paramilitary (and at times military) assault on these cities. These operations, and the resistance they engender from the residents of those cities, will then be used to falsely claim that the cities have devolved into violent chaos and lawlessness, when in fact nearly all the violence is coming from law enforcement itself.
The justification for this assault is that cities and the people who live there “hate our Country” and are therefore not really part of our country at all. And of course, since it’s Trump this is very much about race. You’ll note his use of the anachronistic term “inner cities.” Geographically speaking, Central Park West is just as “inner” within Manhattan as 125th Street in Harlem, but the term refers to the latter and not the former, because it’s not about geography at all. He also claims that cities have become a “Third World Dystopia” as a contrast to the “Heartland.” There are plenty of communities in rural America that have suffered through crushing poverty and addiction crises, but no one refers to them as “Third World.” That’s an appellation Trump reserves for places with large numbers of people who aren’t white.
And it doesn’t come just from Trump; all the elements of this rhetoric are being reinforced by conservative media, which are telling their audiences every day that American cities are literally in flames, burning to the ground to feed liberals’ hatred of the true America. “They're burning their own cities just to prove to their bloodthirsty base that they're fighting Trump in the streets, burning their own cities for power,” says Fox News’ Jesse Waters.
Then at a Monday press conference at the G7 meeting in Canada, Trump invoked “Great Replacement” theory to justify his use of state violence against urban Americans:
“Biden allowed 21 million people to come into our country. Of that, vast numbers of those people were murderers, killers, people from gangs, people from jails, they emptied their jails out into the U.S. Most of those people are in the cities. All blue cities. All Democrat-run cities. And they think they’re going to use them to vote. Not gonna happen.”
Anti-urbanism has been a feature of American discourse since even before the country became independent; Thomas Jefferson, who seldom missed an opportunity to express his contempt for all things urban, wrote that “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” People considered cities too loud, too dirty, too crowded, and too dangerous, and that was often true. But cities have also always been a wellspring of culture and innovation, which is part of what draws people there.
As a result, the story of this country is in many ways the story of steady urbanization. At the founding, most Americans were farmers and cities were relatively small; the cast of “Hamilton” may sing that the New York of 1776 was “the greatest city in the world,” but at the time its population was tiny, around 20-25,000. A hundred years later, the 1880 Census still classified over 70% of Americans as living in rural areas; 40 years after that, the 1920 census was the first in which the urban population outnumbered the rural population.
The migration from farm to city continued steadily in the ensuing years. Today, there are 346 American cities with over 100,000 residents; together they hold over 100 million of us. There are many ways to define what is urban and what is rural, but the Census still uses a binary classification; according to their system, the 2020 Census showed 80% of the country as urban and 20% as rural.
In their system, most of those who live in suburbs will be classified as “urban” because they live in metropolitan areas. But suburbs are defined by their proximity to the city, which is still the fuel that powers them and the reason people want to live there; without that, they’d just be isolated towns. Today, a majority of Americans describe the place where they live as suburban, but there has been an important change there too. Suburbs are getting more urban all the time. Which is something else Donald Trump can’t stand.
What do I mean by that? People who want to live in suburbs are increasingly looking for all the accoutrements of urban life, in greater quantity than suburbs used to feature. Yes, there’s still plenty of sprawl, but in today’s most dynamic suburbs you can find all the things people want out of the city: restaurants, entertainment, and communal public spaces, including active “downtowns” where people gather.
The evolution of the suburbs is happening all over the country, but let’s take just one example: Silver Spring, Maryland is a suburb just north of Washington, D.C., but if you go there it feels a lot like a small city. Between the 2010 and 2020 Census it grew from 71,000 residents to 81,000. It is absolutely bursting with new restaurants and retail, including from a fast-growing community of Ethiopian immigrants joining a place that is already one-quarter Latino, and its small skyline is dotted with cranes erecting new apartment buildings.
The same is true of the suburbs to the south of D.C. Virginia has turned from a purple to a blue state because of the rapid growth of the northern Virginia suburbs, driven by immigrant communities. In Fairfax County, for instance, over 20% of the population is Asian-American. Next door, Alexandria has gone from being a suburb to a genuine city in its own right, with a population of 159,000.
That’s a story that is repeated in suburbs outside large cities all across the country, one of growth and increasing racial and ethnic diversity. And just as the diversity of cities was always self-reinforcing, the diversity of suburbs is now too. When my great-grandparents came to America at the turn of the 20th century, it only made sense to go to New York; that’s where all the other Jews were. If you’re an Ethiopian immigrant coming here today, you can settle in a major city, but if you go to Silver Spring you’ll see a dozen Ethiopian restaurants and coffee shops, and know that this is a place you can feel comfortable. Put both internal and external migration together, and you have suburbs that have become dramatically less white over the last few decades:
For years, suburbs voted Republican; the people who fled cities for the white-picket-fence dream were mostly white and mostly conservative. But as suburbs have grown more diverse, their politics have changed, to the point where today suburbs are the main political battleground in America. Republicans own the rural areas, Democrats own the cities, and the suburbs are where elections are decided.
For Donald Trump, this is an emergency. In 2020 he started claiming that Democrats were coming to “destroy the suburbs”; it was part of his 2024 campaign as well. When he said that, it was affordable housing and racial diversity he was warning against. In other words, the horrifying future for the suburbs would be that they would come to look like the city. Which in many ways and in many places, they already have.
There are perfectly valid reasons one might want to live in a rural area or an exurb; everyone has their own conception of what constitutes a good place to live. But it’s important to keep pointing out that when Trump attacks cities, he’s attacking America. Los Angeles County, where the current controversy began, is home to almost 10 million people. That’s greater than the population of 40 of the 50 states; it exceeds the populations of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Rhode Island, Delaware, Montana, Maine, and New Hampshire combined.
The story of the city is the story of America, of ambitious and energetic people coming to pursue their American dreams, banging up against each other, sometimes collaborating, sometimes in conflict, but always remaking themselves and the country again and again. Cities are messy and loud and complicated and innovative and dynamic, and so is America at its best.
Donald Trump should know that; his driving ambition for most of his life was to make it in Manhattan. Which also happens to be the place from which Fox News blasts its viewers every day with the message that our cities are hellholes, yet for some reason, the network hasn’t relocated its operations to rural North Dakota.
This ought to be a key part of the response to what Trump is doing: Yes, it’s authoritarian; yes, it’s unconstitutional; yes, it’s a betrayal of our ideals and our values. But it’s also an assault on the heart of America. Don’t be afraid to say it.
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It continues to be the case that almost none of Abundance’s critics seem to have actually read the book. The first wave of critics basically ignored the ideas in it, and talked about their own ideas instead. Later critics became more aggressive, frenetically lobbing insult-words at the authors — “libertarian”, “Republican”, “oligarch-funded”, etc. — that completely ignored the book’s argument that excessive regulation is holding back big government. Occasionally, these shouters would admit that they had not, in fact, read the book they were insulting.
What explains this frantic, scrambling assault? I have no doubt that many progressives instinctively feel that anyone who criticizes any kind of regulation is a small-government pro-corporate neoliberal. But Marc J. Dunkelman’s book Why Nothing Works — which makes the same exact point as Abundance, with more depth on the history and legal details of anti-government regulation — has provoked no such outpouring of vitriol.
My best guess is that it’s not the ideas in Abundance that frightened progressives, but the identities of the authors — or, more specifically, one of the authors. Marc J. Dunkelman is a bookish academic, and Derek Thompson is a well-read wonkish opinion writer, but Ezra Klein is a powerful tastemaker and arbiter of opinion within the Democratic party. If Ezra Klein says that it’s time for the Democrats to start concentrating their energies on raising state capacity, then there’s a good chance that five years later, “raising state capacity” is what the party will be all about.
That shift in focus is inherently threatening to progressives who had thought that their moment had come — that in the wake of neoliberalism’s overthrow, anti-corporatism would define the Democrats’ economic agenda going forward. It threatens to disempower one set of thought leaders, policy wonks, and activists, and empower a different set. And although the Abundance agenda is often about empowering government, it doesn’t attack the private sector the way the progressives want to; that will mean continued corporate influence in the Democratic party, and more social status for private businesspeople who get to keep making profits, which are two things progressives really don’t want.
So what looks like Ezra Klein Derangement Syndrome1 is probably all about factional control, and about struggles for status among groups of elites.
But I don’t want to paint with too broad of a brush, because there are a few progressive critics who do seem to have actually read Abundance. One of these is Sandeep Vaheesan, who wrote a 6500-word review of the book for the Boston Review. I commend Vaheesan for spending the effort.
Vaheesan’s review is, to be blunt, not very good. Despite having clearly read Abundance, he insists on mischaracterizing its central arguments and putting words in the authors’ mouths. And when he tries to marshal evidence that America’s high housing and energy costs are due to the inherent limitations of the profit motive rather than to red tape, his efforts fall short.
But at the same time, Vaheesan’s criticisms do successfully highlight one of the Abundance movement’s key weaknesses. Although Klein, Thompson, and other Abundance thought leaders are clear about what kinds of things they want Americans to have more of (housing, energy, health care, etc.), and although they make a great argument for more state capacity as a way to get those things, they do tend to leave out one intermediate step — they rarely discuss what concrete steps a more empowered government might take in order to provide abundance. This omission doesn’t destroy their case, but it makes it easier for critics to misinterpret their message.
OK, so first, let’s go through Vaheesan’s review of Abundance, and talk about some of the reasons why it misses the mark.
The first big problem with Vaheesan’s review is that, like other progressive critics, he views the Abundance agenda as being all about private-sector deregulation. Here are some excerpts:
Many readers will find [Abundance’s argument] persuasive, primed by decades of anti-government rhetoric directed at certain state activities from Democrats and Republicans alike…
But achieving [material abundance] requires breaking with the ethos of neoliberalism—its deference to private capital and hostility to public governance—that structures so much of Klein and Thompson’s thinking, even when they are praising Biden’s “post-neoliberal” industrial policy…A much more promising path to abundance than the one this book offers is to embrace a twenty-first-century New Deal. That is the tried-and-true model for a “liberalism that builds” in the United States, and Abundance rightly invokes it as a foil to the present. Yet Klein and Thompson strangely shy away from calling for a new (or Green) New Deal…
Remove [regulatory] hurdles, Abundance contends, and private actors will deliver abundance—at least when goaded by sufficiently high levels of public subsidy…
It’s not insignificant that Klein and Thompson’s attacks echo the Trumpist agenda they disclaim…
Replicating [public-sector success] on a national scale and across a range of urgent challenges calls for a serious revival of New Deal politics, not a doubling down on the ethos of neoliberalism—however appealingly rebranded. [emphasis mine]
Like many other progressive critics of Abundance, Vaheesan claims that the book is all about private-sector deregulation and rebranded neoliberalism. Unlike the others, he ought to know better.
A short and less detailed post today, because I’m under severe time pressure. But I wanted to say something about Donald Trump’s off-again-on-again deportation policies.
Trump returned to power apparently convinced that America is being overrun with violent immigrant criminals. So all he had to do was order ICE to start rounding up these evildoers and kick them out.
However, tracking down undocumented immigrants who are also criminals has turned out to be a slow affair, because the great majority of immigrants — like the great majority of people in general — are law-abiding. In fact, the available evidence suggests that undocumented aliens are less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans. Things move a little faster if ICE ignores due process and just sends people it imagines might be criminals to overseas prisons. But this means sending people who may well be innocent — and legal residents — to horrifying gulags. And while such things don’t bother Trump or Stephen Miller, they do in fact bother many Americans.
Yet Miller, by all accounts, has been deeply frustrated at the slow pace of deportations. So the administration began just rounding up people who look to them like illegal immigrants. Again, the abandonment of due process and rule of law clearly didn’t bother them.
But the loss of an important part of the labor force bothered business interests. And so last week Trump suddenly announced that he wouldn’t be going after immigrant workers in agriculture and the hospitality industry, who are “very good, long time workers.”
What this meant, I guess, was that the dragnets will be limited to industries that employ large numbers of undocumented immigrants, but in which these immigrants are not a crucial part of the work force.
So I wondered how long it would take Trump to realize that there are no such industries. I mean, wait until he learned about who does the hard, dangerous work in the construction industry.
Sure enough, it only took a couple of days for the administration to reverse its policy of exempting farms and restaurants from immigrant raids. Anti-immigrant hardliners realized, even if Trump didn’t, that going easy on immigrants who are crucial to the economy would in effect mean abandoning the whole idea of mass deportation.
As often, it’s useful if disturbing to read what Trump says, unfiltered by media sanewashing. Here’s part of a screed from Sunday:
Notice that Trump is still going on about “our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities,” oblivious to the reality that homicides in major cities have plunged — in New York, where immigrants make up 37 percent of the population, murders were 83 percent lower in 2024 than in 1990, and have continued to fall rapidly this year. Note also that Trump has gone full Replacement Theory, claiming that Democrats are deliberately bringing in illegal aliens to “expand their voter base” (undocumented immigrants can’t vote.)
But in the context of Trump’s temporary move on farm and hospitality workers, the line that struck me was the one about how immigrants were “robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.” Which “good paying Jobs and Benefits” did he have in mind? Agricultural field work? Scrubbing toilets? Installing drywall?
Incidentally, not only do undocumented immigrants often do the most physically demanding and unsafe work, they are often deliberately misclassified as independent contractors, which means that they “do not have access to health insurance, medical leave, workers’ compensation insurance coverage, and safe workplace protections.”
The point is that in general undocumented immigrants don’t take good jobs away from native-born Americans. By and large they take jobs the native-born don’t want or would only take at much higher wages. This means that immigrants are complements, not substitutes, for native workers. They increase, not reduce, native-born wages. And mass deportation, if it really gets going, will be an economic as well as a human catastrophe.
Which doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. TACO doesn’t necessarily mean that Trump chickens out from bad policies. Sometimes it means chickening out from good, or in any case less bad, policies. In this case he has chickened out in the face of MAGA hardliners, retreating from a policy change that would have limited the damage from anti-immigrant fanaticism.
MUSICAL CODA
That memvid thing that's been going around recently is a trap. It's an embedding store that records the original text that has been embedded in QR codes in a video file. That's an absurd thing to do, and the only purpose of the repo is to make people who uncritically share it look foolish. Don't fall for the trap.
Tags: jokes
After many months of previews, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash have reached general availability with new, memorable model IDs: gemini-2.5-pro
and gemini-2.5-flash
. They are joined by a new preview model with an unmemorable name: gemini-2.5-flash-lite-preview-06-17
is a new Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite model that offers lower prices and much faster inference times.
I've added support for the new models in llm-gemini 0.23:
llm install -U llm-gemini
llm 'Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle' \
-m gemini-2.5-flash-lite-preview-06-17
There's also a new Gemini 2.5 Technical Report (PDF), which includes some interesting details about long context and audio and video support. Some highlights:
While Gemini 1.5 was focused on native audio understanding tasks such as transcription, translation, summarization and question-answering, in addition to understanding, Gemini 2.5 was trained to perform audio generation tasks such as text-to-speech or native audio-visual to audio out dialog. [...]
Our Gemini 2.5 Preview TTS Pro and Flash models support more than 80 languages with the speech style controlled by a free formatted prompt which can specify style, emotion, pace, etc, while also being capable of following finer-grained steering instructions specified in the transcript. Notably, Gemini 2.5 Preview TTS can generate speech with multiple speakers, which enables the creation of podcasts as used in NotebookLM Audio Overviews. [...]
We have also trained our models so that they perform competitively with 66 instead of 258 visual tokens per frame, enabling using about 3 hours of video instead of 1h within a 1M tokens context window. [...]
An example showcasing these improved capabilities for video recall can be seen in Appendix 8.5, where Gemini 2.5 Pro is able to consistently recall a 1 sec visual event out of a full 46 minutes video.
The report also includes six whole pages of analyses of the unaffiliated Gemini_Plays_Pokemon Twitch stream! Drew Breunig wrote a fun and insightful breakdown of that section of the paper with some of his own commentary:
Long contexts tripped up Gemini’s gameplay. So much about agents is information control, what gets put in the context. While benchmarks demonstrated Gemini’s unmatched ability to retrieve facts from massive contexts, leveraging long contexts to inform Pokémon decision making resulted in worse performance: “As the context grew significantly beyond 100k tokens, the agent showed a tendency toward favoring repeating actions from its vast history rather than synthesizing novel plans.” This is an important lesson and one that underscores the need to build your own evals when designing an agent, as the benchmark performances would lead you astray.
Let's run a few experiments through the new models.
Here are some SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles!
gemini-2.5-pro - 4,226 output tokens, 4.2274 cents:
gemini-2.5-flash - 14,500 output tokens, 3.6253 cents (it used a surprisingly large number of output tokens here, hence th cost nearly matching 2.5 Pro):
gemini-2.5-flash-lite-preview-06-17 - 2,070 output tokens, 0.0829 cents:
The Gemini team hosted a Twitter Space this morning to discuss the new models, with Logan Kilpatrick, Tulsee Doshi, Melvin Johnson, Anca Dragan and Zachary Gleicher. I grabbed a copy of the audio using yt-dlp, shrunk it down a bit with ffmpeg
(here's the resulting 2.5_smaller.m4a) and then tried using the new models to generate a transcript:
llm --at gemini-2.5_smaller.m4a audio/mpeg \
-m gemini/gemini-2.5-flash \
'Full transcript with timestamps' \
--schema-multi 'timestamp:mm:ss,speaker:best guess at name,text'
I got good results from 2.5 Pro (74,073 input, 8,856 output = 18.1151 cents, 147.5 seconds) and from 2.5 Flash (74,073 input audio, 10,477 output = 10.026 cents, 72.6 seconds), but the new Flash Lite model got stuck in a loop (65,517 output tokens = 6.3241 cents, 231.9 seconds) part way into the transcript:
... But this model is so cool because it just sort of goes on this rant, this hilarious rant about how the toaster is the pinnacle of the breakfast civilization, and then it makes all these jokes about the toaster. Um, like, what did the cows bring to you? Nothing. And then, um, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh, and then, uh...
(continues until it runs out of output tokens)
I had Claude 4 Sonnet vibe code me a quick tool for turning that JSON into Markdown, here's the Markdown conversion of the Gemini 2.5 Flash transcript.
A spot-check of the timestamps seems to confirm that they show up in the right place, and the speaker name guesses look mostly correct as well.
There have been some changes to Gemini pricing.
The 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Flash-Lite Preview models both charge different prices for text v.s. audio input tokens.
I think this mean I can't trust the raw output token counts for the models and need to look at the [{"modality": "TEXT", "tokenCount": 5}, {"modality": "AUDIO", "tokenCount": 74068}]
breakdown instead, which is frustrating.
I wish they'd kept the same price for both type of tokens and used a multiple when counting audio tokens, but presumably that would have broken the overall token limit numbers.
Gemini 2.5 Flash has very different pricing from the Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview model. That preview charged different rates for thinking v.s. non-thinking mode.
2.5 Flash Preview: $0.15/million input text/image/video, $1/million audio input, $0.60/million output in non-thinking mode, $3.50/million output in thinking mode.
The new 2.5 Flash is simpler: $0.30/million input text/image/video (twice as much), $1/million audio input (the same), $2.50/million output (more than non-thinking mode but less than thinking mode).
In the Twitter Space they mentioned that the difference between thinking and non-thinking mode for 2.5 Flash Preview had caused a lot of confusion, and the new price should still work out cheaper for thinking-mode uses. Using that model in non-thinking mode was always a bit odd, and hopefully the new 2.5 Flash Lite can fit those cases better (though it's actually also a "thinking" model.)
I've updated my llm-prices.com site with the prices of the new models.
Tags: gemini, llm, llm-reasoning, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-pricing, ai, llms, llm-release, google, generative-ai
The Steering Council (SC) approves PEP 779 [Criteria for supported status for free-threaded Python], with the effect of removing the “experimental” tag from the free-threaded build of Python 3.14 [...]
With these recommendations and the acceptance of this PEP, we as the Python developer community should broadly advertise that free-threading is a supported Python build option now and into the future, and that it will not be removed without following a proper deprecation schedule. [...]
Keep in mind that any decision to transition to Phase III, with free-threading as the default or sole build of Python is still undecided, and dependent on many factors both within CPython itself and the community. We leave that decision for the future.
— Donghee Na, discuss.python.org
LPL Financial analyzed 25 major geopolitical episodes, dating back to Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. “Total drawdowns around these events have been fairly limited,” Jeff Buchbinder, LPL’s chief equity strategist, wrote in a research note on Monday. (Full recoveries often “take only a few weeks to a couple of months,” he added.)
Deutsche Bank analysts drew a similar conclusion: “Geopolitics doesn’t normally matter much for long-run market performance,” Henry Allen, a markets strategist, wrote in a note on Monday.
Here is the NYT piece, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The post Markets are forward-looking appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The central core is one of the most consistent eighteenth century cities you will find in Europe. Until the visit, my first there, I had not realized how much of the town’s growth came during that time, in part because of some special trade privileges, and in part because of the slave trade. Here is some 18th century economic history of Bordeaux. The central plazas and radiating streets are splendid, as is the large Girondins monument nearby.
The main museum is subpar, with some good Redons (he is from there), and the main church is pretty good but excelled by other locales. In this sense there is not much to do in Bordeaux. There is, however, some good modern and also brutalist architecture near and across the main river bank. Check out this bridge. I enjoyed these creations, as they injected some element of surprise into my visit.
You can still get an excellent meal at the nearby country chateaus, but if you just stop for normal French food in the town it is pretty mediocre, not better than say WDC. The classic French food traditions are moving more and more into corners of the country, and away from everyday life.
Typically I am surprised by how normal France feels. People want to say “The French this, the French that…” but to me they are fairly Americanized, often speak good English, and have few truly unique cultural habits these days. They also seem reasonably well adjusted, normal mostly in the good sense, and thus of course somewhat boring too.
Walking and driving through the less salubrious parts of town is a useful corrective, but I do not feel the place is falling apart. And the best estimates are that six to nine percent of the city is Muslim, hardly an overwhelming number.
I learned just before leaving that Kevin Bryan was in town too, here are his observations. Bordeaux is certainly worth visiting, but I also am not surprised it is the last major French city I have been to in my life.
The post Bordeaux observations appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
New Mexico, June 17, 2025 — Desert Works Propulsion (DWP) has successfully completed initial testing of multiple prototype discharge and neutralizer cathodes developed for Turion Space Corp.’s TIE-20 ion thruster. […]
The post Desert Works Propulsion Successfully Tests Prototype Cathodes for Turion Space TIE-20 Thruster appeared first on SpaceNews.
European startup The Exploration Company, which is developing a cargo vehicle with a key test flight launching within days, says it has long-term plans to fly people as well.
The post The Exploration Company outlines plans for human spaceflight appeared first on SpaceNews.
China carried out a successful pad abort test early Tuesday for its next-generation crew spacecraft for moon and low Earth orbit missions.
The post China conducts pad abort test for crew spacecraft, advancing moon landing plans appeared first on SpaceNews.
Three European aerospace companies expect to decide by next month whether to combine their space divisions, something that could still take years to win regulatory approvals.
The post July decision expected on combination of European space companies appeared first on SpaceNews.
The Trump administration’s proposal would cut electro-optical imagery funding and eliminate funding entirely for the acquisition of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery
The post CEOs push back on proposed cuts to commercial satellite imaging programs appeared first on SpaceNews.
If you’ve worried that AI might take your job, deprive you of your livelihood, or maybe even replace your role in society, it probably feels good to see the latest AI tools fail spectacularly. If AI recommends glue as a pizza topping, then you’re safe for another day.
But the fact remains that AI already has definite advantages over even the most skilled humans, and knowing where these advantages arise—and where they don’t—will be key to adapting to the AI-infused workforce.
AI will often not be as effective as a human doing the same job. It won’t always know more or be more accurate. And it definitely won’t always be fairer or more reliable. But it may still be used whenever it has an advantage over humans in one of four dimensions: speed, scale, scope and sophistication. Understanding these dimensions is the key to understanding AI-human replacement.
First, speed. There are tasks that humans are perfectly good at but are not nearly as fast as AI. One example is restoring or upscaling images: taking pixelated, noisy or blurry images and making a crisper and higher-resolution version. Humans are good at this; given the right digital tools and enough time, they can fill in fine details. But they are too slow to efficiently process large images or videos.
AI models can do the job blazingly fast, a capability with important industrial applications. AI-based software is used to enhance satellite and remote sensing data, to compress video files, to make video games run better with cheaper hardware and less energy, to help robots make the right movements, and to model turbulence to help build better internal combustion engines.
Real-time performance matters in these cases, and the speed of AI is necessary to enable them.
The second dimension of AI’s advantage over humans is scale. AI will increasingly be used in tasks that humans can do well in one place at a time, but that AI can do in millions of places simultaneously. A familiar example is ad targeting and personalization. Human marketers can collect data and predict what types of people will respond to certain advertisements. This capability is important commercially; advertising is a trillion-dollar market globally.
AI models can do this for every single product, TV show, website and internet user. This is how the modern ad-tech industry works. Real-time bidding markets price the display ads that appear alongside the websites you visit, and advertisers use AI models to decide when they want to pay that price—thousands of times per second.
Next, scope. AI can be advantageous when it does more things than any one person could, even when a human might do better at any one of those tasks. Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT can engage in conversation on any topic, write an essay espousing any position, create poetry in any style and language, write computer code in any programming language, and more. These models may not be superior to skilled humans at any one of these things, but no single human could outperform top-tier generative models across them all.
It’s the combination of these competencies that generates value. Employers often struggle to find people with talents in disciplines such as software development and data science who also have strong prior knowledge of the employer’s domain. Organizations are likely to continue to rely on human specialists to write the best code and the best persuasive text, but they will increasingly be satisfied with AI when they just need a passable version of either.
Finally, sophistication. AIs can consider more factors in their decisions than humans can, and this can endow them with superhuman performance on specialized tasks. Computers have long been used to keep track of a multiplicity of factors that compound and interact in ways more complex than a human could trace. The 1990s chess-playing computer systems such as Deep Blue succeeded by thinking a dozen or more moves ahead.
Modern AI systems use a radically different approach: Deep learning systems built from many-layered neural networks take account of complex interactions—often many billions—among many factors. Neural networks now power the best chess-playing models and most other AI systems.
Chess is not the only domain where eschewing conventional rules and formal logic in favor of highly sophisticated and inscrutable systems has generated progress. The stunning advance of AlphaFold2, the AI model of structural biology whose creators Demis Hassabis and John Jumper were recognized with the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024, is another example.
This breakthrough replaced traditional physics-based systems for predicting how sequences of amino acids would fold into three-dimensional shapes with a 93 million-parameter model, even though it doesn’t account for physical laws. That lack of real-world grounding is not desirable: No one likes the enigmatic nature of these AI systems, and scientists are eager to understand better how they work.
But the sophistication of AI is providing value to scientists, and its use across scientific fields has grown exponentially in recent years.
Those are the four dimensions where AI can excel over humans. Accuracy still matters. You wouldn’t want to use an AI that makes graphics look glitchy or targets ads randomly—yet accuracy isn’t the differentiator. The AI doesn’t need superhuman accuracy. It’s enough for AI to be merely good and fast, or adequate and scalable. Increasing scope often comes with an accuracy penalty, because AI can generalize poorly to truly novel tasks. The 4 S’s are sometimes at odds. With a given amount of computing power, you generally have to trade off scale for sophistication.
Even more interestingly, when an AI takes over a human task, the task can change. Sometimes the AI is just doing things differently. Other times, AI starts doing different things. These changes bring new opportunities and new risks.
For example, high-frequency trading isn’t just computers trading stocks faster; it’s a fundamentally different kind of trading that enables entirely new strategies, tactics and associated risks. Likewise, AI has developed more sophisticated strategies for the games of chess and Go. And the scale of AI chatbots has changed the nature of propaganda by allowing artificial voices to overwhelm human speech.
It is this “phase shift,” when changes in degree may transform into changes in kind, where AI’s impacts to society are likely to be most keenly felt. All of this points to the places that AI can have a positive impact. When a system has a bottleneck related to speed, scale, scope or sophistication, or when one of these factors poses a real barrier to being able to accomplish a goal, it makes sense to think about how AI could help.
Equally, when speed, scale, scope and sophistication are not primary barriers, it makes less sense to use AI. This is why AI auto-suggest features for short communications such as text messages can feel so annoying. They offer little speed advantage and no benefit from sophistication, while sacrificing the sincerity of human communication.
Many deployments of customer service chatbots also fail this test, which may explain their unpopularity. Companies invest in them because of their scalability, and yet the bots often become a barrier to support rather than a speedy or sophisticated problem solver.
Keep this in mind when you encounter a new application for AI or consider AI as a replacement for or an augmentation to a human process. Looking for bottlenecks in speed, scale, scope and sophistication provides a framework for understanding where AI provides value, and equally where the unique capabilities of the human species give us an enduring advantage.
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Conversation.
Up, and Mr. Mayland comes to me and borrowed 30s. of me to be paid again out of the money coming to him in the James and Charles for his late voyage. So to the office, where all the morning. So home to dinner, my wife not being well, but however dined with me.
So to the office, and at Sir W. Batten’s, where we all met by chance and talked, and they drank wine; but I forebore all their healths. Sir John Minnes, I perceive, is most excellent company. So home and to bed betimes by daylight.
Markets are such an important way in which humans interact that I'm always cheered to note that economists aren't alone in studying them. (And studying them is different from simply appreciating them...:). Here's an interdisciplinary conference just finishing up that doesn't seem to involve many economists at all.
the program is here:
And here's the very interesting call for papers, which I've quoted below the link:
"Since its first meeting in Sigtuna in 2010, IMSW has gathered scholars interested in the creation and operation of markets. At the heart of the workshop are empirical accounts of mundane market practices as well as market formation and change processes. Over the years, discussions at IMSW have highlighted the variability of market arrangements and outcomes, paid close attention to the metrologies and evaluative practices linked to markets, scrutinized the power in and of markets, and engaged in speculations on the possibility of better markets. While the ethos of the workshop has always been to question the benevolence and neutrality of markets, we believe that as IMSW now returns to Stockholm, the time is ripe for something a bit different. We therefore call for an even more explicit focus on the negative externalities, excesses, and ethical impotency of markets. As befits the return of IMSW to the land of Nordic noir, we invite contributions that explore the dark sides of markets.
Perhaps more than ever before, markets provoke concern. The climate crisis is intimately connected with the current economic system – and many find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The growing influence of financial markets leads to the hegemony of narrow forms of valuation and the severing of many human ties. Marketized technologies pose threats to democracy through their production of both ignorance and further polarization. Digital market infrastructures work as mechanisms of surveillance but also facilitate the formation and operation of markets beyond the reach of regulatory interventions. The marketization of areas such as education and healthcare contributes to problems of unequal access, and bureaucratization makes structures inflexible to change or improvement. These and other similar developments certainly warrant the attention of the market studies community.
As IMSW turns 15, we propose, in the spirit of the gloomiest, moodiest instincts of adolescence, a side-step from constructivist market studies to "destructivist" market studies. This challenge involves new markets to study, new verbs to master, and new questions to ask. Instead of the very respectable markets usually studied by market studies scholars, we encourage the exploration of taboo markets, illegal markets, and repugnant markets. In addition to studies of imagining, designing, and maintaining markets, we would like to see inquiries into destroying, deceiving, threatening, and scheming in markets. We look forward to submissions addressing questions such as: What role do markets play in the current rather destructive time capsule? How are affects such as hate, fear, loathing, and shame provoked and used in markets? What effects do markets have when they create insiders and outsiders? How do market epistemologies help actors mobilize obscurity and opacity in society?
Markets have been lauded as mechanisms for optimal resource allocation and denounced as structures of oppression. Beyond this polemic debate, the workshop’s historical rooting in STS and ANT serves as a reminder to look beyond contestations and trace the practices (and not only the ideologies) that (in)form them. In short, the field of interdisciplinary market studies has responded by assuming a position where both “Le bon Dieu” and “The Devil” are to be found in the details. In this vein, we look forward to a workshop full of constructive discussions. While finding solutions to the problems identified may not always be within our reach, a sound introspection, reflection, and mapping of the values we guard definitely is.
Submission topics
We particularly invite submissions that address or are related to any of the following topics, though we are open to other relevant areas of work:
The Externalities of Markets:
In line with the established approach of studying market framing, we invite submissions that explore the production of negative externalities and unexpected consequences of markets. This includes studies of markets for exchange objects with negative effects (i.e.,‘bads’ for sale instead of ‘goods’), human and non-human suffering caused by markets, as well as attempts to make visible and address negative externalities.
The Excesses of Markets:
Contemporary markets are characterized by excesses such as overconsumption, waste, and luxury indulgence. We invite submissions that explore the processes and practices giving rise to and making visible these and other excesses. This includes studying the setting of standards and norms related to sufficiency and excess, whether in relation to economic growth or consumer lifestyles.
The “Otherness” of Markets:
In contemporary market society, having access to markets can have decisive impact. For markets to operate, frames and/or boundaries need to be established, but boundaries (by default) also create insiders and outsiders. The “Otherness” of markets invites explorations of the effects of boundaries, focusing on the consequences of being an “outsider” with identifiable topics such as poverty, gender discrimination, and inequality.
The Ignorance of Markets:
Recent decades have seen increased trust in and skepticism towards knowledge produced in and around markets. Sophisticated tools improve forecasting and knowledge sharing, yet as recent failures of prediction have shown (financial crisis, Covid-pandemic, US election 2016) their conclusions can be arbitrary, biased, and ideologically motivated. We invite submissions that explore the production of ignorance and “non-knowledge” in markets as well as their hidden, discreet, and invisible dimensions.
The Repugnance of Markets:
We invite submissions exploring themes of moral outrage, taboo, and disgust in and around markets. This includes the study of illegal and/or illicit markets, but also of variations in the legal and moral categorization of market phenomena across national, (sub)cultural, and temporal settings.
The Repair of Markets:
The dark sides of markets give rise not only to despair but also to various efforts at repair. The heterogeneity and pliability of markets remain central tenets in market studies and can be usefully applied also to situations of concern and discontent. We therefore invite contributions that explore the work of proposing alternative market arrangements and/or alternatives to markets, creating better markets, and caring for markets. "
HT: Koray Caliskan
Update June 18, 3:15 a.m. EDT: SpaceX confirms deployment of the 28 Starlink satellites.
SpaceX completed its 75th Falcon 9 rocket launch of the year with a mission that blasted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in the predawn hours of Wednesday. The mission, dubbed Starlink 10-18, included the 9,000th Starlink satellite launched to low Earth orbit to date.
The Falcon 9 rocket took a north-easterly trajectory following liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 at 1:55 a.m. EDT (0555 UTC).
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a greater than 95 percent chance of favorable weather at liftoff. Meteorologists said possible evening showers should dissipate ahead of the opening of the launch window.
SpaceX used the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1090 to launch the Starlink 10-18 mission. This was its fifth trip to space and back following the launches of SES’ O3b mPOWER 7&8, NASA’S Crew-10, Bandwagon-3 and Starlink 6-67.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1090 landed on the droneship, ‘Just Read the Instructions.’ This marked the 125th landing on this vessel and the 464th booster landing to date.
With the deployment of the 28 Starlink satellites, SpaceX has now launched 9,003 Starlink satellites to date. The company launched more than 1,300 in 2025 alone up to this point.
According to the latest stats compiled by Jonathan McDowell, an expert orbital tracker and astronomer, there are currently about 7,800 Starlink satellites remaining in low Earth orbit.
Links for you. Science:
The NASA science missions that would be axed in Trump’s 2026 budget
To save rhinos, conservationists are removing their horns
What really keeps mosquitoes away? Probably not your lavender plants.
15,000 Light-Years Away, Something Is Blinking – And It Might Rewrite Physics
We Welcome Our Alien Overlords
An Interview With A Public Health Researcher Whose Funding Was Terminated By The Trump Administration
Other:
Come and Take Them: The Battle of Thermopylae and the making of a political myth
A diminished DOGE reels from the departure of the ‘Dogefather,’ Elon Musk (The Night of the Long Sporks)
Corruption Has Flooded America. The Dams Are Breaking.
The ugly truth of Trump’s America first agenda: The president stops the investments that made America wealthy in recent years
State of Play: Once upon a time, State Department officials would register dissent by writing a memo, or even resigning in protest. But what good would that do under Trump, where debate is squashed, and 20 percent of the agency is about to be laid off?
Even Cat Turd Abandoned Him
MAPPED: 70 Percent of Trump’s Cabinet Tied to Project 2025 Groups
NASA, Pentagon push for SpaceX alternatives amid Trump’s feud with Musk
Woke Bill Kristol
An ICE raid disrupts life on Martha’s Vineyard
Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard predicted young male voters flocking to Trump
The Corporate Fear Campaign to Keep Workers Locked Into Their Jobs
‘A Betrayal’: Colorado’s Democratic Governor Vetoes Bill Targeting Algorithmic Rent-Setting
Trump’s fight with Musk reveals MAGA’s biggest delusion
Artificial Intelligence and The Posture of Skepticism
The #MeToo Creeps Creep Back
Trump’s Pageant of Corruption is a Gift to the Democratic Party
Elon Musk versus MAGA: Republicans have reached a tipping point
YouTube’s Imminent A.I. Revolution
“It Blows My Mind That There’s No Opposition”: When ICE Allies Run Unchallenged
Feudalism Is Our Future
A ‘Home Improvement’ Clip Is Going Viral For Exposing Just How Backwards We Have Gone As A Society
The Biden Investigation Is a Path to Even Greater Lawlessness
Trump’s Vision of Government: Members Only
Bill Atkinson, Macintosh Pioneer and Inventor of Hypercard, Dies at 74
Ohio State announces every student will use AI in class
Trump aims to slash Pell Grants, which may limit low-income students’ college access
Stop bending the knee to Trump: it’s time for anticipatory noncompliance
And why that matters.
The last couple of weeks have made it clear that the current professional Democrat strategy of ‘popularism’, which is to say, poll-driven politics failed, at least when it comes to immigration. Yes, people, when asked about generic immigrants, people are anti-immigration. But when they’re faced with the reality of immigration–most undocumented immigrants just want to wash dishes in the back or seal coat your driveway–people change their minds.
When immigrants are depicted as MS-13 warlords turning our cities* into WWII-era Stalingrad, they’re not popular, but the reality is very different, and ICE’s brutality is forcing people to confront the lived reality of immigration and is tearing down the fantasies of the Republican Cinematic Universe.
It also appears, the fears of the popularist pollsters that immigration is bad for Democrats were wrong: it’s actually hurting Trump’s overall favorability and people’s views on his immigration policies specifically. And they didn’t just miss, the popularist pollsters swung, missed, fell down in the batter’s box, and then injured themselves.
Something to keep in mind as the popularist pollsters attempt to take over the Democratic Party.
*In suburban and rural areas, I guess they’re just limited to ‘eating the dogs’?
Nice piece in Fast Company by Zachary Petit:
One critical moment came in February 2010, when J. Crew featured Field Notes in its catalog, alongside the retailer’s other “personal favorites from our design heroes.” There was a Timex watch, Ray-Bans, Sperry shoes — “and out of fucking nowhere, Field Notes,” Coudal says. “And when that happened, a lot changed for us.”
Coudal says it gave the brand instant credibility — after all, if it was good enough for J. Crew, it was good enough for your store. In time, friends began sending him screenshots of Field Notes in TV shows; he and Draplin would see people jotting notes in them in bars and elsewhere; on the design web, they became an obsession. By 2014, there was even a subreddit dedicated to them titled “FieldNuts.”
Fred Lambert, writing for Electrek:
Bloomberg has just released an embarrassingly bad report about the self-driving space, in which it claimed Tesla has an advantage over Waymo by misrepresenting data. [...] The report compares Tesla’s and Waymo’s self-driving efforts, going so far as to claim that “Tesla is closer to vehicle autonomy than peers.”
Right off the bat this smells fishy, given that Waymo is actually operating self-driving taxis in several cities, and Tesla ... is not.
Steve Man, the Bloomberg Intelligence analyst behind the report, based his report on Tesla’s own quarterly misleading “Autopilot Safety Report.” The report is widely considered to be unserious for several main reasons:
- Tesla bundles all miles from its vehicles using Autopilot and FSD technology, which are considered level 2 ADAS systems that require driver attention at all times. Drivers consistently correct the systems to avoid accidents.
- Tesla Autopilot, which is standard on all Tesla vehicles, is primarily used on highways, where accidents occur at a significantly lower rate per mile compared to city driving.
- Tesla only counts events that deploy an airbag or a seat-belt pretensioner. Fender-benders, curb strikes, and many ADAS incidents never appear, keeping crash counts artificially low.
- Finally, Tesla’s handpicked data is compared to NHTSA’s much broader statistics that include all collision events, including minor fender benders.
Trusting Tesla’s own safety report is like saying, “Elon Musk says Tesla is ahead, so they must be ahead.”
Eli Tan and Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:
On Monday, WhatsApp said it would start showing ads inside its app for the first time. The promotions will appear only in an area of the app called Updates, which is used by around 1.5 billion people a day. WhatsApp will collect some data on users to target the ads, such as location and the device’s default language, but it will not touch the contents of messages or whom users speak with. The company added that it had no plans to place ads in chats and personal messages.
(a) I’ve never once looked at the Updates tab in WhatsApp; (b) does anyone believe they’re not going to put ads in the other tabs sooner or later?
Todd Spangler, Variety:
Meanwhile, the Trump Mobile “47 Plan” is pricier than the unlimited plans from prepaid services operated by Verizon’s Visible, AT&T’s Cricket Wireless and T-Mobile’s Metro, which are each around $40 per month.
The Trump T1 Phone, which runs Google’s Android operating system, will cost $499. It features a 6.8-inch touch-screen with a 120 Hz refresh rate. The smartphone also has a “fingerprint sensor and AI Face Unlock,” according to the company’s website. Reps for Trump Mobile didn’t respond to an inquiry about what company is manufacturing the Android phone.
The Wall Street Journal, “Trump’s Smartphone Can’t Be Made in America for $499 by August”:
A spokesman for the Trump Organization said in an email that “manufacturing for the new phone will be in Alabama, California and Florida.”
Despite the language in the press release, Eric Trump indicated that the first wave of phones wouldn’t be built here. “You can build these phones in the United States,” the Trump son told podcaster Benny Johnson on Monday morning on The Benny Show after holding up a gilded device that looked just like an Apple iPhone. “Eventually, all the phones can be built in the United States of America. We have to bring manufacturing back here.”
The Journal goofs, bigly, by claiming that the T1 “shows some specs that would beat Apple’s biggest, priciest iPhone models”. The T1 specs are so idiotic that one of them claims “5000mAh long life camera”, conflating battery capacity with (I guess?) focal distance.
The Verge, “The Trump Mobile T1 Phone Looks Both Bad and Impossible”:
Where things get especially strange, though, is its supposed combination of Android 15, 5G, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. In many ways, these are opposing specs: Android 15 is generally only available on very recent devices, many cheap phones still don’t support 5G, and almost every phone maker has stopped including headphone jacks with their devices in the last few years. There are a few that have both, but modern phones with a headphone jack are few and far between. And pretty much all made in China.
I don’t know what will be funnier — if Trump himself starts using one of these, or if he doesn’t.
I’ll give them credit for making them available exclusively in gold. That’s on brand. But I’m guessing the quality will be on par with Trump Watches, which is to say, “RUMP”-quality.
Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.
Simon Willison, regarding the various rebuttals to “The Illusion of Thinking” research paper (which I linked to here) from Apple’s machine learning team:
I thought this paper got way more attention than it warranted — the title “The Illusion of Thinking” captured the attention of the “LLMs are over-hyped junk” crowd. I saw enough well-reasoned rebuttals that I didn’t feel it worth digging into.
And now, notable LLM skeptic Gary Marcus has saved me some time by aggregating the best of those rebuttals together in one place! [...]
And therein lies my disagreement. I’m not interested in whether or not LLMs are the “road to AGI”. I continue to care only about whether they have useful applications today, once you’ve understood their limitations. [...] They’re already useful to me today, whether or not they can reliably solve the Tower of Hanoi or River Crossing puzzles.
Count me in with Willison. I think it’s interesting what constitutes “reasoning”, but when it comes to these systems, I’m mostly just interested in whether they’re useful or not, and if so, how.
See also: Victor Martinez’s rebuttal to the most-cited rebuttal.
WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, back in 2012 (two years before Facebook acquired them for $19 billion, 13 years before this week’s introduction of ads into WhatsApp):
Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out... And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.
Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.
When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”
These screens make for a useful overview of what Apple thinks the highlight features are in each OS.
Aric Toler, a visual investigations reporter for The New York Times, on X back in April:
For about a year, I worked with a retired British academic named Alasdair Spark to solve a mystery: where did the original photo from the end of The Shining come from, and where/when was it captured?
Last week, we finally found the answer.
See also: This post from 2012 about the original photograph, from (who else?) Lee Unkrich.
I haven’t had a lot to say about Israel and Iran because I haven’t had a lot to add. But I want to suggest something about the possible entry of the United States into the war. These aren’t conclusions, more questions I’ve had and questions that help me frame how I’ve looked at what’s happening.
In the first couple days of this hot conflict, the conventional wisdom and reporting went from Israel doing this more or less entirely on its own, perhaps even interfering in U.S. diplomacy, to the idea that the apparent rush of diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran was actually a ruse concocted by Israel and United States to lull the Iranians into letting their guard down. At first this seemed to be what they call in the online world right wing “cope,” shoving Donald Trump back into the center of the story as He-Man hero when he had actually seemed marginal to the action. But then it started showing up in news reports. And from what I can tell at this point, it’s almost treated as a given, just part of the reported story.
This certainly may be accurate. But I’m not sure that it is. I think it’s also possible that the initial attack was fabulously successful in tactical terms (no one would deny that) and Trump basically wanted in on it. Because he likes success. In a normal administration, reporters might get a clearer read on what was real or what wasn’t. But this isn’t a normal administration. Much of “what the plan is” is an unknowable thing in Donald Trump’s head and a feature of the Trumpian personality cult is that once there’s an approved story, that is the story. Period. I could be right or wrong on my supposition here. But I’m not even sure if the people inside the administration actually know. In any case, I think there’s a pretty good chance the whole ‘we were secretly working together to lull Tehran into complacency’ is a complete fiction, an online MAGA speculation that the White House and Trump glommed onto and made real because it was convenient and helpful.
Meanwhile, in the last 48 hours or so, we’ve gone from the U.S. being pretty clear it will not get involved beyond defensive assistance to Israel in blocking missiles and drones to the situation this morning, in which it seems like the U.S. may be very close to joining the Israeli bombing campaign. And this isn’t just a case of “the more, the merrier.” Only the U.S. has the combination of bunker-busting bombs and strategic bombers that make it plausible to destroy or disable all the key facilities that make up Iran’s nuclear program.
It is important to note that the U.S. has very good reason to make Iran think it may be about to do that. So it may be a ruse. We don’t know. But I think it’s very possible that the U.S. is on the verge of a major, major military campaign that it wasn’t considering at all just a few days ago and that we may be doing that more or less solely because Donald Trump is jazzed about and attracted by the idea of “winning.” And Israel is now “winning.” So he wants in.
It’s important to step back and recognize that there is really, literally no one in the inner discussion of U.S. foreign policy today who has any level of foreign policy or military crisis experience at all. That’s a big statement. But I think it bears out. The two heads of the U.S. intelligence apparatus have zero experience in intelligence work. The head of the Pentagon is Pete Hegseth and he appears to have surrounded himself with lackeys. Marco Rubio is both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. He did focus to a degree on foreign policy in the Senate. But he’s never been involved in any national security crisis. He’s never worked in the executive branch. Even the people who are hardcore Trumpers but had some real level of foreign policy experience, like Keith Kellogg, now have other assignments. Kellogg is envoy to Ukraine. The current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs isn’t a career Army Officer. He spent a significant amount of his career in the Reserves. (I don’t think at least — but not certain on this point — that he ever served on the Joint Staff.) The point is that there’s really no one in the room, as it were, who is in a position to keep the President from just riffing. And I think there’s a decent chance that’s exactly what’s happening.
Now, a separate point. The Israelis have been threatening to attack the Iranian nuclear program for at least 20 years. It’s been a particular fixation of Benjamin Netanyahu. But it’s important to understand that it’s far from his alone. The peace camp in Israel is basically dead. But how to manage the conflict with the Palestinians is still very divisive in Israeli politics. Iran is far less so. In the past, it’s been the top generals or retired generals who’ve held Netanyahu back. The key question has always been the upsides and downsides of such an action — specifically, how many potential dangers weighed against how much you could actually destroy. I think it’s fair to say that if the assumption was that you could actually destroy the whole program militarily and not take too extreme a level of diplomatic damage, it would have happened years ago. The key is you don’t want to take all the risks if you’re still going to leave most of the program intact.
One thing that struck me very early in this conflict was that the Israelis started putting out word that while they were doing immense damage to the Iranian military and even elements of the nuclear program, they didn’t have the capacity to destroy the key underground facility at Fordow, which is buried deep in the side of a mountain not that far from the Iranian religious center at Qom. Only the Americans have the bunker buster bombs and the strategic bombers that can do that, the Israeli sources said fairly publicly. “So we hope they’ll help,” basically.
That is, to put it mildly, a very strange admission. Generals will pretty much always want a plan that provides a strong likelihood that you can achieve the strategic objective with means under your control. If you’re going to launch this kind of attack you actually want to destroy or seriously hobble the current Iranian nuclear program. But they seemed to be saying, well, we’ll start and then hopefully the U.S. will join in and do the big part. In other words, having a plan in which a critical element of the plan is something totally beyond your control. That’s not how militaries tend to operate. Militaries and countries are often not clear with themselves about their true aims or how likely they are to achieve them. But it at least seems, based on these statements, like they went into this one with a pretty clear-eyed view that they actually could not accomplish on their own what people thought they were trying to do.
Now let me state a few caveats clearly. It’s entirely possible there are lots of communications and understandings behind the scenes we don’t know about. The Israelis also may not be seeing the Iranians’ nuclear program in such binary terms. Perhaps a sufficient level of damage is enough. Perhaps that, in addition to a level of damage that could push things back a few years, is enough to send the signal that the Israelis or someone else will just destroy it again. That does seem to be the premise of the mix of military and diplomatic pressure. Make a deal, Iran, because you’re never actually going to get to a nuclear weapon. There are also reports that maybe Israel does have a plan to destroy this facility on its own. If you control the skies, which Israel does appear to control now, and you have enough time, maybe you just keep dropping more and more bombs. I have no ability to evaluate whether that makes sense. There are claims in the Israeli press that that is the plan, that that can work. Again, totally above my pay grade. I have no idea.
There’s an additional point. Beyond pro-forma condemnations, Israel’s de facto Gulf state quasi-allies have been very quiet about all this. Indeed, Europe, which has been increasingly hostile toward the unending bombardments in Gaza, has been quite hands off and non-critical about these attacks. There’s been no flurry of Security Council resolutions or condemnations or anything like it. The real message from the European states has been something like, if you can pull it off, go for it. In that sense we’re seeing the effect of Israel’s shattering of the power of Hezbollah last year. Iran’s “axis of resistance” is in shambles with a mix of the profound military damage to Hezbollah, the fall of the Assad regime and the crushing of the offensive capacity of Hamas. Add to this that Iran’s ballistic missile capacity seems far less fearsome than people assumed. Iran is weak and alone. Even Russia seems to be sending the signal to watch out and not to expect help.
What all this amounts to is that the Iranians are really, really isolated. Maybe the global community hasn’t done a lot on Gaza’s behalf. But there’s at least been a lot of rhetorical opposition. That’s almost completely absent here. Perhaps the Israelis just knew their man, that if they got the ball to the five yard line, Trump wouldn’t be able to resist swooping in and making the “win” his own. I don’t really believe that, it’s far too speculative and leaves to chance to many things you can’t control. But I can’t completely dismiss the possibility since we’ve seen so much evidence just in the last few days of Donald Trump being swept along with the swirl of events, lure of attention and wanting to get in on a win. He sees a winning operation and he can’t resist slapping the Trump nameplate on it. And here, unlike in any normal world, we’re not talking about “Donald Trump” as an administration or a national security team, but one guy — one very, very, very powerful guy — and his phone.
His Haydn piano sonatas were his best work and also they were pathbreaking in helping us understand that composer. I also very much appreciated his short Beethoven pieces on the old Vox box set, starting with the Bagatelles, and as a live performer his Schubert was memorable…
The post Alfred Brendel, RIP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
From the University of Barcelona:
Master’s Degree in Political Ecology Degrowth and Environmental Justice
By the way, the web site uses cookies.
The post Practice what you preach appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. New Mennonite colony for Angola? (NYT)
4. Rohit sentences to ponder, LLMs seem relatively safe.
5. New Musa al-Gharbi book is now under contract.
6. Conversations with Coleman podcast is now at The Free Press.
7. 68,000 applications for the Gold Visa so far (FT).
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
This morning, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) released their monthly housing market index: Builder Sentiment at Third Lowest Reading Since 2012There is much more in the article.
...
There are several negatives for new home builders now. The NAHB lists the following: rising inventory levels (this is true for both new homes and existing homes that compete with new homes), price declines for existing home sales in a “growing number of markets”, buyer hesitancy due to “elevated mortgage rates and tariff and economic uncertainty”.
In addition, margins are being squeezed by rising costs (both material and labor), and price cuts. This will be a difficult period for homebuilders.
The following graph shows the NAHB HMI and single family starts since 1985.
This was the encore the last time I heard Brendel play, in 2008. Also lingering in my mind is his Beethoven cycle at Carnegie Hall in the nineteen-nineties. "Listening to him, the mind dances," I wrote then. A remarkable musician and man.
fzf
is a tool that you can use to select items from a list. I think it’s most
popularly used to search your shell history (as a Ctrl+R
replacement in bash).
I’ve honestly still never found a use for fzf
myself (other than fzf.vim which is amazing) but I just learned that
you can use it to review a git commit like this and I thought that was really
cool. You can scroll up and down through the files on the left and it’ll
display the diff on the right:
#!/bin/bash
commit=${1:-HEAD}
git show --stat=120 --format="" "$commit" | \
grep '|' | \
fzf --ansi \
--disabled \
--bind 'j:down,k:up,q:abort' \
--preview="echo {} | sed 's/ *|.*//' | xargs -I% git show --color=always $commit -- %" \
--preview-window=right:60%
You can also use fzf
as a sort of “jq playground” like this:
#!/bin/bash
printf '' | fzf --print-query \
--preview "jq -C {q} '$1' 2>&1" \
--preview-window=up:80%
I think it’s really cool that you can use fzf (which is theoretically a search tool) to implement lots of UIs that aren’t doing search at all, like these two!
In a further sign of declining builder sentiment, the use of price incentives increased sharply in June as the housing market continues to soften.
Builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes was 32 in June, down two points from May, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) released today. The index has only posted a lower reading twice since 2012 – in December 2022 when it hit 31 and in April 2020 at the start of the pandemic when it plunged more than 40 points to 30.
“Buyers are increasingly moving to the sidelines due to elevated mortgage rates and tariff and economic uncertainty,” said NAHB Chairman Buddy Hughes, a home builder and developer from Lexington, N.C. “To help address affordability concerns and bring hesitant buyers off the fence, a growing number of builders are moving to cut prices.”
Indeed, the latest HMI survey also revealed that 37% of builders reported cutting prices in June, the highest percentage since NAHB began tracking this figure on a monthly basis in 2022. This compares with 34% of builders who reported cutting prices in May and 29% in April. Meanwhile, the average price reduction was 5% in June, the same as it’s been every month since last November. The use of sales incentives was 62% in June, up one percentage point from May.
“Rising inventory levels and prospective home buyers who are on hold waiting for affordability conditions to improve are resulting in weakening price growth in most markets and generating price declines for resales in a growing number of markets,” said NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz. “Given current market conditions, NAHB is forecasting a decline in single-family starts for 2025.”
...
All three of the major HMI indices posted losses in June. The HMI index gauging current sales conditions fell two points in June to a level of 35, the component measuring sales expectations in the next six months dropped two points lower to 40 while the gauge charting traffic of prospective buyers posted a two-point decline to 21, the lowest reading since November 2023.
Looking at the three-month moving averages for regional HMI scores, the Northeast fell one point to 43, the Midwest moved one point higher to 41, the South dropped three points to 33 and the West declined four points to 28.
emphasis added
Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for May 2025, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $715.4 billion, down 0.9 percent from the previous month, and up 3.3 percent rom May 2024. ... The March 2025 to April 2025 percent change was revised from up 0.1 percent to down 0.1 percent.
emphasis added
Industrial production (IP) fell 0.2 percent in May after increasing 0.1 percent in April. Manufacturing output ticked up 0.1 percent in May, driven by a gain of 4.9 percent in the index for motor vehicles and parts; the index for manufacturing excluding motor vehicles and parts fell 0.3 percent. The index for mining increased 0.1 percent, and the index for utilities decreased 2.9 percent. At 103.6 percent of its 2017 average, total IP in May was 0.6 percent above its year-earlier level. Capacity utilization moved down to 77.4 percent, a rate that is 2.2 percentage points below its long-run (1972–2024) average.
emphasis added
Studying morally contested transactions doesn't always suggest paths by which consensus might be reached. It often suggests that conflicting views may be irreconcilable.
That seems to be the case for the growing legalization of Medical Aid in Dying (MAID, also called medically assisted suicide), about which I've recently blogged several times.
MAID laws face determined religious opposition. When Hawaii legalized MAID in 2018, the Catholic Diocese of Honolulu issued some guidance to clergy pointing out that the law's requirements for informed consent seemed to coincide with the requirements for a sin to be a mortal sin.
Diocese of Honolulu November 5, 2018: Instruction Regarding Sacraments and Funerals In Situations Involving Physician Assisted Suicide for Clergy, Parish Staff and Ministers to the Sick and Homebound
“Everyone is responsible for his life before God who has given it to him. It is God who remains the sovereign Master of life. We are obliged to accept life gratefully and preserve it for his honor and the salvation of our souls. We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of” (Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC], no. 2280)
...
7."For a sin to be a mortal sin, three conditions must be fulfilled:
8."The process required by the State of Hawaii for a person seeking medically assisted suicide is meant to guarantee that he or she is fully informed and has made a deliberate consent, thus likely fulfilling the requirements for mortal sin.
9." If a person dies in mortal sin without contrition, such final impenitence results in the “exclusion from Christ's kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back” (CCC, no. 1861; see no. 1864)
HT: Julio Elias
Excellent Megan McArdle column in the Washington Post tracing how we have swung from one form of insanity on vaccine policy to another with barely a pause in between:
In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.
But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.
In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.
…Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.
…That 2020 committee meeting was one of many widely publicized mistakes that turned conservatives against public health authorities. It wasn’t the worst such mistake — that honor belongs to the time public health experts issued a special lockdown exemption for George Floyd protesters. And of course, President Donald Trump deserves a “worst supporting actor” award for turning on his own public health experts. But if you were a conservative convinced that “public health” was a conspiracy of elites who cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives — well, there was our crack team of vaccine experts, proudly proclaiming that they cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives.
This is one of the reasons we now have a health and human services secretary who has devoted much of his life to pushing quack anti-vaccine theories.
I recall this episode well. Nate Silver and Matt Yglesias deserve credit for publicizing the insanity and stopping it–although similar policies continued at the state level.
The post The Deadly Cost of Ideological Medicine appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
- by Antone Martinho-Truswell
Every time I get into an online conversation about prompt injection it's inevitable that someone will argue that a mitigation which works 99% of the time is still worthwhile because there's no such thing as a security fix that is 100% guaranteed to work.
I don't think that's true.
If I use parameterized SQL queries my systems are 100% protected against SQL injection attacks.
If I make a mistake applying those and someone reports it to me I can fix that mistake and now I'm back up to 100%.
If our measures against SQL injection were only 99% effective none of our digital activities involving relational databases would be safe.
I don't think it is unreasonable to want a security fix that, when applied correctly, works 100% of the time.
(I first argued a version of this back in September 2022 in You can’t solve AI security problems with more AI.)
Tags: sql-injection, security, prompt-injection
“There is a significant risk that France will be passed by neighbouring countries like Germany and Poland, who are working hard to increase military spending quickly,” said Tenenbaum.
That is from the FT. I am far from convinced that Germany will use its fiscal freedom wisely to protect its national and also European security. Still, I am glad they have this option, and in a pinch probably they would do what is necessary.
We can all agree that fiscal policy should be relatively tight in good times, all expected values taken into account, and looser in bad times. The underdiscussed issue is exactly which times are “the good ones,” and perhaps the next ten years is when the fiscal space truly will be needed. Such an on line, pile it on, dogmatic critical slaughter of Germany and Merkel was attempted when the eurocrisis hit, and so I fear many people will be reluctant to recognize the possible truth of this point. But war is so, so much worse than the other bad world-states, and that is the one you really need to be prepared for. Of course the ideal thing would have been for Merkel to boost defense spending back then, but only rarely was that the demand.
The post An addendum to the German fiscal austerity debates appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) marked the first time in three decades that material changes were made to the corporate tax code of the United States. We use TCJA as a quasi natural experiment to estimate the impact of changes in user cost of capital on investment. Following the method of Auerbach and Hassett (1991), using cross-sectional data we find that the user cost is associated with higher rates of investment consistent with previous studies. BEA asset types with greater reductions in user cost of capital and marginal effective tax rate (METR) after the 2017 TCJA had greater statistically significant increases in their investment rates several years after the tax reform. Specifically, we find the magnitude of a 1 percentage point decrease in user cost is associated with a 1.68 to 3.05 percentage point increase in the rate of investment, larger than prior estimates of the responsiveness of investment with respect to user cost of capital.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
The post New U.S. Corporate Tax Reform Evidence appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In a democratic society, justice must not only be done but it must be seen to be done. That principle depends on transparency, accountability, and accurate documentation of legal proceedings. At the heart of this process is court reporting, a profession often under appreciated but absolutely essential to the legal system.
Court reporters don’t just transcribe; they preserve the integrity of the judicial process. Without them, we risk losing not only records but also public trust. Here’s why accurate court reporting is vital to democracy and how it supports a fair and functioning society.
Democracy thrives on the principle that everyone is equal under the law. But that equality is impossible without a reliable system of record keeping. Court reporters ensure that every word spoken in legal proceedings is captured accurately, forming the official record that judges, attorneys, and future cases may rely on.
Inaccurate or incomplete records can compromise verdicts, mislead appeals, or even lead to miscarriages of justice. For justice to be upheld, facts must be preserved precisely, and that’s where court reporters come in.
Courtrooms don’t always come with cameras or public observers. In many cases, the written transcript is the only record available for review. Accurate reporting makes sure that journalists, citizens, legal scholars, and future litigants can examine exactly what happened in court.
This transparency is critical. It allows the public to hold the legal system accountable, track legal precedent, and ensure that power is exercised fairly. Professional Washington DC court reporting firms play a key role in documenting proceedings in the nation’s capital, where the stakes for justice, democracy, and constitutional clarity are especially high.
When a case is appealed, the appellate court does not re-try the case; it reviews the original court record. That means transcripts produced by court reporters must not only be accurate but also comprehensive. Any gaps or errors could affect the outcome of an appeal and limit the ability of higher courts to deliver fair judgments.
This reliability is critical in a democracy, where checks and balances depend on the accuracy of information flowing between judicial levels.
From defendants to victims, witnesses to attorneys, everyone in a courtroom relies on fair treatment. Accurate transcription ensures that no party’s words are distorted, left out, or misunderstood. It also creates a trusted reference point in cases of dispute over what was said or agreed to during hearings.
In this way, court reporters protect individuals’ rights as much as the institutions they serve. Every transcript is a form of legal protection, proof of what transpired and a shield against misinterpretation or abuse.
Legal systems are built on precedent. Past rulings help guide future decisions, shape legal theory, and uphold consistency in judicial outcomes. Court reporters contribute to this continuity by maintaining an accurate historical record. This archival role ensures that future generations can learn from past rulings and that the legal system continues to evolve based on a reliable foundation.
In the age of misinformation, having an accurate and authoritative record is more important than ever. Misunderstandings or deliberate distortions of what happened in court can erode public trust and manipulate opinion. Certified transcripts, created by experienced professionals, provide a factual anchor amid the noise, especially in high-profile or politically sensitive cases.
Court reporters are silent stewards of democracy. Their detailed, impartial transcripts make it possible for justice to be reviewed, defended and understood. In doing so, they provide a critical link between the courtroom and the public, helping uphold transparency, accountability, and trust.
As democracy faces new challenges in an era of fast information and complex legal issues, the need for reliable, professional court reporting has never been more vital. Ensuring access to skilled court reporters is not just a matter of legal procedure. It’s a matter of preserving democratic integrity.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE IN SUPPORT OF FREEDOM OF THE PRESS
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At ToonieBet, you’ll find a diverse selection of live casino games that cater to all preferences. Whether you’re a fan of classic card games like blackjack or you lean towards the spinning thrills of roulette and baccarat, there’s something for everyone. Each game is hosted by professional dealers who guide the action, ensuring an engaging experience for all participants. The real-time interaction and strategic gameplay make these live offerings particularly appealing to those seeking an authentic casino feel.
The unique aspect of ToonieBet offerings lies in their real-time nature, allowing players to make decisions on the fly. This immediacy brings an added layer of excitement as you can watch the game unfold with each passing second. Such dynamics not only enhance the thrill but also offer opportunities for players to refine their strategies and enjoy a more personalized gaming experience.
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To enhance authenticity, features such as multiple camera angles are utilized, giving you different perspectives of the game table. This attention to detail allows for a more immersive experience, where you can focus on specific elements of the gameplay as if you were physically present. The integration of these technologies demonstrates a commitment to player satisfaction by offering state-of-the-art gaming options.
This platform understands that different players have unique preferences when it comes to live gaming features. For many, the interactive chat function is a highlight, enabling communication with dealers and other players in real-time. This social component adds depth to the gaming experience by fostering connections among participants.
Beyond these interactive elements, ToonieBet offers a platform where each game can be experienced from various angles thanks to multiple camera setups. This level of detail ensures that every roll or card dealt is observed closely, enhancing both strategy formulation and enjoyment.
The advantages of engaging in live casino games here are manifold. One key benefit is the social aspect; playing against live dealers allows for human interaction often absent in digital-only formats. This interaction adds realism and can make each session more enjoyable.
Moreover, live casino games offer an adrenaline rush due to their real-time decision-making elements. Players are drawn into high-stakes environments where their choices have immediate consequences, making for an exhilarating experience.
The thrill of competing against live dealers combined with state-of-the-art technology makes these offerings particularly attractive. As players immerse themselves in this vibrant atmosphere, they discover not only entertainment but also a chance to hone skills and develop strategies in a dynamic setting.
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While there's been no shortage of political and geopolitical headlines over the past 2 business days, there hasn't been much by way of inspiration for the bond market. Bonds (and, thus, rates) have moved nonetheless.Tuesday:
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Tomorrow's Retail Sales data is capable of causing volatility in either direction, depending on the outcome. Then on Wednesday, we'll hear from the Fed. While they will not be cutting rates at this meeting, they will be updating their rate outlook--something that frequently gets the market's attention. [30 year fixed 6.91%]
emphasis added