A Multiwavelength Look at Proxima Centauri’s Flares

A Multiwavelength Look at Proxima Centauri’s Flares

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.

I’m Not Leaving

Trump, As Defacto Dictator, Ramps Up Lawless Attacks On Critics

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 defacto 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 suggested 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.


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Mistakes

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.

Professors Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley, and Marci Shore have all departed Yale for the University of Toronto.

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.

Dangers and Warnings

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.

Con Artistry

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.

Trump Dictatorship Begins

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.”

Namby-pamby

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.

First Ally Lost

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.


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The post I’m Not Leaving appeared first on DCReport.org.

Tuesday 1 April 1662

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.

Read the annotations

Vehicles Sales "Surge" to 17.8 million SAAR in March

Wards Auto released their estimate of light vehicle sales for March: March U.S. Light-Vehicle Sales Surge in Preemptive Move to Potential Tariff-Based Price Increases (pay site).
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.
Vehicle SalesClick on graph for larger image.

This graph shows light vehicle sales since 2006 from the BEA (blue) and Wards' estimate for February (red).

Sales in March (17.77 million SAAR) were up 11.1% from February, and up 13.3% from March 2024.

Sales in March were well above the consensus forecast.

The second graph shows light vehicle sales since the BEA started keeping data in 1967.

Vehicle Sales
This was the best March since 2021.

Here's Why I'm Telling Young Musicians to See the Dylan Biopic

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).


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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.

Film screenshot

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.


Chechnya bans all music deemed too fast or too slow.

According to CNN:

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.


Mexico’s President goes to war against songs about drug lords.

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.”


Former desert rock songwriter takes new job as al Qaeda warlord—banning music and punishing musicians.

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 Qaeada 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.


Labor union changes its demands because of the band Pearl Jam.

A rail workers’ union in Australia planned to go on strike—but delayed its move because it feared upsetting grunge rock fans.

According to The Guardian:

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.


A political battle rages over the “Nutcracker Suite” in Lithuania.

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.


A Buddhist monk who relies on pop music stirs up controversy and backlash.

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.

According to Fulcrum:

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:


Police try to arrest the roving opera fan of Minnesota.

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.


Students expelled from school for performing a Native American dance.

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.”


Iran sentences rapper to death because of his protest lyrics and his support of anti-hijab protests.

According to France24:

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.


Putin uses Shostakovich for propaganda purposes.

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.”

He told the the council:

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.


Taliban bans the sound of women’s voices singing .

Afghanistan’s leaders are worried about women singing in public.

According to CNN:

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.



Apple and Spotify take down Hong Kong protest song—and not just in Hong Kong.

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.

According to Radio Free Asia:

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.



There’s now a Reddit where people share playlists of songs to accompany a total collapse in society.

It currently has 3,500 participants. You can dig the sweet tunes here.

Collapse Music image

That’s all for now. I plan to share more surveys of this sort in the future.

The Shape of a Modern Cancer Journey

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.

Read more

They Can't Even Make the Trains Run On Time

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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.

A different Trump administration could exist

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 will be worse for everyone

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.

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Links 4/1/25

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?

Quoting Brad Lightcap

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

debug-gym

debug-gym

New paper and code from Microsoft Research that experiments with giving LLMs access to the Python debugger. They found that the best models could indeed improve their results by running pdb as a tool.

They saw the best results overall from Claude 3.7 Sonnet against SWE-bench Lite, where it scored 37.2% in rewrite mode without a debugger, 48.4% with their debugger tool and 52.1% with debug(5) - a mechanism where the pdb tool is made available only after the 5th rewrite attempt.

Their code is available on GitHub. I found this implementation of the pdb tool, and tracked down the main system and user prompt in agents/debug_agent.py:

System prompt:

Your goal is to debug a Python program to make sure it can pass a set of test functions. You have access to the pdb debugger tools, you can use them to investigate the code, set breakpoints, and print necessary values to identify the bugs. Once you have gained enough information, propose a rewriting patch to fix the bugs. Avoid rewriting the entire code, focus on the bugs only.

User prompt (which they call an "action prompt"):

Based on the instruction, the current code, the last execution output, and the history information, continue your debugging process using pdb commands or to propose a patch using rewrite command. Output a single command, nothing else. Do not repeat your previous commands unless they can provide more information. You must be concise and avoid overthinking.

Via Import AI

Tags: prompt-engineering, llms, python, generative-ai, llm-tool-use, ai, microsoft, claude

A Note on Trade Deficits and Manufacturing

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

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.

Via @halfstackdatascience.com

Tags: podcasts, generative-ai, podcast-appearances, ai, llms, data-journalism

Pydantic Evals

Pydantic Evals

Brand new package from the Pydantic AI team which directly tackles what I consider to be the single hardest problem in AI engineering: building evals to determine if your LLM-based system is working correctly and getting better over time.

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.

Tags: evals, python, pydantic, generative-ai, ai, llms

Economic Tailwinds and Headwinds

After the election in November 2016, I pointed out that the economy was solid, that there were significant economic tailwinds and that it was unlikely that Mr. Trump would do everything he said during the campaign. See: The Future is still Bright! and The Cupboard is Full

I was pretty optimistic on the economic outlook!

By early 2019, I was becoming more concerned: "So far Mr. Trump has had a limited negative impact on the economy. ... Fortunately the cupboard was full when Trump took office, and luckily there hasn't been a significant crisis" (emphasis added).  

Unfortunately, the COVID crisis struck in early 2020 and Trump performed poorly.

Once again, the economy was in good shape at the start of Mr. Trump's 2nd term in 2025.  Just after the election, Fed Chair Powell said, "The recent performance of our economy has been remarkably good, by far the best of any major economy in the world."  And in December, Powell said the US economy is the "envy of other large economies around the world".

In his 2nd term, Mr. Trump is being more aggressive with his economic plans.  At the same time, he is not benefiting from the tailwinds I described in 2016.

For example, in 2016, I was positive on housing starts and new home sales.  

Multi Housing Starts and Single Family Housing StartsClick on graph for larger image.

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

The black arrows point to the start of Mr. Trump's terms in 2017 and 2025.  In early 2017 I was projecting further increases in housing starts.  Now I think housing starts will be down year-over-year and move more sideways over the next few years.

Also, in 2016, demographics were improving, and the largest cohort in US history was moving into their peak earning years.  Now, demographics are more neutral, and possibly even negative if legal immigration is limited.

The key tailwinds at the start of Mr. Trump's 1st term and now more neutral and even negative.

And there are additional self-induced headwinds.  The tariffs are clearly negative for economic growth.  Goldman Sachs economists recently noted:
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.

Of course, I don't expect any progress over the next four years on key long-term economic issues like climate change and income / wealth inequality (that will likely get worse).

The US economy is resistant to policy mistakes, and I'm still not currently on recession watch.  However, I'm not sanguine.

Tuesday assorted links

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.

       

Comments

 

The Boy Who Couldn’t Get Lost

Today is The Map Room’s 22nd anniversary. It’s also the final day of its membership drive, which as of the time of this writing is just three members short of the goal. To mark those… More

World of Maps Owners Retiring, Seeking New Owners

Ottawa map and book store World of Maps is for sale, per their Facebook page: “After 30 years of running this interesting and profitable map & book business Petra and Brad want to sell and… More

The first flight of Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rocket lasted just 40 seconds

The first flight of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket didn't last long on Sunday. The booster's nine engines switched off as the rocket cartwheeled upside-down and fell a short distance from its Arctic launch pad in Norway, punctuating the abbreviated test flight with a spectacular fiery crash into the sea.

If officials at Isar Aerospace were able to pick the outcome of their first test flight, it wouldn't be this. However, the result has precedent. The first launch of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket in 2006 ended in similar fashion.

"Today, we know twice as much about our launch system as yesterday before launch," Daniel Metzler, Isar's co-founder and CEO, wrote on X early Monday. "Can't beat flight testing. Ploughing through lots of data now."

Read full article

Comments

Construction Spending Increased 0.7% in February

From the Census Bureau reported that overall construction spending decreased:
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.
emphasis added
Both private and public spending increased:
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.
Construction Spending Click on graph for larger image.

This graph shows private residential and nonresidential construction spending, and public spending, since 1993. Note: nominal dollars, not inflation adjusted.

Private residential (red) spending is 5.3% below the peak in 2022.

Private non-residential (blue) spending is at a new peak.

Public construction spending (orange) is at a new peak.

Year-over-year Construction SpendingThe second graph shows the year-over-year change in construction spending.

On a year-over-year basis, private residential construction spending is up 1.6%. Private non-residential spending is up 2.5% year-over-year. Public spending is up 6.0% year-over-year.

This was above consensus expectations; however, spending for the previous two months was revised down.

The Lost Food of Soho

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.

Old Man Don’s Cross To Bear

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?

Bizarre Turn in Bizarre Story

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.

Don’t Make an Idol out of Donald Trump’s Will … And Other Thoughts on the Third Term Circle Jerk

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.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission ‘Terminates’ Union Agreement

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.

Countdown to 3,000

Today is the last day of our Annual March TPM Membership Drive. It’s also the last day of our 25% discount. We’ve already hit our 2,500 new member goal. But we’re so close we’re making a push to get to 3,000. We’re currently 67 new members short of that number. Thank you to everyone who helped us to get to 2,500. And if you haven’t become a member yet but would like to support our team and our work just click right here.

Thank you.

SSI (Social Security) Payments Update

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.

Possible New Disruption of SSI (Social Security) Payments

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.

Grade this blog

I was a teacher for 35 years. Now it’s time for me to be the student and receive a grade from my readers. Below is what I posted here right before the election. In the comment section, please grade me on this advice. How well has it held up?

Part 4: Advice for undecided voters

If you are truly undecided, and are reading this post, you are probably an idealistic Reagan Republican. [You certainly aren’t a liberal, or a Trumpist Republican]. If so, you should vote for Harris. Here’s why:

I have nothing good to say about Harris. That’s not the point. Your only chance to get back the old Reaganite GOP is if Trump somehow loses. In that unlikely event there might be a Republican backlash against Trumpism, as this election was obviously easily winnable for the GOP. (BTW, Trump is an incredibly weak/incredibly strong candidate. He’s super weak in the sense of hugely underperforming where any other GOP candidate would be right now, and incredibly strong in the sense of forcing the rest of the GOP to kiss his ring in a way that even Reagan could not do.)

If Trump does win, the odds are very strong that his second term will be a disaster. He lucked out the first time, but how likely is that to happen again? He has promised to be far more reckless the second time around, not relying on RINOs for advice. His advisors will be incompetent fools. Our fiscal situation is far worse. The Supreme Court has ruled that he’s above the law. No constraints. His mental health has dramatically deteriorated, and much of his speech is now completely incomprehensible. So how might things go bad from a Reaganite Republican perspective?

  1. A Neville Chamberlain agreement with Russia on Ukraine.

  2. Teapot Dome-style corruption.

  3. A government attack on free speech.

  4. Further slide toward the Alzheimer’s ward of an assisted living unit.

  5. A “Nixon to China” deal with the Dems that ushers in a revenue stream big enough to finance a Euro-style welfare state. (Recall that Trump is actually a Clinton Democrat who only joined the GOP because it was his ticket to the White House.) Perhaps that 10% tariff will morph into a 10% VAT.

I’m not saying that any of these things will necessarily happen. But come on, you have two eyes. You can see that he’s becoming an increasingly unhinged politician. In his second term he won’t even have to worry about public opinion, or have the need to please future GOP primary voters holding him back. How can this possibly not end badly? You’d have to be really dense not to see how this is likely to end. Even skilled presidents usually have bad second terms.

If Harris is elected she’ll be held back by a GOP Senate, and the need to triangulate Bill Clinton-style if she is to have any chance of getting re-elected in 2028. But even if she does, she’d be easy pickings for a DeSantis or Nikki Haley, either of whom would be beating Harris by 10 points in this election. If you’re a Reaganite Republican wouldn’t you prefer watching Harris flounder for 4 years knowing the old Reaganite GOP will come roaring back in 2028? Or would you prefer to have your colleagues laugh in your face as you suffer one embarrassment after another for all the insane things that Trump is likely to do? And then watch helplessly as the Dems take Congress and the Presidency in 2028, with enough political power to GET THINGS DONE.

Politics is weird. Wokism got stronger under Trump and it’s getting weaker under Biden. Don’t obsess about your distaste for the liberals. Think strategically about what will advance your interests in the long run. You have a brain, don’t you? Then use it. If you are a Reagan Republican then Harris is the only sensible vote. Hold your nose and pull that lever. Contra Vance, emotional people are not being patriotic; rational people are patriotic. Don’t blow it.

PS. When I set up the blog this past September, I subtitled it “Nostalgia for the Neoliberal Era” (roughly 1980-2007.) Anyone else beginning to feel nostalgia for that period?

PPS. If you want something a bit more hopeful, there’s this from the post right after the election:

Whatever you think of the old idea of “checks and balances”, that system is gone. Trump can do as he likes. This time, I expect he’ll be able to find one of those “German generals” (Trump’s term) that will not push back at his more whacky proposals.

On the plus side, it’s important to recall Adam Smith’s remark that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. The US is still the world’s leading economy, and it is likely that we’ll come to our senses before declining to the level of a place like Argentina. History goes in cycles, and the US has been through some other difficult periods. There was a moment in 1937 when the system of checks and balances seemed gone, before we pulled back from the brink. Presidents have only a marginal impact on the direction of the country. So there’s always reason to hope.

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The Free Press

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.

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Tossing Civil Rights Enforcement

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.

Justice and Homeland Security

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.”

Redefining Civil Rights

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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Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings

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.

ISM® Manufacturing index Decreased to 49.0% in March

(Posted with permission). The ISM manufacturing index indicated expansion. The PMI® was at 49.0% in March, down from 50.3% in February. The employment index was at 44.7%, down from 47.6% the previous month, and the new orders index was at 45.2%, down from 48.6%.

From ISM: Manufacturing PMI® at 49% March 2025 Manufacturing ISM® Report On Business®
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®.

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
This suggests manufacturing contracted in March.  This was below the consensus forecast, new orders and employment were especially weak and prices very strong.

BLS: Job Openings Decreased to 7.6 million in February

From the BLS: Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary
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.
emphasis added
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.

This series started in December 2000.

Note: The difference between JOLTS hires and separations is similar to the CES (payroll survey) net jobs headline numbers. This report is for February; the employment report this Friday will be for March.

Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey Click on graph for larger image.

Note that hires (dark blue) and total separations (red and light blue columns stacked) are usually pretty close each month. This is a measure of labor market turnover.  When the blue line is above the two stacked columns, the economy is adding net jobs - when it is below the columns, the economy is losing jobs.

The spike in layoffs and discharges in March 2020 is labeled, but off the chart to better show the usual data.

Jobs openings decreased in February to 7.57 million from 7.76 million in January.

The number of job openings (black) were down 10% year-over-year. 

Quits were down 8% year-over-year. These are voluntary separations. (See light blue columns at bottom of graph for trend for "quits").

Links 3/31/25

Links for you. Science:

Rare frog rediscovered after 130 years
Why This Measles Outbreak Is Different
AI-driven weather prediction breakthrough reported (a machine learning approach–unclear how well the models will predict, given rapid environmental change)
RFK Jr. Says Maybe We Should Just Let The Bird Flu Run Rampant
The Current and Future Burden of Long COVID in the United States
The spread of antibiotic resistance is driven by plasmids amongst the fastest evolving and of broadest host range

Other:

Horny Young Men Should Be Anti-Trump. There’s only one prominent young male liberal political influencer, and the ladies love him. (Because they’re also liberal.)
Trump Executive Order Would Cut More Than $1 Million From D.C. Libraries
‘I wish you’d be angry.’ California Democrats face voter fury over Trump, Elon Musk
Even ‘Boring’ NYC Influencers Cause Discourse
How the anti-vaccine movement weaponized a 6-year-old’s measles death
How right-wing influencers are exploiting the Justin Baldoni-Blake Lively feud. Members of the right’s massive media ecosystem are attracting even bigger audiences by stretching outside their comfort zones.
After historic indictment, doctors will keep mailing abortion pills over state lines
College professors are paid less now than they were in 1970, while upper administrator salaries have increased many times over
Trump to Pick Union-Busting Attorney for Key Labor Law Position
Lawyer, up!
Talking Their Book
It’s March Madness. Our University Leaders Must Speak Out Against the Madness
Over 40 percent of DCA flights were delayed or canceled last month
Minoritarianism Is Everywhere (interesting, but disagree with parts)
How to access D.C.’s paid family leave benefits
Tesla trade-ins on pace for record high amid Musk backlash
Musk Is Firing Federal Workers Who Prevent Bloated Tech Contracts
DOGE is going global. It needs to be stopped.
Leaked report reveals shocking downfall for Tesla — here’s what’s driving the drop in sales
“Ludicrous” Situation: Jeffrey Epstein Case Redaction Takes Over FBI’s New York Office
What’s the Matter with Abundance?
Why CDC’s Planned Vaccine-Autism Study Is Raising Eyebrows
These Librarians Won’t Let America’s Fever Hit Fahrenheit 451
Elon Musk ‘Financially Retaliated Against’ Son He Shares With Ashley St. Clair: Lawyer
Trump says Education Department will no longer oversee student loans, ‘special needs’
Education Department cuts agency that compiles ‘Nation’s Report Card’ and measures student performance
The Progressive Legal Group That Keeps Taking On Trump In The Courts – And Winning
Crypto’s Clout in Washington Is Soaring
Elon Musk’s daughter says father’s rally gesture was ‘definitely a Nazi salute’

Tuesday Telescope: A close-up of the magical camera at the end of a robotic arm

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.

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Europe’s quest to finally land on Mars takes another turn

Oh, ExoMars, what a long, strange trip it has been. Are you ever going to go to space?

The ExoMars mission represents Europe's third attempt to land successfully on Mars, and at a cost of more than $1.3 billion. there is a lot riding on its success. But success is far from assured for a mission that has been whipsawed by geopolitical tensions, budget cuts, and an ever-changing architecture over the last 20 years.

The latest news, announced Sunday, is that Airbus will design and build the lander that will carry the ExoMars down to the surface of Mars. The mission is scheduled to launch no earlier than 2028 on a US rocket. But there have been so many twists and turns in the ExoMars story that it's very difficult to know what will ultimately happen.

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Headlines that could have been dated April 1

 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

 French pole vaulter video: Anthony Ammirati dislodges bar with penis, costing him medal opportunity at 2024 Olympics

    (And here's the video)


LAPD Raids Medical Lab For (Nonexistent) Weed, Get Gun Stuck In An MRI Machine

 

If you watch long enough, a comet will appear. If you watch long enough, a comet will appear.


AI Discovers New Uses for Old Drugs

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.

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Radar Trends to Watch: April 2025

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?

AI

  • OpenAI has adopted Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open protocol that prescribes how agents talk to external services.
  • OpenAI has replaced DALL-E with a new image generator for GPT-4o. It gives users better control over placement, which is needed for professional use.
  • The full (641 GB) version of DeepSeek’s latest V3 can run on a Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra chip and 512 GB of RAM. Open models running locally can compute with proprietary models in the cloud.
  • Unlike other AI benchmarks, ARC-AGI-2 focuses on tasks that are easy for humans but difficult for AI systems. If we’re going to attain general intelligence, ARC-AGI-2 shows the way.
  • Claude 3.7 Sonnet has added a tool for searching the web. It’s also added a think tool that allows Claude to determine when it needs to stop during the reasoning process and gather more data to complete the current task.
  • OpenAI has refreshed its audio models. Updates include promptable voice synthesis that lets users describe how to say something (GPT-4o mini TTS) and a new transcription model (GPT-4o Transcribe).
  • NVIDIA has announced DGX Spark and DGX Station, both desktop supercomputers for AI. The price for an entry-level system will probably be around $3,000.
  • OLMo 2 32B is a new addition to the OLMo 2 models. It outperforms GPT-4o mini while requiring minimal resources to run it. Like the rest of the OLMo family, it’s completely open: source code, training data, evals, intermediate checkpoints, and training recipes.
  • Anthropic has developed a text editor tool as part of its computer use API. The text editor tool allows Claude 3.5 or 3.7 to modify files directly; for example, it can make changes directly in source code rather than suggesting changes.
  • Google has announced Gemini Robotics, two models based on Gemini 2.0 that are designed to deal with the physical world. Robotics uses multimodal input to control physical devices; Robotics-ER can reason about physical objects.
  • Google has released Gemma 3, the latest in its Gemma series of open models. Gemma 3 is multimodal, has a 128K context window, comes in sizes from 1B to 32B, and was designed to support safe, responsible development. It’s available from GitHub and other repositories.
  • Local Deep Research is a tool that looks up resources, similar to the deep research offerings from OpenAI and other AI vendors, but uses Ollama to run the model of your choice locally.
  • OpenAI has announced several new tools aimed at helping developers build agents. The Responses API is a simple interface for querying models; web search facilitates web searches; computer use allows applications to perform tasks on other computers, like Anthropic’s tool of the same name; and file search allows applications to search for data locally.
  • A new Chinese agent, Manus, claims to be an “general AI agentâ€� that “delivers results.â€� It’s currently in private beta, though outsiders can submit tasks; the results may (or may not) be posted on Manus’s site. Manus appears to be built on top of Claude, using its agent APIs.
  • Letta is a framework for building AI applications that have long-term memory. This means that you can build agents that know what you’ve done in the past.
  • DeepSeek’s recent “Open Source Weekâ€� didn’t receive as much attention as it deserved. Every day, the company shared one of the libraries that it used to build R1. PySpur has done us all a service by summarizing DeepSeek’s releases.
  • Alibaba has released the final version of QwQ-32B, a reasoning model that it claims has performance equivalent to DeepSeek’s R1, a 671B model. The previews of QwQ were impressive; time to see whether it lives up to its claims.
  • OctoTools is a platform for developing agents. It doesn’t require training; it’s extensible, with tool cards to define the capabilities of tools it can use. It includes a planner to generate a series of actions to accomplish a task and an executor that executes those commands.
  • Unlike earlier language models, reasoning models will cheat to win chess games. Cheats include removing an opponent’s pieces from the board and attempting to modify the opposing chess engine. It’s unclear why this happens, or what it means.
  • agents.json is a specification for describing the contract between agents and APIs. It’s based on the OpenAPI standard. agents.json allows agents to discover how to use other services.
  • Researchers from DeepSeek have released a paper on “native sparse attention,â€� a technique for making attention mechanisms much more computationally efficient. NSA might open the way for infinite context windows.
  • Brain2Qwerty is a new language model designed to translate brainwaves into alphabet characters. It’s noninvasive, relying on EEGs or similar technology to detect brainwaves. Despite a high error rate, Brain2Qwerty is a significant step forward.
  • Academic research on a model that has been fine-tuned specifically to generate insecure code has discovered that the model will behave deceptively and inappropriately in other ways. The researchers have named this “emergent misalignment.â€�
  • olmOCR is an open source tool for recognizing and extracting text from just about anything while preserving natural reading order. Among other things, it supports tables, equations, and handwriting.
  • Microsoft has released bitnet.cpp, an inference framework for 1-bit models. It’s open source.
  • General Reasoning provides open source questions and reasoning traces for training open reasoning models. It’s open for contributions. Data is available either from its API or through Hugging Face.

Programming

  • Scallop is a new programming language designed for neurosymbolic programming. It’s built on top of the Datadog analytics platform and integrates well with PyTorch.
  • Remember Asteroids? Now there’s a version that’s driven by Wikipedia edits: Each edit spawns a new asteroid. Creation of a new article gives the player an extra life.
  • Oracle has released Java 24, which includes APIs to support post-quantum cryptography and the development of AI applications.
  • A new programming language named Rhombus looks like it might be worth trying. It’s “stable enough to be useful, but not done.â€� Who said that language development would stop in the age of AI?
  • Kagent is an open source framework for managing AI agents in the cloud with Kubernetes. It uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to access other tools it needs.
  • Cross-document view transitions sound awful, but they allow web developers to build sites from many small HTML pages.
  • Stack traces are underrated. They’re particularly useful for helping an AI assistant to debug.
  • The leader of the Neovim project foresees brain-computer interfaces for a world without keyboards. He’s also talking about more mundane features, like AI extensions and a Wasm Neovim artifact that would allow embedding Neovim in web apps.
  • Torii is an authentication framework for Rust that lets developers decide where to store and manage users’ authentication data. It doesn’t require a specific cloud or storage provider; users can plug in the provider of their choice.
  • How do you authenticate AI agents? OAuth works, of course, but there are good questions about whether it can scale to support the loads that AI agents will bring.
  • Jupyter has announced support for running R in the browser using WebAssembly.
  • Postgres can be used as a graph database by taking advantage of the pgRouting extension. Whether this is a better solution than a dedicated graph database is up to you.
  • There are obsessions, and there is implementing a Wasm virtual machine capable of running Doom using only the TypeScript type system. Given last month’s demonstration of Linux booting in a PDF in a browser, we can say that amazing, useless, and fun hacking is thriving.
  • Google has improved memory safety in its C++ applications by adding “spatial memory safetyâ€� (in less academic terms, array bounds checking) to libc++. The surprise is that this addition didn’t reduce performance significantly.
  • Google’s Gemini Code Assist (the company’s equivalent to GitHub Copilot) is now free for up to 180,000 code completions per month. Google also announced Gemini Code Assist for GitHub, which facilitates using GitHub for code reviews.
  • The open source curl utility is implemented in the safest 180,000 lines of C code anywhere. It’s worth watching curl’s creator, Daniel Stenberg, talk about writing safe code in an unsafe language.

Security

  • Cloudflare is blocking all unencrypted (i.e., non-HTTPS) attempts to connect to its APIs. Opening an unencrypted connection can inadvertently reveal sensitive information, even if the server only responds with a redirect or 403 (forbidden) code.
  • Cybercriminals are using online file conversion tools to steal information and infect sites with malware, including ransomware.
  • Cybercriminals have also succeeded in using Microsoft’s Trusted Signing service to sign malware, allowing malware to appear legitimate and to pass many security filters.
  • GitHub has announced a tool that scans source repositories for secrets (for example, login credentials, account keys) that shouldn’t be disclosed.
  • A supply chain attack against GitHub Actions has exposed CI/CD secrets embedded in over 20,000 repositories. The primary target of the attack appears to have been Coinbase, but there’s a lot of collateral damage.
  • Innovation in phishing is outpacing tools for detecting phishes. The most recent advances use fake sites to bypass multifactor authentication, in a variation of man-in-the-middle attacks.
  • Atomic Object has published a list of resources and best practices for security, safety and privacy when building language models into software.
  • A new ransomware decryptor for the Akira ransomware uses GPUs to brute-force the keys. It’s available on GitHub.
  • A hostile third-party JavaScript library has been used to inject four backdoors into over 1,000 WordPress sites.
  • Silk Typhoon, a cyber espionage group sponsored by the Chinese government, has been going through GitHub repos and other public sources to find API keys and other credentials that they can use in attacks. Keep your private keys private!
  • GitVenom is an info-stealing attack. Attackers have created many GitHub repositories for projects that contain malicious code. When victims download the repository and execute the code, it steals credentials, wallet data, and other information.
  • Simon Willison’s post, “Grok 3 Is Highly Vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection,â€� does a great job of explaining an important large model vulnerability.

Operations

  • Cloudflare is defending its clients from AI bots that ignore robots.txt and scrape their content by generating a “labyrinthâ€� of fake content on the fly when an AI bot is detected, trapping it in useless information.
  • Where is observability going? Charity Majors’s post is a must-read. Let’s forget about 2.0 and 3.0. Will observability become more like data governance? Is observability data destined for a data lake?
  • xlskubectl lets you manage a Kubernetes cluster through a Google spreadsheet. That may sound weird, but is it really any worse than wrestling with configuration files?
  • eBPF allows distributed system monitoring and observability rather than centralized monitoring. By moving intelligence to the nodes where the data is generated, systems can respond to issues in real time.
  • The OpenCost project provides tools for monitoring and predicting cloud expenses.
  • European cloud providers offer an alternative to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. These providers focus on trust, predictable costs, and less complex APIs—and keeping data away from the US, of course.

Web

  • Napster lives? It’s being purchased by a company that wants to build a music-oriented social media site. With blockchains and the metaverse.
  • Cara and Pixelfed are alternatives to Facebook and Instagram for artists and photographers who want to participate in online spaces where generative AI is not allowed.
  • The return of Digg? This time with AI-driven content moderation? Kevin Rose, one of Digg’s original founders, thinks so. The key is giving communities the tools they need.
  • The Opera browser is adding agentic browsing. Users can describe tasks that they want the browser to perform. User data is kept locally; agentic browsing runs entirely in the browser, and doesn’t rely on external servers.

Quantum Computing

  • The Bell-1 is a new 6-qubit quantum computer. It’s significant because it’s on the market; its cooling system is much smaller than a dilution refrigerator; and it incorporates both classical silicon integrated circuits and quantum circuits.
  • Researchers have shown that a quantum system has an advantage over classical computers in playing a specific game. There have been other claims about quantum advantage, but this is the first that involves a task that can be explained to a normal human.
  • USTC, the University of Science and Technology of China, has demonstrated “quantum supremacyâ€� with a 105-qubit quantum computer. Their results on random circuit sampling are a million times faster than Google’s best published results.
  • PsiQuantum claims that it has a quantum chip design that can be manufactured at scale. It also claims impressively low error rates for its photon-based qubits.
  • Google has introduced quantum-safe signatures to the key management system for Google Cloud. This is an important step toward safe post-quantum cryptography.

Biology

  • A biohybrid robotic hand incorporates living muscles from lab-grown human cells. The biggest problem is keeping the muscles alive. And like human muscles, they get tired and need to rest after a few minutes of work.
  • No woolly mammoths yet (more precisely known as cold-adapted elephants), but CRISPR has now given us woolly mice. The mice are a proof of concept, and are easier to experiment with. Their creators don’t yet know if they can tolerate cold better than regular mice.

Augmented and Virtual Reality

  • A startup has developed a new mixed-reality system that tracks the user’s eyes to compute what it should project onto a transparent screen.

The Research Behavior of Individual Investors

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.

       

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Autism’s missing women

Four girls sitting on a riverbank, sitting in two groups of two; three upright and one lying down, with backpacks and bags nearby.

Long believed to be particularly associated with males, new research is revolutionising our understanding of autism

- by Gina Rippon

Read at Aeon

What Makes a Good Teacher?

The Contraptions Book club March pick is Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biopgraphy, by Robert Irwin. We will discuss this the week of April 28th.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the last few months about a timeless question: What makes a good teacher?

It’s been on my mind because I’m currently trying to bootstrap an education track for the hitherto research-focused Summer of Protocols program I run, to incept the subject of protocols into university curricula. A tough sort of challenge at any time — every young idea, good or bad, wants to make it into syllabuses after all, and catch the young ‘uns as early as possible — but particularly tough in 2025.

The best university system in the world, which has set the standard worldwide for nearly a century, is under assault by people who appear to harbor a curiously visceral hatred for all formal education. A hatred that seems to extend way beyond specific complaints about things like DEI programs. As a product of this system who is largely happy with what I got out of the experience, I naturally have… opinions.

What happens to the American university system 2025-28 will likely determine what happens to higher education worldwide for the next half-century.

First, a quick boost: Applications for the curriculum development grants program close tomorrow (April 1), so if you know any talented college-level teachers or professors, or exceptional independent course creators, who might be interested in teaching the brave new subject of protocols, in these troubled times, point them to the program.

Like I said, it’s a tough environment for higher education, but this is precisely why it’s interesting to try and do something at the level of the foundational, millennia-old mission of the university — preserving existing knowledge, and integrating emerging knowledge into learning and teaching. It’s the ability to do this in tough times, rather than in easy times, that is perhaps the essence of education as an institutionalized domain. That’s when you learn who is truly committed to education as a calling, rather than as a sinecure or a Trojan horse for political agendas.

Good answers to the question what makes a good teacher, may not immediately suggest ways to fight the battles that need fighting today, but they will show why those battles are worth fighting at all. And as Viktor Frankl noted (channeling Nietzsche), we can deal with almost any how if we have a good answer to why.

I asked the question on Substack Notes, and got a few responses (including mine, which I might elaborate on in a future post). I’m interested in more answers:

The reason I’m interested in this question is that it seems to me the right back-to-basics question to ask about the teaching profession. Which does on occasion rise to the level of the noble calling we tend to portray it as in good times.

These are, of course, not particularly good times. Teaching at all levels, and at all times, is a political and ideological battlefield, but in the US (and to a lesser extent, around the world), this is probably the most embattled the sector has been in living memory, trapped as it is between a rock and a hard place — technological disruption from AI and online/virtual media, and political attacks from the Trump regime.

The Student View

On a personal note, it’s surreal to watch this battle take shape at a time when I’m the most immersed in proper study since grad school a quarter century ago, inhabiting at age 50 a headspace that I last inhabited in 1999.

I’m in 3 weekly study groups (on governance systems, robotics, and distributed computing) with friends, run a serious book club that takes on fairly weighty reads, and am working slowly through a few courses (two electrical engineering courses from MIT Open Courseware). On the practical front, I haven’t done this much hands-on hacking, building, and laboratory tinkering (supported by a mish-mash of formal and informal educational material) since 1998, when I taught a laboratory course in grad school.

While my current studies have no live teachers in the loop, each time I sit down to study something seriously, I’m reminded of how much I’m practicing behaviors first learned under the watchful eye of good teachers. We tend to remember the exceptionally charismatic (which is not the same thing as good), and exceptionally terrible teachers, but much of what we know about how to learn, how to study, comes from the quieter good teachers, many of whom we forget.

It also strikes me, reflecting on my own educational path — very conventional both on paper and in reality — that the modern public discourse around teaching and learning has been hijacked to a remarkable degree by charismatic public figures mythologizing their own supposedly maverick education stories.

These stories often feature exaggerated elements of rebellion, autodidact mastery, subversive hacking, heroic confrontations with villainous teachers and schoolyard bullies, genius non-neurotypical personal innovations and breakthroughs, and powerful experiences outside formal learning. These stories often sound like self-serving tales told by middle-aged Ferris Bueller caricatures trying to process distorted memories of somewhat traumatic school years. But they don’t strike me as a particularly accurate view of schooling, either as I experienced it, or as I witnessed most of my peers experiencing it.

These discourses understate the extent to which actual maverick outliers are in fact quite rare, and actually quite well accommodated by at least good schools. They understate the extent to which formal education not only comprehends and accommodates natural patterns of rebellion, but even designs around it, and encourages students to cultivate personal mythologies of heroic unaided agency for their own good.

Take for instance, one of my own “maverick” memories, of the sort I might put into a startup application for Y Combinator (an institution that invites and thrives on educational self-mythologizing). As was generally the case in the late 80s, nerdy students like me generally understood and used computers much better than the teachers who were supposed to be teaching us. Our computer science teacher was a mediocre math teacher who had taken some sort of bad certificate course in programming and understood very little. It was obvious to me and several of my friends that we were much better than her at both math and computers.

I feel a bit bad for her now — an average middle-aged woman who did her best. But us self-satisfied, self-styled wannabe hackers, we laughed at her behind her back. And we found opportunities to sneak into the computer lab on weekends and evenings to learn more, and faster, than she knew or could teach.

But what all of us in that cohort forget is that the “sneaking” comprised going and asking the custodian of the lab keys (the American Jesuit priest who ran the Astronomy club) to let us in — which he genially did. Despite our run-ins with the teachers we were easily leaving behind, the school did recognize and support us, putting us on programming competition teams, structuring term projects to let us get creative, and so on. The teacher I am kinda maligning once sent me to the Vice Principal’s office for mouthing off (I got slapped a couple of times — it was a different era), but also put me on the programming quiz and contest teams. That my buddies and I knew more than her wasn’t exactly a revelation to her. She did her best to deal with it in a positive way. Only later did I realize that dealing compassionately and positively with young people smarter than yourself is a basic teaching skill.

I was probably somewhere in the middle of the maverick spectrum. Not as straight-and-narrow as the grades-oriented hard-working kids, and not as unruly and unmanageable as the true mischief-makers. Somewhere between Lisa and Bart Simpson. I was largely, but not entirely, a solo self-directed learner. I did well mostly as a side-effect of being actually interested in a nerdy rather than instrumental way in the curriculum subjects. When the teachers were good, I paid attention and benefited. When they weren’t, I mostly ignored them and got good grades anyway. I cruised along with no real effort until I got to college, and was usually somewhere in the top 3-5 in the class of around 40 odd students. I gleefully filled up my spare time with all the available extra-curricular activities (I was a member of six clubs I think, and president of the physics club — more Max Fischer from Rushmore than Ferris Bueller — and founded a magazine and a short-lived airplane club).

The bulk of my educational experiences were positive. Most teachers were at least passably good enough, and a handful were standout formative influences.

Of course, this was partly because I was fortunate enough to go to very good schools throughout. My grade school was a solid Jesuit school. My university experiences were at top public universities in India and the US.

This is of course not the median experience. The median school is probably much worse at every level. But the point is, the university system at its best is where we should be looking for answers to why it is worth defending.

The State of Play

The question what makes a good teacher is about looking for the why of institutionalized education. Many of those mounting the assaults on universities today have a particular hostile answer they hope to institutionalize — that the best teacher is no teacher.

Arrayed against them, regardless of what else they believe about how universities need to evolve or reform, is everybody who believes this is the wrong answer.

Now, any idiot can set up and run a university during eras when everybody loves universities, is eager for the experiences they provide, and is eager to throw money at them. But it takes true education visionaries to do it when universities come under assault, as they do reliably do every few decades. As we like to say in the crypto world, winter is the best time to buidl.

Like many observers, I genuinely don’t know if the formal education sector will survive the current assault in the long term. I suspect it will simply because universities are likely Lindy — they have existed for a long time in the past, so we can expect them to last a long time in the future.

The modern university as we know it is about a millennium old (Al Azhar university in Egypt is perhaps the oldest, with the University of Bologna in Italy being the oldest in Europe). If you loosen the definition of what constitutes a university and squint a bit, the institutional form goes back even further to Buddhist universities like Nalanda and Takshashila in Mauryan India. So the idea of education being a formalized, specialized, and scaled-up process in society (as opposed to being limited to informal learning within communities, or within systems like apprenticeship or private tutoring), is nearly 2500 years old. Possibly older — I suspect there was probably at least some formally institutionalized education in the Bronze Age too.

ChatGPT 4o prompt: buddhist cave painting style depiction of a teacher teaching students in a classroom
ChatGPT 4o prompt: buddhist cave painting style depiction of a teacher teaching students in a classroom

This is why I tend to raise an eyebrow over revolutionary proclamations that the university as an idea, embodied in particular sorts of built environment where teachers and learners gather to study, is about to die.

Powerful though the forces of technology and politics are, the impulse to formally preserve knowledge and learning processes is even stronger. I do think formal education has not just survived worse, it is has historically been the mechanism by which entire civilizations have maintained a continuous identity through the rise and fall of empires and religions. University-like institutions have survived where states and economies have collapsed, and religions have replaced each other wholesale through slaughter.

We talk a lot about the post-nation-state and post-capitalist eras, and the joke goes that it is easier to imagine the end of civilization than the end of capitalism, but I think that distinction goes to universities. It is easier to imagine almost any other pillar of modernity — markets, liberal-democratic states, judiciaries — ending, than universities. Universities are the cockroaches of the institutional landscape (in the best sense of that metaphor), able to survive the destruction of almost everything else.

Interestingly, the Tech Right that’s part of this assault is less interesting a force for its role in the technological disruption than its role on the political front. Elon Musk (like many among the tech wealthy) is famously a believer in unschooling, and his many kids are presumably growing up without exposure to formal education. And he has certainly managed to spin a particularly cinematic tale of his own supposedly maverick educational experiences.

I suppose as a relatively satisfied customer of around 30 years of formal education (from preschool through postdoc), it should come as no surprise that I believe in the fundamental power and value of the institution, whatever its contemporary problems. There is no shortage of such problems today, including the ones that constitute the casus belli of the current assault on them. But they strike me as ordinary problems calling for ordinary reform and evolution initiatives.

The ongoing assaults strike me as pure political vandalism with a thin veneer of convenient justification narratives. They have little to do with the stated causes (issues like DEI), and a lot to do with both personal resentments, and larger ideological wars.

Two Background Briefs

Since I’m currently experimenting a lot with AI-assisted writing in the optional Sloptraptions section of this newsletter, I thought it would be fun to turn AI-assisted attention to the issue. I co-wrote, with ChatGPT 4o, two short essays about education over the weekend.

In Knowledge Under Siege, I tried to work out a historically situated view of the current political battles in the US. Much to my surprise, it was ChatGPT that came with the core insight — that universities are being attacked not because they are in the way of a political agenda, but because they’re already being replaced and in danger of becoming irrelevant, making them valuable targets for symbolic assaults aimed at total destruction.

In Deep Teaching, I tried to work out a scheme for thinking about various ways in which AI-assisted teaching could work, using the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Diamond Age as the starting point. It turned into quite a solid frame (with several actually interesting insights being contributed by ChatGPT):

These briefs are stubs for further thinking for me. Whatever happens, the war over traditional universities is probably going to be existential for all societies that have historically believed in their value.

But even if universities as we know them vanish, the basic question at the heart of this essay likely never will.

Back to Basics

So let’s ask once again: What makes for a good teacher?

My brief delving sessions into the current battles around education have only reinforced my sense that going back to the basics is key to universities not just surviving the current onslaught in some form that recognizably retains their unique features, but doing so with a reinvigorated sense of mission.

That mission is teaching.

In the last half-century, it might seem like the research mission has overwhelmed the teaching mission, but this is not true. Even the modern research university — a brilliant American invention that vastly improved on its European ancestors — rests on the foundation of rock-solid teaching traditions. If the teaching traditions are undermined, everything built on top of it — from Nobel-winning discoveries and particle accelerators, to decades-old memories of pandemics and wars — collapses.

As an aside, I find it ironic that Elon Musk’s empire is largely built on intellectual and technological accomplishments of decades of university research, on topics ranging from battery chemistries to rocketry. Much of it the result of a mechanism that he has disingenuously sought to portray as an administrative grift (the indirect cost support model developed by Vannevar Bush’s OSD during WW2, which allowed the modern research university to emerge).

What’s more, I do think the teaching mission cannot be entirely reduced to rewilded children and young adults wandering by themselves in the wildernesses of technological modernity, Lord of the Flies style, beating advanced knowledge into each other with Hobbesian viciousness between bouts of blow-things-up experimentation in garages.

Institutionalized education is one of the most profound inventions of humanity. Many mammals teach their young to survive and thrive in the wild, showing them how to hunt or forage. It is only humans that create complex institutions to perpetuate and extend vast amounts of knowledge over centuries, and reliably discover and cultivate minds capable of carrying on the traditions, at scale. Universities are, arguably, the original large language models, biologically embodied.

You only have to talk to someone who has escaped an oppressive small town and landed in a college town, where they flourished, to understand this. Going from being surrounded by anti-intellectual family and community who neither understand nor appreciate your potential, and are perhaps even hostile to it, to an environment that encourages and nurtures it, is a profound experience.

Even those with supportive environments, like me (I went to a good Catholic school, and my parents indulged my every nerdy interest as best they could) find that a good college campus is a whole new level of the knowledge game.

And going from a good but relatively spartan Indian university (IIT Bombay) to richly resourced leading research universities in the US (University of Michigan, Cornell), was yet another level-up.

Much as I appreciate my family and friends, there is no way in hell I’d have been able to embark on the sort of educational journey I did without universities (there’s a great Hindi movie called Udaan, about kids escaping my hometown of Jamshedpur). No amount of creative unschooling, self-learning, and internet-fueled autodidactic adventuring would have been right for me.

It might well be enough for many other types of personalities to discover themselves and thrive, but for me — and I suspect the majority of humanity — the university system is the pump that systematically gets them to their natural level of cognitive development.

And despite all the effects of technology, fancy laboratory equipment, and increasingly sophisticated physical and virtual classroom environments, the key to what formal education does remains good teaching.

Teaching Teaching

If you haven’t taught in a formal setting yourself, you likely have no idea of what it takes or how hard it is. I spent 7 semesters as a graduate teaching assistant at Michigan (basic engineering courses like fluid mechanics, laboratory practices, linear algebra), and designed and taught an advanced graduate course at Cornell (I still have the notes; it was called “Design of Complex Engineering Systems”). That was 20 years ago. More recently, I developed and taught a few online courses, and do the occasional corporate workshop.

Teaching is genuinely hard. It’s not like giving talks at conferences. There’s a there there to teaching. Especially good teaching. I can whip up a good talk on any topic I’ve been thinking about in about an afternoon. A good from-scratch classroom lecture on the other hand (or workshop or other format), will take me several days.

I’m not particularly good at teaching, but not terrible either. Which means I had to learn to teach, by being taught to teach. My main dose of this meta-education came via a summer course on college teaching I took at U. Michigan in 2003, just before I graduated (and after I’d done 7 semesters of teaching).

At the time, the culture wars we are witnessing today were just getting started. I learned about Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered. We talked about Paulo Frere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We had our share of uncomfortable conversations about what is known now as “DEI,” where I usually found myself arguing against it, exploiting my brown-skin privileges to argue un-PC positions with the (mostly White) ideologues teaching the course. But it was all in a regular critical debate mode rather than in Muskian must-burn-and-salt-the-earth mode.

It is important to note that at least back then, in 2003, the political “meta” of the teaching-about-teaching was only a small fraction of what we talked about. Even the already highly politicized schools of education of the early 2000s did recognize that there were layers of basics they had to teach, below the political debates. Stuff about basic classroom techniques. About working whiteboards, grading, and designing homework exercises. About plain old voice-modulation, pacing, and chunking of material into bite-sized pieces. There was solid stuff about how to lecture or design small group activities, and not-so-solid stuff that’s been discredited since, like theories of “learning styles.” That’s how it goes. Like any kind of knowledge, pedagogical knowledge has its own constantly unfolding tale of epistemic creative destruction.

Pedagogy is a type of programming. A deep skill that has developed over millennia across the world. A skill you can’t just assume you can intuit and begin to practice effectively overnight, any more than you could just walk into Google with no computing background and start hacking away at code. Good intentions are not enough. Genuine concern for the learner’s needs is not enough. Mindful engagement is not enough. You need an aptitude for teaching, and learned and practiced skills.

That summer course earned me a “certificate in college teaching.” It feels like a real credential to me, not just some ideological indoctrination badge. I learned things about teaching, and it made me a better teacher. Sure, there was a politics to it that I mostly disagreed with, but not to the point where I questioned the very existence or value of the course, or the institution hosting it.

But what’s happened in the last decade — and which has supplied the convenient excuses for the current unbridled assault on all aspects of the university system — is that the political meta has threatened to eat the bread-and-butter of pedagogy as a skill and critical societal function. The balance is arguably way off today. Modern descendants of the course I took in 2003 likely do look primarily like political indoctrination, not the teaching of teaching skills.

A genuine case can and should be made for correcting that kind of ideological overreach. But in the meantime, it is important to acknowledge that scholars graduating in various disciplines with PhDs, ready to begin university teaching careers, are not idiots. Just because a committed ideological tribe has installed itself in their midst, and has been trying to indoctrinate them in certain ways, doesn’t mean they are mindless zombies who become easily infected with some imaginary “mind virus” that they then proceed to go around spreading. That strikes me as pure projection — the missionary zealots of Silicon Valley are far more vulnerable to mind viruses. It’s their greatest strength — being able to drink the Kool-Aid du jour and drive towards trillions of dollars worth of new wealth with a maniacal cultish energy. But it comes with a great weakness — processing everything as a holy war.

To the extent stuff like the threat of capture of universities by DEI programs is a problem, it is one that can be addressed surgically, without tearing down the entire host institutions.

But that’s not what’s happening right now. What’s happening looks increasingly like an assault designed to destroy the institution as a whole, and replace it with some mix of Lord of the Flies unschooling culture, and reactionary ethnonationalist institutionalism marching under the banner of “meritocracy.”

This is not abstract or theoretical for me. I spent a decade on a student visa, enjoying the academic freedoms now under threat. I was part of the era when landing in a US university was the dream for any smart person anywhere in the world. It is genuinely saddening to see the script flip, and the best of the world’s scholarly talent starting to look for the exits or shying away from the entrances. If I were graduating undergrad today in India, I would not be looking to head to the US (which some might see as no great loss, but my reaction is probably shared by much more talented and valuable people).

I assume, if you’re a reader of this newsletter, you loosely agree with me that rampant vandalism of universities, and what amounts to modern library-burning, is not a great idea. Neither is a future shaped by political ideologues who have captured it from the inside.

These are not good ideas for the same reason that letting either extreme pacifists on the outside or murderous psychopaths on the inside run militaries or police forces are not good ideas.

But if neither vandalism from the outside, nor ideological capture from the inside, points to a future worth having for the education system, what does?

I think the answer is one of those simple to state, but hard to implement ones: going back to the basics of good teaching.

Whatever your philosophy of teaching (from laissez-faire learner-directed, to classical sage-on-the-stage lecturing) and whatever your views on the use of technology in the process (whether you think computers should be banned from classrooms or that every student should have a Diamond Age style Primer), if you believe that teaching as a human activity can and does have a future, a necessary future, the search for that future must begin with asking once again the most basic question.

What makes a good teacher?

Like everybody else with a stake in the world of education, I have specific selfish objectives. But beyond the specific subject I’m trying to incept into educational curricula — the art and science of protocols — I am personally interested in this broader question. I hope our summer program goes beyond finding good answers to the question what’s a good way to teach protocols to shedding light on that more basic, timeless question, what makes a good teacher?

Even though other questions might seem more pressing, like what to do about AI, Trump, and Elon, I suspect good answers to those questions — ultimately shallower, even though more urgent — will rest on good answers to the big one.

What makes a good teacher?

Living in Freiburg, Germany

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.

       

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★ France Fines Apple $162M for App Tracking Transparency, Taking the Side of Surveillance Advertisers Over Users

Jon Brodkin, reporting for Ars Technica, “France Fines Apple €150M for “Excessive” Pop-Ups That Let Users Reject Tracking”:

France’s competition regulator fined Apple €150 million, saying the iPhone maker went overboard in its implementation of pop-up messages that let users consent to or reject tracking that third-party applications use for targeted advertising.

The App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework used by Apple on iPhones and iPads since 2021 makes the use of third-party applications too complex and hurts small companies that rely on advertising revenue, said a press release today by the Autorité de la concurrence (Competition Authority). The system harms “smaller publishers in particular since, unlike the main vertically integrated platforms, they depend to a large extent on third-party data collection to finance their business,” the agency said.

User consent obtained via the ATT framework “authorizes the application in question to collect user data for targeted advertising purposes,” the agency said. “If consent is given, the application can access the Identifier for Advertisers (‘IDFA’), the identifier by which each device can be tracked through its use of third-party applications and sites.” The French investigation was triggered by a complaint lodged by advertising industry associations.

Ben Lovejoy, correctly calling the decision “bizarre” at 9to5Mac:

Complaints were made in a number of countries — some arguing that it was unfair because Apple exempts its own apps (which are in reality subject to even tighter controls), others saying the loss of revenue forced developers to raise prices to compensate. [...]

Although expected, the decision is still inexplicable. ATT involves precisely one popup asking a simple yes/no question. Additionally, Apple lets users switch on a toggle (shown above) to block apps from even asking the question. It’s especially odd given that ATT is a privacy feature, and Europe has the strongest privacy laws in the world. The EU has also previously vindicated Apple’s introduction of ATT.

It’s not inexplicable or odd if you view the decision as coming from a perspective where government bureaucracy is viewed as an inherent good, and well-intentioned process is all that matters, not actual results. Read the Autorité de la Concurrence’s decision (which they helpfully do make available in English) and it’s pretty clear:

The Autorité found that the ATT framework imposed by Apple is not necessary, insofar as the consent obtained is not valid under the applicable laws, in particular the French Data Protection Act.

In practice, the fact that publishers that so wish cannot rely on the ATT framework to comply with their legal obligations means that they must continue to use their own consent collection solutions, known as consent management platforms (“CMPs”). The result is that multiple consent pop-ups are displayed, making the use of third-party applications in the iOS environment excessively complex, as observed by the French data protection authority (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés — CNIL) in a 2022 opinion issued at the request of the Autorité.

It’s ostensibly “not necessary” because French and EU privacy laws are supposedly enough, and all that’s needed. And it’s unfair because now, under ATT, third-party surveillance advertisers who seek to track users across apps on iOS need to ask permission twice — first through the clear-as-a-bell “Ask App Not to Track” / “Allow Tracking” prompt required by Apple, and again through the byzantine but ultimately toothless permission requirements of France and the EU. ATT has had measurable effects because users understand it, and they prefer not to be tracked. EU and French privacy laws are largely ineffective because, in practice, they bury users with confusion. The bureaucratic hurdles they impose are to the benefit, not detriment, of the surveillance ad industry. That’s now proven out by industry groups — the ones ATT successfully tempered — successfully getting France’s regulators to penalize Apple. Users don’t know how to lobby government bureaucracies. What the Autorité de la Concurrence is saying, in so many words, is that two layers of consent is too much, and the only one that’s necessary is the one that advertising lobbying groups don’t object to, not the one they do (but which users understand and like).

It’s clear that only one of these two things — Apple’s ATT or French/EU privacy regulations — was actually effective at reducing tracking: ATT. No one claimed that French or EU privacy laws resulted in Meta losing a fortune because they had to adjust their kleptomaniacal thievery of users’ privacy. But by all accounts, including Meta’s own, ATT cost Meta billions. And yes, ATT hurt small businesses too — small businesses that were built upon surreptitious tracking that users had neither awareness of nor control over. It’s like a consortium of sketchy pawn shops complaining to the authorities after a popular retailer successfully cracked down on an organized shoplifting/pickpocketing ring, and the authorities then fining the retailer for the damage to the pawnbrokers’ business fencing stolen goods — and for exposing the police as ineffective.

App Tracking Transparency actually accomplished, in practice, via user-focused plain-language consent, what the EU’s privacy laws were intended to do but do not. This fine boils down to France declaring that Apple shouldn’t have actually done what the EU was pretending to do. They’re acting at the behest of the very developers and advertising companies who were (and still are trying) to conduct cross-app tracking that App Tracking Transparency successfully gave users some control over.

Release Day for Apple’s .4 OS Versions

All out today:

  • iOS 18.4 (priority notifications, lots of new languages and EU support for Apple Intelligence).
  • MacOS 15.4 (AI message categorization in Apple Mail, Quick Start for setting up a new machine).
  • VisionOS 2.4 (Apple Intelligence, new Spatial Gallery app, new Vision Pro sibling app for iPhone).
  • WatchOS 11.4 (new Sleep Wake Up alarm option that will emit sound even when the watch is in silent mode).
  • tvOS 18.4 (UI tweaks to TV app).

And the big new feature across all OSes: eight new emoji. Also, lots of new WebKit features.

 ★ 

The White House Correspondents Association Speaks Cowardice to Power

Brian Steinberg and Pat Saperstein, reporting for Variety over the weekend:

The White House Correspondents’ Association has canceled plans to have comedian Amber Ruffin perform at its annual dinner on April 26, a new sign of the pressures being brought to bear on news organizations during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The journalism group, which has seen its control over interactions with Trump eroded in recent weeks, made the decision after Taylor Budowich, a White House deputy chief of staff, raised comments Ruffin has made in the past that are critical of Trump. Earlier this week, Ruffin told a podcast backed by The Daily Beast that she would not try to make sure her jokes targeted all sides of the political spectrum as the WHCA had requested, and likened the Trump administration to “kind of a bunch of murderers.” Playing to both sides “makes them feel like human beings,” she said, “cause they’re not.” [...]

“The WHCA board has unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year. At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists,” WHCA president Eugene Daniels wrote to members in a statement.

“For the past couple of weeks, I have been planning a re-envisioning of our dinner tradition for this year,” he added. “As the date nears, I will share more details of the plans in place to honor journalistic excellence and a robust, independent media covering the most powerful office in the world.”

What an enormous mountain of obvious horseshit this explanation is. The WHCA only announced that Ruffin would be hosting this year’s show on February 4, at which point this lickspittle clown Eugene Daniels was quoted thus by The Hollywood Reporter:

“When I began to think about what entertainer would be a perfect fit for the dinner this year, Amber was immediately at the top of my list,” Eugene Daniels of Politico, president of the association, said in a statement on Tuesday. “She has the ability to walk the line between blistering commentary and humor all while provoking her audience to think about the important issues of the day. I’m thrilled and honored she said yes.”

So eight weeks ago this obsequious bootlicker Daniels thought Amber Ruffin “would be a perfect fit for the dinner this year” but now, four weeks before the show, he’s trying to claim with a straight face that “For the past couple of weeks, I have been planning a re-envisioning of our dinner tradition for this year”?

The kids magazine Highlights for Children has a long-running comic strip called “Goofus and Gallant”, the premise of which is that Goofus is a kid who always does the wrong thing, and Gallant always does the right thing. Goofus, especially in the older strips, is an absurd parody. This Eugene Daniels toady is the Goofus of journalism. The entire point of the WHCA is to assert the group’s collective independence as journalists — and the independence they assert is specifically from the White House. So of course they shouldn’t have responded to White House pressure to fire Ruffin as this year’s host. But it’s even worse for an ostensible journalist — the president of the WHCA for chrissakes — to try to get even a single person in the world to believe that this is anything other than caving to White House pressure, and that in fact (“Yeah, that’s the ticket!”) he’d been planning to cancel the entire concept of having a comedian host at all “for the past couple of weeks” when just eight weeks ago he described Ruffin as “a perfect fit for the dinner this year”.

This is Baghdad Bob level nonsense. I’m not one for performative resignations, but how does any news outlet or journalist agree to remain a member of the WHCA after this?

 ★ 

[Sponsor] Democracy

“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.

 ★ 

Live coverage: SpaceX to launch 27 Starlink satellites on Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg

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

Update April 1, 7:55 p.m. EDT: SpaceX adjusted the T-0 liftoff time.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is preparing to deliver the latest 27 Starlink V2 Mini satellites into low Earth orbit. The mission, dubbed Starlink 11-13, will be the 25th Starlink flight of the year.

Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base is set for 6:47 p.m. PDT (9:47 p.m. EDT, 0147 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.

Space Force to test satellite refueling technologies in orbit

Orbit Fab refueling shuttle

Multi-year experiments aim to validate commercial solutions for space-based logistics

The post Space Force to test satellite refueling technologies in orbit appeared first on SpaceNews.

Nelson concerned about NASA layoffs and other changes

Nelson

Former NASA Administrator Bill Nelson says he is concerned about some of the recent changes at the agency, such as the firing of its chief scientist.

The post Nelson concerned about NASA layoffs and other changes appeared first on SpaceNews.

NASA adds Starship to launch contract

Starship IFT-7 liftoff

NASA has added SpaceX’s Starship to a contract used for launching agency missions, but the vehicle still has significant work ahead before it can start launching major missions.

The post NASA adds Starship to launch contract appeared first on SpaceNews.

Chinese Bluetooth satellite startup raises early funding

Render of a Bluelink Satcom satellite in low Earth orbit, featuring a gold-colored cube-shaped bus with four extended solar panel arms arranged in a cross configuration, set against the backdrop of space and the Earth's horizon.

HELSINKI — Chinese startup Bluelink Satcom has raised early-stage funding to build a satellite network capable of detecting Bluetooth signals from space. Bluelink Satcom announced an angel+ funding round March […]

The post Chinese Bluetooth satellite startup raises early funding appeared first on SpaceNews.

Investigation into failed New Glenn landing completed

NG-1 liftoff

Blue Origin says its next New Glenn launch will be as soon as late spring after completing an investigation into the failed booster landing on the vehicle’s first flight.

The post Investigation into failed New Glenn landing completed appeared first on SpaceNews.

GITAI finalizes robotic arm study for Japan’s crewed lunar rover

Space robotics specialist GITAI has completed a concept study for a mechanical arm that would be ready to support Japan’s crewed lunar rover early next decade.

The post GITAI finalizes robotic arm study for Japan’s crewed lunar rover appeared first on SpaceNews.

“Standardization, automation, and industrialization are no longer optional”

The name Beyond Gravity sounds like a startup. Can you explain who your company is? André Wall: We have more than 50 years of experience supplying key components for the world’s […]

The post “Standardization, automation, and industrialization are no longer optional” appeared first on SpaceNews.

Will America’s stockmarket convulsions spread?

Investors are hurrying to find alternatives—but all face difficulties of their own

Orogeny

Most properties can only boast INDOOR heated floors.

Fram2 astronauts begin historic polar orbit spaceflight following a launch from the Kennedy Space Center

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 39A to begin the Fram2 polar orbit mission. This was the 200th orbital launch from LC-39A. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now

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 four astronauts of the Fram2 mission pose inside the suit up room near Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. From left to right: mission commander Chun Wang, vehicle pilot Rabea Rogge, vehicle commander Jannicke Mikkelsen and mission specialist and medical officer Eric Philips. Image: Fram2

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 SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket climbs into the upper atmosphere as it prepares for main engine cutoff (MECO) and the separation of the rocket’s booster from its second stage. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now

One for the history books

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.”

Rabea Rogge, foreground, and Jannicke Mikkelsen, background, train inside a mockup of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft at SpaceX’s facilities in Hawthorne, California. Image: Fram2/SpaceX

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.

Monday 31 March 1662

This morning Mr. Coventry and all our company met at the office about some business of the victualling, which being dispatched we parted.

I to my Lord Crew’s to dinner (in my way calling upon my brother Tom, with whom I staid a good while and talked, and find him a man like to do well, which contents me much), where used with much respect, and talking with him about my Lord’s debts, and whether we should make use of an offer of Sir G. Carteret’s to lend my Lady 4 or 500l., he told me by no means, we must not oblige my Lord to him, and by the by he made a question whether it was not my Lord’s interest a little to appear to the King in debt, and for people to clamor against him as well as others for their money, that by that means the King and the world may see that he do lay out for the King’s honour upon his own main stock, which many he tells me do, that in fine if there be occasion he and I will be bound for it.

Thence to Sir Thomas Crew’s lodgings. He hath been ill, and continues so, under fits of apoplexy. Among other things, he and I did discourse much of Mr. Montagu’s base doings, and the dishonour that he will do my Lord, as well as cheating him of 2 or 3,000l., which is too true.

Thence to the play, where coming late, and meeting with Sir W. Pen, who had got room for my wife and his daughter in the pit, he and I into one of the boxes, and there we sat and heard “The Little Thiefe,” a pretty play and well done.

Thence home, and walked in the garden with them, and then to the house to supper and sat late talking, and so to bed.

Read the annotations

Tuesday: Job Openings, ISM Mfg, Construction Spending, Vehicle Sales

Mortgage Rates From Matthew Graham at Mortgage News Daily: Mortgage Rates Inch Lower, But Remain Broadly Sideways
Sideways" 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.

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
Tuesday:
• At 10:00 AM ET, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for February from the BLS.

• Also at 10:00 AM, ISM Manufacturing Index for March. The consensus is for the ISM to be at 50.3, unchanged from 50.3 in February.  

• Also at 10:00 AM, Construction Spending for February. The consensus is for 0.2% increase in construction spending.

• All Day: Light vehicle sales for March.

Meet the Fram2 crew: A cryptocurrency entrepreneur, a cinematographer, a robotics engineer and an Arctic explorer

The four astronauts of the Fram2 mission pose inside the suit up room near Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. From left to right: mission commander Chun Wang, vehicle pilot Rabea Rogge, vehicle commander Jannicke Mikkelsen and mission specialist and medical officer Eric Philips. Image: Fram2

Four people united by their fascination with the Earth’s polar regions are embarking on a spaceflight that will allow them to experience those remote areas like no human before.

Chun Wang, a 42-year-old entrepreneur and adventurer, chartered a free-flier mission with SpaceX aboard the Dragon Resilience spacecraft. Following eight months of training, he along with Jannicke Mikkelsen, a 38-year-old cinematographer and director; Rabea Rogge, a 29-year-old, arctic robotics researcher; and Eric Philips, a 62-year-old polar explorer are undertaking a multi-day mission, dubbed “Fram2.”

Wang said he took inspiration from previous spaceflights that named their spacecraft and missions after historic vessels.

“On the evening of April 23, 2023, I was in Saudi Arabia, lying in my hotel bed, thinking about the perfect name for the world’s first spaceflight mission to orbit the poles,” Wang told Spaceflight Now in a prelaunch interview. “I recalled the British Mars lander, Beagle2. I had spent a lot of time following that mission, among others, during my college years. It was named after the Beagle, the ship that carried Charles Darwin around the world in the 1830s. That’s when it hit me. I could name my mission after a ship, too.

“I thought of Fram, the ship aiming to [explore] both poles.”

An artist’s rendering of the Crew Dragon Resilience orbiting over a polar region amid the aurora during the Fram2 mission. Graphic: SpaceX

According to The Fram Museum, the polar ship was the first “specifically built in Norway for polar research.” It sailed on three key expeditions: it drifted with the ice floes the Arctic Ocean between 1893 and 1896, to the arctic archipelago west of Greenland between 1898 and 1902 and to Antarctica from 1910 to 1912.

Like the expeditions of yesteryear, Wang wanted to bring together this collective to bring their experiences with polar exploration to bear on this mission.

“As a crew, we are eager to showcase our explorational spirit and show the world the polar regions from a new angle while also showcasing how technology helps push the boundaries of how we understand Earth and Space,” Chun said. “We’ve all dedicated our lives to exploring and sharing the polar regions with others in different ways, we have a chance to do this on a scale that no one else has ever had.”

For a mission overview, click here. Before they take to the skies, here’s an introduction to the four members of the Fram2 mission.

Fram2 mission commander Chun Wang pictured inside the crew access arm at Launch Complex 39A during the dry dress rehearsal on Saturday, March 29, 2025. Image: Fram2/SpaceX

Chun Wang

The man behind the Fram2 mission, Chun Wang, is an entrepreneur who became fascinated with travel at a very young age. Growing up in China, he said it wasn’t until he turned 18 in 2000 and went off to university that he traveled more 172 km (107 mi) from his home.

As a kid, he imagined traveling the world, thanks to his grandparents with whom he lived during his childhood. Wang said they were the ones who taught him to read.

“In 1987, when I was 5 years old, my grandfather went for a walk and brought home a world map he had found. That map instantly became my favorite thing to play with, and it sparked my curiosity,” Wang said. “What really caught my eye was the empty space at the bottom of the map—the polar regions. From that moment, I was fascinated by the mystery and excitement of these distant and unknown places.”

Wang began really racking up travel miles when he started working for a Norwegian-owned software company in Beijing. To save money, he slept on the sofa of a French colleague or at the office and then would commute back home on the weekends, which was about 120 km (75 mi) away from the office.

“Despite having a full-time job, I traveled 75,900 km (47,162 mi) by train that year alone, using only my weekends,” Wang said. “In total, I spent two months solely in train cars in 2007, leaving work for the train station on Fridays, only returning the following Mondays.”

Fram2 mission commander Chun Wang visits the Fram Museum in Oslo, Norway in 2022. About a year later, he said he was inspired to name a future spaceflight to explore the polar regions after the ship that set sail on multiple expeditions during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Image: Chun Wang via X

Wang spent the next four years expanding his travels and was able to visit every province in China by train. His first international trip came in 2010 when he visited Nepal and later India.

He said his travels took him to the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent. He hopped onboard what was then India’s longest, non-stop train ride — 16317 Himsagar Express — which took him from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and continued on his journey through the country, which he said ended up costing him about $1,000, “which was everything I had.”

“In those years, I was fascinated by infrastructure and transportation, especially railways. I meticulously recorded every train ride down to the minutes, even the seconds, and posted these records on online forums and bulletin boards,” Wang said. “Someone once gave me the nickname ‘High-Speed Rail 1000 Times Guy’ because I was counting my rides toward a goal of 1000 rides on the high-speed trains.” 

Wang said that as of March 20, 2025, he rode high-speed trains a total of 854 times. His number of air flights, however, is now tantalizingly close to 1,000.

When he began planning the Fram2 mission with SpaceX, Wang also started really paying attention to the number of flights he’d logged. According to his record, his flight onboard the Dragon Resilience will be his 1,000th flight of any kind and his first to space.

Fram2 mission commander Chun Wang holds up a plaque noting that his flight onboard a SpaceX Dragon space craft will be his 1,000th flight to date. Image: Chun Wang via X

Before pursuing spaceflight, Wang’s interest was in new terrestrial technologies. He first heard about personal computers when he was 7-years-old and received his first computer, a 486SX running MS-DOS 5.0 when he was 13-years-old and finished with primary school.

“I used it to write many interesting programs, besides games, one of the earliest was a gravity simulator that visualized planetary motion in the solar system,” Wang said. “At school, I participated in various programming contests, including the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and ACM-ICPC. Instead of taking the national college entrance exam, I was directly admitted to university based on my performance in these contests.”

Wang leveraged his technology skills to co-found the Bitcoin mining company, f2poool in 2013. He said a year after its start, they became “the largest Bitcoin mining pool in the world.” While that distinction is now held by Foundry USA, according to Luxor Technology’s Hashrate Index, f2pool is still the fourth largest Bitcoin mining pool.

Wang said that while they’ve been able to mine 1.3 million Bitcoins over the past decade, his interest in cryptocurrency and Bitcoin has “shifted” over time.

“Now, I find myself drawn to another new and emerging field—the field I have been interested in since childhood —- space,” Wang said. “Since SpaceX began recovering Falcon 9 boosters, the commercial space industry has been advancing at an incredible pace. Once again, I see something new and exciting unfolding, similar to the feeling when I first heard about computers and first discovered Bitcoin.”

From Bitcoin to blastoff

The seeds of the Fram2 mission were born through Wang’s global travels as he continued to push further and further towards the poles. He said he felt a drive to “push the boundaries of how far in longitude and latitude I could go.”

“In 2006, I reached the border with Kazakhstan at 82°E to the west. In 2011, I traveled to India’s southernmost tip, reaching 8°N to the south,” Wang said. “In 2012, I took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Europe, arriving in St. Petersburg at 60°N, 30°E. In 2013, I went to Kamchatka, reaching 160°E to the east, then finally in 2016, I traveled to the United States for the first time.

“In December 2021, I reached the South Pole, and again in July 2023, the North Pole—there are no further points left to push the boundary on Earth anymore, which makes space an exciting frontier to explore.”

Fram2 mission commander Chun Wang pictured during an expedition of the North Pole on July 16, 2023. Image: Chun Wang via Fram2

Wang said as he considered what a spaceflight crew would look like, it was important to gather a group together that didn’t include any Americans. Fram2 will be the first flight of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft without any representation from the United States, which he was intentional.

“In 2004, when I volunteered as a Wikipedia editor, I spent a lot of time working on space related articles, including a list of space-faring countries—those countries with at least an astronaut flown into orbit,” Wang said. “When I selected this crew, I intentionally made the crew diverse to represent the open future we hope to see for space exploration.”

When it came to who to include on this mission, Wang said first and foremost was to ensure that there was someone from Norway since Fram is a Norwegian ship. That’s how Mikkelsen, a Norwegian cinematographer and film director, came to mind.

“Jannicke and I are neighbors when I am in Svalbard, and given her past experience on ‘One More Orbit,’ she is probably one the best fit for this mission,” Wang said.

The other two crew members, Rogge from Germany and Philips from Australia, were folks who Wang met while on a ski expedition in Svalbard in April 2023.

“Eric has been to the North Pole and South Pole for perhaps 30 times, while Rabea has worked on a CubeSat project,” Wang said. “Both of them love space and have polar experience, so we’re a great team connected by our connection to Svalbard and are excited to represent a place we love during the mission.”

Wang said following the Fram2 mission he wants to stay involved with space and hinted at what he has his eye on next.

“Once Starship becomes operational, it will open up unprecedented possibilities for private space travel and Mars won’t be just a distant dream,” he said. “Considering the vast possibilities, I think it’s time to start saving money…”

Fram2 vehicle commander Jannicke Mikkelsen poses in the crew access arm at Launch Complex 39A during the dry dress rehearsal for the mission on Saturday, March 29, 2025. Image: Fram2/SpaceX

Jannicke Mikkelsen

Sitting in the seat reserved for a commander of a Dragon spacecraft is Jannicke Mikkelsen. The 38-year-old is an award winning cinematographer and film director who was hailed by the European Commission as “an innovator in next-gen film production.”

She was also called a “monument” in virtual reality filmmaking by the lead guitarist of Queen, Brian May, who is also an astrophysicist. Mikkelsen received a Master’s degree in cinematography from the National Film and Television school in the United Kingdom.

Highlights of her professional career include serving as the director, director of photography and stenographer on the VR concert film, “Queen + Adam Lambert: VR the Champions.”

“I’ve been very fortunate to work with legends such as Brian May and to call him my mentor. He taught me that inspiration is born through renewed perspective!” Mikkelsen said. “You can either seek out a new perspective, or you can create it. In my career I do a mixture of both. I seek to bring my camera where nobody has gone before me, and I also film in 3D to make you feel like you are there with me.

“To make it possible to bring a camera with me I must innovate because the technology we have available today is insufficient for the challenge ahead. My dream is to take you with me on our Fram2 space mission for you to experience our mission and see planet Earth as we will.”

Mikkelsen, who grew up in Longyearbyen, Norway, said she has long been interested in filming in extreme environments. She said she likes the challenge and promise held in going to extraordinary lengths to get a shot.

“Few venture out into the uncomfortable to explore our planet. To operate in extreme environments takes years of preparation, innovation, and physical training to succeed,” Mikkelsen said. “At large, few seek, or have access to extreme environments. And as we know, out of sight is out of mind. I see it as my duty to show you the most beautiful, yet vulnerable environments on our planet.”

Jannicke Mikkelsen, the vehicle commander of the Fram2 mission, is photographed with one of her cameras during a polar shoot. Image: Fram2

Part of that sense of duty is connected to why she runs. She and her fiancé, Rolf-Harald Haugen, are planning to run both the Spitzbergen marathon and the Berlin marathon even though she hates running.

“I run because I hate running and it’s uncomfortable. Discomfort spawns growth. I will never take my ability to run for granted,” Mikkelsen said. “I spent five years learning to walk, run and jump after a horse riding accident when I was ten years old. To not run would be to do my body and brain a disservice.

“I was given the gift of a second chance at life. I will live my life forever exploring and building my body to carry me where I want to go next.”

Ultimate adventure

Mikkelsen says it’s a huge point of pride for her to be the first professionally trained cinematographer to head to space. As someone who enjoys pushing the boundaries of what’s possible she said she was “honored” to accept the challenge offered by Wang.

“One of our mission objectives is to film the Arctic and Antarctic,” she said. “(It’s) a responsibility I don’t take lightly as the first humans in history to view Earth’s poles from space.”

Mikkelsen is working with her production company, O2XR, to help capture the best views of both the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis for future scientific study. They’ve done extensive work in an attempt to leave as little to chance as possible.

“My team at O2XR and I have planned out every shot from space in detail by using a virtual mockup of our capsule in our orbit,” Mikkelsen said. “This lets me virtually look out the Dragon windows and cupola, film with a virtual camera and attach all my virtual lenses to see what the image will look like when we are in orbit.”

Fram2 vehicle commander Jannicke Mikkelsen places the sticker for of the mission patch on her seat inside the suit-up room near Launch Complex 39A during the dry dress rehearsal on Saturday, March 29, 2025. Image: Fram2/SpaceX

While on orbit, Mikkelsen said she plans to use an array of lenses and cameras, including Canon R5C and the RED V-Raptor 8K.

“Yes I can confirm we have the capability to shoot 180-VR and 8K. VR is a way for you as the viewer to first hand experience our spaceflight,” she said. “The quality will be like joining our four person crew and living with us in Dragon orbiting around Earth.”

When she launches to space, she will also become the first Norwegian astronaut.

“I live on the archipelago Svalbard and am proud to represent the Arctic as part of our crew,” Mikkelsen said. “Beyond being the Vehicle Commander, my job is to document our record breaking space mission to inspire the next generation of astronauts.”

During a discussion on the mission over X’s live audio streaming platform, Spaces, Mikkelsen said she has been collaborating on in-space photography techniques with one of NASA’s most renowned photographers, astronaut Don Petit.

“He’s been testing out a few camera settings for me and verifying that the hypothesis is correct,” she said.

She said beyond documenting the multi-day trip, she’s most excited to help open the door to space for those who haven’t been involved in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.

“I am just really honored that I am not a STEM-educated person. I have a Master’s in cinematography. Even if it’s a very technical subject, it’s still considered art and I’m honored to represent the non-STEM educated in space and flying my film camera,” Mikkelsen said. “I am so proud to be the first educated cinematographer in space. And I am stepping up to the challenge.”

Fram2 vehicle pilot Rabea Rogge poses in the crew access arm at Launch Complex 39A during the dry dress rehearsal for the mission on Saturday, March 29, 2025. Image: Fram2

Rabea Rogge

The youngest member of the Fram2 crew is Rabea Rogge. Hailing from Berlin, Germany, the 29-year-old is taking a pause from pursuing a PhD to take part in this mission to space.

Originally, she was taking a pause from her studies to conduct a trip to Antarctica, but didn’t imagine that flying to low Earth orbit was going to be on the docket.

“I am very humbled that Chun has invited me to this mission of a lifetime,” Rogge said.

The mission isn’t the first time that space or interest in polar regions became a part of Rogge’s life. She started her PhD in Norway with a focus on decision making for autonomous boats in polar waters.

“I find it fascinating how the rules change when conditions get hostile, with wind, waves and ice – it is already hard for us humans, so how should an autonomous agent know how to take the right path of action?” Rogge said.

Fram2 mission pilot Rabea Rogge poses with arctic robotic equipment as part of her PhD work. Image: Rabea Rogge/Fram2

Her work with space began when she took part of a student team that set out to design and build a satellite intending to induce artificial gravity by spinning. The satellite also carried human cells onboard in order to observe “the effects of aging in different levels of microgravity.”

“We were a team of novices in the beginning and knew nothing of satellites – it was incredibly inspiring to see how far we got within one year of hard work, making mistakes and getting up and going again,” Rogge said. “We went from nothing to already having tested a prototype on a parabolic flight and winning the ESA competition.

“We often got told that our plans were too ambitious in the beginning, which only encouraged us more to go forward. It showed me how important perseverance and risk taking is and how much you can contribute to the New Space sector with a great team.”

First German woman in space

Rogge’s involvement in the historic mission came about through a happenstance meeting. She and Eric Philips met Wang while training for a ski expedition in Spitsbergen and they all bonded over their love of “technology, future visions and space technology in general.”

“We are all very interested to see where technology is headed and how it can be pushed to improve our lives even more,” Rogge said. “I was leading the satellite team at that time, so I would not stop talking about space missions and overly ambitious plans.”

During and after the mission, Rogge said she will focus on three main goals. The first two goals are focusing on enabling and communicating quality science to the public and connecting with the broad public through various outreach projects.

“As a researcher I know that we are usually not very good at explaining what we are doing and am excited to change that,” Rogge said. “In this early time of spacefaring, it is our responsibility to share the experience and take people on the journey with us. I am most looking forward to an amateur radio competition and an aurora citizen science project that we have going on from space.”

Rabea Rogge, foreground, and Jannicke Mikkelsen, background, train inside a mockup of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft at SpaceX’s facilities in Hawthorne, California. Image: Fram2/SpaceX

Her final main goal is to provide an example of how human spaceflight can and should become more accessible and inclusive.

“We are the first ever crew without a licensed pilot onboard and our success will continue to make these missions accessible to a larger group of people,” Rogge said. “By progress in the spacecraft being autonomous, less requirements are put on the pilot.

“If we want to become an interstellar civilization we need as much data as we can about living in space, which means broader access to space. We are not quite there yet, but I would love for awareness to spread on how fast the situation is changing – and for this to empower people to take part in the rapid changes.”

Beyond the human spaceflight aspect, Rogge said there’s important polar research that will hopefully be aided by their mission. She pointed to the Aurora project, which involves simultaneous imagine of the auroras from space and from the ground by dozens of observers.

“We have a great team at the university in Svalbard, led by Katie Herlingshaw, working on establishing a citizen scientists network and common database around the world, Ragee said. “For this mission they are studying a specific phenomenon within the Aurora, but the real power lies in establishing this common ground for any future investigation into the physics of the atmosphere. I am very excited to see the results!”

Rogee is also breaking ground in her own right. She will become the first German woman to travel to space. Alexander Gerst, a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut who served as commander of the space station during Expedition 57 and also represented Germany, wrote to Rogge on X to wish her luck and a safe landing.

Rogge said she’s not spending too much time thinking about her place in history, but said she’s “honored to be representing my home city, Berlin, and Germany in space.”

“With Fram2 we want to inspire people to dream big, so I really hope that this effect will be felt in Germany and empower the next generation of spacefarers, engineers, scientists and artists!”

Fram2 mission specialist and medical officer Eric Philips poses in the crew access arm at Launch Complex 39A during the dry dress rehearsal for the mission on Saturday, March 29, 2025. Image: Fram2

Eric Philips

The fourth member of the Fram2 mission is 62-year-old Australian polar explorer, Eric Philips. On his personal website, he describes himself as a “polar adventurer,” which he said goes back to his time as a kid when his parents started taking him and his five siblings to southern Australia.

“I’ve dedicated much of my life to untracked areas of the Arctic and Antarctica including pioneering four glacial routes to the South Pole,” Philips said. “Much of my polar career has been as a guide, taking relative novices into areas previously the domain of professional explorers, a direct extension of my previous occupation as an outdoor educator. Adventure is its own reward and it has made me who I am.”

Philips is the founder and director of the company Icetrek Expeditions and Equipment and has more than 30 years of experience in polar environments. He focuses on Svalbard, Norway, because it is “a snapshot of everything polar, including extreme cold, ice and snow, frozen mountains and fjords, glaciers, polar bears and the aurora.”

“It’s important that people’s engagement with the natural world is experiential, seeing and doing things first-hand,” Philips said. “When such things are taken to their full potential they unlock scientific and geographical mysteries, and keep alive the very spirit of exploration and adventure that catapulted humankind into the Age of Enlightenment.”

Like Rogge, Philips first met Wang during a ski expedition in 2023. Being a part of this space expedition is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

Fram2 mission specialist and medical officer Eric Philips pictured leading an expedition near the North Pole. Image: Petter Nyquist via Fram2

“Yes, like many kids I dreamed of being an astronaut. Even as an adult these musings never left me so for this to become a reality in my sixties is the embodiment of a mantra I reserve for prospective polar adventurers: ‘Dream big. Live bigger. Begin!’” Philips said.

“The point here is that I never stopped living bigger and the chance to become an astronaut befell me, not because of luck but because of life choices. Space exploration is an iteration of the frontier days of polar exploration, when explorers on board ships such as Fram carved routes towards and beyond unknown horizons.”

Historic elevations

The Fram2 mission will be the highest inclination for a crew launch in history. He said getting to experience parts of the Earth he’s explored dozens of times on the ground from space will be a highlight of his career.

“I’ve viewed thousands of images of Antarctica and the Arctic while planning polar expeditions, but there is no experiential evidence that what we observe in those images is truly representative of how they look from space with human eyes,” Philips said. “To be among the first people to see these high latitudes from low earth orbit is an exquisite privilege and I truly believe will be a transformational experience.”

Beyond some of the new feats that will be executed with this mission, Philip said he’s also looking forward to furthering knowledge of the return from space as well. Part of this will come through the execution of an unassisted egress from their Crew Dragon spacecraft.

“More and more, crews returning to Earth or landing on Mars will become increasingly self-reliant when climbing out of a spacecraft,” Philips said. “After Dragon splashes down and is hoisted onto the recovery ship, the Fram2 crew will demonstrate an unassisted egress – releasing restraints, emerging from their seats, unloading mock emergency equipment and exiting through the hatch.”

China AI mandate of the day

Schools in Beijing will introduce AI courses and teaching methods into the primary and secondary school curriculum starting September, to nurture young talent and boost growth in the advancing sector.

In a statement shared on its official website on Friday (Mar 7), Chinese education authorities said schools would “explore and build” AI courses while incorporating AI into “after-school services, club activities, research” and other educational systems in the coming fall semester.

Here is the full story, via Wayne Yap.

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FHFA’s National Mortgage Database: Outstanding Mortgage Rates, LTV and Credit Scores

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: FHFA’s National Mortgage Database: Outstanding Mortgage Rates, LTV and Credit Scores

A brief excerpt:
Here are some graphs on outstanding mortgages by interest rate, the average mortgage interest rate, borrowers’ credit scores and current loan-to-value (LTV) from the FHFA’s National Mortgage Database through Q4 2024 (just released).
...
FHFA Percent Mortgage Rate First LienHere is some data showing the distribution of interest rates on closed-end, fixed-rate 1-4 family mortgages outstanding at the end of each quarter since Q1 2013 through Q4 2024.

This shows the surge in the percent of loans under 3%, and also under 4%, starting in early 2020 as mortgage rates declined sharply during the pandemic. The percent of outstanding loans under 4% peaked in Q1 2022 at 65.1% (now at 54.1%), and the percent under 5% peaked at 85.6% (now at 72.1%). These low existing mortgage rates makes it difficult for homeowners to sell their homes and buy a new home since their monthly payments would increase sharply. This was a key reason existing home inventory levels were so low.

Time is slowly eroding this lock-in effect.
There is much more in the article.

MAGA is Bad for Business

Source: Axios

One odd feature of U.S. politics is that businesspeople, especially small business owners, always seems to believe that they will do better under Republicans, even though history shows that business does better under Democrats. Small business owners supported Trump in the last election, despite ample evidence that he would be very bad for business.

And now they’re getting a rude awakening.

Let’s talk for a second about price controls.

A few weeks ago Viktor Orban, Hungary’s de facto dictator and a darling of the MAGA set, announced that he was imposing profit-margin caps — basically price controls — on groceries. I intended to write something about that as a warning that something similar might happen in the United States, that businesspeople were fools if they assumed that Donald Trump was on their side.

Unfortunately, I never got around to writing that post. So I missed my chance to be prophetic, because it has already happened: Trump reportedly told auto executives sometime in March not to raise prices in response to tariffs. He denies that he said it, but the reporting looks solid. His headline-making assertion that he “couldn’t care less” about rising car prices seems to have been about imported autos, not domestic production.

The reason I expected Trump to follow in Orban’s footsteps is that Trump, like Orban, clearly doesn’t have any fixed principles other than power and self-aggrandizement. Under Trump, policy won’t reflect any consistent ideology. It will, instead, change with his perception of personal advantage, his temper tantrums, his whims and his malignant narcisissim. If he doesn’t like rising prices, he’ll try to stop inflation through bullying.

In short, MAGA will be very bad for business.

Most immediately, it seems as if Trump doesn’t care that his tariffs will raise business costs in addition to raising prices for consumers. We’ll get a better sense of how much costs will rise after “Liberation Day,” the big announcement of new tariffs planned for Wednesday. (War is peace, freedom is slavery, tariffs are tax cuts.) But it’s the increase has already begun.

Indeed, thanks to tariffs already in effect the U.S. economy is already getting unscrewed, with manufacturers having a hard time keeping their stuff together.

You see, steep tariffs on steel and aluminum were the opening salvo in Trump’s trade war, and they are being applied not just to the metals themselves but to anything made from the metals, including screws, nuts and bolts. And foreign producers are not absorbing the tariffs; they are sharply raising prices.

This was, of course, predictable and predicted. Tariffs don’t just make foreign goods more expensive to consumers. In a world where many of the goods we import are productive inputs like screws — or auto parts — tariffs directly raise the cost of manufacturing in the United States. Yet Trump’s threats against automakers suggests that he thinks he can control inflation through intimidation.

The direct effect of tariff-driven rising costs is, however, just the beginning of the ways Trumpism will be bad for business.

In the past I’ve been skeptical about claims that uncertainty is a big factor in the economy. During the Obama years vague appeals to “uncertainty” often seemed, in practice, to be invoked as a fancy way of saying “policies I don’t like,” and was used as an excuse for ignoring that fiscal austerity forced by congressional Republicans held the economy back. But in the 10 weeks since Trump was inaugurated, perceived uncertainty has soared. Here’s one widely cited index:

Source: policyuncertainty.com

It’s not hard to see why. Trump’s apparent turn to price controls is just one more indication that there are no longer any rules, that economic policy changes from day to day with Trump’s moods. I’m finishing this post up just two days before the big tariff announcement, and all indications are that the administration still hasn’t decided on the general structure of the tariffs, let alone their size. Nor will we be able to take the issue as settled after the big announcement: Trump may impose further tariffs, or slash them as suddenly as he raised them, depending on who spoke to him last. L’Etat, c’est Trump.

This kind of uncertainty is paralyzing for businesses, who are realizing that any kind of long-term commitment can turn out to have been a disastrous mistake. Build a plant that depends on imported parts, and Trump may cut you off at the knees with new tariffs. Build a plant that’s only profitable if tariffs stay in place, and Trump may cut you off at the knees by backing down.

Again, the point is that there really isn’t a MAGA economic philosophy, just whatever suits Trump’s fragile ego.

All of this was predictable and predicted. Before the election many economists warned that Trump’s policies would be destructive, although the models didn’t really take the sheer craziness into account.

The remarkable thing is how many supposedly hard-headed businesspeople didn’t see the obvious. Small business owners, in particular, clearly favored Trump, and as the chart at the top shows, their optimism soared when he won. Now it’s crashing.

So business owners allowed themselves to be deluded, as usual, but with even less excuse than normal. What they should have realized is that Trump’s lack of concern for ordinary Americans’ lives doesn’t mean that he’s pro-business, and that the election wasn’t about left versus right — it was about rule of law versus autocracy. Now we’re getting a first taste of what life under autocracy is like, and it’s bad for everyone, including businesspeople.

MUSICAL CODA

Poster for The Sting (1973) vs The Studio (2025)

Central image is totally different, but everything around that is taken from The Sting poster. In my opinion, it copies too much from one place.

Monday assorted links

1. Australia fact of the day: “In 2023-24, for the first time, Australia spent more on in-kind benefits (e.g. the NDIS) than on transfers.”

2. Fine-tuned chatbots seem to work as well as humans for mental health treatments in this RCT.

3. The decline in publicly listed companies is microcaps.

4. The pro-natalist movement in the Trump administration is now being treated by the NYT as a normie thing.

5. Is creative destruction from AI showing up in labor market data?

6. AI art is more likely to look like this than like Rembrandt.

7. A poll on which is your favorite Odyssey translation.

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Freddie Mac House Price Index Increased in February; Up 3.4% Year-over-year

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Freddie Mac House Price Index Increased in February; Up 3.4% Year-over-year

A brief excerpt:
Freddie Mac reported that its “National” Home Price Index (FMHPI) increased 0.18% month-over-month on a seasonally adjusted (SA) basis in February. On a year-over-year basis, the National FMHPI was up 3.4% in February, down from up 3.6% YoY in January. The YoY increase peaked at 19.0% in July 2021, and for this cycle, bottomed at up 0.9% YoY in May 2023. ...

Freddie HPI CBSAFor cities (Core-based Statistical Areas, CBSA), here are the 30 cities with the largest declines from the peak, seasonally adjusted. Austin continues to be the worst performing city. However, 7 of the 10 cities with the largest price declines are in Florida.
There is much more in the article!

Open letter on Science

 Here's the NYT story out this morning,

Trump Administration Has Begun a War on Science, Researchers. Say Nearly 2,000 scientists urged that Congress restore funding to federal agencies decimated by recent cuts.

 

And here's the letter (and all the signatures):
TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
We all rely on science. Science gave us the smartphones in our pockets, the navigation systems in our cars, and life-saving medical care. We count on engineers when we drive across bridges and fly in airplanes. Businesses and farmers rely on science and engineering for product innovation, technological advances, and weather forecasting. Science helps humanity protect the planet and keeps pollutants and toxins out of our air, water, and food.

For over 80 years, wise investments by the US government have built up the nation’s research enterprise, making it the envy of the world. Astoundingly, the Trump administration is destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data, and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.

The undersigned are elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, representing some of the nation’s top scientists, engineers, and medical researchers. We are speaking out as individuals. We see real danger in this moment. We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry. We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.

The administration is slashing funding for scientific agencies, terminating grants to scientists, defunding their laboratories, and hampering international scientific collaboration. The funding cuts are forcing institutions to pause research (including studies of new disease treatments), dismiss faculty, and stop enrolling graduate students—the pipeline for the next generation’s scientists.

The administration’s current investigations of more than 50 universities send a chilling message. Columbia University was recently notified that its federal funding would be withheld unless it adopted disciplinary policies and disabled an academic department targeted by the administration. Destabilizing dozens of universities will endanger higher education—and the research those institutions conduct.

The quest for truth—the mission of science—requires that scientists freely explore new questions and report their findings honestly, independent of special interests. The administration is engaging in censorship, destroying this independence.  It is using executive orders and financial threats to manipulate which studies are funded or published, how results are reported, and which data and research findings the public can access. The administration is blocking research on topics it finds objectionable, such as climate change, or that yields results it does not like, on topics ranging from vaccine safety to economic trends.

A climate of fear has descended on the research community. Researchers, afraid of losing their funding or job security, are removing their names from publications, abandoning studies, and rewriting grant proposals and papers to remove scientifically accurate terms (such as “climate change”) that agencies are flagging as objectionable. Although some in the scientific community have protested vocally, most researchers, universities, research institutions, and professional organizations have kept silent to avoid antagonizing the administration and jeopardizing their funding.

If our country’s research enterprise is dismantled, we will lose our scientific edge. Other countries will lead the development of novel disease treatments, clean energy sources, and the new technologies of the future. Their populations will be healthier, and their economies will surpass us in business, defense, intelligence gathering, and monitoring our planet’s health. The damage to our nation’s scientific enterprise could take decades to reverse.

We call on the administration to cease its wholesale assault on U.S. science, and we urge the public to join this call. Share this statement with others, contact your representatives in Congress, and help your community understand what is at risk. The voice of science must not be silenced.  We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation’s research enterprise is destroyed.  

The views expressed here are our own and not those of the National Academies or our home institutions.

Housing March 31st Weekly Update: Inventory up 1.1% Week-over-week, Up 30.6% Year-over-year

Altos reports that active single-family inventory was up 1.1% week-over-week.

Inventory is now up 8.2% from the seasonal bottom in January and is increasing.

The first graph shows the seasonal pattern for active single-family inventory since 2015.

Altos Year-over-year Home InventoryClick on graph for larger image.

The red line is for 2025.  The black line is for 2019.  

Inventory was up 30.6% compared to the same week in 2024 (last week it was up 30.3%), and down 19.0% compared to the same week in 2019 (last week it was down 19.5%). 

The gap to more normal inventory levels has closed significantly!  It now appears inventory will be close to 2019 levels towards the end of 2025.

Altos Home InventoryThis second inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research.

As of March 28th, inventory was at 676 thousand (7-day average), compared to 668 thousand the prior week. 

Mike Simonsen discusses this data regularly on Youtube

The Signal Chat Leak and the NSA

US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who started the now-infamous group chat coordinating a US attack against the Yemen-based Houthis on March 15, is seemingly now suggesting that the secure messaging service Signal has security vulnerabilities.

"I didn’t see this loser in the group," Waltz told Fox News about Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Waltz invited to the chat. "Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean, is something we’re trying to figure out."

Waltz’s implication that Goldberg may have hacked his way in was followed by a report from CBS News that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had sent out a bulletin to its employees last month warning them about a security "vulnerability" identified in Signal.

The truth, however, is much more interesting. If Signal has vulnerabilities, then China, Russia, and other US adversaries suddenly have a new incentive to discover them. At the same time, the NSA urgently needs to find and fix any vulnerabilities quickly as it can—and similarly, ensure that commercial smartphones are free of backdoors—access points that allow people other than a smartphone’s user to bypass the usual security authentication methods to access the device’s contents.

That is essential for anyone who wants to keep their communications private, which should be all of us.

It’s common knowledge that the NSA’s mission is breaking into and eavesdropping on other countries’ networks. (During President George W. Bush’s administration, the NSA conducted warrantless taps into domestic communications as well—surveillance that several district courts ruled to be illegal before those decisions were later overturned by appeals courts. To this day, many legal experts maintain that the program violated federal privacy protections.) But the organization has a secondary, complementary responsibility: to protect US communications from others who want to spy on them. That is to say: While one part of the NSA is listening into foreign communications, another part is stopping foreigners from doing the same to Americans.

Those missions never contradicted during the Cold War, when allied and enemy communications were wholly separate. Today, though, everyone uses the same computers, the same software, and the same networks. That creates a tension.

When the NSA discovers a technological vulnerability in a service such as Signal (or buys one on the thriving clandestine vulnerability market), does it exploit it in secret, or reveal it so that it can be fixed? Since at least 2014, a US government interagency "equities" process has been used to decide whether it is in the national interest to take advantage of a particular security flaw, or to fix it. The trade-offs are often complicated and hard.

Waltz—along with Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the other officials in the Signal group—have just made the trade-offs much tougher to resolve. Signal is both widely available and widely used. Smaller governments that can’t afford their own military-grade encryption use it. Journalists, human rights workers, persecuted minorities, dissidents, corporate executives, and criminals around the world use it. Many of these populations are of great interest to the NSA.

At the same time, as we have now discovered, the app is being used for operational US military traffic. So, what does the NSA do if it finds a security flaw in Signal?

Previously, it might have preferred to keep the flaw quiet and use it to listen to adversaries. Now, if the agency does that, it risks someone else finding the same vulnerability and using it against the US government. And if it was later disclosed that the NSA could have fixed the problem and didn’t, then the results might be catastrophic for the agency.

Smartphones present a similar trade-off. The biggest risk of eavesdropping on a Signal conversation comes from the individual phones that the app is running on. While it’s largely unclear whether the US officials involved had downloaded the app onto personal or government-issued phones—although Witkoff suggested on X that the program was on his "personal devices"—smartphones are consumer devices, not at all suitable for classified US government conversations. An entire industry of spyware companies sells capabilities to remotely hack smartphones for any country willing to pay. More capable countries have more sophisticated operations. Just last year, attacks that were later attributed to China attempted to access both President Donald Trump and Vance’s smartphones. Previously, the FBI—as well as law enforcement agencies in other countries—have pressured both Apple and Google to add "backdoors" in their phones to more easily facilitate court-authorized eavesdropping.

These backdoors would create, of course, another vulnerability to be exploited. A separate attack from China last year accessed a similar capability built into US telecommunications networks.

The vulnerabilities equities have swung against weakened smartphone security and toward protecting the devices that senior government officials now use to discuss military secrets. That also means that they have swung against the US government hoarding Signal vulnerabilities—and toward full disclosure.

This is plausibly good news for Americans who want to talk among themselves without having anyone, government or otherwise, listen in. We don’t know what pressure the Trump administration is using to make intelligence services fall into line, but it isn’t crazy to worry that the NSA might again start monitoring domestic communications.

Because of the Signal chat leak, it’s less likely that they’ll use vulnerabilities in Signal to do that. Equally, bad actors such as drug cartels may also feel safer using Signal. Their security against the US government lies in the fact that the US government shares their vulnerabilities. No one wants their secrets exposed.

I have long advocated for a "defense dominant" cybersecurity strategy. As long as smartphones are in the pocket of every government official, police officer, judge, CEO, and nuclear power plant operator—and now that they are being used for what the White House now calls calls  "sensitive," if not outright classified conversations among cabinet members—we need them to be as secure as possible. And that means no government-mandated backdoors.

We may find out more about how officials—including the vice president of the United States—came to be using Signal on what seem to be consumer-grade smartphones, in a apparent breach of the laws on government records. It’s unlikely that they really thought through the consequences of their actions.

Nonetheless, those consequences are real. Other governments, possibly including US allies, will now have much more incentive to break Signal’s security than they did in the past, and more incentive to hack US government smartphones than they did before March 24.

For just the same reason, the US government has urgent incentives to protect them.

This essay was originally published in Foreign Policy.

How Brazil built a world-beating aircraft manufacturer

Although Donald Trump is hard at work deindustrializing America with tariffs, reindustrializing the country is still a worthy goal, and I’m hoping we can get back to it soon.

A lot of Americans seem to have a despairing attitude about their country’s ability to build anything at all, or to dominate new industries. There’s definitely an inferiority complex with respect to China in particular. There’s also a lot of skepticism toward industrial policy, with a lot of libertarians claiming that it always fails, and MAGA people turning up their nose at it in favor of tariffs.

And yet when I look at the aircraft manufacturing industry, I see that China’s most valuable entrant is at number 12 on the list, while the 7th spot is held by Embraer, a company from Brazil. You usually don’t think of Brazil as a manufacturing powerhouse, and yet it has one of the world’s top jet making companies — ahead of any manufacturer from East Asia.

How the heck did that happen? I was discussing this with Pedro Franco de Campos Pinto, a Brazilian economics lecturer at Musashi University in Tokyo, who’s very interested in the history of his country’s industrial policy. He agreed to write a post for me about how Brazil was able to beat the odds and build a world-class aircraft company. His post is full of potentially valuable lessons for the U.S., as we think about how our country can reindustrialize in the face of Chinese competition.


Latin America (LA) remains something of an understudied area in economics. There is a remarkable number of different experiences and policies LA countries have gone through in the 20th century; e.g., decades long mass immigration, concerted efforts to industrialize via import substitution, hyperinflation… Aside from that, understanding LA’s current state, composed mostly of countries caught in the middle-income trap, could be very important for rising economies in South and Southeast Asia.

Noah’s ongoing interest in Industrial Policy (IP) led me to mention my home country of Brazil’s experiences: the contrasting examples of the Zona Franca of Manaus (ZFM), a special economic zone, and Embraer, a once state-owned,1 now public company. The latter can be considered an exemplary success of IP, but one achieved despite a near collapse in the 90s and not quite the way expected by its originators, whereas the former is arguably one of the most misguided and costly "successes" in IP history and serves as a warning for countries attempting IP without due care. Let’s start with the more negative example of the ZFM and end with the more positive example how Embraer achieved great heights (pun intended) later.

One small caveat, as the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1984) played an outsized role in both policies. Both personally and as an economist, I abhor the dictatorship and what it did to Brazil, but I’ve tried to keep my own personal feelings towards that institution aside.

The ZFM and how it came to be…

As the name suggests, the ZFM is a special economic zone with primary effects on a single city, Manaus, where manufacturing firms have lower taxes and some simplified bureaucracy. Although tentatively initiated in the 50s by a democratic government as a part of a larger effort to “develop” the Amazon, it was the military dictatorship’s 1967 law created the ZFM as we know it and endures until now.2 The overarching goal was simple: to develop the Amazon region by industrializing it.

Why Manaus? The city of Manaus is located right in the heart of the Amazon, in the Amazonas state, on the shores of the Amazon River. This is quite important for what follows, because the Amazon River is large enough to handle fairly large container ships.3 Unfortunately, the Amazon basin does not connect Manaus to other major industrial cities directly, meaning that most shipping must navigate the full length of the Amazon River first and then either continue via the ocean or transfer to trucks in Belém, Pará. Manaus itself had experienced a substantial boom and bust due to the rubber boom in the late 19th century/early 20th century; despite the bust, the city had continued to grow and by the 1950s it was among the top 20 largest cities in Brazil and by far the biggest city “inside” the rainforest itself.

Map by ClausHansen via Wikimedia Commons

And why this preoccupation with developing the Amazon? The dictatorship did care about economic growth in general, but that’s likely to be of secondary concern in this case. Instead, the likely biggest reason for these efforts remains one of the silliest in economic history: paranoia that some other country could claim portions of the Brazilian Amazon without a larger population presence there, famously summarized during a 1966 speech by the then dictator Castelo Branco which, loosely translated, was “use it or lose it”.4 To be clear, the Amazon is not a very hospitable place; it was and remains sparsely populated, and it is largely devoid of significant natural resources aside from things like lumber, some agricultural potential and its inherent biological diversity. The notion that any of Brazil’s much smaller Amazon neighbours or, even more ridiculously, the US, is interested in “taking” the Amazon is self-evidently not very credible, but somehow remains(!) popular in some Brazilian circles, at least until recently.

Returning to the ZFM, in a very real sense, these tax incentives worked. If the goal was to populate Manaus, then the simple fact is that it went from a small city of around 100kin the 1950s to 2m nowadays, growing 4x faster than the total Brazilian average. It is striking that there is a large industrial complex in a metropolis quite literally surrounded by the Amazon forest and River.

Photo by Portal da Copa via Wikimedia Commons

How much is this attributable to the ZFM? To reference the most comprehensive data-driven study (which I will come back to many times) I could find, Holland et al., the fact that similar states and cities that did not benefit from the ZFM and did not grow nearly as much is fairly conclusive in its own right.

More direct evidence comes, again via Holland et al., by looking at Manaus’s GDP in terms of industrial activity, which went from somewhere between 40% just before the ZFM passed to a peak above 60% in the 1980s, before returning to around 40% again in the mid-90s, around the time of the liberalization and end of the Brazilian hyperinflation. Although the number varies depending on economic activity, around 100k workers are currently directly employed in the ZFM and there’s a good case to be made that, per Enrico Moretti’s research, there are substantial local multipliers resulting from the industries located in the ZFM. It’s very hard not to conclude that the ZFM accomplished the goal of getting people to live in Manaus due to the factories located there.

The consequences of misguided IP

At this point, you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop and, indeed, I could and will list a bunch of things showing why this isn’t worth the cost. But let’s take one step before this and ask ourselves a fundamental question: does the ZFM make any sense?

Why are manufacturing industries located where they are? E.g., why did Detroit have the automobile industry, why does China have its manufacturing hubs on the coast, etc.? A full answer would take much more than a simple column to answer, but clustering effects (i.e., being close to other companies and workers is helpful), the presence of a well-educated workforce and low transportation costs are important parts of the answer and on all three counts, the ZFM makes no sense whatsoever. Fundamentally, you don’t want to locate your manufacturing away from industrial clusters, with a poorly-educated workforce and far away from where your products are going to end up; that’s a recipe for wildly inefficient production.

In terms of clustering, despite the deindustrialization of the 90s and 00s, Brazil still has quite a few manufacturing clusters in the South-Eastern and Southern states. Not surprisingly, these were also the biggest and most industrialized states before the ZFM. The creation of the ZFM resulted in deagglomeration of some industries (electronic goods and motorbikes are two clear examples) as manufacturing plants moved to Manaus. As we know now, this almost certainly made it harder for these and related industries to take advantage of clustering effects, which are typically considered very important in manufacturing.

In terms of educated workforces, I have to be a bit speculative here. Holland et al. claims there’s no data before the 1980s that would give us an idea of how well-educated workers were in Manaus vis-à-vis other areas and I’m inclined to believe them.5 Still, there was a large disparity of GDP per capita in the 1950s and 60s between the Amazon state and more developed states: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro had something like 7x more GDP per capita.

Source: Wikipedia

It seems very improbable that education in the Amazon state was even close to that of other states, especially as access to education at the time was very low in all of Brazil, with only around 30% of under 20s attending school. The quality of education was also quite low. I.e., Manaus likely had subpar educational outcomes at a time when Brazil was doing a very poor job of educating its people. It is true that the state of Amazonas and city of Manaus now have significantly better educated populace compared to similar, less developed states/cities (one of Holland et. al’s best arguments in favour of the ZFM), but Manaus is not a paragon of education in Brazil and it does not have many good universities either.6

Finally, in terms of transportation costs. As you might expect, a significant portion of the manufacturing done in the ZFM is sent to other Brazilian states, maybe around 30%; that is, a big portion of this manufacturing ends up being sold in other, more populous and richer states.7 The ZFM also imports a lot of input goods, as discussed below. Hence, the baffling issue of having a large manufacturing base in a location that adds at the very least 12-14 days of shipping8 to your logistics, increasing costs significantly, both in terms of time and money.

So why do firms do it? Why manufacture in Manaus at all? Because the tax incentives are not just large, but they have become de facto permanent for all practical purposes. The original project envisioned the tax incentives to finish in the 1990s but this is Brazil we’re talking about: whenever a certain privilege is granted by government to a group, that group will fight tooth and nail to keep it. In this case, after multiple extensions, the current deadline for ending the tax incentives is 2073. And this is not a decision from the dictatorship either; these extensions took place after Brazil’s return to democracy, showing how this IP resulted in a natural and powerful lobby group.

How much does this cost the government? Coming back to Holland et al, even in their most generous analyses,9 conclude that each job created by the ZFM costs the government (in 2018) around R$25k, very close to the R$33k of Brazil’s GDP per capita at that date; I would be willing to guess that it’s likely that the actual cost of each job is higher than Brazil’s GDP per capita, which is quite astounding. Another way of looking at things is that the amount of tax foresworn corresponds to around 0.4% of GDP, an incredible amount for a single city that has 0.9% of Brazil’s population.

There’s one last, important topic to consider here. Has this at least resulted in technological development of the industries of Manaus? This is an area I’m less confident about, but what evidence I can find isn’t great. Manufacturing in Manaus was initially largely last-step assembly stage, where components of goods where mostly imported from elsewhere. This is, of course, a common step when developing local industries, but because of all the factors listed above, including the lack of larger clusters and better universities, the logistics costs, etc., as best as I can tell, there’s been some, but overall small development of local suppliers or new technologies. For one thing, a World Bank report stated that the ZFM is “losing competitiveness and is finding ever harder to attract new companies”, which is not exactly a great sign.

So, let’s turn to a case study instead. Honda, which has over 75% of the motorbike market in Brazil, boasts of its manufacturing of motorbikes in the ZFM. Although it does the final assembly in the ZFM to take advantage of the tax incentives, 72% of suppliers are located in São Paulo state (2600km away as the crow flies, at least 9 days by boat, one way), 20% in Manaus proper, meaning there are claims that there are more manufacturing jobs in São Paulo state for motorbikes assembled in Manaus. I don’t need to point out the insanity of this logistical arrangement, stemming from all the factors listed above.

Photo by Jose Serra via Wikimedia Commons

Another way to see this is that, according to Holland et. al, the ZFM imports around $7.4b of inputs from other countries (and $4.5b from other states) and exports a piddling $0.48b back into the world.10 This is not the sign of a competitive, cutting-edge industry, but one which seems largely stuck at the assembly-stage of manufacturing, over 50 years after its creation. Indeed, given that import tariffs for most manufactured goods are high in Brazil, I’ve heard many argue that this is a very coddled industry.

I could add here a discussion about the environmental impacts, but this analysis has already become too long; suffice to say, the little evidence there is shows little impact either way. Not too surprising, since most of the cutting down of the Amazon stems from demand for cattle raising in other states. But this also means there’s little reason to claim that the ZFM is a positive thing for the Amazon forest, and, indeed, I suspect that on net it’s had a negative effect.

Finally, and to return to the bigger picture, even the strongest defences towards the ZFM end up being rather weak; claims about how the cost of taxes isn’t too high or the educational system may be a bit better than other places in Brazil simply isn’t good enough to justify the ZFM.11 And perhaps no better argument against the ZFM is the fact that manufacturing in Manaus would likely wither without the incredibly generous tax incentives that it receives.

Let’s summarize. More than 50 years after its creation, the ZFM has achieved the goal of populating the Amazon or, at least, of growing the city of Manaus. It may have had some positive effects, but overall, it remains a hugely expensive “success”, both in terms of foregone taxes and the creation of completely illogical logistics and the declustering of industries.

Pretty shocking stuff. And not surprising: the goal of this IP was never to create a world-class industry and it shows. Good IP should be about targeting industries where you temporarily give certain advantages, e.g., as tariffs and subsidies, and maybe offer longer term support in other ways (such as infrastructure and government assistance in diverse ways for technological development) but with the goal of exposing these industries to market competition, sooner than later. Protection should only last until the sector is ready. And the IP should be done in places that might be able to develop themselves fully, whether by some natural advantage or continued support in other ways (e.g., education). As we can see, the ZFM pretty much does the opposite of all of this in nearly every respect.

In Brazil itself, the ZFM is a perpetual object of discussion. Critics have attacked the ZFM since close to its inception, but the built-in lobbying from firms has proved quite strong. Yet it’s such a hugely costly blunder for Brazil as a whole, one that actively hinders the development of better manufacturing capacity. Not to say that the ZFM should be ended immediately, given that around 100k jobs directly depend on its existence, but some kind of phasing out of the ZFM and/or change in the policy could potentially have big, positive effects in Brazil as a whole in the long-run.

Embraer’s teammates: ITA and DCTA

So! After looking at the costly “success” that ZFM is for Brazil, it follows logically to ask ourselves, can a country like Brazil get IP right? There is at least one striking example where that happened, for aircraft manufacturer Embraer, which is widely lauded as a stunning example of manufacturing prowess in Brazil. The example of Embraer is a good illustration of the ups and downs that even successful IP can have and how a focus on some key aspects, research support, exports, among others, seems to have played a role in its current success.

To understand Embraer, we need to first begin with the foundation of the Aeronautics Technological Institute and the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology. The first of these is a public but military-run university, much better known by its Portuguese acronym, ITA; the second, also better known by its acronym DCTA, is an aeronautics research centre and is also military-run. Both were founded by a rather interesting figure, Casimiro Montenegro Filho.

As a brief aside, although not well known even in Brazil, Casimiro was a bit of an aviation pioneer, having founded and flown the first airmail flights in Brazil in the 1930s and moving from the army to the air force at a relatively high rank12 when the latter was founded in the 1940s, which allotted him the influence needed for what comes next. He visited the US in the mid-40s and took a great interest in MIT and how effective it was as a technological institute. Despite Brazil being a much poorer country at the time,13 he wanted to try to create a similar institution in Brazil and even convinced a MIT professor, Richard Habert Smith, to be the first rector of the DCTA. After extensive lobbying of successive governments, he succeeded in spearheading the creation of the CTA (as it was known at the time) and assisted in the creation of ITA.14

We need to focus on both ITA and DCTA right from the start as their joint role in Embraer’s success should not be underestimated. Both were created with the goal of achieving a high degree of excellence in aeronautics engineering and seem to have largely succeeded in this respect. Why they were successful, unlike many other Brazilian attempts to create high quality educational institutions, is an interesting conundrum, one that is useful to speculate a bit on.

Part of the reason may be as military-run institutions, I suspect that neither has had funding issues comparable to other Brazilian higher education and research institutes,15 although I wasn’t able to find any direct evidence of this. They also seem to have largely kept to their original goals throughout their history, of developing engineering talent and knowhow for use in Brazil, both military and civilian. The city they are located in, São José dos Campos, was deliberately chosen to be within driving distance of both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the megacities of Brazil, allowing ITA, in particular, to more easily attract students and engineers from both cities.

Both were successful in attracting talented engineers from abroad in their early years and have managed to sustain and develop links abroad. ITA itself has a fearsome reputation, no doubt helping to attract good students; its entrance examinations are famous in Brazil for probably being the hardest in the nation and covering topics well outside of the Brazilian high school system. This reputation, in particular, is important, because although Brazil’s primary and secondary education systems are quite poor, Brazil is large enough that there always will be outstanding students every year which will be attracted to elite institutions like ITA.

Regardless of how they’ve managed to achieve this, both institutions were and remain fundamental in creating and sustaining Embraer, by providing qualified personnel, expertise and projects throughout the years. The closeness of the three institutions is quite literal, all three within a 10-minute drive from each other. Indeed, it’s a fairly safe bet that the existence of all three is why São José dos Campos is such a successful city in Brazil; they likely became anchors that helped attract relatively high-tech manufacturing and technological development in the area. Directly and indirectly, it’s a safe bet that they helped transform the small and sleepy town of around 50,000 in 1950 into a city of 700,000 (a growth of 14x compared to 4x for Brazil as a whole), with a GDP per capita amongst the highest in Brazil, 50% above average.

The rise of Embraer

Let’s now return to Embraer itself. It was founded by a former student at ITA in 1969/70, as a result of a successful, simple aeroplane prototype developed at the DCTA, with the goal of commercialising the prototype. Brazil had had some success with commercial aeroplane manufacturers before and during WWII, producing at its peak over 250 planes per year, but this was largely driven by military demand and these companies quickly collapsed after the war, with only a couple of smaller producers operating in Brazil before Embraer’s success eclipsed them.

Embraer was founded as a majority owned state company, with its founders coming from both ITA and DCTA. The company understood early on that it would need to focus on a niche product and said initial product would be the EMB-110, a small commuter plane for both military and civilian use that could operate well in areas with poor infrastructure, as was the case in Brazil. Embraer’s focus in the first 20 years or so was in similar types of aircraft (i.e., small airplanes) and in that respect, it worked: in its first peak in 1989, Embraer was selling nearly USD1b (in 2000 dollars) with half being exports and it had around 2500 employees. Given its focus on a relatively niche product, this was clearly a successful company. Note, however, that I called this the first peak… we’ll get back to this.

How did Embraer achieve this success? We’re already explored one hugely important factor, the general and high-quality expertise provided by ITA and DCTA, but several other factors also played a big role, many of them quite typical in IP. Firstly, as a state-owned company, the government provided the substantial initial investment required, not a trivial issue given the relatively underdeveloped capital markets of Brazil in the 60s, and continued to fund projects in the first 2 decades or so. Secondly, the military was an important source of orders throughout its early history, providing it with a steady flow of orders. Thirdly, the company, jointly or separately from ITA and DCTA, kept close links with foreign aeroplane manufacturers, having created partnerships as early as the 70s.16 Fourthly and in a similar vein, relatively early on Embraer was already exporting substantial amounts of its planes and this focus on exports remained throughout its history.

This, in particular, is an important point. As I discussed briefly above, Brazil had implemented an import substitution program that focused on industrialization as early as the 1930s, but things really took off starting in the 1950s and such programs lasted until around the late 1980s, early 1990s. In a way, similar to the case of the ZFM, these programs were successful in getting Brazil to both grow and industrialise rapidly; indeed, Brazil’s growth from 1950 to 1980 was around 7% a year and was likely only behind Japan amongst major economies as the fastest growing, allowing Brazil to reach middle-income status sometime in the 1970s.

But as the name suggested, this was an IP to create industries focused on selling to local markets, not export markets. This was achieved through various means, but one key focus was to incentivize FDI by having high import tariffs and tax incentives, as well as investing substantially in infrastructure. Having exports not be a big part of this IP was likely a big mistake and a major factor leading to the lost decade of the 1980s. I believe that a substantial part of Brazil’s growth woes ever since stem from this too.17 The reason why is, in short, without the discipline of markets (such as exports), manufacturing firms in Brazil simply didn’t continue to invest and push to become as efficient as they were after their initial FDI. Why should they? Protected from competition and with a big internal market, there was no need to do so. One way to see this is how TFP growth in Brazil has been mostly very low since around 1980.

Embraer, happily, never had this issue and it always seemed to be at least trying to keep up with the aeronautical engineering frontiers. Given how important exports were and remain for it, it has pretty much always faced market competition to discipline it and has largely been able to keep pace with other aeronautical companies in similar niches.

Finally, one surprising factor that likely contributed significantly to Embraer’s growth is the success of the agriculture sector in Brazil, in two ways.18 Firstly, there was the enormous expansion of the agricultural frontier of Brazil that took place from the 1970s and onwards, as you can see below; a lot of this expansion took place in the first decades of Embraer and, particularly in the regions of the 1980s onwards, these were areas that had exceedingly poor infrastructure, incentivizing the use of commuter planes. Secondly, in areas outside of the frontier, there was a push to mechanise farms, which included the use of agriculture planes, a type of plane that Embraer also makes and has always had significant sales with. I should add that in this vein and as others have suggested, the sheer size of Brazil always meant it was going to have significant demand for planes to connect the country, although I should also note that the major Brazilian airlines of the time were mostly flying American planes.

The fall and rise again of Embraer

Let’s return to the issue of the first peak, as things turned for the worse in the early 1990s. This was a very tough period for Brazil, as it endured the pinnacle of hyperinflation and had low/negative GDP growth. World GPD growth fell dramatically around that time and the US in particular, a major market for Embraer’s planes, went into recession. Finally, Embraer made a big bet to create a new plane with an Argentine aircraft manufacturer, FMA, that unlike other foreign partnerships, was unsuccessful and the resulting plane was too costly for the market. Overall Embraer sales would collapse to around 25% the level of 1989 and the firm was in a dire situation, as the government itself was incapable of providing significant funds at the time.

With a more liberal, in the classic sense, government in power and despite protests, only one path forward seemed viable and Embraer was privatised in 1994. This was a significant decision in allowing Embraer to flourish, as it injected capital into a company desperately needing some and, by most accounts, the increased freedom allowed Embraer to seek out more international partnerships which greatly reduced R&D costs and transformed it from a vertically integrated company into one that outsources a lot of its components, allowing for greater efficiency. Embraer also benefited from significant export subsidies at that time, probably the only way the government could still help out.19

Embraer also took a big bet around that time that paid off exceedingly well: it decided to start manufacturing regional jets in addition to its previous focuses.20 Again, this was a smart bet on a niche product, as the US market, the biggest market for regional planes, was dominated by inefficient turboprop planes in the early 90s and fuel-efficient jets were primed to take over. Indeed, the Canadian manufacturer Bombardier was first to take the plunge and was very successful in the beginning.

This leads to a long story of the competition between Embraer vs Bombardier. To keep things brief, despite or perhaps because of Bombardier’s initial head start in the area, Embraer was able to quickly catch up, leading to a competitive duopoly that lasted for around 10 years. However, thanks to its less expensive aeroplanes21 and a huge strategic blunder by Bombardier of trying to manufacture larger planes, Embraer was able to take the reins definitely by the mid-2000s.22

And this is where things more or less lie to this day. Embraer is now the biggest regional jet manufacturer in the world and is by far the most technologically advanced manufacturer in Brazil. Indeed, with Boeing’s current woes, there’s been a lot of discussion of whether Embraer might take the plunge itself and try to enter the larger jet market. Personally, I doubt that it will or should, given what happened to Bombardier and how the company perpetually chooses to focus on more niche products, but who knows?

Let’s get back to economics. The “moral of the story” is that Embraer is a good example of a very successful IP that, in many ways, followed the classic path as (I understand it) recommended by the literature for IP. That is, Embraer had strong initial government support/intervention in different ways, but a lot of this was eventually reduced; it always had a strong focus on exports; there was always a focus on keeping up with the technological frontier via foreign partnerships and via the important indirect, government support for technology and skilled labour via ITA and DCTA; it chose niche products where it could compete from the very start. It also benefited from being privatised and being given more freedom, meaning it was successful in a way that was not at all envisioned when founded as a state-owned company. Compared to other cases of IP in Brazil, Embraer’s privatization and its strong focus on exports from the start likely played key roles in its current success.

The broader picture of IP in LA

To end things, let me address something at Noah’s request. One of my sources for this column, the Odd-Lots podcast, had an episode about Embraer and although they get most things about Embraer itself right, I think it’s worth pointing out their broader picture of Brazil does not conform to my understanding at all! That is, unless there’s been a big change in economic consensus that I’m unaware of, their claims about import substitution policies are very much not what mainstream Brazilian economists believe in. In brief, the success of these policies in the 50s to 70s cannot be used to justify the subsequent lost decade of the 80s (more like 15 years in reality), nor the tepid growth (in GDP and TFP terms) since then. This is not meant as a broad stroke against all IP, but specifically against how these policies were pursued in LA.

Furthermore, the podcast raises questions about whether the liberalization of the 80s and 90s was “premature” and why there’s been a lack of clear IP since then. The latter, together with the more general question of how Brazil can become developed, is worthy of a serious discussion (and perhaps another column!), but I’d seriously question how “premature” this liberalization was. Taking the 50s as a starting point until the opening up of the 80s/90s (which reduced tariffs and allowed previously restricted imports, such as cars), that gives us 30/40 years(!) for an industry to be ready to compete with imports.23 To cite one example the podcast highlights, the fact that native Brazilian automotive companies such as Gurgel failed despite decades of protection (27 years of existence, in Gurgel’s case), is indicative of why import substitution is considered, in the long-run, a failure.

To end this rather long digression, there’s a couple of points the podcast claims, in particular, that I believe are plain wrong, no matter how you feel about import substitution in general. For example, in its defence of import substitution, it states there were “ambiguous failures which as in [sic] like nuclear power and computers in Brazil”. As far as I understand things, the attempt made during the 1980s to create a computer chip industry in Brazil by raising import tariffs to extraordinary high levels despite, among many, many other things, lack of engineering talent or a significant pipeline to develop it, remains one of most criticized episodes of IP that I am aware of.24

The podcast also states that firms created by this policy, such as Embraer, Petrobras and Vale, “took decades and loads of failures before any of these companies became profitable.” To focus on just Embraer, it’s true that in some ways, one can argue that Embraer only truly became “successful” after it entered the regional jet business (i.e., over 25 years after its foundation, 45 years if one focuses on foundation of DCTA), which would suggest that IP can take a very long time before it works… but that’s arguably not the case. Embraer saw significant success (and profits!) before its crisis of the early 1990s and most of the factors that would lead it becoming the even bigger success that it is today, i.e., ITA and DCTA, the foreign partnerships, the focus on exports, etc., were already present then. Many cases of IP do take a long time to happen, but you should be able to see things working well before a quarter-century has passed!

And as a truly very last point about both the ZFM and Embraer, note that there’s a strong irony at play here. Both policies were (essentially) military projects, but with differing goals and methods, and both can be said to have accomplished said goals, but with vastly different consequences for Brazil as a whole.


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1

Majority state owned, to be clear.

2

Holland, Márcio, et al. "Zona Franca de Manaus: impactos, efetividade e oportunidades." FGV, available at: http://site. suframa. gov. br. Acesso em 11 (2019). https://eesp.fgv.br/sites/eesp.fgv.br/files/estudos_fgv_zonafranca_manaus_abril_2019v2.pdf

3

The current record being seems to be Post-Panamax sized ship of 5500 TEU (https://www.revistaportuaria.com.br/noticia/19966).

4

Integrar para não entregar, i.e., integrate the Amazon region with rest of Brazil or it will be handed (lit delivered) to others.

5

The lack of more and better data is likely the biggest reason why LA is understudied in economics.

6

https://ruf.folha.uol.com.br/2023/ranking-de-universidades/principal/ is a fairly comprehensive ranking and only 2 of the top 100 Brazilian universities are in Amazonas, compared to 16 in the state of São Paulo.

7

Holand et al. presents data that allows us to get a very rough estimate that maybe around $25b of $80b is sent to other states, but I wish I had been able to find clearer data on this.

8

https://www.transamazonas.com.br/travessia-de-balsa-belem-manaus-transporte-fluvial-de-carga-carro-moto-caminhao-picape/ estimates this as the time to transport merchandise to and from Belem, the big port city at the edge of the Amazon. From there, merchandise can be transported by trucks or boats. Given the inefficiencies involved, in practice, this is very much an underestimate.

9

Using generous local job multipliers and taking into account tax intakes, i.e., using net taxes.

10

There are some studies claiming that some goods are re-exported from other states and should be counted as exports from the ZFM, but this just highlights the insane logistics of the ZFM.

11

If you can read Portuguese and are willing to go over Holland et. al, you’ll see that the very best arguments they can make still paint a fairly damning picture of the ZFM, if only by virtue of how weak the defense is.

12

Either Major or Lt Colonel, it’s not quite clear.

13

Having around 10% of GDP per capita of the US at that time.

14

And other military commanders of the time, to be clear, this was not a solo effort. The exact nature of his contribution for ITA itself is unclear, but there’s several sources attributing to him some merit in getting ITA to function.

15

To be clear, like virtually all Brazilian institutions, they’ve faced significant budget cuts/swings in the past. This is me guessing, but I’d imagine that they probably have not had the dramatic swings that other research institutions have faced and they’ve probably been able to budget themselves better; both consequences of being military-run, which helps protect their funding both during and after the dictatorship. Money from Embraer projects itself has probably helped significantly too.

16

Two important early partners consisted were Piper and Aermacchi, both relatively successful small aeroplane manufacturers.

17

But certainly not the sole explanation. The litany of problems that Brazil’s economy has are myriad, to list just a few: poor educational systems, poor infrastructure, myriad difficulties stopping companies from scaling up, a truly insane tax system, heavily government directed investments, incompetent and sometimes corrupt bureaucracies, excessive regulations, slow and capricious law systems, etc.

18

As another aside, note that, to my best of my knowledge, the agriculture sector in Brazil had a much lighter touch compared to the industrial sector in that time period, allowing for significantly more “exposure to market forces”; the implications are quite obvious. Not to say that there were not important contributions from the government, the state-run research institute Embrapa has played an outsized role in both expanding the frontier and increasing Brazilian agriculture productivity, for example, but overall, agriculture faced less direct and indirect government intervention.

19

Many other aircraft manufacturers were also receiving subsidies at that time, such as Bombardier.

20

Regional planes are smaller planes, usually under 100 passengers, that are used more or less exclusively for short-haul flights, particularly connecting lower traffic airports to bigger ones.

21

Bombardier’s business planes were adapted to become regional jets, whereas Embraer’s were designed as such. This is in addition to the efficiencies achieved post-privatization as explained.

22

Bombardier decided to compete directly with Boeing and Airbus in manufacturing a narrow-body jet, one step above regional jets. Cost overruns and manufacturing delays ended up costing Bombardier so much that it was forced to sell off many of its assets, including its own regional jet line. Bombardier now only manufactures business jets.

23

I should point out the opening was not as complete as is sometimes portrayed, as tariffs remained (and remain) relatively high overall: https://portalibre.fgv.br/sites/default/files/2021-03/artigo-centro-de-estudos-do-setor-externo_agosto2010.pdf

24

The nuclear power program, although slightly more successful, is also probably a misguided effort, given both the potential and actual success of renewable energy in Brazil.

Another Update on the Situation at Indiana University

I wanted to provide a quick update on the case of Professor Xiaofeng Wang at Indiana University. For overview details, see the posts below. The latest is the IU chapter of a faculty organization (the American Association of University Professors) has sent a letter to the university challenging Professor Wang’s termination. You can see that letter here. The letter itself is the best evidence we as yet have that Wang was in fact fired by the university. The university itself has not confirmed that or publicly commented at all. And at least no one who is talking appears to be in contact with Wang. So we don’t have any confirmation from him or anyone speaking on his behalf.

It’s important to note that all of this is unfolding in the context of people having pretty little information about what’s happening. It appears that Professor Wang is the target of a federal investigation of some sort. And the context points to something tied to espionage of some sort. But again, we don’t know that. We simply know that Wang is at the forefront of research on technologies central to high-end industry and national security (computer science, cryptography, AI). And he’s being investigated by the federal government. The AAUP letter alleges that Wang, a tenured professor, was fired with no internal university due process. The local chapter’s argument is that while such an investigation or conviction might eventually merit such a termination, due process is still critical. As they say, that is especially so in the current political climate in the U.S.

I want to step back and note some of the background and challenges of reporting on a case like this. The U.S. and China are two global powers at the forefront of technological, defense and great power competition. They are both investing huge resources in espionage and counter-espionage. A significant amount of China’s espionage and recruitment in the U.S. focuses on Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans. It is equally true that especially over the last quarter century there has been ethnic profiling of Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans and there have been repeated panics in which people are investigated and have their lives disrupted or worse on the basis of little or no evidence. Both of these things are true and it’s very hard to know, without a lot more evidence, whether this is part of those storylines.

I’ve tried as best as I can to provide both webs of context. They’re both real. This lack of information is especially true for me since I had never heard of Wang until this weekend. But I’ve been in contact with a number of people who either know him, his work, his department or the broader field — in a number of cases all four — and they’re equally in the dark.

The one point I’ve wanted to make clear is that every signal we’re getting here points to an investigation in the general counter-espionage space. That doesn’t mean an accusation or investigation is valid necessarily. We know that’s true in the general, “innocent ’til proven guilty” sense. But that’s especially the case in the current U.S. political environment.

Federal scrutiny of Chinese-American scientists and Chinese nationals ratcheted up substantially in the latter part of the first Trump administration. So how much this is part of a larger Trump administration crackdown or something that would have happened under a Harris administration, we don’t know. I’ve heard one story circulating that suggests that this whole probe is over what I’d call close to a clerical error, or essentially a technical infraction that Wang himself wasn’t even responsible for. But it’s really just a rumor among people in the field who probably don’t know or can’t know what the FBI is looking at.

What it all comes down to is that anything is possible here. The fact that the Trump administration is filled with people who are extremely hawkish with respect to the PRC and indifferent to civil liberties and even properly predicated investigations just adds to the general climate of “who knows?”

The one thing that seems likely here is tied to the university’s response. We don’t know the full backstory. What we do know is that university’s actions here either began or were at least announced within his Department on March 14th. Placing someone on leave during an investigation is normal. But the university has gone well beyond normal, taking down public pages, apparently firing him when the FBI showed up at his homes on Friday. It’s conceivable that they’ve been presented with evidence that is either so strong or covers wrongdoing of a truly exceptional nature that they felt they had no choice. But what seems more likely is that in the current political climate they don’t want to do anything that in any way feels like they’re getting in a fight with the Trump administration. So they acted as they have here.

Cuts to Science Research Funding Cut American Lives Short

The Conversation logo

Federal Support Is Essential for Medical Breakthroughs

Nearly every modern medical treatment can be traced to research funded by the National Institutes of Health: from over-the-counter and prescription medications that treat high cholesterol and pain to protection from infectious diseases such as polio and smallpox.

The remarkable successes of the decades-old partnership between biomedical research institutions and the federal government are so intertwined with daily life that it’s easy to take them for granted.

However, the scientific work driving these medical advances and breakthroughs is in jeopardy. Federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are terminating hundreds of active research grants under the current administration’s direction. The administration has also proposed a dramatic reduction in federal support of the critical infrastructure that keeps labs open and running. Numerous scientists and health professionals have noted that changes will have far-reaching, harmful outcomes for the health and well-being of the American people.

The negative consequences of defunding U.S. biomedical research can be difficult to recognize. Most breakthroughs, from the basic science discoveries that reveal the causes of diseases to the development of effective treatments and cures, can take years. Real-time progress can be hard to measure.

Scientist in lab.
Medical breakthroughs are built on years of painstaking research. Photo: Edward Jenner via Pexels

As biomedical researchers studying infectious diseases, viruses and immunology, we and our colleagues see this firsthand in our own work. Thousands of ongoing national and international projects dedicated to uncovering the causes of life-threatening diseases and developing new treatments to improve and save lives are supported by federal agencies such as the NIH and NSF.

Considering a few of the breakthroughs made possible through U.S. federal support can help illustrate not only the significant inroads biomedical research has made for preventing, treating and curing human maladies, but what all Americans stand to lose if the U.S. reduces its investment in these endeavors.

A Cure for Cancer

The hope and dream of curing cancer unites many scientists, health professionals and affected families across the U.S. After decades of ongoing NIH-supported research, scientists have made significant progress in realizing this goal.

The National Cancer Institute of the NIH is the world’s largest funder of cancer research. This investment has led to advances in cancer treatment and prevention that helped reduce the overall U.S. cancer death rate by 33% from 1991 to 2021.

Basic science research on what causes cancer has led to new strategies to harness a patient’s own immune system to eliminate tumors. For example, all 12 patients in a 2022 clinical trial testing one type of immunotherapy had their rectal cancer completely disappear, without remission or adverse effects.

Cuts in NIH funding will directly affect patients.

Another example of progress is the 2024 results of an ongoing clinical trial of a targeted therapy for lung cancer, showing an 84% reduction in the risk of disease progression or death. Similarly, in a study of women who were immunized against the human papillomavirus at age 12 or 13, none developed the disease later. Since the widespread adoption of HPV vaccination, cervical cancer deaths have dropped 62%.

Despite these incredible successes, there is still a long way to go. In 2024, over 2 million people in the U.S. were estimated to be newly diagnosed with cancer, and 611,720 were expected to die from the disease.

Without sustained federal support for cancer research, progress toward curing cancer and reducing its death rate will stall.

Autoimmune and Neurodegenerative Diseases

Nearly every family is touched in some way by autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. Government-funded research has enabled major advances to combat conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

For example, approximately 1 in 5 Americans have arthritis, an autoimmune disease that causes joint swelling and stiffness. A leading cause of disability and economic costs in the U.S., there is no cure for arthritis. But new drugs in development are able to significantly improve symptoms and slow or prevent disease progression.

Researchers are also gaining insight into what causes multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks the protective covering of nerves and can result in paralysis. Scientists recently found a link between multiple sclerosis and Epstein-Barr virus, a pathogen estimated to infect over 90% of adults around the world. While multiple sclerosis is currently incurable, identifying its underlying cause can provide new avenues for prevention and treatment.

Barack Obama tours a biomedical research facility with scientists.
President Barack Obama visits a federally funded biomedical research lab — the kind now at risk due to budget cuts. Photo: National Institutes of Health, public domain image.

Alzheimer’s disease causes irreversible nerve damage and is the leading cause of dementia. In 2024, 6.9 million Americans ages 65 and older were living with Alzheimer’s. Most treatments address cognitive and behavioral symptoms. However, two new drugs developed with NIH-supported research and clinical trials were approved in July 2023 and July 2024 to treat early-stage Alzheimer’s. Federal funding is also supporting the development of blood tests for earlier detection of the disease.

None of these breakthroughs are a cure. But they represent important steps forward on the path toward ultimately reducing or eliminating these devastating ailments. Lack of funding will slow or block further progress, leading to the continued rise of the incidence and severity of these conditions.

Infectious Diseases and the Next Pandemic

The world’s capacity to combat infectious disease will also be weakened by cuts to U.S. federal support of biomedical research.

Over the past 50 years, medical and public health advances have led to the eradication of smallpox globally and the elimination of polio in the U.S. HIV/AIDS, once a death sentence, is now a disease that can be managed with medication. Moreover, a new version of treatments called preexposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, offers complete protection against HIV transmission when taken only twice per year.

Similarly, the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the critical role biomedical research plays in responding to public health threats. Increased federal support of science during this time allowed the United States to emerge with new drugs, vaccine platforms with the potential to treat a variety of chronic diseases, and insights on how to effectively detect and respond to pandemic threats.

The ongoing avian influenza outbreak and its spillover into American dairy herds and poultry farms is another pandemic threat looming on the horizon. Rather than build upon infrastructure for outbreak surveillance and preparedness, grants that would allow scientists to better understand long COVID-19, vaccines and other pandemic-related research are being cut. Decreased funding of biomedical research will hamper the U.S.’s ability to respond to the next pandemic, putting everyone at risk.

Scientists in lab at desk.
Research across the country has ground to a halt as grants remain in limbo or have been terminated altogether. Photo: Tima Miroshnichenko via Pexels

Losses From Defunding Biomedical Research

The National Institutes of Health contributed over $100 billion to support research that ultimately led to the development of all new drugs approved from 2010 to 2016 alone. Over 90% of this funding was for basic research into understanding the causes of disease that provides the foundation for new treatments.

Under the new directive to eliminate projects that support or use terms associated with diversity, equity and inclusion, the NIH and other federal agencies have made deep cuts to biomedical research that will directly affect patient lives.

Already, nearly 41% of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lifetime, and nearly 11% with Alzheimer’s. About 1 in 5 Americans will die from heart disease, and nearly 1.4 million will be rushed to an emergency room due to pneumonia from an infectious disease.

Defunding biomedical research will result in a cascade of effects. There will likely be fewer clinical trials, fewer new treatments and fewer lifesaving drugs. Labs will likely shut down, jobs will be lost, and the process of discovery will stall. The U.S.’s health care system, economy and standing as the world’s leader in scientific innovation will likely decline.

Moreover, when the pipelines of scientific progress are turned off, they will not so easily be turned back on. These consequences will affect all Americans and the rest of the world for decades.

University shortfalls directly resulting from cuts to research support will dramatically reduce the capacity of American institutions to educate and provide opportunities for the next generation. Funding cuts have led to the shuttering or heavy reduction of training programs for future scientists.

Graduate students and postdoctoral trainees are the lifeblood of biomedical research. Supporting these young people committed to public service through research and health care is also an investment in medical advancements and public health. But the uncertainty and instability resulting from the divestment of federally funded programs will likely severely deplete the biomedical workforce, crippling the United States’ ability to deliver future biomedical breakthroughs.

By cutting biomedical research funding, Americans and the rest of the world stand to lose new cures, new treatments and an entire generation of researchers.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article HERE.

Photo at top: Tara Winstead via Pexels


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The Speech Igniting This Moment

The Speech Some Democratic or Progressive Leader Could Make and Start the Change

What would be in such a speech? First, they should skip the long list of what’s wrong and the horrible things happening. Go directly to stating what they would do if they had enough voters. Things like:

  • Implement automatic industry-wide collective bargaining, as it is in Germany and still in a few U.S. industries, giving employees the leverage to get what their work is really worth.
  • Minimum hours guarantee. If the employer later finds they don’t need you for as many hours as they said, that’s on them. You still get paid for the hours you agreed to work.
  • Fixed schedule. If you’re hired for the day shift, you can’t be switched to the evening shift, or not without compensation.
  • A very aggressive prosecution program against wage theft.
  • Automation compensation. To whatever extent a company gets richer because automation reduces work, the employees get to share in that increase. As far as possible, rather than laying off workers, keep the same workers but for fewer hours but for the same pay.

Note that the items above are not social programs. Government help is needed and will be needed on some issues, like child care, but the core push is to have the rules of the economic game refocused on giving people what they should be getting in the first place, but aren’t. Social-program help is good where appropriate, but enforcing that people get what their work is already worth is much more solid and much more powerful.

Note also that these items are not just goals, like, “Young people should not go broke or in debt because they want to go to college or a trade school.” (Senator Bernie Sanders at the recent Fight Oligarchy tour.) A noble goal, but just a wish, dependent on budgets and other factors. The items listed above are more in the realm of real steps that could be done in short order, and are about people getting their proper share of the wealth they are already creating.

Another item a leader can declare is about messaging. It’s something they could push from within a progressive White House, from the bully pulpit: A call on media outlets to give an alternative to the daily stock market report that comes with almost every newscast. Yes, people are somewhat affected by the stock market if they have a retirement account, but the subtext is, this economy is not about you. It’s about the big investors. But imagine a few seconds every day on some people-news as well. There are lots of people-centered numbers that could be reported too. Such as, has the level of employee confidence in being able to find better jobs changed? Has the employee share of national income changed, how the pie is sliced? How are we doing on the percentage of people with some preparation for retirement? What’s an initial estimate on the amount of wealth the work of all workers has added to the nation today?

Can a president influence media this way? Well, we’re learning a president can intimidate law firms and colleges and make wealthy donors kiss the ring. I’d bet an ethical, but bold, leader could get lots of media to add this little piece to their reporting.

All of these steps and a hundred similar ones need to be pushed with an emphasis on functioning within the constitution, and on being fiercely inclusive of all. Yes such steps fall short of some social goals, such as DEI. But you get these kind of leaders in power, and the people themselves in turn more empowered, and people feeling more economically secure, and you have a country in a condition much more open to dealing with the many other issues it needs to.

These steps are radical, because radical change is needed and wanted, but they’re also centerist. They apply to everyone. Democrats who feel the need is to be more progressive, and ones who want to be more centerist, should both be able to get behind these.

Finally that leader needs to say, “I don’t have the votes for this. We leaders don’t have the votes for this. But this is about doing things. Here’s your part, what you can do. Let your commitment to vote for these leaders and these changes be know. Get everyone you can to join you. The popular vote was lost by less than 2%. For now we’ll resist in every way we can until, in a year and a half at the Congressional elections, we start the big changes. Then complete that by your votes regaining the next White House and a new wave of daily news of big changes will start flowing. A very different kind of big changes. Ones that are for you.”


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Sell Floyd Bennett Field!

I’ve been shouting Sell! for many years. Perhaps now is the chance to do it. Here’s a recap:

The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF) for more [N.B. the vast majority of this land is NOT parks, AT 2011]. It is time for a sale. Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars – perhaps trillions of dollars – for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes. At the same time, a sale of western land would improve the efficiency of land allocation.

But it’s not just federal lands in the West. Floyd Bennett Field is an old military airport in Brooklyn that hasn’t been used much since the 1970s. Today, it’s literally used as a training ground for sanitation drivers and to occasionally host radio-controlled airplane hobbyists.

In August 2023, state and federal officials reached an agreement to build a large shelter for migrants at Floyd Bennett Field, amid a citywide migrant housing crisis caused by a sharp increase in the number of asylum seekers traveling to the city. The shelter opened that November, but its remote location deterred many migrants. City officials announced plans in December 2024 to close the shelter.

By Msedwick Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12649418

Floyd Bennett Field is over 1000 acres and should be immediately sold to the highest bidder.

Brad Hargreaves on twitter has a good thread with some more examples.

Addendum: Here’s a NPR article (!) from 10 years ago that I am sure still applies even if not in all details:

Government estimates suggest there may be 77,000 empty or underutilized buildings across the country. Taxpayers own them, and even vacant, they’re expensive. The Office of Management and Budget believes these buildings could be costing taxpayers $1.7 billion a year.

…But doing something with these buildings is a complicated job. It turns out that the federal government does not know what it owns.

…even when an agency knows it has a building it would like to sell, bureaucratic hurdles limit it from doing so. No federal agency can sell anything unless it’s uncontaminated, asbestos-free and environmentally safe. Those are expensive fixes.

Then the agency has to make sure another one doesn’t want it. Then state and local governments get a crack at it, then nonprofits — and finally, a 25-year-old law requires the government to see if it could be used as a homeless shelter.

Many agencies just lock the doors and say forget it.

The post Sell Floyd Bennett Field! appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Will Democrats in 2029 Be Up to the Job?

I’ll have to flesh this out some at a later date, but Brian Beutler gets at a very important point in a review of the ‘abundance agenda’* (boldface mine):

This is, at best, only hinted at in Abundance. The book details many kinds of governing failures, and identifies important sources of those failures. It is much quieter on how partisan politics will have to change for Democrats to be able to do anything quickly. Not just build nuclear power plants, but depose fascists and rebuild federal agencies and create a public health-insurance option.

If past is prologue it will not happen. Twenty years after the filibuster abolition movement came together the leadership of the Democratic party is largely unchanged. The candidates it recruits are allergic to taking hard votes. We have roughly two years to change that, if an incoming trifecta in 2029 will be willing to do whatever’s necessary “to put a motor in it and take off.”

That is, to do things most of today’s Democrats run scared from even talking about.

And then we need to replicate that philosophy of action at every level of government in as many states as possible. We need to transform a party of timid overanalyzers into a party of fearless actors and reactors in an incredibly short span of time. Ezra and Derek have written a good book, but this is the graveyard they whistle past. And so I’d invite them to lend their voices to the cause of building a Democratic Party that fights: for abundance, sure, but more proximately to defeat the authoritarian right and lock it out of power indefinitely, so that their vision, or any similar vision of progress, stands a chance.

Any progressive agenda needs more than ideas. It needs power and the will to use it. There’s no abundance, let alone old-fashioned safety-net liberalism, without something like Project 2029 as a predicate.

There are people in the Democratic Party, and not just on the left, who I can imagine being this aggressive and active. But Democrats have too many elected officials who won’t even take their own side in a fight (here’s a recent example). Worse, there are still too many rank-and-file Democratic voters who let them get away with this.

Maybe it’s naive of me, but I still think Democrats can take back power in 2028. That said, I’m not convinced they will do what is necessary, including imposing consequences on those who deserve it (which is a whole different topic), to do anything other than having another four years of norms-based center-leftism**, followed by a Republican return to power.

*I’m not very keen on the abundance agenda, in part because I don’t trust its two major proponents, and in part because we shouldn’t use vague phrases: if you want more housing, then call for that; if you want more mass transit, then call for that. Don’t muddy things up with a vague phrase that the right will demonize.

**Which was still better than what we had at any other time in the last forty years.

Mike Ostrovsky on congestion pricing (podcast)

Congestion pricing: as it's happening:


Congestion Pricing: Economics, Theory, Reality

March 29, 2025 • 57 mins
with @mostrovs @skominers @rhhackett

Welcome to web3 with a16z. I’m your host Robert Hackett, and today we’re talking about congestion pricing — an area of mechanism design that’s aimed at alleviating something everyone hates: traffic.

Now you may have heard this term recently since New York adopted its own version of congestion pricing at the beginning of the year. This is the first program of its kind in the U.S. — and it’s got supporters and detractors. We’ll talk about that, and we’re also going to talk about much more.

In the first part of today’s episode we’ll trace the history of the economic ideas that got us here. In the middle, we’ll dig deeper into the details of putting congestion pricing into practice, plus technological alternatives. And in the final part, we’ll explore parallels to — and implications for — crypto networks.

Our guests are Michael Ostrovsky, a Stanford Economics Professor who specializes in this area and who has done research on congestion pricing in New York. We’re also joined by a16z crypto Research Partner Scott Kominers, who is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School where he teaches market design and entrepreneurship.

Resources:



Great AI Steals

Picasso got it right: Great artists steal. Even if he didn’t actually say it, and we all just repeat the quote because Steve Jobs used it. Because it strikes at the heart of creativity: None of it happens in a vacuum. Everything is inspired by something. The best ideas, angles, techniques, and tones are stolen to build everything that comes after the original.

Furthermore, the way to learn originality is to set it aside while you learn to perfect a copy. You learn to draw by imitating the masters. I learned photography by attempting to recreate great compositions. I learned to program by aping the Ruby standard library.

Stealing good ideas isn’t a detour on the way to becoming a master — it’s the straight route. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

This, by the way, doesn’t just apply to art but to the economy as well. Japan became an economic superpower in the 80s by first poorly copying Western electronics in the decades prior. China is now following exactly the same playbook to even greater effect. You start with a cheap copy, then you learn how to make a good copy, and then you don’t need to copy at all.

AI has sped through the phase of cheap copies. It’s now firmly established in the realm of good copies. You’re a fool if you don’t believe originality is a likely next step. In all likelihood, it’s a matter of when, not if. (And we already have plenty of early indications that it’s actually already here, on the edges.)

Now, whether that’s good is a different question. Whether we want AI to become truly creative is a fair question — albeit a theoretical or, at best, moral one. Because it’s going to happen if it can happen, and it almost certainly can (or even has).

Ironically, I think the peanut gallery disparaging recent advances — like the Ghibli fever — over minor details in the copying effort will only accelerate the quest toward true creativity. AI builders, like the Japanese and Chinese economies before them, eager to demonstrate an ability to exceed.

All that is to say that AI is in the "Good Copy" phase of its creative evolution. Expect "The Great Artist" to emerge at any moment.

Woodcut printmaker Tom Killion

Painting of a vibrant green hillside with trees and a winding river, showing detailed textures and overlapping colours.

Inspired by Japanese master artists, a woodcut printmaker is constantly reimagining the landscapes of his California home

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

The stagnation of physics

A desert highway at dusk with cliffs and the moon visible and a rear-view mirror showing a road and sunset reflection behind.

Physicists today need to jettison the all-too-attractive myth that they are uncovering the hidden reality of our Universe

- by Adrien De Sutter

Read at Aeon