Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios.Mr. Moore came to me, and he and I walked to the Spittle an hour or two before my Lord Mayor and the blewcoat boys come, which at last they did, and a fine sight of charity it is indeed. We got places and staid to hear a sermon; but, it being a Presbyterian one, it was so long, that after above an hour of it we went away, and I home and dined; and then my wife and I by water to the Opera, and there saw “The Bondman” most excellently acted; and though we had seen it so often, yet I never liked it better than to-day, Ianthe acting Cleora’s part very well now Roxalana is gone. We are resolved to see no more plays till Whitsuntide, we having been three days together. Met Mr. Sanchy, Smithes, Gale, and Edlin at the play, but having no great mind to spend money, I left them there. And so home and to supper, and then dispatch business, and so to bed.
Financial experts and influencers rarely see eye to eye on many topics, but when it comes to investing, they all agree, it’s a must. You must invest. It’s one of the most effective ways to grow your money over time and create a source of income that works for you. However, to do it right, you need to choose the right assets.
The right investments can help you build wealth, while the wrong ones can lose you a lot of money. This doesn’t mean you need to overcomplicate things, just that you need to make informed decisions.
In the investment community, there are two assets that are typically popular and have stood the test of time: stocks and ETFs. You might have heard of them before and wondered, which one is actually worth it? That’s exactly what this guide is here to answer. By the end, you’ll have a clear idea of whether ETFs or stocks align better with your financial goals.
“Investing” is a really broad term that can take on many forms. A traditional view of the word simply means putting your money into a business, buying real estate, or collecting assets like art and commodities with the intent of generating returns. However, with advancements in technology and the financial sector making investing more accessible than ever, a more modern approach has emerged, one that has made the concept of investing more accessible and flexible, especially to individuals. As a result, more people are turning to online investment, often through trading online, as a convenient and efficient way to grow their wealth. This shift has opened the doors for wider participation in financial markets, particularly through stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
You might have heard that it’s possible to own a part of popular companies like Apple, Amazon, or Tesla. Well, you can. That’s essentially what individual stocks are. They (stocks) represent ownership in a company, meaning that when you invest in a stock, you’re buying a partial ownership stake in a business or company.
So, when you invest in a stock of a company, and that company does well, your investment can grow, and you earn returns in two major ways:
Note: Stocks are generally considered high-risk investments in the investment community. Stock prices can be highly volatile, influenced by factors like company performance, market trends, economic conditions, and even some global events. So, before investing in any stock, it’s wise to consult with a financial advisor.
On the other hand, ETFs are investment funds that hold a diversified mix of assets. Think of an ETF as a basket of assets consisting of stocks, bonds, or commodities. Unlike individual stocks, ETFs bundle multiple investments together. They trade on stock exchanges just like individual stocks, but instead of tracking a single company, they often follow an index, sector, or asset class.
ETFs might not be as talked about as individual stocks, but in the online investment community, some of the most popular include S&P 500 ETFs like SPY (SPDR S&P 500) and VOO (Vanguard S&P 500 ETF). They are considered comparatively safer than individual stocks because of their built-in diversification. Since you’re not putting all your money into one company, but spreading it across multiple assets, the impact of a single stock’s poor performance on your portfolio is reduced.
If you enjoy researching and analyzing companies, stocks might be a great fit for you. Investing in individual stocks means digging into financial reports, tracking market trends, and making strategic decisions.
Stocks also come with higher risk, but if you’re willing to take on that risk for the potential of high rewards, they can be an exciting option. Many of the biggest success stories in investing have come from well-chosen individual stocks.
For active traders, stocks offer the flexibility to buy and sell frequently, taking advantage of short-term price movements. If you prefer a hands-on approach and enjoy the fast-paced nature of trading, stocks provide plenty of opportunities.
If you’re new to investing and want a simple, low-risk way to get started, ETFs are a great option. They provide instant diversification, reducing the impact of any single stock’s performance on your portfolio.
For long-term investors, ETFs offer steady growth with less volatility than individual stocks. By spreading your investment across multiple assets, they help create a more balanced and resilient portfolio.
If you prefer a more passive investing approach with minimal research, ETFs allow you to invest without constantly analyzing individual companies. Many ETFs simply track an index or sector, making them a “set it and forget it” strategy for growing your wealth over time.
It is pretty common for investors to hold both stocks and ETFs for a balanced portfolio. It brings the best of both worlds together. ETFs serve as the stable foundation, providing diversification and reducing overall risk, while stocks can offer high-growth opportunities for those willing to take on more risk.
Both stocks and ETFs have their advantages, but the right choice depends on your risk tolerance, investment style, and financial goals. If you’re after high growth and don’t mind volatility, stocks could be your best bet. If you prefer a diversified, low-maintenance approach, ETFs might suit you better. For a more balanced strategy, you can also combine both. Whatever you choose, the key is to invest wisely and stay committed to your financial future.
Photo at top by Marcus Winkler via Pexels
“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.
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The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has released the coincident indexes for the 50 states for January 2025. Over the past three months, the indexes increased in 47 states, decreased in one state, and remained stable in two, for a three-month diffusion index of 92. Additionally, in the past month, the indexes increased in 35 states, decreased in nine states, and remained stable in six, for a one-month diffusion index of 52. For comparison purposes, the Philadelphia Fed has also developed a similar coincident index for the entire United States. The Philadelphia Fed’s U.S. index increased 0.6 percent over the past three months and 0.2 percent in January.Note: These are coincident indexes constructed from state employment data. An explanation from the Philly Fed:
emphasis added
The coincident indexes combine four state-level indicators to summarize current economic conditions in a single statistic. The four state-level variables in each coincident index are nonfarm payroll employment, average hours worked in manufacturing by production workers, the unemployment rate, and wage and salary disbursements deflated by the consumer price index (U.S. city average). The trend for each state’s index is set to the trend of its gross domestic product (GDP), so long-term growth in the state’s index matches long-term growth in its GDP.
Click on map for larger image.
And here is a graph is of the number of states with one month increasing activity according to the Philly Fed. Links for you. Science:
Mass. hospitals expand bedside addiction treatment amid new evidence of its benefits
The loneliest people (and places) in America. What we’re all getting wrong about the loneliness epidemic
Octopus jumps shark and goes for a ride on its back
A huge iceberg broke off Antarctica. What scientists found under it startled them.
‘Chaos and Confusion’ at the Crown Jewel of American Science
An Interview With A Fired USDA Specialist
Other:
The Underlying Problem: This is happening because some people are too rich.
The Pluralistic Ignorance of the Trump Opposition. Institutions are failing to stand up for their principles. That does not mean Americans as a whole are not resisting what is happening.
Federal workers split over return-to-office mandate. Some are job hunting.
Downtown Boston office tower One Lincoln fetches $400 million at auction. Sale would be barely half the value of a three-year-old mortgage on the 36-story Financial District tower. (I thought sending everyone back to the office was supposed to fix this…)
Scorched Earths
Now’s the time for the Democrats to demoralize Trump voters
Homeland Security Revokes Temporary Status For 532,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans And Venezuelans
Apple is becoming a utility. That’s hard for fanboys to take.
‘Uber With Guns’ App Contracts With Police Officers Accused Of Misconduct
The new iPhone is AI-ready. So where’s the AI?
Tesla Trade-Ins Are At An All-Time High, Edmunds Says
What Was the Top 40?
Schumer triggered collapse of public confidence in his party
Now What? If Senate Democrats truly believed only the courts can rein in Trump, they’d act like it.
What’s in the Book Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Want You to Read
Chuck Schumer Is the Weakest Link. The Senate minority leader wants to make sure everyone else is fighting for democracy—so he’s not at risk.
Tax revenue could drop by 10 percent amid turmoil at IRS. Staff cuts and disruptions related to the U.S. DOGE Service have officials bracing for a sharp loss of revenue.
Was That Smart
USDA cancels $500M in food deliveries, leaving food banks scrambling
We’re All We’ve Got Left
Tony Cheng’s, a D.C. Chinatown mainstay for decades, fights for survival
Trump’s Economics—and America’s Economy
How DOGE is making government almost comically inefficient
80 Teslas damaged at once at Canadian Showroom
Eight decades after the liberation of Theresienstadt, a survivor remembers
IRS Predicts DOGE Lost Half a Trillion Dollars for the USA
Centennial Bulb glows strong at age 124, a survivor in turbulent times
Can art survive the climate crisis? We may never know how many priceless works in private hands went up in smoke in the L.A. fires. How extreme weather is shaking up the economics of the art world. (great opportunities for forgers though…)
Composite primary keys in Django
Django 5.2 is out today and a big new feature is composite primary keys, which can now be defined like this:class Release(models.Model): pk = models.CompositePrimaryKey( "version", "name" ) version = models.IntegerField() name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
They don't yet work with the Django admin or as targets for foreign keys.
Other smaller new features include:
./manage.py shell - a feature borrowed from ./manage.py shell_plus in django-extensionsresponse.content.decode("utf-8") any more5.2 is also an LTS release, so it will receive security and data loss bug fixes up to April 2028.
From Apocalypse Now:
Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.
Today, according to Trump and co., is Liberation Day — the day Trump will announce big new tariffs on top of the substantial tariffs he’s already slapped on steel, aluminum and autos.
Nobody knows much about the details, which don’t appear to have been settled until the last minute, and Trump won’t hold his press conference until 4 PM. For now, Goldman Sachs thinks the average tariff rate will rise to 15 percent, which means that the historical timeline will look like this:
Source: USITC
That bump at the left of the chart is the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff. So if the reality is anything like this, it will be a much bigger shock to the economy than Smoot-Hawley, especially because imports as a share of the economy are three times what they were in the 1920s:
This chart also tells you that you should ignore anyone citing the relatively mild effects of Trump’s 2017-18 tariffs as a reason not to be worried. Trump’s actions then were minor trade skirmishes, while this is all-out trade war.
As I said, I don’t know exactly what will be announced later today. One safe prediction, however, is that over the next few days we’ll see many news analyses purporting to explain the thinking behind this radical change in U.S. policy.
Such analyses will be a waste of time, because there’s nothing to explain. I’m not saying that the Trump team’s thinking is unsound. I don’t see any thinking at all.
I don’t know how many people realize that the administration’s case for tariffs is completely incoherent, that it has not one but two major internal contradictions.
Here’s the story: Trumpers are claiming that tariffs
1. Won’t increase prices, because foreign producers will absorb the cost
2. Will cause a large shift in U.S. demand away from imports to domestic production
3. Will raise huge amounts of revenue
If you think about it for a minute, you realize that (1) is inconsistent with (2): If prices of imports don’t rise, why would consumers switch to domestically produced goods? At the same time, (2) is inconsistent with (3): If imports drop a lot, tariffs won’t raise a lot of money, because there won’t be much to tax.
So the public story about tariffs doesn’t make any sense. And Trump’s rants about tariffs go beyond nonsense. Here’s one of the latest:
Does he really believe that Canada is a major source of fentanyl? Worse, does he believe that fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs?
But is it all a cover for the real, probably sinister agenda of Trump’s tariff push?
No. There isn’t any secret agenda, devised by people who know that the public story is nonsense. How do I know that? Because who, exactly, do you think is devising this secret agenda?
If you follow policy debates at all closely, you soon realize that there is a big difference between the parties in how they get and use policy advice.
Politicians from both parties tend to recruit people who tell them what they want to hear. Democrats, however, usually want their policy advisors to have some reputation — warranted or not — for genuine professional expertise. This means putting up with people who sometimes don’t tell politicians what they want to hear, because they have external reputations to defend. For example, many economists with close ties to Democratic politicians argued that Biden’s stimulus plan was too big.
Republicans, however, have long preferred “experts” who are pure hacks, who can be counted on to support whatever the party says. I often feel sorry for genuinely conservative but serious economists who aren’t pure hacks — there are actually many of them — who never achieve the kind of access to power they seem to expect.
The sad truth is that in the modern G.O.P., actually knowing what you’re talking about disqualifies you from being part of the inner circle, because people who know something and have reputations to protect might not be loyal cheerleaders. And this is especially true now that Trump is in charge: The only way to survive as an adviser is to be a lackey willing to support whatever the Leader says on any given day.
That is, you have to be like Trump’s trade czar Peter Navarro, who, according to Vanity Fair, was cold-called by Jared Kushner because he had co-authored a book called Death by China.
Some people were surprised that this time around Trump didn’t offer a job to Robert Lighthizer, possibly the most prominent protectionist intellectual in America. After all, Lighthizer is widely respected for his trade policy expertise even among people who think his advice is all wrong. But actually knowing something and having an independent reputation are disqualifying in this administration and the G.O.P. more generally. This is why we have a Fox News host running the Pentagon. It’s why Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, asked to defend the tariff plans, replied, “You have to trust the President’s instincts.”
Which brings me back to my original point: There can’t be any secret agenda behind the Trump tariffs, because there’s nobody around Trump with the knowledge or independence to devise such an agenda. This is all about Trump’s gut feelings. A White House official told Politico that he likes the “shock and awe,” and that
Each country needs to panic and call. … Trump wants to hear you grovel and say you’ll cut a deal.
Since most of our trading partners aren’t in a groveling mood, trade war seems inevitable.
You might imagine that Trump will back off if his tariff gambit goes as badly as seems likely. But I don’t think he will, because his team of sycophants will tell him things are going great.
I love the smell of napalm burning economies in the morning [/Marlon Brando].
MUSICAL CODA
President Donald Trump has told his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner, ubiquitous cheerleader and Washington hatchet man…
Musk’s looming retreat comes as some Trump administration insiders and many outside allies have become frustrated with his unpredictability and increasingly view the billionaire as a political liability, a dynamic that was thrown into stark relief Tuesday when a conservative judge Musk vocally supported lost his bid for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat by 10 points.
It also represents a stark shift in the Trump-Musk relationship from a month ago, when White House officials and allies were predicting Musk was “here to stay” and that Trump would find a way to blow past the 130-day time limit.
Here is the full story. I am told frequently that fascism is coming, and recently I was criticized on Twitter (by a German, in German) for discussing DOGE without considering fascism as a kind of essential element of the project. There is plenty to complain about, but this latest development does not sound as if fascism is upon us!? Plus Stefanik is keeping her seat, rather than going to the UN, for electoral reasons, namely wanting to preserve a (slight) GOP majority in the House. So I won’t be moving to Canada, or elsewhere, anytime soon.
The post Elon to retreat from DOGE appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Click on graph for larger image.
The second graph shows light vehicle sales since the BEA started keeping data in 1967. Four adventurers suited up and embarked on a first-of-a-kind trip to space Monday night, becoming the first humans to fly in polar orbit aboard a SpaceX crew capsule chartered by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire.
The private astronauts rocketed into orbit atop a Falcon 9 booster from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:46 pm EDT Monday (01:46 UTC Tuesday). Instead of heading to the northeast in pursuit of the International Space Station, the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft departed Launch Complex 39A and arced to the southeast, then turned south on a flight path hugging Florida's east coast.
The unusual trajectory aligned the Falcon 9 with a perfectly polar orbit at an inclination of 90 degrees to the equator, bringing the four-person crew directly over the North or South Pole every 45 minutes.
Pattern: You can see that folks are working at cross purposes
Transformation: Give them an incentive that will influence their actions towards a common goal
When I say “incentive”, folks immediately think “money”. While money is a powerful incentive, it also tends to distort behavior, precisely because it is so useful & so personal. Still, “$100 to everyo…
Au Revoir, Come Back When You Want To Appreciate Us, Our History and Our Culture More.
Sorry to go over all Monty Python Life of Brian but as they said ’the Romans are bastards/they’ve taken everything we’ve got/as if it were their right/ and we’ve got nothing in return’
For “Romans” read Americans and Trumpians. The United Kingdom in now getting heartily fed up with its bastard child since 1776 – the United States. Donald J Trump has fractured whatever is left of the ‘special relationship’ and, frankly, we are glad. We are European not North American. Let’s make America Isolated Again.
We do have some cause to thank our American brothers and sisters. They helped us out – late – to win two World Wars. Sent us materiel, soldiers and lives. Europe, though, understands wars on their land. America does not. The US left a legacy – NATO to provide an umbrella against the Soviet menace. Plenty of money but then they were (and are) the richest country in the alliance. It is called mutual aid.
The relics of US military hegemony can still be found in the UK. Look at East Anglia with its large USAF bases at Lakenheath and Mildenhall. I was in a hotel in Lavenham, in Suffolk, last year and entire rooms were dedicated to US Airmen past and present. We are (or were) a land-based aircraft carrier for the US. Greenham Common in Berkshire and Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire was where they parked their Cruise missiles. Today they are put to more productive uses-Upper Heyford is now a large, much needed, housing estate. We have done without them and we could do without the still extant US bases in our country. ’RAF Croughton’ still exists in Northamptonshire as an electronic spy base. American.
Donald Trump claims Scotland as his ancestral home through his mother. He owns two golf courses – what else? The one in Aberdeen Scotland was built despite local opposition, the other Turnberry Ayrshire is a jewel in the Crown – an Open Championship course. We could easily repatriate both of them with little effect.
The US has brought us some cultural riches and much cultural garbage as well. Those US airmen brought rock and roll and black music with them. That begat the Beatles and much of British pop music. But, we managed to Anglicize it, temper it and sell it back to the Americans.
The US brought us electronic baggage too. Much of early British television was simply American cast offs sold cheaply to a new entrant . I remember I love Lucy, Dr Kildare, Perry Mason all in prime time and more when growing up. Fortunately, British TV grew up too and started to tell British stories to a British audience to much effect. We now sell series or formats for series to the Americans. Our television is simply more thoughtful. That is down to tighter regulation. You won’t find Fox News or Breitbart here and our political culture is much richer for that.
Hours of bad television corrupted our shared English language. That has not been a gain. Today, you would be hard pressed to find Americanisms in English apart from in the obtuse world of management consultancy.
So what are we left with? A ’special relationship’ that exists mainly in the imaginations of British politicians. Donald Trump is undermining it and ripping it up day after day. A tariff war on British luxury cars such as Jaguar and Land Rovers – both brands popular in the USA – is not a way to secure any Anglo American entente.
What the Trumpians fail to understand is the sheer sense of the tragic history of Europeans. If you lived in Alsace-Lorraine, Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia or Poland, who were subject to the Nazi jackboot, you know what invasion means.
Trump needs to understand that of Ukraine and the ‘coalition of the willing’ (led by the UK ,France and Germany) aiming to defend it. It is for Europeans and Ukrainians to fight for their land, not for Vladimir Putin to land grab or Trump to asset grab her mineral wealth.
In short, thank you very much Uncle Sam for all you have done for the UK and Europe for 250 years but it may be time for us to look after ourselves and not kowtow to you. Au revoir, come back when you want to appreciate us, our history and our culture more .
By the by, we sold you the Monty Python series. Enjoy it.
“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 What Did the Americans Ever Do for Us? appeared first on DCReport.org.
Just like last year, I’m doing a hanami party in Tokyo, and all Noahpinion readers are invited! It’s this Saturday, April 5th, at 1:00 to 5:00 PM in Yoyogi Park! Here’s the approximate location where we’ll be. Please feel free to bring snacks, drinks, etc. And if you want me to sign your copy of my new book Weeb Economy (now available in Japanese stores and websites), please bring that too!
(For those of you who aren't in Japan — i.e. most of you — a “hanami” is a picnic with cherry blossoms. Anyway, I'm going to do some more meetups back in the U.S., so stay tuned.)
Hope to see you soon!
1. More on deep learning in economics.
2. A history of indirect cost in U.S. science funding.
3. Joshua Rothman on whether “we” (they!) are taking AI seriously enough (New Yorker).
4. More Scott Sumner movie reviews.
5. Martha Argerich profile (NYT).
6. The fight over Ayn Rand’s estate. Mostly about Peikoff.
7. Subscribe to The Free Press at fifteen percent discount.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Speaking of podcasts, there's a new episode of 4764 out. Have a listen. Only 4 minutes of your life.
On April 22, 2022, I received an out-of-the-blue text from Sam Altman inquiring about the possibility of training GPT-4 on O’Reilly books. We had a call a few days later to discuss the possibility.
As I recall our conversation, I told Sam I was intrigued, but with reservations. I explained to him that we could only license our data if they had some mechanism for tracking usage and compensating authors. I suggested that this ought to be possible, even with LLMs, and that it could be the basis of a participatory content economy for AI. (I later wrote about this idea in a piece called “How to Fix ‘AI’s Original Sin’.�) Sam said he hadn’t thought about that, but that the idea was very interesting and that he’d get back to me. He never did.
And now, of course, given reports that Meta has trained Llama on LibGen, the Russian database of pirated books, one has to wonder whether OpenAI has done the same. So working with colleagues at the AI Disclosures Project at the Social Science Research Council, we decided to take a look. Our results were published today in the working paper “Beyond Public Access in LLM Pre-Training Data,� by Sruly Rosenblat, Tim O’Reilly, and Ilan Strauss.
There are a variety of statistical techniques for estimating the likelihood that an AI has been trained on specific content. We chose one called DE-COP. In order to test whether a model has been trained on a given book, we provided the model with a paragraph quoted from the human-written book along with three permutations of the same paragraph, and then asked the model to identify the “verbatim� (i.e., correct) passage from the book in question. We repeated this several times for each book.
O’Reilly was in a position to provide a unique dataset to use with DE-COP. For decades, we have published two sample chapters from each book on the public internet, plus a small selection from the opening pages of each other chapter. The remainder of each book is behind a subscription paywall as part of our O’Reilly online service. This means we can compare the results for data that was publicly available against the results for data that was private but from the same book. A further check is provided by running the same tests against material that was published after the training date of each model, and thus could not possibly have been included. This gives a pretty good signal for unauthorized access.
We split our sample of O’Reilly books according to time period and accessibility, which allows us to properly test for model access violations:
We used a statistical measure called AUROC to evaluate the separability between samples potentially in the training set and known out-of-dataset samples. In our case, the two classes were (1) O’Reilly books published before the model’s training cutoff (t − n) and (2) those published afterward (t + n). We then used the model’s identification rate as the metric to distinguish between these classes. This time-based classification serves as a necessary proxy, since we cannot know with certainty which specific books were included in training datasets without disclosure from OpenAI. Using this split, the higher the AUROC score, the higher the probability that the model was trained on O’Reilly books published during the training period.
The results are intriguing and alarming. As you can see from the figure below, when GPT-3.5 was released in November of 2022, it demonstrated some knowledge of public content but little of private content. By the time we get to GPT-4o, released in May 2024, the model seems to contain more knowledge of private content than public content. Intriguingly, the figures for GPT-4o mini are approximately equal and both near random chance suggesting either little was trained on or little was retained.
AUROC scores based on the models’ “guess rate� show recognition of pre-training data:
We chose a relatively small subset of books; the test could be repeated at scale. The test does not provide any knowledge of how OpenAI might have obtained the books. Like Meta, OpenAI may have trained on databases of pirated books. (The Atlantic’s search engine against LibGen reveals that virtually all O’Reilly books have been pirated and included there.)
Given the ongoing claims from OpenAI that without the unlimited ability for large language model developers to train on copyrighted data without compensation, progress on AI will be stopped, and we will “lose to China,� it is likely that they consider all copyrighted content to be fair game.
The fact that DeepSeek has done to OpenAI exactly what OpenAI has done to authors and publishers doesn’t seem to deter the company’s leaders. OpenAI’s chief lobbyist, Chris Lehane, “likened OpenAI’s training methods to reading a library book and learning from it, whereas DeepSeek’s methods are more like putting a new cover on a library book, and selling it as your own.â€� We disagree. ChatGPT and other LLMs use books and other copyrighted materials to create outputs that can substitute for many of the original works, much as DeepSeek is becoming a creditable substitute for ChatGPT.Â
There is clear precedent for training on publicly available data. When Google Books read books in order to create an index that would help users to search them, that was indeed like reading a library book and learning from it. It was a transformative fair use.
Generating derivative works that can compete with the original work is definitely not fair use.
In addition, there is a question of what is truly “public.� As shown in our research, O’Reilly books are available in two forms: Portions are public for search engines to find and for everyone to read on the web; others are sold on the basis of per-user access, either in print or via our per-seat subscription offering. At the very least, OpenAI’s unauthorized access represents a clear violation of our terms of use.
We believe in respecting the rights of authors and other creators. That’s why at O’Reilly, we built a system that allows us to create AI outputs based on the work of our authors, but uses RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) and other techniques to track usage and pay royalties, just like we do for other types of content usage on our platform. If we can do it with our far more limited resources, it is quite certain that OpenAI could do so too, if they tried. That’s what I was asking Sam Altman for back in 2022.
And they should try. One of the big gaps in today’s AI is its lack of a virtuous circle of sustainability (what Jeff Bezos called “the flywheel�). AI companies have taken the approach of expropriating resources they didn’t create, and potentially decimating the income of those who do make the investments in their continued creation. This is shortsighted.
At O’Reilly, we aren’t just in the business of providing great content to our customers. We are in the business of incentivizing its creation. We look for knowledge gaps—that is, we find things that some people know but others don’t and wish they did—and help those at the cutting edge of discovery share what they learn, through books, videos, and live courses. Paying them for the time and effort they put in to share what they know is a critical part of our business.
We launched our online platform in 2000 after getting a pitch from an early ebook aggregation startup, Books 24×7, that offered to license them from us for what amounted to pennies per book per customer—which we were supposed to share with our authors. Instead, we invited our biggest competitors to join us in a shared platform that would preserve the economics of publishing and encourage authors to continue to spend the time and effort to create great books. This is the content that LLM providers feel entitled to take without compensation.
As a result, copyright holders are suing, putting up stronger and stronger blocks against AI crawlers, or going out of business. This is not a good thing. If the LLM providers lose their lawsuits, they will be in for a world of hurt, paying large fines, reengineering their products to put in guardrails against emitting infringing content, and figuring out how to do what they should have done in the first place. If they win, we will all end up the poorer for it, because those who do the actual work of creating the content will face unfair competition.
It is not just copyright holders who should want an AI market in which the rights of authors are preserved and they are given new ways to monetize; LLM developers should want it too. The internet as we know it today became so fertile because it did a pretty good job of preserving copyright. Companies such as Google found new ways to help content creators monetize their work, even in areas that were contentious. For example, faced with demands from music companies to take down user-generated videos using copyrighted music, YouTube instead developed Content ID, which enabled them to recognize the copyrighted content, and to share the proceeds with both the creator of the derivative work and the original copyright holder. There are numerous startups proposing to do the same for AI-generated derivative works, but, as of yet, none of them have the scale that is needed. The large AI labs should take this on.
Rather than allowing the smash-and-grab approach of today’s LLM developers, we should be looking ahead to a world in which large centralized AI models can be trained on all public content and licensed private content, but recognize that there are also many specialized models trained on private content that they cannot and should not access. Imagine an LLM that was smart enough to say, “I don’t know that I have the best answer to that; let me ask Bloomberg (or let me ask O’Reilly; let me ask Nature; or let me ask Michael Chabon, or George R.R. Martin (or any of the other authors who have sued, as a stand-in for the millions of others who might well have)) and I’ll get back to you in a moment.� This is a perfect opportunity for an extension to MCP that allows for two-way copyright conversations and negotiation of appropriate compensation. The first general-purpose copyright-aware LLM will have a unique competitive advantage. Let’s make it so.
I’m afraid I don’t have anything too exciting to report on the film front, at least regarding new releases. But I did enjoy seeing six Argentine noirs from the 1950s that were playing on Criterion Channel (CC), which is a great bargain for movie buffs.
I watched the first season of Mad Men, and don’t have much to say about it other than it does have one good character. I much prefer films to TV shows. I have started a 16 hour series on the history of film, and will report on it in the next film dump.
I feel like there may be a bit of “grade inflation” in my ratings—perhaps I get softer as I get older. And I was gratified to discover a rich new cache of noirs, one of my favorite genres.
I read novels by Virginia Woolf, Michel Houellebecq, Haruki Murakami, and Junichiro Tanizaki. I’m about halfway through the Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante. It’s not even the sort of novel that I generally like, but it’s extremely entertaining—I see why it’s so highly rated. (Another example is Lord of the Rings—I like the novel, but not the genre.)
2025:Q1 films
Newer films
The Shadowless Tower (China) 3.6 It’s often only in retrospect that we notice a new artistic school. It seems to me that with the directors following in the footsteps of Jia Zhangke, Chinese cinema is finally beginning to reach its potential. There’s nothing particularly notable about this film, but everything is very well done. Great visuals, sly humor, and a very perceptive look at the challenges of being middle aged. As is often true of Asian films, you need a good TV to do justice to the excellent cinematography.
The Missing Pieces (US) 3.6 This is nothing more than 90 minutes of random scenes that were never used in the film version of Twin Peaks. But just as a collection of Dylan outtakes is often better than the very best work of famous rock stars, this collection of outtakes is superior to the vast majority of Hollywood films. With no plot to focus on, you really notice Lynch’s ability to create a surreal mood. They don’t all work, but when they do it’s about as good as cinema gets. Also saw another similar documentary called More Things That Happened, which consists of outtakes from Inland Empire. It wasn’t quite as good.
The Brutalist (US) 3.5 This hugely ambitious epic has a number of appealing qualities, most notably the excellent acting. The film doesn’t insult your intelligence and there are some intriguing ideas, but also a bit too many Hollywood clichés. The biggest disappointment was the visual style, which was relatively pedestrian for a film about a visual artist. (Just as I was disappointed by the music in the Dylan biopic.) The building he designed seemed a bit of a pastiche of architectural styles, ranging from Wright’s Johnson Wax building to Tadeo Ando’s Church of Light, but far inferior to either. I had trouble making sense of what I was seeing. There was a huge light-filled dome, but the exterior was entirely boxy in shape. Perhaps I’m being too literal minded; maybe the ambiguity was the point. Nonetheless, I have a warm spot in my heart for any Hollywood film that defends the relatively unpopular architectural style of brutalism.
Black Bag (US) 3.3 Steven Soderberg’s film is intelligent and well crafted, but ultimately it’s quite forgettable. The problem is a lack of ambition. You cannot take it seriously as a le Carré sort of spy story—it’s got too many Hollywood clichés that are not believable. And while it’s witty at times, it doesn’t have any truly memorable characters or dialogue. In the end, it’s just light entertainment. But that’s better than 90% of films these days.
Becoming Led Zeppelin (UK) 3.0 This one got good reviews, although it’s actually kind of bland. It covers up through their second album, but I find their later albums to be a bit more interesting. The one thing that makes it worth watching is that it picks up the dizzying rate of cultural change around 1968. In one of their first concerts, in a brightly-lit auditorium, they play songs like Dazed and Confused to an audience of well dressed middle-aged British couples with their small children covering their ears. But by the time they got to San Francisco a few months later . . .
Drive-Away Dolls (US) 2.9 This Tarantino-style film was directed by Ethan Coen, without the aid of Joel. (I guess we now know that Joel is the brains of the operation.) Billed as the first of a lesbian comedy/detective story B-movie trilogy. Two more on the way?
Room 666/Room 999 (France) 2.8 A couple documentaries where directors are asked whether cinema is dying. My own view is that it makes more sense to think of specific types of cinema as having a finite life. Thus you might say the cinema of Breathless and 8 ½ and L’Avventura and Persona died at the end of the 1960s. The great silent comedies died out in the early 1930s. The great American westerns died at the end of the 1950s. We shouldn’t look for directors to recreate what we know and love, and most of us shouldn’t expect to recognize a great new style of cinema until it’s almost over. I’ll probably fail to understand the great films of the 2030s, which younger cinéastes will appreciate.
Babygirl (US) 2.8 I find the style of many modern Hollywood films to be a bit annoying, as they assault the viewer with lots of loud music and glitzy images. Because the characters are so obviously fake, it’s hard to maintain interest in what you are seeing. Challengers and Anora had a similar style, but overall were better films.
Older films:
The Wailing (Korea, 2016, CC) 3.8 Great horror film, although I didn’t like it quite as much the second time around. (Also loses something on TV.) When I think of South Korea, what comes to mind is:
1. Fastest growing economy over the past 60 years.
2. Leads the world in plastic surgery.
3. Longest working hours.
4. Most intense competition in education.
5. Produces films that lead the world in . . . what’s the adjective here? In being extreme? Intense? Excessive?
Are those traits somehow related? Never been to Korea, but it doesn’t seem to be a country full of happy-go-lucky people sitting under palm trees sipping piña coladas while listening to calypso music.
Desire (US, 1936, CC) 3.8 Combines the best qualities of director Frank Borzage (romance) and producer Ernst Lubitsch (humor), thus refuting the auteur theory, at least for this one film. As always, Marlene Dietrich is wonderful. Gary Cooper is also excellent, which is not always the case. (Picture below is from a different film)
The Wild Pear Tree (Turkey, 2019) 3.8 As I get older, my appreciation for Ceylan’s films steadily increases. Many will find this too slow, but I loved it.
The End of Violence (US, 1997, CC) 3.7 For a brief period in the 1990s, Bill Pullman seemed like the coolest actor in Hollywood. This amazing run included The Last Seduction in 1994, Lost Highway in 1997, and The End of Violence, also in 1997. (The last two would make a great double feature.) Even if in the end this film doesn’t add up to much (and was panned by critics), Wim Wenders knows how to push all the pleasure buttons in a movie lover’s brain. Seeing it again 28 years later, I noticed that most of all this film is about the role of Hispanic immigrants in America. Always overlooked by the mainstream culture, but the only people in the film that seemed to maintain their sanity. Without them, everything would fall apart.
Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (Japan, 1941, CC) 3.7 A warm-up for Tokyo Story, this is one of the earliest Ozu films to show his mature style. It shows Ozu’s democratic sympathies in a society that was (is?) still pretty strongly divided by class.
If I Should Die Before I Wake (Argentina, 1952, CC) 3.7 Must see for fans of Night of the Hunter. And if you are not a fan of Night of the Hunter, then what’s wrong with you?
Ladies of Leisure (US, 1930, CC) 3.7 This early Capra/Stanwyck collaboration is greatly underrated by the critics. Excellent cinematography and Barbara Stanwyck gives a spectacular performance.
Thirty Day Princess (US, 1934, CC) 3.6 Only a 1934 film could have the line, “How much is that in 59-cent dollars?” (And not many viewers in 2025 would notice the line.) The 1930s produced an almost endless stream of charming romantic comedies, and this is an above average example. Features Cary Grant, but Sylvia Sydney is the real star.
The Black Vampire (Argentina, 1952, CC) 3.6 Remake of the classic Fritz Lang film entitled “M”, which was Peter Lorre’s breakout role. This one is also very good, featuring many of the themes that appeared in other Argentine noirs (lots of dark shadows, a child in danger, a blind witness, an obsession with Freudian psychology, etc.)
The Bitter Stems (Argentina, 1956, CC) 3.6 The first half is just OK, but the second half of this noir is excellent. This is the first of a series of 6 Argentine noirs that I saw on Criterion Channel, and it made me want to see the other five. Every so often I’m reminded of how many excellent films are out there that no one has ever heard of. These films were almost lost forever; in some cases all but one print was destroyed. Great cinematography and there’s a scene in Buenos Aires that makes it look like the most modern city in the world.
Brighton Rock (UK , 1948, CC) 3.6 Classic British noir based on a Graham Green novel. Richard Attenborough is the reason to watch this film; he’s nothing like the much older actor I’m familiar with from his later films.
Human Desire (US, 1954, CC) 3.6 Railroad fans will not want to miss this noir, which was directed by Fritz Lang and features some excellent acting (especially Gloria Graham.) So many classic scenes in movie history took place on trains, at least relative to other forms of transportation. I feel like the decline of passenger rail has adversely affected the art of film.
Don’t Bother to Knock (US, 1952, CC) 3.5 In most respects, this is just an average film. But Marilyn Monroe is one of America’s greatest actresses, and her performance here towers over everyone else in the picture (which includes other quite competent actors like Richard Widmark and Ann Bancroft.)
Never Open That Door (Argentina, 1952, CC) 3.5 Same director and same year as If I Should Die Before I Wake. This is actually two short films. I’d rate the first one 3.4 and the second one 3.6.
Drunk (Denmark, 2020) 3.5 I started out on burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff. This love letter to drunkenness (directed by Vinterberg) is a lot of fun if you don’t take it too seriously. The films “message” is unclear, which I generally regard as a good thing. Some Anglo-Saxon wimp translated the title as “Another Round.”
Il Grido (Italy, 1957) 3.4 Antonioni went out of his way to make the Po valley look bleak and desolate. Billed as a restored version, but it was hard to tell, as the scenery still looked pretty muddy. It was almost universally panned by critics, so I’d like to say that it’s a hidden masterpiece. Many scenes are very nicely done, but unfortunately the story is just not that interesting. Strictly for Antonioni completists.
Masculine-Feminine (France, 1966, CC) 3.4 Seems a bit more superficial than his previous films. But maybe that’s the point—the film seems to encapsulate the classic Godard style more than any of his other films. I guess I prefer films that combine his trademark style with something else of interest. And the humor hasn’t always aged well, although certain scenes are quite amusing.
The Bride Wore Black (France, 1969, CC) 3.4 Truffaut imitates Hitchcock, even using Bernard Herrmann for the score. As an exercise in style, it’s quite well done. But imitations always pale when compared to the original. There’s a difference between a great director making the best film he can, and a great director trying to imitate the style of another. Hitchcock wasn’t trying to make Hitchcock films; he was trying to make great films.
Forbidden (US, 1932, CC) 3.3 The Capra/Stanwyck collaboration got better reviews than the previous Ladies of Leisure, but is nowhere near as good. It starts well, but then gets bogged down in ponderous melodrama that would have been edgy at the time but hasn’t aged well.
Shockproof (US, 1949, CC) 3.3 Sam Fuller wrote part of the screenplay for the Douglas Sirk melodrama, but I found much of the acting and dialogue to be a bit wooden. Things pick up when the couple goes on the run, and I was especially amused to see what the US-Mexico border looked like in 1949. Ah, the world we’ve lost.
The Beast Must Die (Argentina, 1952, CC) 3.2 This was directed by the same guy that did The Black Vampire, but it’s not as visually interesting. It’s a plot driven film, for people that like that sort of thing (which is most people.)
Bluebeard’s 8th Wife (US, 1938, CC) 3.2 I expected more from a film directed by Lubitsch with a screenplay by Billy Wilder. One problem is Gary Cooper, who doesn’t at all come across as the sort of man who would have had seven previous wives.
Sapphire (UK, 1959, CC) 3.2 An early color film that exposes British anxieties about race. More interesting if viewed as a historical document than as a police procedural.
Frenchman's Creek (US, 1944, CC) 3.2 I don't have any problem with this light-hearted Technicolor romance, but I wonder how it got past the Hays Code. I guess there's no concern about characters getting away with murder as long as they are lovable French pirates. This almost 2-hour film is light as a feather, with little or no real drama. I suppose audiences in 1944 were not looking for stressful stories. Funny how Cornwall looks like the coast of California.
Shopworn (US, 1932, CC) 3.1 Another pre-code Barbara Stanwyck picture, with a plot that seemed to be very popular around 1932---poor girl marries rich man.
Pick-Up Alley (US, 1957, CC) 3.0 You can see intimations that the 1960s are just around the corner, as this Broccoli production was full of exotic locations and sexy women. Unfortunately, by this time the classic noir was running out of gas. Trevor Howard is fine, Victor Mature is a bore, and Anita Ekberg is a typical example of what back in the 50s was called a “bombshell”. The film’s poster said, “This is a film about dope!” Has some appeal as an exercise in campy humor.
Say Anything (US, 1989, CC) 3.0 I wasn’t interested in seeing this when it came out, but hoped that the patina of age would make it at least slightly tolerable. It was just barely watchable, thanks to John Cusack’s acting and Peter Gabriel’s music.
Sheep Without a Shepard (Malaysia/China, 2019) 3.0 At one time I would have found the plot twists to be intriguing, but at this point I find it hard to become interested in films with so much obviously fake emotion.
I Am Mother (Australia, 2019) 3.0 Well crafted sci-fi that doesn’t really break any new ground.
Virtue (US, 1930, CC) 3.0 Pre-code drama starring Carole Lombard. Lots of films at this time were obsessed with female chastity. It makes me wonder what sort of things we are obsessing over today that no one will care about in 100 years.
Native Son (Argentina/US, 1951, CC) 3.0 This is the weakest of the 6 Argentine noirs that I saw last month. Both the acting and the screenplay are highly uneven, but it is an interesting examination of American race relations circa 1951. Too controversial for an American studio, it was an Argentine production (with a French director). It also provides an interesting look at living conditions on Chicago’s south side, which might cause those with nostalgia for the “prosperity” of the 1950s to re-evaluate their views. Based on the Richard Wright novel.
Leave Me Alone (Taiwan, 2021) 2.9 A pale imitation of the great Taiwanese films of the 1990s.
Dead Calm (Australia, 1989, CC) 2.7 I was intrigued by the prospect of seeing Nicole Kidman’s first major film. Alas, good acting cannot overcome a mediocre director and an obviously contrived story. But then how many actresses from the 1980s are still playing sexy roles in 2025?
PS. I found this Barbara Stanwyck picture from 1924, age 17:
From Moody’s Analytics Economists: Q1 Moody’s CRE Preliminary Trend AnalysisThere is much more in the article.The national multifamily market has been under supply-side pressure over the past two years. Steady demand finally paused the vacancy climb after a banner year with record-level inventory growth. Average vacancy stalled at 6.3%, the highest since 2010.Moody’s Analytics reported that the apartment vacancy rate was at 6.3% in Q1 2025, unchanged from an upwardly revised 6.3% in Q4, and up from 5.8% in Q1 2024. This is the highest vacancy rate since 2010.
This graph shows the apartment vacancy rate starting in 1980. (Annual rate before 1999, quarterly starting in 1999). Note: Moody’s Analytics is just for large cities.
John Kelsey and I wrote a short paper for the Rossfest Festschrift: “Rational Astrologies and Security“:
There is another non-security way that designers can spend their security budget: on making their own lives easier. Many of these fall into the category of what has been called rational astrology. First identified by Randy Steve Waldman [Wal12], the term refers to something people treat as though it works, generally for social or institutional reasons, even when there’s little evidence that it works—and sometimes despite substantial evidence that it does not.
[…]
Both security theater and rational astrologies may seem irrational, but they are rational from the perspective of the people making the decisions about security. Security theater is often driven by information asymmetry: people who don’t understand security can be reassured with cosmetic or psychological measures, and sometimes that reassurance is important. It can be better understood by considering the many non-security purposes of a security system. A monitoring bracelet system that pairs new mothers and their babies may be security theater, considering the incredibly rare instances of baby snatching from hospitals. But it makes sense as a security system designed to alleviate fears of new mothers [Sch07].
Rational astrologies in security result from two considerations. The first is the principal-agent problem: The incentives of the individual or organization making the security decision are not always aligned with the incentives of the users of that system. The user’s well-being may not weigh as heavily on the developer’s mind as the difficulty of convincing his boss to take a chance by ignoring an outdated security rule or trying some new technology.
The second consideration that can lead to a rational astrology is where there is a social or institutional need for a solution to a problem for which there is actually not a particularly good solution. The organization needs to reassure regulators, customers, or perhaps even a judge and jury that “they did all that could be done” to avoid some problem—even if “all that could be done” wasn’t very much.
As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as Starliner's thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go.
He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone's throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission's flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.
But what if it was not safe to come home, either?
Can the Sun appear to rise twice at the same time?
“Despite policy uncertainty and downbeat consumers, the bottom line is this: The March topline number was a good one for the economy and employers of all sizes, if not necessarily all sectors,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist, ADP.This was above the consensus forecast of 119,000. The BLS report will be released Friday, and the consensus is for 135,000 non-farm payroll jobs added in March.
emphasis added
Susan Athey, throughout her career and in her presidential address to the AEA, has added to our vision of how economists can make our way in the world.
Presidential Address: The Economist as Designer in the Innovation Process for Socially Impactful Digital Products By Susan Athey, American Economic Review 2025, 115(4): 1059–1099, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.115.4.1059
"This paper provides an economic perspective on data-driven innova tion in digital products, focusing on the role of complex experiments in measuring and improving social impact. The discussion highlights how tools and insights from economics contribute to each stage of the innovation process. Key contributions include identifying problems, developing theoretical frameworks, translating goals into measur able outcomes, analyzing historical data, and estimating counter factual outcomes. The paper also surveys recently developed tools designed to address challenges in designing and analyzing data from complex experiments "
##########
I'm fond of papers that consider "The Economist As..." See e.g.
In Don’t Let the FDA Regulate Lab Tests! and The New FDA and the Regulation of Laboratory Developed Tests I warned that the FDA’s power grab over laboratory developed tests was both unlawful and likely to result in deadly harm (as it did during COVID). Thus, I am pleased that a Federal judge has vacated the FDA’s rule entirely, writing:
…the text, structure, and history of the FDCA and CLIA make clear that FDA lacks the authority to regulate laboratory-developed test services.
…FDA’s asserted jurisdiction over laboratory-developed test services as “devices” under the FDCA defies bedrock principles of statutory interpretation, common sense, and longstanding industry practice.
The judge also noted some of the costs that I had pointed to:
…the Fifth Circuit has made clear that district courts should generally “nullify and revoke” illegal agency action, Braidwood, 104 F.4th at 951. The Court finds that such relief is appropriate here. The final rule will initially impact nearly 80,000 existing tests offered by almost 1,200 laboratories, and it will also affect about 10,013 new tests offered every year going forward. The estimated compliance costs for laboratories across the country will total well over $1 billion per year, and over the next two decades, FDA projects that total costs associated with the rule will range from $12.57 billion to $78.99 billion. FDA acknowledges that the enormous increased costs to laboratories may cause price increases and reduce the amount of revenue a laboratory can invest in creating and modifying tests.
… For these reasons, it is ORDERED that the Laboratory Plaintiffs’ Motions for Summary Judgment, (Dkt. #20, #27), are GRANTED. The final rule is hereby SET ASIDE and VACATED.
HHS head RFK Jr. should immediately instruct the FDA to halt any further efforts to regulate laboratory developed tests.
The post Federal Judge Rejects FDA Power Grab appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Mortgage applications decreased 1.6 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending March 28, 2025.
The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, decreased 1.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index decreased 1 percent compared with the previous week. The Refinance Index decreased 6 percent from the previous week and was 57 percent higher than the same week one year ago. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index increased 2 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index increased 2 percent compared with the previous week and was 9 percent higher than the same week one year ago.
“Treasury yields continue to be volatile as economic uncertainty dominates markets. Most mortgage rates finished last week lower, with the 30-year fixed essentially unchanged at 6.70 percent. Last week’s level of purchase applications was its highest since the end of January, driven by a 3 percent increase in conventional purchases, while government purchase applications were down 2 percent,” said Joel Kan, MBA’s Vice President and Deputy Chief Economist. “Overall purchase activity has shown year-over-year growth for more than two months as the inventory of existing homes for sale continues to increase, a positive development for the housing market despite the uncertain near-term outlook. Refinance applications were down almost 6 percent last week and remain very sensitive to rate movements, as most borrowers have mortgages with lower rates.”
...
The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($806,500 or less) decreased to 6.70 percent from 6.71 percent, with points increasing to 0.62 from 0.60 (including the origination fee) for 80 percent loan-to-value ratio (LTV) loans.
emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.
- by Aeon Video
Lunar lander companies want NASA to revise and expand its approach to buy services as Congress raises questions about NASA’s handling of VIPER.
The post CLPS companies seek expanded opportunities for commercial lunar landers appeared first on SpaceNews.
How good is AI at persuading humans to perform costly actions? We study calls made to get delinquent consumer borrowers to repay. Regression discontinuity and a randomized experiment reveal that AI is substantially less effective than human callers. Replacing AI with humans six days into delinquency closes much of the gap. But borrowers initially contacted by AI have repaid 1% less of the initial late payment one year later and are more likely to miss subsequent payments than borrowers who were always called by humans. AI’s lesser ability to extract promises that feel binding may contribute to the performance gap.
That is from a new paper by James J. Choi, Dong Huang, Zhishu Yang, and Qi Zhang. No AI asked me to run this blog post!
The post How Good is AI at Twisting Arms? Experiments in Debt Collection appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Opt-in section of the Contraptions Newsletter devoted to backgrounders, notes, and experiments cooked up with AI assistance. Serving up elevated slop 1-2 times a week. Cooking time of this one: 1 hour. Recipe at end. If you only want my hand-crafted writing, you can unsubscribe from this section.
In the late 20th century, something curious began to happen with baby names in the United States. For decades, mass broadcast media—television, film, radio—had helped homogenize naming conventions. A handful of names dominated birth certificates across the country. “Jennifer,” “Michael,” “Lisa,” and “Jessica” ruled entire generations, boosted by soap operas, sitcoms, and celebrity culture. Names traveled through society the same way pop songs or slogans did: from a few powerful sources outward, radiating influence and narrowing choice.
But with the rise of the internet, that trend reversed. As culture fragmented into niches and search engines made obscure knowledge instantly accessible, naming became a site of individuation. Parents began seeking uniqueness. By 2020, only 7% of babies in the U.S. were given a top-10 name—down from nearly a third a century earlier. Identity, once homogenized by mass media, had become increasingly customized, self-aware, and aestheticized.
This arc—from homogenization to diversification—is now repeating itself at the level of language itself, not just naming. And this time, the shaping force is not broadcast media, but large language models.
Foundation models like GPT and Claude now serve as the index funds of language. Trained on enormous corpora of human text, they do not try to innovate. Instead, they track the center of linguistic gravity: fluent, plausible, average-case language. They provide efficient, scalable access to verbal coherence, just as index funds offer broad exposure to market returns. For most users, most of the time, this is enough. LLMs automate fluency the way passive investing automates exposure. They flatten out risk and elevate reliability.
But they also suppress surprise. Like index funds, LLMs are excellent at covering known territory but incapable of charting new ground. The result is a linguistic landscape dominated by synthetic norms: smooth, predictable, uncontroversial. Writing with an LLM is increasingly like buying the market—safe, standardized, and inherently unoriginal.
In this new environment, the act of writing raw, unassisted text begins to resemble picking penny stocks. It’s risky, inefficient, and potentially seen as naïve. Yet it remains the only place where genuine linguistic alpha—the surplus value of originality—can be found. Alpha lives in human voice, conceptual invention, emotional charge, and expressive risk. It emerges from the irreducible tensions of context, personality, and thought. And like financial alpha, it is quickly absorbed and neutralized by the systems it disrupts. What begins as a surprise becomes a template; what once felt radical becomes the new benchmark.
As a result, the most original language is retreating into private markets. In Substacks, Signal threads, Discord servers, and private memos, new forms are being tested in semi-anonymous, high-context settings. These are the linguistic equivalents of venture capital and private equity—spaces of risk, scarcity, and concentrated attention. Just as companies now avoid going public too soon, writers may delay or even refuse public release, fearing dilution or misappropriation. Only once an idea matures might it “IPO” into the public sphere—perhaps as a viral tweet, a manifesto, or a cultural phrase. But even then, its time is limited: LLMs will soon flatten it into beta.
This recursive cycle—alpha to beta, originality to norm—is shaping a two-tiered linguistic economy. In the public sphere, language is increasingly frictionless but interchangeable. In the private sphere, language remains risky, inventive, and alive. The future of writing will depend not on mastering the average, but on learning how to stand out against it.
The baby name curve gives us a cultural preview. What once felt efficient and unified eventually came to feel bland and overexposed. As tools for discovery and self-expression became available, people began to opt out of the norm. Now, as LLMs flood the public sphere with plausible language, the same dynamic is underway. The search for linguistic alpha has already begun. It lives in the dark forests and cozywebs of the internet—not yet indexed, not yet flattened. And it belongs to those who understand the value of staying hidden—until the right moment to speak.
1. Start with a Structural Analogy
Identify a complex system in one domain (LLMs in language) and map it to a well-understood system in another (index funds in finance). Ensure the analogy is not superficial—seek systemic parallels in behavior, incentives, and emergent dynamics.
2. Establish Historical Precedent
Introduce a real-world, data-backed precedent (baby name diversification) to show how similar pressures (homogenization vs. individuation) have played out under earlier technological regimes (broadcast media → internet).
3. Define Conceptual Currency
Coin or adopt precise terms to ground the analogy:
Linguistic alpha = surplus expressive or conceptual value
Beta language = average, LLM-produced fluency
IPO of language = public release of original work
4. Frame a Two-Tier System
Articulate how the new environment bifurcates into:
A public, LLM-saturated layer (standardized, low-variance)
A private, experimental layer (risky, creative, context-rich)
5. Loop the Analogy Recursively
Describe how alpha becomes beta: how original language gets commodified by models, mirroring market cycles of innovation and assimilation.
6. Subtly Anchor in Existing Theory
Minimalistically reference concepts like the cozyweb and dark forest as locations for hidden, non-indexed value without diluting the main analogy.
7. Maintain Clean, High-Energy Prose
Keep tone neutral but alive—avoid manifesto or personal voice shifts. Let the ideas carry the charge.
8. Terminate on a Conceptual Open Loop
Conclude not with resolution, but with a hint at future discovery. Signal that this pattern (alpha → beta → renewed alpha) is ongoing, and that the edge belongs to those who can stay ahead of the flattening.
Jason Snell:
While the ads played on, I began creating a thought experiment: There’s a $10 difference between the ad and ad-free plans. If Mr. Netflix (he wears a top hat) came to my house and said, “Jason, I’ve got a great deal for you. I’m going to pay you $120 a year, and all you have to do is watch ads while you watch Netflix,” what would I do? When I started thinking about it, I thought it might be an interesting intellectual question. What would I accept in exchange for having Mean Mr. Netflix beam ads into every show I watch?
Toward Bubble Clarity: An American Economic Review article by Jianjun Miao and Pengfei Wang purports to “provide a theory of rational stock price bubbles.” Here, Tomohiro Hirano and Alexis Akira Toda argue that Miao and Wang’s ‘bubble’ talk is inapt. It is more appropriate to interpret their model as one of multiple fundamental equilibria, where all equilibrium asset prices are equal to the present discounted value of dividends. (Miao and Wang are hereby invited to reply in a future issue of this journal.)
Who Perpetrated the Maidan Massacre? Who Overthrew the Ukrainian Government in 2014? Ivan Katchanovski criticizes Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Adrian Karatnycky, particularly his claims about Maidan in his Yale University Press book Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to War with Russia (2024). (Karatnycky is hereby invited to reply in a future issue of this journal.)
“The silence of these writers is dreadfully expressive”—Burke: David Barker has published five critiques of the temperature~growth literature. None of the commented-on authors has replied (all are listed in Sounds of Silence). Here Barker reflects on the fact that none has engaged his body of work. (The invitation to reply remains open.)
Was Karl Marx’s becoming a big deal destined or adventitious? The debate over a provocative Journal of Political Economy article continues: Joseph Francis rejoins and Phillip Magness and Michael Makovi conclude with a second reply.
Mobile payment adoption and online shopping in China: Muzaffarjon Ahunov and Leo Van Hove criticize an article that found that women consumers do more online shopping expenditure if they have adopted mobile payment instruments, but the result for men was not found. Ahunov and Van Hove point out multiple weaknesses. When they redo the analysis, they find completely different results, both in terms of magnitude and where the gender effect is concerned.
Hello, I’m 1930s America, and I Have a Recovery Problem: George Selgin provides erudite consideration of hypotheses about the recovery, and the non-recovery, of Depression-era America in his book False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933-1947 (University of Chicago Press, 2025), says Jason E. Taylor in his review essay.
Classical Liberalism in Argentina, from 1884 to 2023: Following up on their previous article treating the 19th century, Alejandro Gómez and Nicolás Cachanosky now continue the story of classical liberalism in Argentina. They highlight the impact of nationalist education reforms starting in 1908, which undermined liberal foundations and contributed to the emergence of Peronism and institutional instability. They highlight key figures such as Alberto Benegas Lynch, Carlos Sánchez Sañudo, and Álvaro Alsogaray. The piece extends the Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country series.
From Medieval Provincial Law to State Liberalism: Economic Thought in Sweden—that is the English translation of the recent title by the Swedish intellectual historian Lars Magnusson. Here in a review essay, Max Skjönsberg shares key teachings and the progression from mercantilism to a liberal nation-state.
EJW News: “Jason Briggeman, 416 Thank Yous”
Ivan Katchanovski on Maidan and Ukraine 2014
Jeffrey Sachs, An Established Anti-Establishment Economist
Nicolás Cachanosky on Liberalism in Argentina from 1816 to 1884
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China conducted a new launch for a nebulous series of internet technology test satellites early Tuesday.
The post China launches internet technology test satellites with Long March 2D appeared first on SpaceNews.
SpaceX launched a Crew Dragon spacecraft March 31 on a private astronaut mission that is the first crewed spaceflight to pass over the poles.
The post SpaceX launches Fram2 private astronaut mission appeared first on SpaceNews.
Experiencing a hit-and-run incident can be quite traumatic for anyone involved. It’s an emotionally and mentally unsettling experience. Those affected may feel lost and uncertain about where to turn for help, resources, or guidance. Legal issues only add to the stress, making an already difficult situation even more overwhelming. Navigating these challenges can feel daunting without the right support and information to move forward with confidence. This article explores how hit and run lawyers can help you navigate related legal issues.
Being involved in a hit-and-run accident means the driver leaves without giving details or help at the scene of the incident, which can result in consequences on both criminal fronts for those involved in such cases. Understanding and dealing with these matters may be difficult for individuals who are not well-versed in terms and processes. Hit and run lawyers have the knowledge required to interpret legal details effectively. Their grasp of traffic laws and regulations specific to the area can help victims understand their entitlements and available courses of action.
Proof is crucial in determining faults and pinpointing them. The quality of evidence gathered usually determines the outcome. Lawyers are adept at obtaining evidence such as witness testimonies, security camera footage, and accident records. Their expertise guarantees documentation that bolsters their client’s position. By obtaining this data, lawyers improve the chances of a resolution.
Navigating through insurance providers can pose a challenge as they frequently strive to reduce payouts and add layers of complexity to the claims procedure. Adept legal professionals act as go-betweens by engaging in discussions with insurance companies for their clients. Their negotiation expertise plays a role in ensuring reimbursement for medical bills, costs related to property damage, and other expenses. By taking charge of these talks, lawyers help ease the anxiety that commonly accompanies dealings.
Legal issues go beyond dealing with paperwork and discussions. There is often a lot of distress involved in hit-and-run situations that can leave people feeling exposed. Lawyers don’t just bring their knowledge to the table. They also provide comfort during challenging times. Their empathy and compassion make clients feel cared for and bring a sense of comfort. This supportive attitude helps build a trusting bond crucial for effectively handling processes.
Legal procedures come with time constraints that must be adhered to to avoid any risks to a case’s outcome. A lawyer’s responsibility is to ensure that all required paperwork and filings are completed within the specified deadlines. This careful attention helps prevent any issues that could harm the client’s interests. Efficiently handling timelines allows legal professionals to keep cases moving forward smoothly, reduce the likelihood of delays, and increase the likelihood of achieving a favorable outcome.
Restitution and compensation are key elements in settlements frequently pursued by attorneys. They obtain fair redress for their clients’ losses, such as medical bills, lost income due to injury or property damage, and emotional distress caused by the incident’s aftermath. This dedicated advocacy is aimed at ensuring victims receive compensation to aid in their recovery and move forward from the event, highlighting the significance of legal proficiency in addressing such matters.
Effective legal representation relies heavily on communication as a foundation stone for building trust between attorneys and clients. Attorneys prioritize keeping their clients in the loop regarding any updates on their cases and maintaining transparency every step of the way. Providing updates and explaining legal proceedings to clients enables them to make well-informed decisions. This open communication channel is not nurtured. It also strengthens the bond between attorney and client.
Ultimately, lawyers work to fight for justice for victims of hit-and-run incidents. Their focus on ensuring fairness and holding people accountable highlights their dedication to their clients. Lawyers help victims find closure and progress in their lives by seeking justice. This support goes beyond cases, raising awareness and encouraging responsibility on a larger scale.
Dealing with the complications that arise after a hit-and-run can feel overwhelming at a glance; however, lawyers who specialize in this area offer crucial assistance with their knowledge and caring approach to the situation. From collecting evidence to fighting for fairness in court, these experts lead people through each stage of the ordeal. Hiring a capable attorney can greatly impact the outcome by ensuring a proper and equitable resolution, allowing victims to move forward confidently and begin anew.
The post How a Hit-and-Run Lawyer Can Help You Navigate Legal Challenges appeared first on DCReport.org.
Canada’s MDA Space announced plans April 1 to buy Israeli satellite chipmaker SatixFy in a $269 million deal to further vertically integrate its constellation manufacturing capabilities.
The post MDA Space buys SatixFy to boost constellation production appeared first on SpaceNews.
Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios.The problem of flares in red dwarf planetary systems is stark. With their habitable zones relatively near to the star, planets that might support life are exposed to huge outbursts of particles and radiation that can strip their atmospheres. We can see that in nearby M-dwarfs like Proxima Centauri, which is extremely active not only in visible light but also in radio and millimeter wavelengths. New work at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) digs into the millimeter-wavelength activity. The results do nothing to ease the concern that systems like this may be barren of life.
Small M-dwarf stars are a problem because they operate through convection as energy from fusion at the core is transferred to the surface. A convective structure is one in which hot material from below moves constantly upward, a process that can be likened to what we see in a boiling cauldron of water. Larger stars like the Sun show a mix of radiative transfer – protons being absorbed and reabsorbed as they make their way to the surface – and convection. That enhances M-dwarf flare activity as their plasma is twisted and rotated, producing magnetic fields that snap open only to reconnect. Powerful flares and outbursts of particles are the result.
For a world in an otherwise habitable region around the star, that spells danger. Meredith MacGregor (Johns Hopkins University), who worked with Kiana Burton on the flaring at Proxima Centauri, explains:
“Our Sun’s activity doesn’t remove Earth’s atmosphere and instead causes beautiful auroras, because we have a thick atmosphere and a strong magnetic field to protect our planet. But Proxima Centauri’s flares are much more powerful, and we know it has rocky planets in the habitable zone. What are these flares doing to their atmospheres? Is there such a large flux of radiation and particles that the atmosphere is getting chemically modified, or perhaps completely eroded?”
Image: Artist’s concept of a stellar flare from Proxima Centauri. Credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/S. Dagnello.
MacGregor and Burton have been working on what they describe as the first multi-wavelength study using millimeter observations to probe into the physics of these flares. At their disposal are 50 hours of ALMA observations, covering some 463 flare events at energies between 1024 to 1027 erg. Most of these flares end quickly, ranging in duration from 3 to 16 seconds. The operative term in the study is flare frequency distribution (FFD), which maps the number of flares against energy levels. A power law function as at optical wavelengths would mean that lower-energy flares would be expected to occur more frequently than flares of higher energy, but the team found many flares within each energy range because of the high flare activity at Proxima.
Adds MacGregor:
“The millimeter flaring seems to be much more frequent–it’s a different power law than we see at the optical wavelengths. So if we only look in optical wavelengths, we’re missing critical information. ALMA is the only millimeter interferometer sensitive enough for these measurements.”
The point is significant, and I want to dig into the paper on this:
Proxima Cen has been observed frequently at optical wavelengths, with a much shallower FFD power-law index of 1.88 ± 0.06. This significant difference could indicate a disconnect between sources of optical and millimeter emission during flares. Since optical observations of stellar flares are more readily available and often used to infer the flaring flux at other wavelengths, this result underlines the need for further multiwavelength campaigns to constrain scaling relations. In particular, the higher rate of millimeter flares compared to optical flares and the tight correlation between FUV and millimeter emission observed by M. A. MacGregor et al. (2021) may suggest that the extreme-UV radiation environment of Proxima b due to small flares is also higher than predicted from the optical flare rate.
So the flare activity at Proxima Centauri is more complicated and perhaps more dangerous than we thought. As we learn more about flaring at this star, we have to hope that Proxima Centauri b has a strong magnetic field that can mitigate the effects of this incoming stream of energy and particles. The prospect of an atmosphere being stripped of ozone and water, for example, makes modification or erosion of its gases a strong possibility. Instruments like the Square Kilometer Array may one day be capable of detecting the interactions between such a magnetic field and the star’s stellar wind. But for now, we can only wait for further data.
The paper is Burton et al., “The Proxima Centauri Campaign — First Constraints On Millimeter Flare Rates from ALMA,” Astrophysical Journal Vol 982, Number 1 (17 March 2025), 43. Preprint / Abstract.
Three Yale University professors steeped in the history and techniques of authoritarianism are leaving the United States for new teaching positions at the University of Toronto. They won’t be the last.
As the journalist Donald Trump has said he hates more than any other, I understand perfectly the reasons why these fellow professors, both prominent Trump critics, made their decisions to flee America.
I won’t be joining them, but I also won’t criticize their choices.
The only reasonable conclusion you can come to is that Donald is our de facto dictator, his minions busy consolidating power and removing agents of accountability.
Some of the people I know and trust most in journalism and law have called me this year, fearing for my safety. They’ve all recommended that I leave the country for my own safety and for the benefit of people who follow my work.
‘You need to go,” one long-time and very sober-minded friend said bluntly, noting that I have a dual citizenship daughter in Ontario and qualify on other grounds to emigrate to Canada. “You can do more from there.”
There is very good reason for everyone—including each of you and those you love— to be afraid of wrongful arrest and of being held without access to a court if Trump suspends the Constitutional privilege of habeas corpus, as he has mused about doing and just as Abraham Lincoln did in 1863 during the Civil War.
And don’t think that should you be grabbed off the streets by “mistake” that you will be set free.
That’s precisely what happened to Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional soccer player and coach from Venezuela. Barrios, 36, followed every rule to get asylum in the United States. He had legally protected status as a resident alien when the Trump administration deported him because of tattoos.
Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers believed those tattoos showed gang membership but that his family, lawyer, and experts on the issue say show nothing of the sort. One simply identifies Barrios as a loyal fan of Real Madrid, a Spanish soccer team. Another says “Dios,” which you would think ICE agents know means “god” in Spanish.
The administration has now told a judge it made a mistake. But the rest of the response is terrifying.
Oops, sorry but there’s nothing we can do to correct that mistake, the Trump administration told a federal judge. We shall see as more court hearings loom, but there is plenty the Trump agents could do starting with just asking for El Salvador to let them pick ups Barrios and restore him to the United States..
As the three Yale professors and others who have studied authoritarianism can tell you, correcting mistakes like this just undermines the do-as-we-say-or-else of power mongers. They will fight hard to ensure injustices continue because that enhances their lawless authority.
Timothy Snyder is author of the slim and informative volumes called On Tyranny and On Freedom.
Jason Stanley, who said he wants his children to grow up in a free country not a fascistic America, wrote How Fascism Works, a similarly compelling book.
Marci Shore‘s scholarship is about Eastern Europe, a region with a deep history of authoritarian rulers.
As for me, I suspect I am much less prominent in Trump’s addled mind than when I was in his campaign and first term when I wrote three books exposing everything form his years of deep entanglement and extraordinary favors for his business associate and pal Joseph Weichselbaum, a major league cocaine and marijuana smuggler, to his plying children as young as 12 with liquor, limousines, and hotel suites because they had money to gamble in his supposedly highly regulated Atlantic City casinos.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been in a dangerous situation, especially when I was exposing the brutality, criminal, activity, and worldwide, political spying operation of the LAPD.
A friendly senior officer, very much on the QT, warned me that my life could be in grave danger. I told him I had to do what I had to do, but I also wrote a 31-page memo and placed copies of it in multiple places in case I turned out to be dead wrong.
I’m not leaving. It’s my country and I will defend our Constitution and the liberties of the people until my last breath.
And I say that having warned that down the road, whether it’s a few weeks away or decades away, all dictatorships lead to firing squads.
I’m also not going to criticize those who make a different decision.
I’ve had a long time to ponder a Trump dictatorship. I wrote about Donald becoming president in 1988 and again in 1992. knowing what an utterly dishonest, appallingly ignorant, and ruthless white-collar criminal Donald Trump is.
I also appreciate his extraordinary skill as a con artist. Just look how far his lies and manipulations have gotten him.
I worried within months of meeting him that he just might get to the White House and that if he did, it would be the end of the greatest civic experiment in human history — exactly the kind of impassioned popular error the Framers fretted about as they drafted our Constitution and the reason they made change possible, difficult and, especially, slow.
Since 2015, I’ve been warning people that Donald is a wannabe dictator, a man with a well-documented history of consorting with and doing favors for heavyweight criminals. His excuse that he had no choice being in New York City real estate is bunk, as I’ve shown in fine detail over the years. He has plenty of criminal pals with no connection to the New York real estate industry.
On February 15 he declared that so long as he thinks he is saving our country he can break no law. Days later the Trump White House tripled down on this notion, sending out images of Trump wearing a real crown with the caption “long live the king.”
Unfortunately, our politics reporters and pundits reacted to these declarations with anything but bold descriptions of the facts. Instead, we got namby-pamby coverage along the lines of “what can Trump possibly mean?”
One of the most serious problems in America right now is all the journalists (both news and opinion) and academics who cannot bring themselves to recognize the obvious. Similarly, Congress is infected with quisling Republicans who bow down to Herr Trump and a large number of Democrats who think they can appease him.
The awful truth is that Donald believes he is above the law, has proclaimed in writing that he is above the law, and acts as if he is above the law, which is the very essence of a dictatorship. He’s always thought this way.
Labels don’t matter. The focus by some journalists and academics on weather the Trump administration is “fascist” misses the point and is counterproductive.
I’ve spent my whole career, back to high school when I got my first journalism job in 1966, reporting what politicians do, not just what they say. That’s been the theme of DCReport from the start.
Unfortunately, far too many of my peers in national journalism focus on what politicians say, and far too little on their actions, conduct, and policies.
Pay attention to what Donald and his acolytes are doing – banning more than 250 words, censoring tens of thousands of Internet pages that show anyone but white males, grabbing people off the street over matters as trivial as a college newspaper opinion column, and taking the side of the murderous modern czar in the Kremlin against democracy and liberty, the values our country had stood for from the beginning.
Now the leader of Canada says the U.S. is no longer its ally. Quite right, but if you missed that news its not surprising. It got little play here.
From this and much more, the only reasonable conclusion you can come to is that Donald is our de facto dictator, his minions busy consolidating power, instilling fear, and removing agents of accountability. Columbia University bowed down as did at least two big law firms and Disney, a war-profiteering company in World War II, its conduct contrasting sharply with the other Hollywood studios.)
It took 40 years for Rome to transition from a republic to a dictatorship. Hitler destroyed German democracy in 53 days. It only took Donald Trump 26 days to become our dictator.
Days ago he asserted in an executive order that he will set the rules for the 2026 and later elections. That he lacks authority to control the elections is immaterial. So long as he continues to run rough shod over statutory law, case law, regulations, and his Supreme Court appointees prove their fealty to him he can do as he chooses.
He’s already taking the first step to seizing control of the military, removing valorous and extraordinarily competent generals and admirals, though he has not yet filled all of their positions. Just wait. those posts will go to loyalist officers promoted out of turn.
Replacing patriotic military commanders with toadies is one of the most classic signs of an authoritarian takeover. Watch top military promotions closely, very closely.
“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.
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Within all the morning and at the office. At noon my wife and I (having paid our maid Nell her whole wages, who has been with me half a year, and now goes away for altogether) to the Wardrobe, where my Lady and company had almost dined. We sat down and dined. Here was Mr. Herbert, son to Sir Charles Herbert, that lately came with letters from my Lord Sandwich to the King. After some discourse we remembered one another to have been together at the tavern when Mr. Fanshaw took his leave of me at his going to Portugall with Sir Richard.
After dinner he and I and the two young ladies and my wife to the playhouse, the Opera, and saw “The Mayde in the Mill,” a pretty good play. In the middle of the play my Lady Paulina, who had taken physique this morning, had need to go forth, and so I took the poor lady out and carried her to the Grange, and there sent the maid of the house into a room to her, and she did what she had a mind to, and so back again to the play; and that being done, in their coach I took them to Islington, and then, after a walk in the fields, I took them to the great cheese-cake house and entertained them, and so home, and after an hour’s stay with my Lady, their coach carried us home, and so weary to bed.
March sales were proof that U.S. consumers are very much paying attention to tariffs, as demand on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis surged to 17.8 million units, highest for any month in nearly four years, and far above January-February’s combined total of 15.8 million. Buyers flocking to dealer lots to beat potential price increases, combined with some pre-tariff push by automakers raising deliveries to fleet customers lifted raw volume to over a 4-year high, not to mention a rare double-digit year-over-year gain. Regardless of any coming impacts from tariffs, March's booming results will cause lower volume in the second quarter due to the additional drain to dealer inventory that, based on industry norms, was already lean prior to the month.
Click on graph for larger image. 
I keep telling young musicians to see the new Bob Dylan biopic. But this has nothing to do with nostalgia.
And it’s not for the songs either (which are great). Or for the acting (which is fine). And not even for the filmmaking (which is solid).
I tell them to see the movie as a powerful reminder that songs are change agents in human life. Music is transformative. It shakes people up.
And people want to be shaken. The audience is hungry for this catalytic force—and the Dylan movie shows that repeatedly.
Dylan is like an Old Testament prophet in this film. Much like he was in real life.
Can’t you just imagine Moses staring down Pharaoh—then picking up his guitar and singing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Seven plagues are a-comin’, and there’ll be song for each.
Some people called it protest music, back in the 1960s. Or political music. Even the words rock and roll are appropriate—because that’s what he did to everyone around him.
Now here’s the best part of the story: This disruptive life-changing music is still getting played today.
And it’s still feared by the system.
But you won’t read about this in Rolling Stone (although you should). And you certainly won’t hear about it on TikTok or Spotify. But if you pay attention to real songs in the real world, you can see that they still shake up entire nations.
That’s why I share periodic updates on political and protest music. (You can find previous accounts here and here and here).
So check below for all the unruly music news ignored by the music media.
Minister of Culture Musa Dadayev announced the decision to limit all musical, vocal and choreographic compositions to a tempo ranging from 80 to 116 beats per minute (BPM) at a meeting Friday….The ban will mean that many songs in musical styles such as pop and techno will be banned.
According to the Associated Press:
Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said Monday she has a plan to reduce the popularity of “narco corridos,” a musical genre often linked to drug cartel violence.
Sheinbaum vowed to launch a campaign to promote other, less violent musical styles that aren’t as linked to drug traffickers in an effort to stop glorifying them.
The campaign includes “a competition among corrido bands that have some other kind of lyrics, that glorify other behaviors, other cultural visions.”
My favorite desert blues band of the 21st century is Tinariwen, from Mali. But that ensemble (like many others in Mali) has suffered from unrest in the region.
But the latest blow was unexpected. Iyad ag Ghali, who wrote lyrics for the band, now has a new job—as al Qaeda warlord in West Africa.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
Ag Ghali went on to become the leader of one of the most dangerous al Qaeda franchises in the world, banning music in a swath of West Africa the size of Montana and commanding an army of extremists responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Ag Ghali’s gunmen even ambushed Tinariwen band members and abducted the guitar player.
I’ve met other musicians who underwent unusual career changes. I even did it myself. But nothing like this.
A rail workers’ union in Australia planned to go on strike—but delayed its move because it feared upsetting grunge rock fans.
Sydney trains will run on Thursday….Early on Wednesday morning Transport for NSW said it had agreed with the union to run services on Thursday, a relief for Pearl Jam concertgoers who would have had to find alternative transport.
This may be the first time that Pearl Jam stopped an actual (traffic) jam.
Is it okay to enjoy sugar plum fairies and an anthropomorphic nutcracker? Well, that depends on government policy
According to the New York Times:
Lithuania, an unwavering supporter of Ukraine in the war waged by Russia, set aside Tchaikovsky and the holiday favorite two years ago after declaring a “mental quarantine” from Russian culture…
Theatergoers complained—and politicians listened. When a new culture minister took over, he told the press that he liked listening to Tchaikovsky.
Youn Sung-ho—who performs under the name NewJeansNim—performs Buddhist chants set to modern dance grooves. The audience loves it, but he has stirred up controversy in Malaysia, Singapore, and elsewhere.
In Singapore, the Singapore Buddhist Federation (SBF) called for a ban on his performances, stating that Youn is “not a monk”. While NewJeansNim performed in Malaysia on 3 May 2024, his remaining performance a day before Vesak Day was cancelled by a nightclub in Kuala Lumpur, citing concerns about “social harmony”….
Singaporean authorities subsequently issued an advisory that his performances must not include any religious elements and references. Singapore’s Minister of Home Affairs and Law K. Shanmugam spoke out about the event, calling it “offensive to [the local] Buddhist community.”
Here’s a video, so you can judge for yourself:
According to Bring Me the News:
St. Paul residents in the Midway neighborhood have been offering assurances to one another that they did, in fact, also hear the music. An eerie mystery has unfolded in the overnight hours Tuesday into Wednesday and again Wednesday into Thursday, with a recording of “Flower Duet” from the tragic opera Lakmé and other famous classical tunes blasting from...somewhere.
Three teenage girls wanted to perform a traditional Apache dance. It didn’t go well.
“Their Arizona school expelled two of them, and let the third off with a warning,” according to The Guardian, “citing their attendance as a violation of school policy and grounds for expulsion.”
The authorities claimed that the dance represented a “satanic ritual.”
Branch 1 of Isfahan Revolutionary Court... sentenced Salehi to death on the charge of corruption on Earth," the singer's lawyer Amir Raisian said, quoted by the reformist Shargh newspaper….
Another singer, Mehdi Yarrahi, who supported the protest movement and criticized the mandatory dress rules for women was sentenced to a total of two years and eight months in prison.
During his lifetime, Shostakovich was often caught up in political crossfire. And it’s still happening today.
Vladimir Putin is now using the composer’s music for propaganda purposes. In a March 25 meeting with the Council for Culture and the Arts, Putin declared that music, movies, and books are allies of his regime—much like “the Army” and “the Navy.”
It's enough to watch films about the war, and it will be obvious that this is the case. And many other types of art. Isn't there music? It is enough to recall Shostakovich and his symphony in besieged Leningrad.
This is not the first time Putin has praised Shostakovich as symbol of Russian unity, and probably won’t be the last.
Afghanistan’s leaders are worried about women singing in public.
A woman’s voice is deemed intimate and so should not be heard singing, reciting, or reading aloud in public….
“This Islamic law will be of great help in the promotion of virtue and the elimination of vice,” said ministry spokesman Maulvi Abdul Ghafar Farooq on Thursday, of the new laws.
The protest anthem "Glory to Hong Kong" is prohibited in Hong Kong. But Apple and Spotify have removed it from their platforms in other countries.
The song calls for freedom and democracy rather than independence, but was nonetheless deemed in breach of the law due to its "separatist" intent….
A survey of Spotify and Apple Music in Taiwan, the U.K. and Canada yielded no results for the original version of the song…..
The song's disappearance comes after YouTube blocked access to dozens of videos containing the song to viewers in the city in May, following a court injunction that said it could be used as a "weapon" to bring down the government.
It currently has 3,500 participants. You can dig the sweet tunes here.
That’s all for now. I plan to share more surveys of this sort in the future.
When my wife received a cancer diagnosis recently, I did what any well-connected journalist+husband would do. I called in every favor possible to try and use my contacts’ status and resources to my advantage. (It was ethically dodgy but not Crime and Punishment levels of dodgy or at least that’s how I rationalized the situation.)
My first call – naturally – went to Bryan Johnson. Not because I thought olive oil would come to the rescue but because Johnson had been through this before and helped someone deal with a serious cancer diagnosis and treat it. He also must know more doctors and scientists than anyone really should. And he’s obsessive about things, and I wanted obsessive.
Johnson urged me to hire a researcher or two or three from Kolabtree. That research service helps connect you with scientists and doctors who will head into medical journals and other resources to find studies related to your quest and then synthesize the information. The better you sculpt your query, the better the results, or so I found.
In my wife’s case, the cancer in question was adenoid cystic carcinoma (ACC) of the breast. It’s very, very rare, and this was a problem. There are plenty of studies about ACC of the breast, but the number of patients being analyzed runs thin. The data you’re getting back on treatment options and outcomes blows.
Thank you for reading The Cross Section, and if you find my work valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. Thanks.
Benito Mussolini did not in fact make the trains run on time; the idea that he did was a bit of mythmaking from the very early days of his fascist regime. It’s a powerful notion, so much so that it persists to this day in the two opposite ways that saying is repeated. When someone says “Mussolini made the trains run on time,” sometimes it’s meant sarcastically, as in “Don’t excuse a regime’s malevolence by citing its competence.” If they say it seriously, it means “You gotta hand it to them…” Both rely on the same foundation: If a government can deliver things people need — critical services, some measure of prosperity — they’ll tolerate all manner of repression.
That may be more or less true in different places at different times. But as Donald Trump hurtles the American economy toward recession and Elon Musk rips apart every piece of the federal government he can get his clammy little hands on, we are now experiencing the worst of both worlds: an administration of both limitless malevolence and stunning incompetence.
Strange as it is to remember now, the economy during the first three years of Trump’s first term wasn’t the greatest in world history as he often says (or even the greatest in American history), but on the whole it was pretty good. Inflation and unemployment were low, income growth was steady if unspectacular, and though Trump did nothing to address the deeply rooted problems that he exploited to win office — inequality, deindustrialization, the precarity of a system where workers have almost no power — he didn’t do too much to screw up what was working, either. At the time this appeared politically shrewd, that unlike some of the ideologues in his party, Trump understood what was too dangerous to mess with (e.g. Social Security and Medicare) and steered clear, much to the disappointment of people like Paul Ryan who were hoping to crush the welfare state.
That isn’t to say many bad things didn’t happen, but it’s a reminder that a different kind of Trump administration from what we’re seeing today would have been possible. But it now appears that everything that didn’t go wrong in Trump I was the result not of intentional and savvy neglect, but of a president and an administration that had not fully self-actualized.
There have been incompetent presidents before, but I’m not sure we’ve ever seen this degree of shambolic chaos, a combination of 1) the dumbest, least qualified people, with 2) the worst objectives, and 3) the most sweeping ambition.
Yet every day they tell us they are engaged in a glorious project of “reform” to at last make the federal government “efficient.” So ask yourself this: What part of the government is working better now than it was three months ago?
As far as I can tell, there is not a single aspect of the federal government that is operating more efficiently in this administration. Conservatives are happy that the government is simply no longer doing certain things — providing foreign aid, protecting consumers, conducting medical research — but are there any areas where those conservatives want the government to perform a particular function and could argue that function is being performed with greater effectiveness than it was?
Apart from deterring immigration — a complicated outcome produced by a great many factors — I can’t think of any. Everywhere you look, on the other hand, there are stories of agencies in chaos, services degraded, and systems that may have been too slow before now not operating at all. The trains are most definitely not running on time.
It’s almost enough to make you pine for the days of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, who may have been evil, but at least they knew how to keep the government running. As for Trump himself, he seems to have gotten high on his own economic supply, convinced that each day’s stock market drop or plunge in consumer confidence are only the birth pangs of the magnificent America to come, one that he will be duly rewarded for creating.
But as he prepares the latest tariff announcement after a series of stops and starts, his own economic advisers seem to have no idea what the policy will actually entail. “I can't give you any forward-looking guidance on what's going to happen this week,” said National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, whom you’d think would know. “The President has got a lot of analysis before him, and he's going to make the right choice.” Peter Navarro (whom Trump hired in 2016 because he was pretty much the only trained economist in America who shared Trump’s belief in the magical powers of tariffs) said the new tariffs could be bring in as much as $600 billion per year, which as the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein pointed out “would almost certainly represent the largest peacetime tax hike in modern U.S. history.”
That number is an absurd exaggeration, but others in the administration are bracing the public for a hike in prices. “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” says Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Which is true enough; people might tolerate higher prices if they also came with broader improvements in their lives, like secure health coverage and high-wage jobs. But what if what we get along with the higher prices is a recession, more unemployment, less secure health care, and a government that has rendered itself incapable of solving problems for anyone but those who are willing to open up their wallets for Trump?
Because that’s exactly what we’re heading for. Along with the general decline in services, the administration is already looking to make American life crappier in a hundred ways, from crushing collective bargaining to letting banks charge you more for overdrafts to making your air and water dirtier to leaving you to fend for yourself in a disaster to letting financial scammers know they can do as they please.
I could go on, of course; the list of harms is long and growing by the day. But here’s the thing: Even if you are either broadly supportive of GOP policy goals or just indifferent to them, you're still going to wind up with a government that doesn't work as well and a country where things are just worse. And while it’s not crazy to argue that in certain circumstances dictatorship can be efficient — just look at how quickly China builds train lines and power plants when it wants to — the people who put Trump in office won’t get anything like that, even if they’re pleased to see him hurting people they hate.
The political silver lining is that the now-likely economic downturn and the more slow-moving degradation of so many aspects of ordinary life will produce the same disgruntlement that led to Trump being elected in 2016, then led to him being kicked out in 2020, then led him back to office in 2024. Unhappy voters turned to Trump, and unhappy voters will turn away from him again. If only they could learn the lesson.
Links for you. Science:
How To Build A Thousand-Year-Old Tree
Scientists Uncover Lyme Disease’s Hidden Achilles’ Heel – And How to Exploit It
Politicizing Science: The National Institutes for Health. A merit-based and competitive process will be politicized – or eliminated
Vaccines save lives. Leaders must champion them
Bird flu continues spread as Trump’s pandemic experts are MIA. Vacancies in a key office of pandemic preparedness raise concern.
‘This is a crisis’: A southern Utah city is set to build a power station on top of a premier dinosaur fossil site
Kanzi the Bonobo, Who Learned Language and Made Stone Tools, Dies at Age 44
Other:
I helped build a government AI system. DOGE fired me, rolled the AI out to the whole agency, and implied the AI can do my job and the jobs of the others they’ve fired. It can’t. But, what DOGE accidentally revealed about themselves in the process is fascinating. (must-read)
AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality
DOGE Descends on the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The entire institute’s staff was there, many in black, to greet DOGE employees and their new acting head, Keith Sonderling.
‘We Don’t Want an AI Demo, We Want Answers’: Federal Workers Grill Trump Appointee During All-Hands. Leaked chats obtained by WIRED detail plans for the General Services Administration—and the staff’s angry response.
Donald Trump Declares April 2 “Tax Day”
The Real Goal of Trump’s War on Universities. It isn’t about stopping antisemitism. It’s about power. (“No Republican alive has felt the kind of intoxicating surge of power they are experiencing right now, not because of the size of their 2024 electoral victory but because they have collectively decided that with sufficient aggression and creativity, they can go after just about every individual or institution that ever pissed them off.”)
I’m an American software developer and the “broligarchs” don’t speak for me
Joe Rogan’s Infatuation With Elon Musk Is Angering His Fans
The Big Secret About Medicaid: It’s a Middle-Class Benefit
“They basically want to kill me”: GOP efforts to turn Musk into a MAGA martyr are backfiring
I Teach Jewish Studies. There’s a Bitter Irony to What the Trump Administration Is Asking of My Campus.
U.S. limits Canadian access to iconic Stanstead, Que., border-straddling library, officials say
How Three Alleged Tesla Vandals Got Caught
Paul Weiss’s Shameful Surrender Makes Every Lawyer There Complicit In Trumpian Constitutional Desecration
Chellie Pingree Calls On Leland Dudek To Resign From Social Security Role
Elon Musk’s extensive ties to China, explained. His business empire needs the Chinese government — and that could warp American policy.
Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face
Why it matters that Trump is deleting government data
The Little Bits of Destruction
A Reckoning Is Coming For My Political Party. Chuck Schumer may have felt he was being prudent. But his voters saw a betrayal.
A Piece of Glass Thinner Than a Credit Card Could Solve America’s $25 Billion Energy Problem
Should AGI-preppers embrace DOGE?
Chuck Schumer Should Resign to Spend More Time With His Imaginary Friends
Trump voters wanted to harm other people—or at best didn’t care
Schumer and the Democrats still take their own for granted
‘Dogequest’ Site Claims to Dox Tesla Owners Across the U.S.
How Many People Live Paycheck to Paycheck?
We’re planning to release a very capable open language model in the coming months, our first since GPT-2. [...]
As models improve, there is more and more demand to run them everywhere. Through conversations with startups and developers, it became clear how important it was to be able to support a spectrum of needs, such as custom fine-tuning for specialized tasks, more tunable latency, running on-prem, or deployments requiring full data control.
— Brad Lightcap, COO, OpenAI
Tags: openai, llms, ai, generative-ai
I am supposedly on vacation in an undisclosed location, and for today I want to act like it — especially given that I’ll probably be spending a lot of time later this week reacting to the onset of full-on trade war. So this will be a relatively casual post.
Still, I thought it might be worth saying a bit more about why people like Maury Obstfeld, Jared Bernstein and yours truly are skeptical about the widespread narrative that the dollar’s role as a reserve currency is responsible for U.S. deindustrialization.
It’s not an argument on principle. U.S. trade deficits are surely affected by other countries’ policies, and the size of our manufacturing sector is affected by the size of our trade deficit. It is, instead, a numbers issue. Any way I cut it, the dollar’s reserve currency status is only part of the explanation of U.S. trade deficits. Even more important, trade deficits account for only a small fraction of the decline in manufacturing as a share of our economy.
On the first point: Last year China ran roughly a $1 trillion trade surplus, while the United States ran a roughly equal size trade deficit. So it may seem natural to assume that the first caused the second. But America is only about 40 percent of world GDP ex China, so why are we the sole counterpart to China’s surplus?
Many people assert that the answer is the dollar’s role as the preeminent reserve currency. But as I tried to argue, and Obstfeld explains with much more detail, this story doesn’t hold up when you look at it closely. To explain U.S. trade deficits we need to focus on reasons other than the dollar’s role, such as high productivity growth and relatively favorable demography, that foreigners invest in America.
Beyond that, how central are trade deficits to the relative decline of manufacturing? Most missives about trade and deindustrialization contain some version of this chart, showing the decline in manufacturing as a percentage of total employment:
These missives then simply take it for granted that trade deficits must be responsible for the big decline in this percentage.
But trade deficits are, in fact, responsible for only a fairly small fraction of the long-run decline in the manufacturing share.
How do we know this? Two different ways: international comparisons and bottom-up number-crunching.
International comparisons: In terms of trade, Germany is the anti-America. As we have moved into trade deficit, Germany has moved into massive trade surplus. In fact, Germany’s surpluses are much larger as a share of its own GDP than China’s. Yet Germany has also seen a huge long-term decline in the manufacturing share of employment:
Source: FRED
Data note: FRED offers two different series here, one that only runs up to 2012, another that starts in 2005. I’ve overlapped them, so you can see that they seem consistent.
If Germany’s huge trade surpluses haven’t been enough to avoid a big shift away from manufacturing, even ending U.S. trade deficits (which Trump’s tariffs won’t achieve) wouldn’t make us a manufacturing-centric economy again.
Bottom-up number-crunching: Last year the U.S. ran a manufactures trade deficit of around 4 percent of GDP. Suppose we assume that this deficit subtracted an equal amount from spending on U.S. manufactured goods. In that case what would happen if we somehow eliminated that deficit?
Well, it would raise the share of manufacturing in GDP — currently 10 percent — by less than 4 percentage points, because manufacturing firms buy a lot of services. A rough estimate is that manufacturing value-added would rise by around 60 percent of the change in sales, or 2.5 percentage points, implying that the manufacturing sector would be around a quarter larger than it is.
But look at my first chart above. Manufacturing as a share of employment has fallen about 17 points since 1970. Complete elimination of the trade deficit would undo only around 2.5 points of that decline. So even if tariffs “worked,” which they won’t, they would fall far short of restoring manufacturing to its former glory.
I won’t do the full analysis right now, since as I said I’m supposed to be on vacation, but the difference between the German and U.S. shares of manufacturing in employment is roughly consistent with this calculation.
The fact is that the world needs fewer manufacturing workers than it used to, just as it no longer needs a lot of farmers, and even countries that run big surpluses in manufacturing trade can’t buck that trend. This doesn’t mean that we should abandon efforts to promote manufacturing where that makes sense. But we should do so with a realistic appreciation of the fact that we are going to be mainly a service economy no matter what, and that if we really want to help workers we have to make all jobs better, not dream of a return to an old-time economy.
MUSICAL CODA
Half Stack Data Science: Programming with AI, with Simon Willison
I participated in this wide-ranging 50 minute conversation with David Asboth and Shaun McGirr. Topics we covered included applications of LLMs to data journalism, the challenges of building an intuition for how best to use these tool given their "jagged frontier" of capabilities, how LLMs impact learning to program and how local models are starting to get genuinely useful now.At 27:47:
If you're a new programmer, my optimistic version is that there has never been a better time to learn to program, because it shaves down the learning curve so much. When you're learning to program and you miss a semicolon and you bang your head against the computer for four hours [...] if you're unlucky you quit programming for good because it was so frustrating. [...]
I've always been a project-oriented learner; I can learn things by building something, and now the friction involved in building something has gone down so much [...] So I think especially if you're an autodidact, if you're somebody who likes teaching yourself things, these are a gift from heaven. You get a weird teaching assistant that knows loads of stuff and occasionally makes weird mistakes and believes in bizarre conspiracy theories, but you have 24 hour access to that assistant.
If you're somebody who prefers structured learning in classrooms, I think the benefits are going to take a lot longer to get to you because we don't know how to use these things in classrooms yet. [...]
If you want to strike out on your own, this is an amazing tool if you learn how to learn with it. So you've got to learn the limits of what it can do, and you've got to be disciplined enough to make sure you're not outsourcing the bits you need to learn to the machines.
Tags: podcasts, generative-ai, podcast-appearances, ai, llms, data-journalism
The feature is described as "in beta" and comes with this very realistic warning:
Unlike unit tests, evals are an emerging art/science; anyone who claims to know for sure exactly how your evals should be defined can safely be ignored.
This code example from their documentation illustrates the relationship between the two key nouns - Cases and Datasets:
from pydantic_evals import Case, Dataset case1 = Case( name="simple_case", inputs="What is the capital of France?", expected_output="Paris", metadata={"difficulty": "easy"}, ) dataset = Dataset(cases=[case1])
The library also supports custom evaluators, including LLM-as-a-judge:
Case( name="vegetarian_recipe", inputs=CustomerOrder( dish_name="Spaghetti Bolognese", dietary_restriction="vegetarian" ), expected_output=None, metadata={"focus": "vegetarian"}, evaluators=( LLMJudge( rubric="Recipe should not contain meat or animal products", ), ), )
Cases and datasets can also be serialized to YAML.
My first impressions are that this looks like a solid implementation of a sensible design. I'm looking forward to trying it out against a real project.
Via @samuel_colvin
Click on graph for larger image.Reflecting both the tariff news and a decline in our Q1 GDP tracking estimate to just 0.2%, we have also lowered our 2025 GDP growth forecast by 0.5pp to 1.0% on a Q4/Q4 basis (and by 0.4pp to 1.5% on an annual average basis).And - because of the rhetoric of the Trump administration (suggesting Canada should be the 51st state and the VP saying Denmark isn't a good ally (completely false and offensive) - there will be less international tourism to the US, and there is a growing international boycott of US goods.
1. Inside arXiv.
2. Focal dystonia.
3. Jason Furman goes all Don Boudreaux (NYT).
4. Nabeel podcast with Jackson Dahl, with transcript. And also from Nabeel, people preferred the AI translation.
5. George Borjas now at the CEA, click on staff.
6. Which restaurants have the most attractive diners?
7. The funeral Claude Shannon planned for himself.
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Construction spending during February 2025 was estimated at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $2,195.8 billion, 0.7 percent above the revised January estimate of $2,179.9 billion. The February figure is 2.9 percent above the February 2024 estimate of $2,133.8 billion.Both private and public spending increased:
emphasis added
Spending on private construction was at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $1,686.4 billion, 0.9 percent above the revised January estimate of $1,671.8 billion. ...
In February, the estimated seasonally adjusted annual rate of public construction spending was $509.3 billion, 0.2 percent above the revised January estimate of $508.1 billion.
Click on graph for larger image.
The second graph shows the year-over-year change in construction spending.I was lucky enough to be a talking mouth in this podcast about the Lost Food of Soho. It's an absolutely lovely thing. What a listen. I talk about the New Piccadilly quite a lot and evince sympathies for clearly evil landlords.
From TPM Reader JF …
Good post on the indefensible media coverage of the Third Term shiny object being offered up by the President (see also, invading Greenland, etc.)
There is an additional point worth emphasizing. The reason Donald Trump is talking about this third term ridiculousness is very plain. Second-term American presidents are lame ducks. That’s just how it is. And if they are unpopular lame ducks, after awhile their allies may start to look past them toward the future. Trump is undoubtedly terrified of this—of becoming irrelevant before his term even ends, particularly once the race to succeed him heats up. The way for him to keep the specter of lame-duckishness at bay is to tease the idea that just maybe, who knows, he just sorta might run for a third term. That’s the play, and the media is being played.
Finally, I think this prospect of being a lame duck is much harder for Trump that it is for a “normal” politician because in general, politicians care about their party or movement and they anoint successors (often their VP) to carry the banner after them. A two-term president’s success and failure after the second term is partly measured by whether their successor is elected too. But is Donald Trump capable mentally and emotionally of anointing a successor and imagining life after Trump? Who are we kidding?
A quick update on the story about computer science Professor Xiaofeng Wang and Indiana University. A local NPR affiliate published what purports to be the letter IU Provost Rahul Shrivastav wrote to Wang firing him last Friday.
The relevant portion of the letter goes as follows …
I am writing to advise you that Indiana University has decided to terminate your employment effective immediately. Its my understanding you have informed the chair of your department that you have accepted a faculty appointment with a university in Singapore and will start your role there this summer. Please note that you will not be eligible for rehire with Indiana University.
As you can see, the letter does not precisely say that Wang is being fired because he has taken a job at another university, but it certainly suggests that.
If we assume that this is an indirect way of saying he’s being fired for taking a job elsewhere, this simply isn’t how the academic world works. You don’t just get fired from a tenured position. And taking another job isn’t even in the universe of things that merit termination of a tenured position.
If we assume that this is just a bizarre casual aside, it’s even weirder. If the university had reason to believe that Wang had been involved in major misconduct, there are various ways that could be alluded to in a letter like this, without going into the gory details. If he was accused of or under investigation for the same, there are ways you could reference that as well.
Based on the new details, the whole situation seems even more inexplicable than it appeared. It certainly seems possible that in addition to perhaps acting hastily or fearing a conflict with the Trump administration, there may be some additional source of embarrassment or goof that the university administration or the school itself is hiding. Again, this termination letter is simply too weird.
Amid the chaos and cacophony of Donald Trump’s second term, we’re sucked into this new mini-debate over a potential Trump third term. NBC News got the ball rolling with a headline that read: “Trump won’t rule out seeking third term in the White House, tells NBC News ‘there are methods’ for doing so.” They were roundly criticized for that framing and other news organizations did better by putting the matter more squarely in their headline. For instance, there was The Washington Post, whose headline ran “Trump suggests ‘methods’ exist for bid for unconstitutional third term.”
That’s better, certainly. But there’s only one proper response to all these comments: “No, you’re not.”
Full stop. That’s the whole response.
As a factual matter, I very much doubt even this degraded Supreme Court would go for this. Far more importantly, I do not think the American people would stand for it. I also very much doubt several key swing states critical to the 2028 election would place him on their ballots in obvious defiance of the Constitution. It is critical, simply critical, to remember that it is not solely the courts or the Supreme Court who decide the meaning of the Constitution and enforce its rules.
But the facts of the matter are not the only or even the main issue. This is a predictable and consistent pattern we must be deeply familiar with by now. Someone asks — or Donald Trump asks to be asked — a question about his doing something which is either outrageous, illegal, impossible, etc. The response is always some version of “I can if I want to …” or “I’m considering it … ” or “I’m not ruling it out …” or some version of “Many people want me to…”
And we’re off.
The device is simple and straightforward: an invitation to imagine that the only thing that matters is Donald Trump’s will, what he decides, what he wants to do, what he claims he can do, etc. etc. This simple dynamic is the only thing that matters. It is a public spectacle of angst, terror, sadness around the power of Donald Trump’s will. You’ve seen it playing out over the last couple days. New headlines: He says there are “methods”! “He won’t rule it out!”
Seriously, stop doing this! Not just the press but individual people who will make the decision about the future of this country.
I mean, if this is you, get a hold of yourself.
Is there any act, emolument, benefit, power … anything you’ve ever heard or could even imagine Donald Trump unilaterally “ruling out” for himself? The whole idea is absurd. Of course he doesn’t do that. This is a grasping, predatory and power-hungry man. We know this by now. We also know that perhaps even more he is someone who wants to be the center of attention, someone who wants his will to be the center of attention. It’s like this magic trick he does which get lots of otherwise sensible people to just immediately fall into line.
It’s exhausting.
Am I sure that in response to this post some will say, “But who’s going to stop him???” … “Hahaha, there’s no law!! Don’t you know that by now???” or all the other sudsily cynical rejoinders luxuriating in a perverse impotence. Or perhaps some people are focused on those obscure law professors who’ve come up with this or that workaround. All of these ripostes are no more than taking inchoate fear and transmuting that emotion, that posture of demoralization, into what looks like an argument. But it’s not. It’s just fear, self-flagellation in worship of powerlessness. People do this and they become Trump’s own taskmasters ushering people into deeper and deeper circles of demoralization.
The first thing to do if you’re interested in saving your country is to adopt a posture of cool defiance toward those who would destroy it or pervert it into a mockery of itself. I can’t tell you what is going to happen tomorrow or next year or a decade from now. I can only say what I think is likely. Predicting the future isn’t something anyone is terribly good at. It’s also one of the least important things we do. What is important is the posture we adopt toward the unknown. Don’t make yourself an idol of Donald Trump’s will. When you do this, that is exactly what you’re doing.
There’s only one proper response: “No, you’re not.” Full stop. End of story.
At roughly 6 p.m. ET this evening the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sent out a notice to employees on a commission intranet/internal hub that “the NRC has terminated the NRC’s Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA).” The notice has yet to appear in an agency-wide email. The message cites the President’s March 27th, 2025 Executive Order purporting to cancel union contracts across a broad swath of the federal workforce. As you’d expect, it’s all heading to the courts.
I reported last night that a significant number of SSI recipients had Social Security portals which showed they were no longer beneficiaries. Their payments were also at least slightly late. As of this morning it appears that most or all of those beneficiaries have now received their payments. (I haven’t heard from everyone yet but everyone I’ve heard from has received them.) So as of now this appears to be a records error in the SSA portals rather than a disruption of payments.
As noted last night, in the instances in question, the beneficiaries’ SSA portal now includes the text: “This beneficiary is currently not receiving payments” under “Benefits & Payments.” Those portals now also include no records of historical payments. It’s as though the person had never been an SSI recipient. I will provide more updates when I have more information.
Editor’s note: As of the morning of April 1st, most and likely all recipients discussed in this post have received their payments. So the issue appears to be an SSA portal reporting issue — as described below — rather than a disruption in payments.
I want to tread carefully here. But this seems potentially serious. I am in contact with two families in which the parents have an adult child with severe disabilities who receives SSI payments for their support. In each case, at some time today, their online Social Security portal switched to showing that the adult child was “not receiving benefits.” The full language is “This beneficiary is currently not receiving payments” under “Benefits & Payments.” In one case, the recipient’s payment is later than usual but might still come tomorrow. In the other case, the recipient lives at a facility which receives the payments directly. So that family doesn’t know yet whether there’s been a disruption in payments.
Each family contacted me independently and each is from a different part of the country — one in the Midwest, another in the Northeast. Each family is part of a loose local network of families or support groups of families with disabled adult children. And in each case multiple families in each support network started seeing the same thing today. In other words, this doesn’t seem like an isolated problem or a glitch tied to one family’s account or even a localized issue tied to one metropolitan area or a single care facility.
When it comes to the larger number of families who have seen this “not receiving benefits” language it seems like some have gotten payments on time and others have not. There’s no clear pattern. It also appears that this is impacting SSI and not SSDI even though many of the adult children receive both. Of course, we’re dealing with small sample sizes. So it’s possible SSDI might be affected too.
In the case of both families I am directly in touch with, the parents are themselves Social Security retirement beneficiaries. Their accounts are unaffected.
From what I can tell, it’s still possible that payments will arrive on the late side but not wildly late, at least in some cases. Perhaps the issue is just that a lot of people’s accounts, as of today, include language saying that payments have been cut off even though the payments are being or will still be made. As far as I can tell some families in these extended networks have received their monthly payments despite having this language in their portals.
For now, I’m trying to see if there are other families in similar situations (parents of adult children with severe disabilities who are on SSI and/or SSDI) and are seeing the same thing. If you’re seeing something similar, please contact me at talk at talkingpointsmemo dot com with the subject line “Social Security.” If you’d prefer more security you can reach me on Signal at joshtpm.99 or via encrypted email at joshtpm at protonmail dot com.
I will of course keep whatever personal information you share in confidence. But there’s really no need to share any personal information. I don’t need to know names or any other details of your family’s situation. I’m just trying to see if there are others who are seeing the same thing as I’ve described above.
This is from the Free Press website, written by me, so I will not indent:
The Free Press is where I have decided to make my new intellectual home.
In a rapidly changing world, I feel The Free Press is the correct base for me, and it has the audience I wish to reach.
First, The Free Press is a start-up.
And because The Free Press is a start-up, it can fail. Many people do not like that fact about start-ups, because they do not want to be part of a possible failure. It means disruption, and also the paycheck stops coming. But I enjoy the risk appetite. It is precisely because it can fail that the people here will work harder, and likely smarter, than the competition.
That it is a start-up is not only true in fact, but you sense it the moment you walk into the newsroom, which I did for the first time recently. The place has overwhelming vibes and energy, and you can feel those in each and every person on the floor.
I think we are entering an era where “floor energy” will matter more than before. It will motivate, define, and lift some institutions well above the others.
A lot of The Free Press is charisma- and personality-based. Much of that comes from Bari Weiss, but there are numerous strong personalities on the roster, covering a wide range of topics, and I know they are keen to bring on even more. I expect the importance of charisma- and personality-based content to rise sharply in the near future.
I don’t know if The Free Press knows this yet, because they tend to be old-school, but pretty soon quality AI programs will write better columns than most of what is considered acceptable at top mainstream media outlets. Of course those columns will not be by human beings, and so those writings will not be able to contextualize themselves within the framework of what a particular individual thinks or feels. That kind of context will be all-important, as impersonal content, based on broadly available public information, will be outcompeted by the machines.
I believe The Free Press intellectual and business model is well-positioned to handle this transition. At The Free Press, and for Free Press readers, the individual writer and personality truly matters, and will continue to matter.
I have written for about 10 years for The New York Times and about eight years for Bloomberg Opinion. Both were wonderful experiences, and I worked with great people and benefited enormously from those relationships. But I am now oh, so very excited about this next step.
Stay tuned for my first official column this Thursday. Click here to make sure you get my work delivered directly to your inbox.
Last but not least: Join Bari and me for a livestream Q+A only for paid members of The Free Press. Come to our website on Thursday, April 3 at 4:30 p.m. ET to watch the conversation.
The post The Free Press appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
It seems apparent that the Trump administration war on Civil Rights is stranding thousands who have filed complaints about mistreatment or bias.
We can only guess that Donald Trump’s culture war stances against “wokeness” leave him at ease with rules, government procedures, business and policing practices that leave those who find themselves on the short end of the stick for circumstances they do not control.
His administration took big swipes last week to drop civil rights law enforcement at the Department of Education, the Social Security Administration, the Justice Department and several agencies overseen by Homeland Security. At the same time, he took a swipe at museums, criticizing exhibits he said were based on incorrect perceptions of race and identity in America. And he ordered national review of state voter rolls to clear out non-citizens by some magic Elon Musk technical review.
It is interesting that Trump, who like other politicians of all stripes, likes to single out individual stories in the American quilt that match his partisan point of view, is silent about the effects of all this on ordinary citizens in a pluralistic country. Instead, he repeats his general pitch about radical leftists using diversity, equity and inclusion as an activist agenda to unfairly hire, promote or even recognize achievement by anyone not white, male, and straight.
The BBC managed to find a Cleveland mom now in limbo with unresolved complaints about educational services for her 13-year-old adopted son who is not receiving school services for his fetal alcohol syndrome, ADHD and other mental health problems, Eliminating the civil rights staff at the Department of Education’s Cleveland office (and six others) leaves the family with an unfinished mediation and no one to call.
Nor can they call the Social Security Administration, which has dismissed — under court challenge — 200 enforcement officers who follow on complaints about the disabled.
And at the General Services Administration (GAO), which manages federal property and contracts, the Trump administration has removed a rule that prohibited federal contractors from allowing segregated facilities. The GAO memo applies to all civilian federal agencies, said the prohibition was not in line with Trump’s views on diversity.
The Justice Department’s freeze on civil rights litigation and formal decision to pursue policing reform agreements has created a series of live legal cases abandoned.
A simple internet search shows a long list of dropped cases involving Alabama and Virginia purging voter rolls and Texas adopting challenged election maps, state immigration enforcement challenges, police and fire discriminatory hiring cases, lawsuits involving a shelter provider sexually molesting migrant kids, a North Carolina case challenging the state ban on transition treatments for minors and a Utah suit about prison placement for trans prisoners, among others.
The dismissal of most employees in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and two separate DHS ombudsman offices seem intended to eliminate legal roadblocks to its immigration crackdown efforts. Interestingly, the legal streamlining effort comes just as issues surrounding deportations are running into court challenges. Separations will take 60 days.
As The Hill.com reports, the layoffs at DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and two ombudsman staff who hear complaints, were in response to Justice Department belief that these offices “have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”
The eliminated Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman provides a platform for those to bring concerns about the immigration process, while the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman is a route for the public to flag issues about the problems facing those held in immigration detention.
Homeland’s statement was that “These reductions ensure taxpayer dollars support the Department’s core mission: border security and immigration enforcement. “These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”
The fallout from the Homeland decisions will affect specific individual complaints, of course, but also the politics of Trump’s mass deportation politics.
Rep. Bernie Thompson, D-Miss, noted that Homeland is silencing those who provide a critical review of its policies, a bid overall to end oversight of Homeland Security operations. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus added that civil rights oversight is “not a bureaucratic hurdle if you don’t break the law, geniuses.”
The Trump administration and the courts are warring over whether immigration policies are being based on legal and constitutional footing, on the procedural aspects of roundups and deportations, and on whether the administration is actively ducking court orders on administrative law. Claiming the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as justification for forgoing due process before immediate deportation to El Salvadorean prison camps, for example, crosses all those lines.
From a broader perspective, the Trump Justice Department wants to prosecute or otherwise investigate cases that the Biden administration would have sought to protect, including transgender treatment cases or racially discriminatory policies followed by policing agencies.
Through its actions, the Trump administration is redefining what civil rights means by target and by whether there is anyone to take up the complaint of discrimination.
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The post Tossing Civil Rights Enforcement appeared first on DCReport.org.
I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones.
Are there easy ways to delete data—files, photos, etc.—on phones so it can’t be recovered? Does resetting a phone to factory defaults erase data, or is it still recoverable? That is, does the reset erase the old encryption key, or just sever the password that access that key? When the phone is rebooted, are deleted files still available?
We need answers for both iPhones and Android phones. And it’s not just the US; the world is going to become a more dangerous place to oppose state power.
Economic activity in the manufacturing sector contracted in March after two consecutive months of expansion preceded by 26 straight months of contraction, say the nation's supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM® Report On Business®.This suggests manufacturing contracted in March. This was below the consensus forecast, new orders and employment were especially weak and prices very strong.
The report was issued today by Timothy R. Fiore, CPSM, C.P.M., Chair of the Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) Manufacturing Business Survey Committee:
“The Manufacturing PMI® registered 49 percent in March, 1.3 percentage points lower compared to the 50.3 percent recorded in February. The overall economy continued in expansion for the 59th month after one month of contraction in April 2020. (A Manufacturing PMI® above 42.3 percent, over a period of time, generally indicates an expansion of the overall economy.) The New Orders Index contracted for the second month in a row following a three-month period of expansion; the figure of 45.2 percent is 3.4 percentage points lower than the 48.6 percent recorded in February. The March reading of the Production Index (48.3 percent) is 2.4 percentage points lower than February’s figure of 50.7 percent. The index dropped back into contraction after two months of expansion, with eight months of contraction before that. The Prices Index surged further into expansion (or ‘increasing’) territory, registering 69.4 percent, up 7 percentage points compared to the reading of 62.4 percent in February. The Backlog of Orders Index registered 44.5 percent, down 2.3 percentage points compared to the 46.8 percent recorded in February. The Employment Index registered 44.7 percent, down 2.9 percentage points from February’s figure of 47.6 percent.
emphasis added
The number of job openings was little changed at 7.6 million in February, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the month, hires and total separations held at 5.4 million and 5.3 million, respectively. Within separations, quits (3.2 million) and layoffs and discharges (1.8 million) changed little.The following graph shows job openings (black line), hires (dark blue), Layoff, Discharges and other (red column), and Quits (light blue column) from the JOLTS.
emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.We're back! A long-time reader and subscriber recently mentioned in the Ars Forums that they "kind of" missed the Daily Telescope posts that I used to write in 2023 and 2024. Although I would have preferred that everyone desperately missed the Daily Telescope, I appreciate the sentiment. I really do.
I initially stopped writing these posts about a year ago because it just became too much to commit to writing one thing every day. I mean, I could have done it. But doing so on the daily crossed over the line from enjoyable to drudgery, and one of the best things about working for Ars is that it tends very much toward the enjoyable side. Anyway, writing one of these posts on a weekly basis feels more sustainable. I guess we'll find out!
Today's image comes to you all the way from Mars. One of the most powerful tools on NASA's Perseverance rover is the WATSON camera attached to the end of the rover's robotic arm. In the fine tradition of tortured acronyms at the space agency, WATSON stands for Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering. And because of course it is, WATSON is located on the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument. Seriously, NASA must stand for Not Another Screwball Acronym.
This year there's one headline that stands out from all the others:
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling. By Jeffrey Goldberg
##########
Back before the November election, the headlines that seemed most Foolish were much more cheerful
(And here's the video)
LAPD Raids Medical Lab For (Nonexistent) Weed, Get Gun Stuck In An MRI Machine
The NYTimes has an excellent piece by Kate Morgan on AI discovering new uses for old drugs:
A little over a year ago, Joseph Coates was told there was only one thing left to decide. Did he want to die at home, or in the hospital?
Coates, then 37 and living in Renton, Wash., was barely conscious. For months, he had been battling a rare blood disorder called POEMS syndrome, which had left him with numb hands and feet, an enlarged heart and failing kidneys. Every few days, doctors needed to drain liters of fluid from his abdomen. He became too sick to receive a stem cell transplant — one of the only treatments that could have put him into remission.
“I gave up,” he said. “I just thought the end was inevitable.”
But Coates’s girlfriend, Tara Theobald, wasn’t ready to quit. So she sent an email begging for help to a doctor in Philadelphia named David Fajgenbaum, whom the couple met a year earlier at a rare disease summit.
By the next morning, Dr. Fajgenbaum had replied, suggesting an unconventional combination of chemotherapy, immunotherapy and steroids previously untested as a treatment for Coates’s disorder.
Within a week, Coates was responding to treatment. In four months, he was healthy enough for a stem cell transplant. Today, he’s in remission.
The lifesaving drug regimen wasn’t thought up by the doctor, or any person. It had been spit out by an artificial intelligence model.
AI is excellent at combing through large amounts of data to find surprising connections.
Discovering new uses for old drugs has some big advantages and one disadvantage. A big advantage is that once a drug has been approved for some use it can be prescribed for any use–thus new uses of old drugs do not have to go through the lengthy and arduous FDA approval procedures. In essence, off-label uses have been safety-tested but not FDA efficacy-tested in the new use. I use this fact about off-label prescribing to evaluate the FDA. During COVID, for example, the British Recovery trial, discovered that the common drug, dexamethasone could reduce mortality by up to one-third in hospitalized patients on oxygen support that knowledge was immediately applied, saving millions of lives worldwide:
Within hours, the result was breaking news across the world and hospitals were adopting the drug into the standard care given to all patients with COVID-19. In the nine months following the discovery, dexamethasone saved an estimated one million lives worldwide.
New uses for old drugs are typically unpatentable, which helps keep them cheap—but the disadvantage is that this also weakens private incentives to discover them. While FDA trials for these new uses are often unnecessary, making development costs much lower, the lack of strong market protection can still deter investment. The FDA offers some limited exclusivity through programs like 505(b)(2), which grants temporary protection for new clinical trials or safety and efficacy data. These programs are hard to calibrate—balancing cost and reward is difficult—but likely provide some net benefits.
The NIH should continue prioritizing research into unpatentable treatments, as this is where the market is most challenged. More broadly, research on novel mechanisms to support non-patentable innovations is valuable. That said, I’m not overly concerned about under-investment in repurposing old drugs, especially as AI further reduces the cost of discovery.
The post AI Discovers New Uses for Old Drugs appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
March was the biggest month that Trends has ever had. In addition to almost daily announcements about AI, a lot has been going on in programming, in security, in operations (which usually doesn’t merit its own topic), and even in quantum computing. It’s been a long time since we’ve had much to say about social media, but with a reboot of Digg, a new attempt at Napster, and alternatives to Facebook and Instagram, we’re wondering: Has the world tired of the current social platforms? Someone obviously thinks so.
And we should spend some time on AI. I’ve been running LLMs locally on my laptop. Gemma 3, DeepSeek R1:32B, and QwQ all work well—especially the 4B version of Gemma 3, which is reasonably fast even without a GPU. If you want to spend $10K, you can run the full DeepSeek V3 on a loaded Mac Studio. Does the future belong to giant AI providers? They’ll remain important, but local alternatives are getting better every day.
What will April bring?
Browser data from an approximately representative sample of individual investors offers a detailed account of their search for information, including how much time they spend on stock research, which stocks they research, what categories of information they seek, and when they gather information relative to events and trades. The median individual investor spends approximately six minutes on research per trade on traded tickers, mostly just before the trade; the mean spends around half an hour. Individual investors spend the most time reviewing price charts, followed by analyst opinions, and exhibit little interest in traditional risk statistics. Aggregate research interest is highly correlated with stock size, and salient news and earnings announcements draw more attention. Individual investors have different research styles, and those that focus on short-term information are more likely to trade more speculative stocks.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Toomas Laarits and Jeffrey Wurgler.
The post The Research Behavior of Individual Investors appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
- by Gina Rippon
After two years at Harvard, I had finished all of my graduate school courses and oral (!) exams. Then I had a compulsion for what I should do next, something that at the time appeared remarkably stupid, although it worked out very well for me.
At some critical points in my life I have made key decisions with regard to place, including Mexico, Haiti, New Zealand, and as I will write about today, Freiburg, Germany. Each of those decisions fundamentally reshaped my life. None of those decisions were motivated by rational reasons, or indeed much by traditional reasons at all. I simply wanted to do particular things, and then set off to do so.
After two years of study, a Harvard PhD student would be expected to apprentice with a top professor, “live in the basement of the Science Center” (where the computers were those days), and in general become part of the system. Somehow none of that fit me. I decided instead to study for a year in Freiburg, Germany, at the university there, mostly to learn German but also to run away from a particular kind of fate that most of my peers were choosing. And so I departed from Cambridge in 1984-85, aided by a strong dollar and a small grant from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation.
Other than an Oxford and London summer trip at age 17, it was my first time abroad. I flew over with Kroszner, and we rented a car to drive around Germany for a few weeks before I would settle in Freiburg.
Our first stop was Mainz, which was not too far from Frankfurt airport. I was stunned by everything I saw, ranging from the supermarkets to the food to how the downtown was organized. These days Mainz is regarded as a fairly dull city, but then, for me, it was fascinating beyond belief. Unlike England, Germany struck me as a peer country to the United States, with a roughly equal living standard and in some ways a superior way of life.
Other stops on our trip included the beautiful Baden-Baden, Stuttgart, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, the “Romantic Road” in Bavaria, and of course Berlin. The one day I spent in East Berlin terrified me. Not primarily because of the living standards (which were low), but because the people seemed so fearful and intimidated. I decided that communism was far worse than I had thought. I was relieved to return to West Berlin, which at the time had that Cold War, party town, otherworldly feel. Try watching “Wings of Desire” some day.
Once I settled into Freiurg I was on my own. I refused to hang out with the other American students, and so I learned German pretty quickly. I developed a morning routine of walking to buy the International Herald Tribune, working on my dissertation in the morning on a typewriter, and going into town for lunch and some shopping and errands. Freiburg was the closest I ever have come to living in a proper city, though at the time the population was a mere quarter million or so. Nonetheless one could go “in die Stadt,” an entirely meaningful notion if you know the layout.
I even ended up with a German girlfriend, and from her I learned German all that much better.
Frequently I would feel claustrophobic, and so I would depart for Switzerland, where I would feel even more claustrophobic. Still, I loved those trips, as the sense of perpetual motion was sufficient compensation. Over time I have managed to see every Swiss canton, and I am fond of all of them. For Erleichterung I would visit the Netherlands, or one time Chris Weber came by and we drove to Colmar for Alsatian smoked meats, yum. For Thanksgiving there was an Italy trip to Bergamo and Verona. Later in the spring I went to Venice and Florence.
I had a January lecture tour in Vienna (freezing!), with the Carl Menger Institute, and in May a week-long stint in Graz. My German peers found it literally unbelievable that someone my age had published papers I could present and talk about, in addition to a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on monetary economics.
I also gave a talk at a jazz club in Vienna, the first (but not last) time I experienced talk-giving as a kind of high class entertainment. I mixed German and English, and told a fair number of jokes, and found I enjoyed that. I am thankful to Albert Zlabinger for arranging that evening.
It was that kind of life. There has never been a year that was more exciting or when I learned more about the world.
Art and painting started making sense to me when I visited the Lenbach Haus in Munich, with Blue Rider works, and the Mondrian museum in The Hague. I retain a special fondness for those artists to this day.
Amsterdam probably was my favorite city, though I now feel it is long since ruined by an excess of tourists. To save money, I would sleep on the houseboats there.
Once I tired of German food, delicious though it may be, I started experimenting on the culinary front, at least as much as I could given my location. That was the time in my life when I started trying everything I could.
It simply stunned me how many things in Germany were better, starting with the bread and orange juice and butter, though hardly ending there.
So every day I learned, learned, learned, and was in pretty constant motion.
By the time I returned to the United States, it was clear I would never be entering on mainstream tracks again.
The post Living in Freiburg, Germany appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
These are not just words, they are a pact. A civil contract. Not to party, not to policy, not to an ideology or an individual. It is a compact between a people, our people, and it is under threat. A democracy is a government of collective action by the people. Let this be a reminder, it is time to do more … before it is no more.
Daring Fireball is brought to you this week by the enduring and aspirational project that is democracy.
Update April 1, 9:15 p.m. EDT: SpaceX scrubbed the Tuesday launch attempt and is now targeting Thursday.
SpaceX stood down from a planned Falcon 9 rocket launch Tuesday night. The mission, dubbed Starlink 11-13, will deliver the latest 27 Starlink V2 Mini satellites into low Earth orbit and will be the 25th Starlink flight of the year.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base is now targeting Thursday, April 3, at 3:54 pm PT (7:54 pm ET, 2354 UTC).
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.
The Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission, tail number B1088 in the SpaceX fleet, will launch for a fifth time. It previously supported the launches of NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH rideshare mission, NROL-57, NROL-126 and the Transporter-12 smallsat rideshare flight.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1088 will target a landing on the droneship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ which is positioned in the Pacific Ocean. If successful, this will be the 123rd booster landing on OCISLY and the 426th booster landing to date.
A historic mission took flight from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Monday night. Against the backdrop of an off-shore band of thunderstorms, four first-time astronauts soared off the pad at Launch Complex 39A onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and headed into a polar orbit.
Malta resident Chun Wang funded the orbital polar expedition and flew alongside Norwegian cinematographer, Jannicke Mikkelsen; German arctic robotics researcher, Rabea Rogge; and Australian polar guide, Eric Philips.
Liftoff of the mission, dubbed Fram2, happened at the opening of the launch window at 9:46 p.m. EDT (0146 UTC).
Heading into the launch opportunity, the 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 60 percent chance for favorable weather at the opening of the window, predicting the thunderstorms that caused some consternation by those watching the launch at the LC-39A Press Site.
On Friday, Kiko Dontchev, the vice president of Launch for SpaceX, said they were juggling a similar challenge to launch as they experienced with the Polaris Dawn flight last year.
“This mission is a little more challenging than even a normal crew mission when it comes to launch availability,” Dontchev said during a teleconference about the mission on X. “Because this is a free flier and we are not going to the space station, we not only have to worry about weather at the launch site, weather on the ascent track, but we also have to go ahead and predict weather in the recovery zone.”
The Falcon 9 rocket supporting this mission, tail number B1085 in the SpaceX fleet launched for a sixth time. This was the second time this booster launched crew to orbit following the flight of Crew-9 to the International Space Station in September 2024.
The Fram2 mission marked the first time that a booster with five previous flights launched an astronaut mission.
SpaceX is flying the crew onboard the Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft. This is its fourth trip to space, following the launches of Crew-1, Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn.
The destination of these four astronauts for their 3.5- to 5-day mission takes them on a polar orbit at a 90 degree inclination. While this isn’t the highest inclination for a mission launching from the Space Coast (that would be the ESSA 9 weather satellite in 1969, per astronomer Jonathan McDowell) this will be the highest inclination flown by humans.
“Interestingly, the closest astronauts have ever come to flying in a true polar orbit (90 deg inclination) were the original Soviet Vostok and Voskhod cosmonauts (including Yuri Gagarin) in the early 1960s – and they only flew to around 65 deg,” Jon Edwards, vice president of Falcon and Dragon at SpaceX, wrote on X. “The space shuttle did a single mission to 62 deg in 1990. Now, in the spirit of exploration, Fram2 will take yet another bold step for humankind.”
Mikkelsen, an award-winning cinematographer is responsible for capturing the experience through a variety of cameras throughout the flight. She said it’s marquee moment for human spaceflight.
“My first and immediate thought is: We are leaving planet Earth. We are embarking on an epic expedition to be the first humans in a polar orbit, the last frontier of human exploration in low Earth orbit,” she said. “We are the new generation of astronauts.”
During the mission, the crew will conduct a suite of 22 science experiments and technology demonstrations. Those include experiments monitoring glucose regulation, mushroom growth and the impact of spaceflight on women’s reproductive health.
Learn more about the crew and how they came to this mission by clicking here.
From Matthew Graham at Mortgage News Daily: Mortgage Rates Inch Lower, But Remain Broadly SidewaysSideways" has been the dominant theme for mortgage rates for well over a month now. The average top tier 30yr fixed rate fell below 6.82% on February 25th, and moved down to 6.70% the following week. We haven't been outside of that range since then.Tuesday:
Today was just another day in that regard, or perhaps even a prime example considering it was smack dab in the middle of that range. [30 year fixed 6.74%]
emphasis added
Why does Jupiter have rings?
Let’s be real: Building LLM applications today feels like purgatory. Someone hacks together a quick demo with ChatGPT and LlamaIndex. Leadership gets excited. “We can answer any question about our docs!â€� But then…reality hits. The system is inconsistent, slow, hallucinating—and that amazing demo starts collecting digital dust. We call this “POC purgatoryâ€�—that frustrating limbo where you’ve built something cool but can’t quite turn it into something real.
We’ve seen this across dozens of companies, and the teams that break out of this trap all adopt some version of evaluation-driven development (EDD), where testing, monitoring, and evaluation drive every decision from the start.
The truth is, we’re in the earliest days of understanding how to build robust LLM applications. Most teams approach this like traditional software development but quickly discover it’s a fundamentally different beast. Check out the graph below—see how excitement for traditional software builds steadily while GenAI starts with a flashy demo and then hits a wall of challenges?
What makes LLM applications so different? Two big things:
This creates a whole new set of challenges that traditional software development approaches simply weren’t designed to handle. When your system is both ingesting messy real-world data AND producing nondeterministic outputs, you need a different approach.
The way out? Evaluation-driven development: a systematic approach where continuous testing and assessment guide every stage of your LLM application’s lifecycle. This isn’t anything new. People have been building data products and machine learning products for the past couple of decades. The best practices in those fields have always centered around rigorous evaluation cycles. We’re simply adapting and extending these proven approaches to address the unique challenges of LLMs.
We’ve been working with dozens of companies building LLM applications, and we’ve noticed patterns in what works and what doesn’t. In this article, we’re going to share an emerging SDLC for LLM applications that can help you escape POC purgatory. We won’t be prescribing specific tools or frameworks (those will change every few months anyway) but rather the enduring principles that can guide effective development regardless of which tech stack you choose.
Throughout this article, we’ll explore real-world examples of LLM application development and then consolidate what we’ve learned into a set of first principles—covering areas like nondeterminism, evaluation approaches, and iteration cycles—that can guide your work regardless of which models or frameworks you choose.
A lot of people ask us: What tools should I use? Which multiagent frameworks? Should I be using multiturn conversations or LLM-as-judge?
Of course, we have opinions on all of these, but we think those aren’t the most useful questions to ask right now. We’re betting that lots of tools, frameworks, and techniques will disappear or change, but there are certain principles in building LLM-powered applications that will remain.
We’re also betting that this will be a time of software development flourishing. With the advent of generative AI, there’ll be significant opportunities for product managers, designers, executives, and more traditional software engineers to contribute to and build AI-powered software. One of the great aspects of the AI Age is that more people will be able to build software.
We’ve been working with dozens of companies building LLM-powered applications and have started to see clear patterns in what works. We’ve taught this SDLC in a live course with engineers from companies like Netflix, Meta, and the US Air Force—and recently distilled it into a free 10-email course to help teams apply it in practice.
When building AI-powered software, the first question is: Should my software development lifecycle be any different from a more traditional SDLC, where we build, test, and then deploy?
AI-powered applications introduce more complexity than traditional software in several ways:
What breaks your app in production isn’t always what you tested for in dev!
This inherent unpredictability is precisely why evaluation-driven development becomes essential: Rather than an afterthought, evaluation becomes the driving force behind every iteration.
Evaluation is the engine, not the afterthought.
The first property is something we saw with data and ML-powered software. What this meant was the emergence of a new stack for ML-powered app development, often referred to as MLOps. It also meant three things:
Now with LLMs, AI, and their inherent flip-floppiness, an array of new issues arises:
Beyond the technical challenges, these complexities also have real business implications. Hallucinations and inconsistent outputs aren’t just engineering problems—they can erode customer trust, increase support costs, and lead to compliance risks in regulated industries. That’s why integrating evaluation and iteration into the SDLC isn’t just good practice, it’s essential for delivering reliable, high-value AI products.
In this section, we’ll walk through a real-world example of an LLM-powered application struggling to move beyond the proof-of-concept stage. Along the way, we’ll explore:
By the end, you’ll see how this team escaped POC purgatory—not by chasing the perfect model, but by adopting a structured development cycle that turned a promising demo into a real product.
You’re not launching a product: You’re launching a hypothesis.
At its core, this case study demonstrates evaluation-driven development in action. Instead of treating evaluation as a final step, we use it to guide every decision from the start—whether choosing tools, iterating on prompts, or refining system behavior. This mindset shift is critical to escaping POC purgatory and building reliable LLM applications.
Every LLM project starts with excitement. The real challenge is making it useful at scale.
The story doesn’t always start with a business goal. Recently, we helped an EdTech startup build an information-retrieval app.1 Someone realized they had tons of content a student could query. They hacked together a prototype in ~100 lines of Python using OpenAI and LlamaIndex. Then they slapped on a tool used to search the web, saw low retrieval scores, called it an “agent,� and called it a day. Just like that, they landed in POC purgatory—stuck between a flashy demo and working software.
They tried various prompts and models and, based on vibes, decided some were better than others. They also realized that, although LlamaIndex was cool to get this POC out the door, they couldn’t easily figure out what prompt it was throwing to the LLM, what embedding model was being used, the chunking strategy, and so on. So they let go of LlamaIndex for the time being and started using vanilla Python and basic LLM calls. They used some local embeddings and played around with different chunking strategies. Some seemed better than others.
Before you can evaluate an LLM system, you need to define who it’s for and what success looks like.
The startup then decided to try to formalize some of these “vibe checks� into an evaluation framework (commonly called a “harness�), which they can use to test different versions of the system. But wait: What do they even want the system to do? Who do they want to use it? Eventually, they want to roll it out to students, but perhaps a first goal would be to roll it out internally.
Vibes are a fine starting point—just don’t stop there.
We asked them:
The answers were:
The first answer came easily, the second was a bit more challenging, and the team didn’t even seem confident with their third answer. What counts as success depends on who you ask.
We suggested:
So now we have a user persona, several scenarios, and a way to measure success.
Why wait for real users to generate data when you can bootstrap testing with synthetic queries?
With traditional, or even ML, software, you’d then usually try to get some people to use your product. But we can also use synthetic data—starting with a few manually written queries, then using LLMs to generate more based on user personas—to simulate early usage and bootstrap evaluation.
So we did that. We made them generate ~50 queries. To do this, we needed logging, which they already had, and we needed visibility into the traces (prompt + response). There were nontechnical SMEs we wanted in the loop.
Also, we’re now trying to develop our eval harness so we need “some form of ground truth,� that is, examples of user queries + helpful responses.
This systematic generation of test cases is a hallmark of evaluation-driven development: Creating the feedback mechanisms that drive improvement before real users encounter your system.
Evaluation isn’t a stage, it’s the steering wheel.
Logging and iteration aren’t just debugging tools; they’re the heart of building reliable LLM apps. You can’t fix what you can’t see.
To build trust with our system, we needed to confirm at least some of the responses with our own eyes. So we pulled them up in a spreadsheet and got our SMEs to label responses as “helpful or not� and to also give reasons.
Then we iterated on the prompt and noticed that it did well with course content but not as well with course timelines. Even this basic error analysis allowed us to decide what to prioritize next.
When playing around with the system, I tried a query that many people ask LLMs with IR but few engineers think to handle: “What docs do you have access to?� RAG performs horribly with this most of the time. An easy fix for this involved engineering the system prompt.
Essentially, what we did here was:
Now it didn’t involve rolling out to external users; it didn’t involve frameworks; it didn’t even involve a robust eval harness yet, and the system changes involved only prompt engineering. It involved a lot of looking at your data!2 We only knew how to change the prompts for the biggest effects by performing our error analysis.
What we see here, though, is the emergence of the first iterations of the LLM SDLC: We’re not yet changing our embeddings, fine-tuning, or business logic; we’re not using unit tests, CI/CD, or even a serious evaluation framework, but we’re building, deploying, monitoring, evaluating, and iterating!
Evaluation must move beyond “vibes�: A structured, reproducible harness lets you compare changes reliably.
In order to build our first eval harness, we needed some ground truth, that is, a user query and an acceptable response with sources.
To do this, we either needed SMEs to generate acceptable responses + sources from user queries or have our AI system generate them and an SME to accept or reject them. We chose the latter.
So we generated 100 user interactions and used the accepted ones as our test set for our evaluation harness. We tested both retrieval quality (e.g., how well the system fetched relevant documents, measured with metrics like precision and recall), semantic similarity of response, cost, and latency, in addition to performing heuristics checks, such as length constraints, hedging versus overconfidence, and hallucination detection.
We then used thresholding of the above to either accept or reject a response. However, looking at why a response was rejected helped us iterate quickly:
Low similarity to accepted response: Reviewer checks if the response is actually bad or just phrased differently.
Wrong document retrieval: Debug chunking strategy, retrieval method.
Hallucination risk: Add stronger grounding in retrieval or prompt modifications.
Slow response/high cost: Optimize model usage or retrieval efficiency.
There are many parts of the pipeline one can focus on, and error analysis will help you prioritize. Depending on your use case, this might mean evaluating RAG components (e.g., chunking or OCR quality), basic tool use (e.g., calling an API for calculations), or even agentic patterns (e.g., multistep workflows with tool selection). For example, if you’re building a document QA tool, upgrading from basic OCR to AI-powered extraction—think Mistral OCR—might give the biggest lift on your system!
On the first several iterations here, we also needed to iterate on our eval harness by looking at its outputs and adjusting our thresholding accordingly.
And just like that, the eval harness becomes not just a QA tool but the operating system for iteration.
What we’ve seen here is the emergence of an SDLC distinct from the traditional SDLC and similar to the ML SDLC, with the added nuances of now needing to deal with nondeterminism and masses of natural language data.
The key shift in this SDLC is that evaluation isn’t a final step; it’s an ongoing process that informs every design decision. Unlike traditional software development where functionality is often validated after the fact with tests or metrics, AI systems require evaluation and monitoring to be built in from the start. In fact, acceptance criteria for AI applications must explicitly include evaluation and monitoring. This is often surprising to engineers coming from traditional software or data infrastructure backgrounds who may not be used to thinking about validation plans until after the code is written. Additionally, LLM applications require continuous monitoring, logging, and structured iteration to ensure they remain effective over time.
We’ve also seen the emergence of the first principles for generative AI and LLM software development. These principles are:
As a result, we get methods to help us through the challenges we’ve identified:
An astute and thoughtful reader may point out that the SDLC for traditional software is also somewhat circular: Nothing’s ever finished; you release 1.0 and immediately start on 1.1.
We don’t disagree with this but we’d add that, with traditional software, each version completes a clearly defined, stable development cycle. Iterations produce predictable, discrete releases.
By contrast:
This unpredictability demands continuous monitoring, iterative prompt engineering, maybe even fine-tuning, and frequent updates just to maintain basic reliability.
Every AI system feature is an experiment—you just might not be measuring it yet.
So traditional software is iterative but discrete and stable, while LLM-powered software is genuinely continuous and inherently unstable without constant attention—it’s more of a continuous limit than distinct version cycles.
Getting out of POC purgatory isn’t about chasing the latest tools or frameworks: It’s about committing to evaluation-driven development through an SDLC that makes LLM systems observable, testable, and improvable. Teams that embrace this shift will be the ones that turn promising demos into real, production-ready AI products.
The AI age is here, and more people than ever have the ability to build. The question isn’t whether you can launch an LLM app. It’s whether you can build one that lasts—and drive real business value.
Want to go deeper? We created a free 10-email course that walks through how to apply these principles—from user scenarios and logging to evaluation harnesses and production testing. And if you’re ready to get hands-on with guided projects and community support, the next cohort of our Maven course kicks off April 7.
Many thanks to Shreya Shankar, Bryan Bischof, Nathan Danielsen, and Ravin Kumar for their valuable and critical feedback on drafts of this essay along the way.
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