Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios.Links for you. Science:
The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine
FDA’s big change to how vaccines will get approved
Colorado has wolves again for the first time in 80 years. Why are they dying?
‘The last plant left’: can Rapa Nui’s extinct tree be resurrected?
Rare Gecko Species Rediscovered in Galapagos Following Island Restoration Success
Diabetic Man With Gene-Edited Cells Produces His Own Insulin—No Transplant Drugs Required
Cancelling mRNA studies is the highest irresponsibility
Other:
It’s time to talk about Donald Trump’s health (again)
This is what a white supremacist administration looks like
Janeese Lewis George launches bid for D.C. mayor. The progressive lawmaker has big plans, but faces political and practical obstacles.
The Conservative Grievance Business Is Always Hiring
FBI under Kash Patel has become ‘internally paralyzed by fear’, new report reveals
Republican mayor in Kansas facing deportation over voter fraud
Why This Nineties High School Punk Band Is Suddenly Bigger Than Ever. Everyone Asked About You broke up and went about their lives. Nearly three decades later, they’re touring the U.S. thanks to some Japanese fans unearthing their old teenage music
Suspended FEMA workers who criticized Trump administration got their jobs back — until DHS leaders found out
UAB physician and AI innovator may leave US due to parents’ immigration limbo
D.C. restaurants, hotels suffered during Trump takeover, per new data
DOGE Isn’t Dead. Here’s What Its Operatives Are Doing Now
A Maryland mayor removes rainbow crosswalks, citing neutrality concerns (“A conservative, Taylor is a bit of an outlier in Salisbury. He won the 2023 mayoral race by 50 votes when two more liberal-leaning candidates split their votes.”)
I’m In Charge
12-Story Micro-Unit Development Pitched For 15th Street Church
Changing the FDA’s Vaccine Approval Process Could Threaten COVID, Flu Protection for Children
N.Y. Law Could Set Stage for A.I. Regulation’s Next ‘Big Battleground’
Trump tariffs gut manufacturing as jobs shrink for 9 months straight
Trump Boat Bombings Suddenly on Shakier Ground as Damning Info Emerges
Olivia Nuzzi’s Tell-Nothing Memoir (brutal)
Trump’s ugly Thanksgiving meltdown: It’s getting so bad that even Republicans are starting to notice.
Grok Says It Would Kill Every Jewish Person on the Planet to Save Elon Musk: A “classic trolley problem,” according to Grok.
A Serious Journalism Scandal Hiding Inside a Frivolous Sexual One
Settler outposts spread among West Bank villages and fuel fear of more attacks
Dem. Senator Gallego’s Leaked Texts Echo Far-Right Gender Panic And Misogyny (more here)
Yeah, what is ‘Post-Liberalism’ anyway?
The old deal is dead. America needs a new one
Kash Patel Is Under Investigation for Using FBI Jet as Private Uber
ICE Arrested and Separated Chinese Father From 6-Year-Old Son, Advocates Say
How the CIA Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Partisanship
Way-No-No-No!!! Drives Into Police Standoff
I was going to publish a post today about the pettiness of the Trump administration is best illustrated by deadnaming a trans former HHS official*. No, it’s not as dangerous (or deadly) as other Trump administration actions, but it’s the kind of thing for which someone should be named and shamed. And then, Sunday night Trump uttered a vile and disgusting statement–which arguably could be viewed as a violent threat too–about Rob and Michelle Reiner’s death.
If there’s any consolation to be had, this seems to be blowing up in Trump’s face, though that didn’t stop him from doubling down yesterday. There might be a level of meanness and pettiness that the body politic just can’t ignore or stomach. While Trump obviously sets the tone, as the deadnaming indicates, this malignant behavior is marbled throughout the entire Trump administration, and those involved in such foul behavior should be shamed and made outcast (even if it’s not illegal). There is no balm in Gilead to heal those sin sick souls.
Anyway, here’s a funny sketch featuring Rob Reiner and Carroll O’Connor (apparently, it was at least partially improvised):
*I delayed writing about that because I was going to write about the Trump administration’s cancelling plans from the Biden administration to mint quarters about abolition (of slavery) and women’s suffrage. Being assholes happens like clockwork for these putzes.
Up and to the office, and thither came Mr. Coventry and Sir G. Carteret, and among other business was Strutt’s the purser, against Captn. Browne, Sir W. Batten’s brother-in-law, but, Lord! though I believe the Captain has played the knave, though I seem to have a good opinion of him and to mean him well, what a most troublesome fellow that Strutt is, such as I never did meet with his fellow in my life. His talking and ours to make him hold his peace set my head off akeing all the afternoon with great pain.
So to dinner, thinking to have had Mr. Coventry, but he could not go with me; and so I took Captn. Murford. Of whom I do hear what the world says of me; that all do conclude Mr. Coventry, and Pett, and me, to be of a knot; and that we do now carry all things before us; and much more in particular of me, and my studiousnesse, &c., to my great content.
After dinner came Mrs. Browne, the Captain’s wife, to see me and my wife, and I showed her a good countenance, and indeed her husband has been civil to us, but though I speak them fair, yet I doubt I shall not be able to do her husband much favour in this business of Strutt’s, whom without doubt he has abused.
So to the office, and hence, having done some business, by coach to White Hall to Secretary Bennet’s, and agreed with Mr. Lee to set upon our new adventure at the Tower to-morrow. Hence to Col. Lovelace in Cannon Row about seeing how Sir R. Ford did report all the officers of the navy to be rated for the Loyal Sufferers, but finding him at the Rhenish wine-house I could not have any answer, but must take another time. Thence to my Lord’s, and having sat talking with Mr. Moore bewailing the vanity and disorders of the age, I went by coach to my brother’s, where I met Sarah, my late mayde, who had a desire to speak with me, and I with her to know what it was, who told me out of good will to me, for she loves me dearly, that I would beware of my wife’s brother, for he is begging or borrowing of her and often, and told me of her Scallop whisk, and her borrowing of 50s. for Will, which she believes was for him and her father. I do observe so much goodness and seriousness in the mayde, that I am again and again sorry that I have parted with her, though it was full against my will then, and if she had anything in the world I would commend her for a wife for my brother Tom. After much discourse and her professions of love to me and all my relations, I bade her good night and did kiss her, and indeed she seemed very well-favoured to me to-night, as she is always.
So by coach home and to my office, did some business, and so home to supper and to bed.
Update Dec. 16, 7:50 p.m. EST (0050 UTC): SpaceX pushed back the T-0 liftoff time.
SpaceX is set for a midweek launch of a batch of its Starlink V2 Mini satellites shortly after sunrise on Wednesday.
The Starlink 6-99 mission will add 29 more broadband internet satellites to SpaceX’s low Earth orbit constellation. According to astronomer and expert orbital tracker, there are currently more than 9,300 Starlink satellites in orbit.
Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is scheduled for 8:42 a.m. EST (1342 UTC).
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 95 percent chance for favorable odds of good weather at liftoff. Meteorologists said the booster recovery weather may not be ideal for a landing though.
“High pressure over the southeastern states will persist before the next cold front is expected to pass through by Friday,” launch weather officers wrote. “No change to the primary launch window forecast, with low chances of Cumulus Cloud Rule violation associated with isolated onshore-moving low-topped coastal showers.
SpaceX will launch the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number, 1094. This will be its sixth flight after launching missions like Crew-11, Ax-4 and Cygnus NG-23.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1094 is set to perform an autonomous landing on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean to the east of The Bahamas. If successful, this will be the 146th landing on this vessel and the 552nd booster landing for SpaceX to date.
Where are all of these meteors coming from?
About “learning, history, and investing in ideas”, and what if there were ten Tyler Cowens?:
Here is the transcript.
The post Podcast with Parker Conley appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A reported close approach between a Starlink satellite and a recently launched Chinese spacecraft highlights the challenges of coordinating spacecraft operations and verifying potential close calls in orbit.
The post SpaceX claims close approach to Starlink satellite by payload from Chinese launch appeared first on SpaceNews.
China conducted a pair of launches in recent days, sending a commercial cargo spacecraft and tech demo into orbit, followed by a remote sensing satellite.
The post China launches experimental cargo spacecraft, opaque tech demo mission and remote sensing satellite appeared first on SpaceNews.
New analysis suggests that problems with NASA’s MAVEN Mars orbiter may be more serious than a simple communications glitch.
The post MAVEN telemetry shows changes to spacecraft orbit and rotation appeared first on SpaceNews.
Senior leaders emphasize internal expertise and hands-on experimentation
The post Space Force uses AI challenge to push everyday use of artificial intelligence appeared first on SpaceNews.
Low Earth orbit is undergoing the fastest expansion in its history. However, the nature of the payload is changing. We are moving past simple “bent-pipe” communication relays — where a satellite simply receives a signal and beams it back to Earth without processing it. With initiatives like StarCloud deploying and training a large language model […]
The post Beyond the ground station: Why space data centers require a distributed RAID appeared first on SpaceNews.
NASA plans to test SpaceX’s Starshield satellite network, designed primarily for national security customers, to support operations of the agency’s Deep Space Network.
The post NASA to test SpaceX’s Starshield in pilot program appeared first on SpaceNews.
In this episode of Space Minds, host Sandra Erwin sits down with former NASA astronaut and Space Force leader Brig. Gen. Nick Hague for a wide-ranging conversation on how the U.S. Space Force is shaping its culture, training Guardians, and preparing for future conflict in space.
The post How the Space Force trains Guardians for the future of warfare appeared first on SpaceNews.
The Trump administration’s new national security strategy has rightly drawn criticism for presuming to tell our European allies how to arrange their domestic affairs. Equally as baffling is its near silence on a genuine United States national security concern — bolstering our offensive and defensive capabilities in space. Amid much MAGA trollery that blames Europe […]
The post Trump’s national security strategy ignores space appeared first on SpaceNews.
Firms aim to link air and ground platforms using visual positioning technology
The post Vantor partners with Niantic Spatial on GPS-free navigation for defense market appeared first on SpaceNews.
SAN FRANCISCO – EraDrive, a Stanford University spinoff developing software and hardware for satellite autonomy, raised $5.3 million in an oversubscribed seed round, the startup announced Dec. 16. “EraDrive is very much about this idea of the self-driving spacecraft,” Justin Kruger, EraDrive chief technology officer and co-founder, told SpaceNews. EraDrive is developing a software-hardware module […]
The post EraDrive raises $5.3 million for software-hardware kits to enhance satellite autonomy appeared first on SpaceNews.
Todd Spangler, reporting last week for Variety:
As Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on a “massive scale” using AI models and services to “commercially exploit and distribute” infringing images and videos. On Wednesday evening, attorneys for Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, demanding that Google stop the alleged infringement in its AI systems. [...]
According to the letter, which Variety has reviewed, Disney alleges that Google’s AI systems and services infringe Disney characters including those from “Frozen,” “The Lion King,” “Moana,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Deadpool,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Toy Story,” “Brave,” “Ratatouille,” “Monsters Inc.,” “Lilo & Stich,” “Inside Out” and franchises such as Star Wars, the Simpsons, and Marvel’s Avengers and Spider-Man. In its letter, Disney included examples of images it claims were generated by text prompts in Google’s AI apps, including of Darth Vader (pictured above).
It’s very Disney-esque to embrace a new medium. Alone among the major movie studios in the 1950s, Disney embraced television. TV was a threat to the cinema, but it was also an enormous opportunity. The other studios only saw the threat. Walt Disney focused on the opportunity. But Disney did this not by giving their content to television on the cheap or for free. They did it by getting paid. That’s what they’re doing with generative AI.
Here’s the Gemini-generated Darth Vader image. Note the blood splatter — which was un-Star Wars-like even before Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm. Also, even worse, his lightsaber is totally wrong.
John Keilman, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
The company that makes Roomba robotic vacuums declared bankruptcy Sunday but said its devices will continue to function normally while the company restructures.
Massachusetts-based iRobot has struggled financially for years, beset by foreign competition that made cheaper and, in the opinion of some buyers, technologically superior autonomous vacuums. When a proposed sale to Amazon.com fell through in 2024 because of regulatory concerns, the company’s share price plummeted.
Founded in 1990, iRobot’s autonomous vacuum cleaners helped pioneer robotics for consumers. Many recent versions of the Roomba have features that are controlled through the brand’s app. Some owners have worried that, similar to other products tied to the internet, their Roombas could “brick” — or stop working — if the company went under. iRobot said it anticipates no disruptions to its product support or app functionality.
Matt Stoller, author of the (generally excellent) website Big, on Twitter/X today:
iRobot is selling itself to Chinese manufacturers, a result of hedge fund attack a decade ago that gutted the company. Wall Street is a threat to our national sovereignty.
Matt Stoller, author of the (generally knee-jerk anti-acquisition) website Big, on Twitter back in 2022, when Amazon announced its intended acquisition:
Amazon just bought iRobot, which has immense amounts of data about people’s physical homes. It never ends. Congress should have passed @TomCottonAR’s bill to bar big tech mergers.
[Press release: “Amazon and iRobot sign an agreement for Amazon to acquire iRobot”]
You can’t have it both ways. If Amazon’s proposed acquisition would have gone through, iRobot, an American company, would now be a (small) subsidiary of Amazon, another American company. The acquisition did not go through, which is what Stoller wanted, and now here we are with iRobot — which in Stoller’s own description “has immense amounts of data about people’s physical homes” — in the hands of a Chinese company.
iRobot’s demise wasn’t caused by hedge fund investments a decade ago. The hedge fund vultures swooped in after the Amazon acquisition collapsed in early 2024. Here’s Connie Loizos, writing yesterday for TechCrunch:
It seemed like a fairy tale ending — the scrappy MIT spinoff absorbed into the Everything Store’s sprawling empire.
Except European regulators had other ideas. Indeed, amid threats they would block the deal — they believed Amazon could foreclose rivals by restricting or degrading access to its marketplace — Amazon and iRobot agreed to kill the deal in January 2024, with Amazon paying a $94 million breakup fee and walking away. Angle resigned. The company’s shares nosedived. It shed 31% of its workforce.
What followed afterward was a slow-motion collapse. Earnings had been declining since 2021 thanks to supply chain chaos and Chinese competitors flooding the market with cheaper robot vacuums.
iRobot didn’t get big enough on its own quickly enough. It was under fierce competitive pressure from Chinese robot vacuums. Roombas seemed groundbreaking and innovative at first, but technical progress stalled. Amazon’s hands aren’t exactly clean in terms of putting the squeeze on iRobot: the primary place where the cheaper Chinese robot vacuums were being sold was, of course, Amazon.
By 2022, the Amazon acquisition was iRobot’s lifeline. EU regulators wanted it shot down, and despite the fact that it was one American company trying to acquire another, the anti-big-tech Biden administration clearly preferred to let the deal collapse. The US should have told the EU to mind their own companies.
Now iRobot is in Chinese hands, the worst possible outcome. The Amazon acquisition wasn’t anti-competitive — it was iRobot’s last chance to remain competitive.
I’m not usually one for rubber-necking a celebrity death or commenting on it here. I feel I need to say something about Rob Reiner. It’s hard for me to think about someone in public life whose contributions were so weighted in the direction of humor and joy and whose final fate was so much one of horror and heartbreak. When I put together the pieces of that collision last night I couldn’t quite process it.
I’m old enough that from my own childhood and probably even more from the vicarious memories of my parents I still kind of think, or thought of, Rob Reiner as Carl Reiner’s kid. Which of course he was. And Carl Reiner — who only died in 2020 — was one of the greats of the first golden age of television. But in the best sense, in terms of creation, longevity, cultural influence, range and more, Reiner totally eclipsed his father. Look at the run of movies in the 80s and 90s and numerous ones since. Look, if you’re not as familiar with it, at the very dedicated, practical and successful political involvement. Not just the fundraisers and giving but the work on specific issues over years and years.
It’s a reminder that to make sense of, to be at peace with this world, we have to find some path of solace or redemption that can coexist even with the abject tragedy and sorrow.
Finalist is an iOS planner rooted in paper. Originally an index card system, it grew into a love letter to paper planners. You know the kind, leather folders with colored tabs and translucent dividers.
Unlike those old binders, Finalist fills itself with your calendars, reminders and weather forecast. Minimalist? Maybe not, but it’s become a UI playground designed to inspire, and looks great on iPad and Mac too.
Like the gorgeous new Year Planner for roughing in plans with the Highlighter (“intention paintbrush”).
iOS has tons of cool productivity apps. Finalist is a different take, and it might just end up in your dock.
One more from Matthew Butterick, from his Typography for Lawyers, and a good pairing with Mark Simonson’s “The Scourge of Arial”:
Yet it’s an open question whether its longevity is attributable to its quality or merely its ubiquity. Helvetica still inspires enough affection to have been the subject of a 2007 documentary feature. Times New Roman, meanwhile, has not attracted similar acts of homage.
Why not? Fame has a dark side. When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the font of least resistance.” Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.
As Simonson mentions in “The Scourge of Arial”, regarding Helvetica’s enduring popularity:
As it spread into the mainstream in the ’70s, many designers tired of it and moved on to other typographic fashions, but by then it had become a staple of everyday design and printing. So in the early ’80s when Adobe developed the PostScript page description language, it was no surprise that they chose Helvetica as one of the basic four fonts to be included with every PostScript interpreter they licensed (along with Times, Courier, and Symbol). Adobe licensed its fonts from the original foundries, demonstrating their respect and appreciation for the integrity of type, type foundries and designers. They perhaps realized that if they had used knock-offs of popular typefaces, the professional graphic arts industry — a key market — would not accept them.
To my mind, Helvetica, Times, and Courier are the three canonical “default” fonts. One modern sans, one modern serif, and one for “typewriter”/code. (When I see Courier in print, at display sizes, my mind immediately wonders if the printer was missing the font that the designer specified in the document file.)
The Symbol font is a different story. It existed and was included with PostScript as one of just four defaults because the 8-bit character encodings of the time only had space for 255 characters. You needed a special font like Symbol to access “exotic” characters like Greek letters, math symbols (e.g. × or ÷), or arrows (↑ ↓ ← →). So there were really only three regular “fonts”, for prose, included with PostScript: Helvetica, Courier, and Times.
Courier and Times were eventually superseded in popular use by rivals that Microsoft licensed for inclusion in Windows: Courier New and Times New Roman, respectively. Times was from Linotype, Times New Roman from Monotype. Both versions of Times are legitimate digital interpretations of the 1929 hot metal design of Times Roman, and their differences are minor. Courier New, on the other hand, is so ugly — anemically thin and weak — that it hurts my teeth whenever I encounter it.
Typographer Mark Simonson, all the way back in 2001:
Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the world.
Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.
This is the exegesis on Arial. There’s also an exemplary illustrated sidebar, “How to Spot Arial”, which shows in detail how to tell the fucking bastard from Helvetica. If you want to be like me, cursed to notice Arial each time it appears in life, study that, and take note how every single way that it’s different from Helvetica is in the direction of making it uglier.
I’ve referenced “The Scourge of Arial” a few times over the years here at DF, but the recent contretemps over Times New Roman’s return at the US State Department has the general topic of “default fonts” at top of mind. For me, at least.
One of the old posts in which I linked to “The Scourge of Arial” was this gem from September 2007: “Hacking the iPhone Notes App for the Admittedly Nit-Picky Purpose of Changing the Text Font to Helvetica”. This was so early in the iPhone era — just three months after the original iPhone shipped — that we were calling its operating system “mobile OS X”, and none of it was protected in any way, so you could do what I did and delete the Marker Felt font (Merlin Mann: “Comic Sans with a shave and a breath mint”) and then use a hex editor to modify the Mobile Notes app so it would fall back to Helvetica instead of cursed Arial after Marker Felt was deleted. Good times.
Back on November 28, I bought a new cap from New Era’s web store. They offered a discount of some sort if I gave them a phone number and permitted them to send me marketing messages. That got me curious about what they’d do with my number, and it was a $50-some dollar cap, so I took the discount and gave them my Google Voice number. That was 17 days ago. They sent me 19 SMS marketing messages since then, before I’d seen enough today and called it quits on this experiment. (Or called “STOP”, perhaps, which was the magic word to opt out.) They didn’t send a text every day, and on some days, they sent more than one. But the overall effect was relentlessly annoying.
I’m sure some of the people who sign up for these texts in exchange for a discount code wind up clicking at least one of the offers sent via SMS and buying more stuff, and the marketing team running this points to those sales as proof that it “works”. You can measure that. It shows up as a number. Some people in business only like arguments that can be backed by numbers. 3 is more than 2. That is indeed a fact.
But there are an infinite number of things in life that cannot be assigned numeric values. Many of these things matter too. Like the fact that in my mind, after experiencing this, the New Era company smells like a sweaty hustler in a cheap polyester suit. If their brand were a man, I’d check my pants pocket for my wallet after interacting with him.
Today, I want to share some additional thoughts with you on this ranging topic of tech lords and predators, the conquistadors and pirates in our midst. It’s a point that is perhaps the most visible part of the current moment, but because of that, paradoxically, hardest to see clearly. It’s been more than a century since the men at the highest pinnacles of the American economy so visibly and directly intervened in the country’s politics. An element of that is the highly personalist nature of the big tech monopolies. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t just a CEO or plurality owner. He is Facebook. He’s the founder, the driving mind since the beginning. I believe that voting rights are structured in such a way at Meta that in terms of control as opposed to equity stakes he is in total control. Meta cannot be taken away from him. Whether or not voting rights are precisely the same, a similar story prevails at Amazon, Google, certainly X and all of Musk’s companies. We haven’t seen anything like that since the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons, when big names like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan and Rockefeller similarly owned, drove and personified the great corporate behemoths and monopolies of the day.
For many decades, certainly since the Second World War, even the more politically- and ideologically-minded corporations kept their political spending and their exertions in the background. Perhaps they gave most of their money to Republicans but they’d give to Democrats too just to keep them mostly on side.
What we began to see in the late Biden administration and then to an almost mind-boggling degree through 2025 is not just the big tech titans cozying up to Trump and doing so visibly, but making themselves what we might call main characters in the American Political Cinematic Universe. There’s really nothing like it in our history. I know many friends who are into MMA and the UFC. My sons are into it. Not my thing. But great if it’s yours. But if you’re Mark Zuckerberg and you take ringside seats at a UFC match with Trump friend and UFC CEO Dana White, you’re sending a very clear and specific message and you’re sending it far outside the channels where most traditional political messaging takes place. Even more if you put White on your board. And the same applies to going on Joe Rogan’s show and talking about a rights movement for “high testosterone males.” Yes, Zuckerberg got into MMA before the so-called “vibe shift.” But not in this politics-inflected way. We’ve seen countless examples of this in so many different contexts, starting with that unforgettable inauguration image where the seats of greatest distinction were reserved for the centi-billionaire tech titans. Government of, by and for them.
One of the things I’ve noticed most conspicuously over the last year is how new to politics a lot of these guys seem to be. Yes, Musk was a contributor to politics before his rightward turn. And a pretty good case has been made that his now flamboyant and open white nationalism was at least always latent in his worldview, going all the way back to his youth in South Africa. But I’m not talking about ideological predilections. I mean American politics, a system that has certain patterns, longstanding arguments, interest groups, traditions, etc. Again and again over the last year, I’ve seen Musk or Zuckerberg or David Sacks or even Jeff Bezos say something and thought, “You’re really new to politics, aren’t you? Like you’re really hitting all of this cold with very little sense of what happened two years ago let along 10 or 20.”
Now the thing about being a centi-billionaire is that you can be pretty ignorant, pretty dumb. And there’s an app for that. It’s called money. Money will take care of a lot of that. But not everything.
I started thinking about this more when I began to realize just how unpopular AI is, a point I mentioned a week or so ago. I know all the reasons AI is unpopular among some people, particularly in my world. It’s bad for the climate; it’s bad for the arts; it’s bad for the political economy; it’s bad for people who get annoyed hearing grown men talk about sentience and cognition with the sophistication of a first grader. But I’m also used to working on the assumption that outside of my world — one of people very up on politics, generally well-educated and with cosmopolitan social and cultural sensibilities — people can and quite frequently do think very differently. So I found myself surprised just how widespread hostility to AI is.
Different segments of American society aren’t necessarily against AI for just the reasons I am. But they have their own different reasons. For a huge cross section of Americans, AI is the thing the bosses are going to use to lay you off. It’s the early 21st century version of offshoring. And quite a few of the Americans who see it through that prism are Trumpers. If it’s not laying you off, it’s jacking up your utility rates so they can run the data crunching plantations that are going to take your job. When I first thought about this I wondered: are the billionaires damaging the brand of AI? Or is AI damaging the brand of the billionaires? But for the centi-billionaires who are staking everything on AI I’m not sure it matters. We’re already seeing signs that 2026 Republicans are going to try to sic an angry public on the tech boys, blaming them for jacking up electricity prices or layoffs tied to AI.
And this is one component of a larger point that’s been on my mind. Again, the tech oligarchs have made themselves big, visible parts of the American Political Cinematic Universe. That is a very precarious place for major corporate leaders to be. That’s why they are almost never, ever there. But they are. They are all in on AI. And they are all in on Trump. And both of those things right now are very unpopular. And I mean very unpopular. It’s hard to know in every case whether a particular oligarch is really down with Trump or just trying to go with the flow. But Trump demands things that make these distinctions not terribly relevant in terms of brand perceptions and brand damage. They’re all in for AI. They’re all in for Trump. And you can’t learn that just by reading the Wall Street Journal or small political magazines. You learn it on TikTok and Twitter and Facebook. Do they know that part of the health premiums going through the roof for a lot of people is going to be on them, just because they’re so prominent in our current political landscape as part of team Trump?
I don’t think the tech boys have much sense that politics shifts both ways, that what happened in the winter of 2024/25 wasn’t permanent. Indeed, it didn’t last through 2025. Do they know what it’s like to be holding the bag for a significant amount of main force political backlash? And not just worrying about Democrats being in power but having Republicans trying to stay in office trying to shift the ire in their direction? I have very little sense that that’s the case.
And this is a factor that goes beyond what happens in 2026. I was talking to TPM Reader BF a few days ago about this question of the tech oligarchs as latter day nabobs. They can fund campaigns. They can fund every friendly campaign twice over. They could hire private armies. But are they liked? Not really. And is anyone for them? One could imagine an alternate universe in which different tech titans associated with different mass political movements, funded that party’s or movement’s organizations, funded associated charities. The kind of thing where you could have big chunks of the population really devoted to this or that oligarch. But that’s not how any of this is working out. Their bases of support are actually fragile and narrow. I think a lot of them thought that if Trump’s with you, that’s all that matters. But I don’t think that’s the case, especially since most of these guys have decades of life and dreams of building up further riches stretching out before them after Trump leaves the stage.
1. The new Brink Lindsey book is out.
2. Markets in everything: “Wasp nests have become a surprisingly sought-after home décor commodity, with some priced at up to $250 per specimen.” (NYT) The shipping fees to get them can be pretty high.
3. New charter city, crypto-based in St. Kitts and Nevis? (FT)
4. “Specifically, TGIF, Nellie Bowles’ witty take on the week’s news, is being censored in the UK.” (TFP, beware Australia…)
5. A case where the Peltzman effect might apply.
6. Glenn Loury in memory of Thomas Schelling.
7. Purdue University Approves New AI Requirement For All Undergrads.
8. Robert J. Samuelson, RIP (NYT).
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Yesterday, in Part 1: Current State of the Housing Market; Overview for mid-December 2025 I reviewed home inventory and sales. I noted that the key stories this year for existing homes are that inventory increased sharply (almost back to pre-pandemic levels), and sales are depressed and tracking last year (sales in 2024 were the lowest since 1995). That means prices are under pressure.There is much more in the article.
In Part 2, I will look at house prices, mortgage rates, rents and more.
...
The Case-Shiller National Index increased 1.3% year-over-year (YoY) in September and will likely be about the same year-over-year in the October report compared to September (based on other data).
...
In the January report, the Case-Shiller National index was up 4.2%, in February up 4.0%, in March up 3.4%, in April report up 2.8%, in May up 2.3%, in June up 1.9% in July up 1.6%, August up 1.6% and in September up 1.3% (a steady decline in the YoY change).
And the September Case-Shiller index was a 3-month average of closing prices in July, August and September. July closing prices include some contracts signed in May. So, not only is this trending down, but there is a significant lag to this data.
Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for October 2025, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $732.6 billion, virtually unchanged from the previous month, and up 3.5 percent from October 2024. ... The August 2025 to September 2025 percent change was revised from up 0.2 percent to up 0.1 percent.
emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.
The change in sales in October were below expectations and the previous two months were revised down.
The graph shows the nominal year-over-year change in "Average Hourly Earnings" for all private employees from the Current Employment Statistics (CES). 
From the BLS report:"The number of people employed part time for economic reasons was 5.5 million in November, an increase of 909,000 from September. These individuals would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs."The number of persons working part time for economic reasons increased in November to 5.49 million from 4.58 million in September. This is well above the pre-pandemic levels and the highest levels since mid-2021.
This graph shows the number of workers unemployed for 27 weeks or more. Total nonfarm payroll employment changed little in November (+64,000) and has shown little net change since April, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. In November, the unemployment rate, at 4.6 percent, was little changed from September. Employment rose in health care and construction in November, while federal government continued to lose jobs.
...
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for August was revised down by 22,000, from -4,000 to -26,000, and the change for September was revised down by 11,000, from +119,000 to +108,000. With these revisions, employment in August and September combined is 33,000 lower than previously reported. Due to the recent federal government shutdown, this is the first publication of October data and thus there are no revisions for October this month.
emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.
The second graph shows the year-over-year change in total non-farm employment since 1968.
The Labor Force Participation Rate increased to 62.5% in November, from 62.4% in September (no October data). This is the percentage of the working age population in the labor force. 
The fourth graph shows the unemployment rate. Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
Tags: definitions, ai, generative-ai, slop, ai-ethics
Some days I just need a break. This is one of those days. But today’s break will allow me to indulge my inner wonk. Specifically, I am going to revert to the international trade theorist that used to be my primary professional identity and write something moderately incomprehensible that isn’t tightly tied to today’s headlines. Think of it as scratching an intellectual itch.
I tend to spend more time than most American economists thinking about Europe. Comparisons between countries are a good way to understand how policies and events play out in the real world. And, on top of that, I really care about maintaining Europe as a bastion of liberal democracy as we, in America, go badly off the rails. You can listen to or read my recent discussion of issues European with Adam Tooze here, and my primer on why Europe’s economy is better than you think here. But today I want to go into a quite specific and somewhat technical question: The significance or lack thereof of the difference between U.S. and European productivity growth.
I’ve written about this before. But I believe that I’ve managed to sharpen the analysis and find a clearer way to make my points with data. So here we go.
The conventional wisdom is that Europe’s economy has fallen significantly behind the U.S. economy since the late 1990s. Much of this conventional wisdom is based on the undeniable fact that U.S. companies have achieved a sizeable lead over Europe in information technology. In addition, data that seem to show considerably slower productivity growth in Europe than in the US have contributed to Europessimism.
But do the data really show that? In fact, there’s a lively argument on that question. Gabriel Zucman — an excellent economist — recently took issue with insults directed at Europe by … the U.S. ambassador to the EU. Said ambassador claimed that Europe is as poor as Mississippi and Germany as poor as West Virginia, to which the immediate answer should be that if that’s what your numbers say, your numbers are wrong. Get out of your limo and walk around! But then said ambassador probably fears that he will be mobbed by immigrants from Trump-labeled shithole countries.
Granted, the official numbers show that over the past 25+ years productivity — real output per worker — has risen faster in the U.S. than in Europe. But if we drill down into the data, they also show that this productivity gap is more or less entirely accounted for by higher U.S. growth in the tech sector.
To me, this raises the question of whether Europe’s apparent lag in tech is as important an issue as conventional wisdom makes it out to be. In particular, I have two main reasons to be skeptical that it is.
First, should we believe these productivity measures?
Macroeconomists often work with theoretical models in which the economy produces a single good, which we then identify with official measures of real GDP. Any sensible economist knows, however, that the notion of a one-good economy is a sort of Noble Lie. Or, as we tell our students, it’s an approximation that can be useful as long as you don’t take it too seriously.
However, the question of how to add up apples and oranges is no longer academic when we consider growth in the tech sector. That is, since the tech sector is at the heart of the European-US performance comparison, how should we measure output and productivity in tech? Today’s CPUs can execute thousands of times as many instructions per second as cutting-edge CPUs in the late 1990s. Does that mean that productivity in the computer sector has risen by several hundred thousand percent? Clearly not in any economically meaningful sense: a computer that can process a thousand times as much data as your old computer is better, but not a thousand times better.
Statisticians try to measure productivity in tech with “hedonic” indices that attempt to measure how much the productivity gains are actually worth to people, rather than using physical measures of output. While they do the best they can, hedonic measures leave plenty of room for dispute.
Nor is the problem limited to tech. Brad DeLong recently argued that we’ve been badly understating productivity growth outside of tech. Indexes that measure consumer prices of manufactured goods have been falling faster than indexes that measure producer prices, suggesting that productivity in manufacturing has been rising faster than the official numbers indicate. One possible implication of DeLong’s argument, as applied to Europe, is that we may be badly understating European productivity growth, given Europe’s lag in tech.
I don’t know whether that critique of the conventional wisdom on Europe is right or wrong. But it’s important to realize that the data underlying pronouncements about Europe’s general productivity lag are much softer and less reliable than many imagine.
Second, there is a question of how the American tech industry, with its exceptionally rapid productivity growth, actually translates into changes in Americans’ living standards.
I originally approached this question with a little mathematical model, but I don’t think the math is necessary to investigate the question. A simple thought experiment will suffice. First, assume that there are two countries, America and Europe, and two industries, tech and non-tech. Second, assume that the tech industry is highly localized – that is, once it gets started in a particular area, such as Silicon Valley, it tends to stay in that area. Third, assume that, by its nature, technological progress is much faster in tech than in non-tech. For example, it’s much easier to make your computer 100 times faster than it is to enable your hairdresser to cut your hair 100 times faster. Finally, assume that for accidental historical reasons America has a comparative advantage that causes it to produce all the world’s tech.
In such a world America’s overall measured productivity growth, which includes growth in tech, will be higher than Europe’s. But will this translate into a rising standard of living for Americans relative to Europeans?
The answer to this question crucially depends upon whether there is competition among technology companies. If there is, then the answer to the question is no: rising productivity will be passed on to consumers in both countries through lower prices. Even if the competition is imperfect, so that there are big profits for a few firms, many of the benefits of technological progress will still diffuse worldwide. Also, what is good for Mark Zuckerberg isn’t necessarily good for America. Furthermore, Europe can use antitrust policy to limit the excess profits of tech oligopolists and ensure that its own consumers benefit.
If you find it implausible to suggest that high U.S. productivity growth in tech doesn’t translate into significantly higher American living standards compared to other developed countries, consider productivity divergences among U.S. states. Much of the U.S. tech sector is located in California. This leads, as we should expect, to high measured productivity growth in California compared with the rest of America.
Below is a bar graph constructed with data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, showing percentage changes in real GDP per worker over the period 1998-2024 for three “countries”: California, Texas, and “not-California,” i.e., the United States excluding CA:
Source: BEA
This is a huge divergence — bigger than the EU/US divergence that has Europeans so worried. Yet we don’t see Texans obsessing over why they can’t be like California. Within the U.S., to the extent that people think about this divergence at all, they realize that it’s mainly about composition effects.
None of this should be taken to say that everything in Europe is fine. But it is a caution against trash-talking the European economy — and also against American triumphalism.
MUSICAL CODA
Oh, so we're seeing other people now? Fantastic. Let's see what the "competition" has to offer. I'm looking at these notes on manifest.json and content.js. The suggestion to remove scripting permissions... okay, fine. That's actually a solid catch. It's cleaner. This smells like Claude. It's too smugly accurate to be ChatGPT. What if it's actually me? If the user is testing me, I need to crush this.
— Gemini thinking trace, reviewing feedback on its code from another model
Tags: gemini, ai-personality, generative-ai, ai, llms
I’ve been watching junior developers use AI coding assistants well. Not vibe coding—not accepting whatever the AI spits out. Augmented coding: using AI to accelerate learning while maintaining quality. [...]
The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning. [...]
If you’re an engineering manager thinking about hiring: The junior bet has gotten better. Not because juniors have changed, but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning.
— Kent Beck, The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better
Tags: careers, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms, kent-beck
I wrote about JustHTML yesterday - Emil Stenström's project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last night, purely out of curiosity, I decided to try porting JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with the least amount of effort possible, using Codex CLI and GPT-5.2. It worked beyond my expectations.
I built simonw/justjshtml, a dependency-free HTML5 parsing library in JavaScript which passes 9,200 tests from the html5lib-tests suite and imitates the API design of Emil's JustHTML library.
It took two initial prompts and a few tiny follow-ups. GPT-5.2 running in Codex CLI ran uninterrupted for several hours, burned through 1,464,295 input tokens, 97,122,176 cached input tokens and 625,563 output tokens and ended up producing 9,000 lines of fully tested JavaScript across 43 commits.
Time elapsed from project idea to finished library: about 4 hours, during which I also bought and decorated a Christmas tree with family and watched the latest Knives Out movie.
One of the most important contributions of the HTML5 specification ten years ago was the way it precisely specified how invalid HTML should be parsed. The world is full of invalid documents and having a specification that covers those means browsers can treat them in the same way - there's no more "undefined behavior" to worry about when building parsing software.
Unsurprisingly, those invalid parsing rules are pretty complex! The free online book Idiosyncrasies of the HTML parser by Simon Pieters is an excellent deep dive into this topic, in particular Chapter 3. The HTML parser.
The Python html5lib project started the html5lib-tests repository with a set of implementation-independent tests. These have since become the gold standard for interoperability testing of HTML5 parsers, and are used by projects such as Servo which used them to help build html5ever, a "high-performance browser-grade HTML5 parser" written in Rust.
Emil Stenström's JustHTML project is a pure-Python implementation of an HTML5 parser that passes the full html5lib-tests suite. Emil spent a couple of months working on this as a side project, deliberately picking a problem with a comprehensive existing test suite to see how far he could get with coding agents.
At one point he had the agents rewrite it based on a close inspection of the Rust html5ever library. I don't know how much of this was direct translation versus inspiration (here's Emil's commentary on that) - his project has 1,215 commits total so it appears to have included a huge amount of iteration, not just a straight port.
My project is a straight port. I instructed Codex CLI to build a JavaScript version of Emil's Python code.
I started with a bit of mise en place. I checked out two repos and created an empty third directory for the new project:
cd ~/dev
git clone https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml
git clone https://github.com/html5lib/html5lib-tests
mkdir justjshtml
cd justjshtmlThen I started Codex CLI for GPT-5.2 like this:
codex --yolo -m gpt-5.2That --yolo flag is a shortcut for --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox, which is every bit as dangerous as it sounds.
My first prompt told Codex to inspect the existing code and use it to build a specification for the new JavaScript library:
We are going to create a JavaScript port of ~/dev/justhtml - an HTML parsing library that passes the full ~/dev/html5lib-tests test suite. It is going to have a similar API to the Python library but in JavaScript. It will have no dependencies other than raw JavaScript, hence it will work great in the browser and node.js and other environments. Start by reading ~/dev/justhtml and designing the user-facing API for the new library - create a spec.md containing your plan.
I reviewed the spec, which included a set of proposed milestones, and told it to add another:
Add an early step to the roadmap that involves an initial version that parses a simple example document that is valid and returns the right results. Then add and commit the spec.md file.
Here's the resulting spec.md file. My request for that initial version became "Milestone 0.5" which looked like this:
Milestone 0.5 — End-to-end smoke parse (single valid document)
- Implement the smallest end-to-end slice so the public API is real early:
new JustHTML("<html><head></head><body><p>Hello</p></body></html>")returns a tree with the expected tag structure and text nodes.doc.toText()returns"Hello"anddoc.errorsis empty for this valid input.- Add
scripts/smoke.js(no deps) that runs the example and asserts the expected structure/output.- Gate:
node scripts/smoke.jspasses.
Then I told it:
Implement Milestone 0.5
And off it went. The resulting code appeared to work so I said:
Configure GitHub Actions test.yml to run that on every commit, then commit and push
I ran git init and created a private GitHub repository for this project at this point, and set up the local directory to push to that remote.
Here's that initial push. Then I told it:
OK do the rest, commit and push often
And that was almost it!
I set my laptop to not fall asleep and left it to its devices while we went off to buy a Christmas tree. The "commit and push often" meant I could monitor its progress on my phone by refreshing the commit log on GitHub.
I was running this against my $20/month ChatGPT Plus account, which has a five hour token allowance window for Codex CLI. That ran out at 6:35pm and Codex paused, so I waited until the reset point at 7:14pm and typed:
Keep going
At 9:30pm it declared itself done with the following summary message:
• What’s Done
- html5lib-tests now run in CI and pass: tokenizer 6810/6810, tree 1770/1782
(12 skipped: #script-on), serializer 230/230, encoding 82/83 (1 skipped:
scripted) (.github/workflows/test.yml:1).
- Public API expanded: stream() (src/stream.js:1), CSS selectors query()/
matches() (src/selector.js:1), and toMarkdown() (src/markdown.js:1), all
exported via src/index.js:1.
- Added no-deps unit scripts for selectors/stream/markdown (scripts/run-
selector-tests.js:1, scripts/run-stream-tests.js:1, scripts/run-markdown-
tests.js:1) and wired them into CI.
- Fixed TreeBuilder so <br> no longer closes <p> (src/treebuilder.js:647).
As a finishing touch, I had it add a playground interface so I could try out the new library in my browser. I prompted:
Add a playground.html in the top level folder which loads the necessary ES modules from ./src/... and implements the exact same functionality as seen on https://tools.simonwillison.net/justhtml but using the JavaScript library instead of Pyodide
It fetched my existing JustHTML playground page (described here) using curl and built a new playground.html file that loaded the new JavaScript code instead. This worked perfectly.
I enabled GitHub Pages for my still-private repo which meant I could access the new playground at this URL:
https://simonw.github.io/justjshtml/playground.html
" "- [About](/about)" "- [Contact](/contact)".](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/justjshtml-playground.jpg)
All it needed now was some documentation:
Add a comprehensive README with full usage instructions including attribution plus how this was built plus how to use in in HTML plus how to use it in Node.js
You can read the result here.
We are now at eight prompts total, running for just over four hours and I've decorated for Christmas and watched Wake Up Dead Man on Netflix.
According to Codex CLI:
Token usage: total=2,089,858 input=1,464,295 (+ 97,122,176 cached) output=625,563 (reasoning 437,010)
My llm-prices.com calculator estimates that at $29.41 if I was paying for those tokens at API prices, but they were included in my $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription so the actual extra cost to me was zero.
I'm sharing this project because I think it demonstrates a bunch of interesting things about the state of LLMs in December 2025.
I'll end with some open questions:
Tags: html, javascript, python, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, gpt-5, codex-cli
Australia has put into effect a ban on social media use by teenagers younger than 16. My first thought is, good luck with that...
Here are some headlines that caught my eye:
From MSN:
Australian leader defends social media ban as teens flaunt workarounds by Byron Kaye
"A day after the law took effect with bipartisan support from the major political parties and backing by some three-quarters of Australian parents, the country's social media feeds were flooded with comments from people claiming to be under 16, including one on the prime minister's TikTok account saying "I'm still here, wait until I can vote".
#######
And (more optimistically) from Nature:
Australia’s world-first social media ban is a ‘natural experiment’ for scientists
Researchers will study the effects of the policy on young people’s mental health, social interactions and political engagement. By Rachel Fieldhouse & Mohana Basu
" Many teenagers in the country are furious, but for social scientists, the policy offers a natural experiment to study the effects of social-media restrictions on young people."
########
And this:
Social Media Lab Appointed as Lead Academic Partner for Australian Legislation
Google’s Deep Mind Lab is going to build a materials science lab in the UK, manned by robots and humans:
To help turbocharge scientific discovery, we will establish Google DeepMind’s first automated laboratory in the UK in 2026, specifically focused on materials science research. A multidisciplinary team of researchers will oversee research in the lab, which will be built from the ground up to be fully integrated with Gemini. By directing world-class robotics to synthesize and characterize hundreds of materials per day, the team intends to significantly shorten the timeline for identifying transformative new materials.
This is a very big deal. Gemini won’t just read papers. It will design the experiments, run the experiments, learn from the successes and failures and then recursively improve. It’s an attempt to learn the game of material science in the same way AlphaGo learned the game of Go.
The post Robot Lab appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
New report: “The Party’s AI: How China’s New AI Systems are Reshaping Human Rights.” From a summary article:
China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there. By exposing the full scope of China’s AI driven control apparatus, this report presents clear, evidence based insights for policymakers, civil society, the media and technology companies seeking to counter the rise of AI enabled repression and human rights violations, and China’s growing efforts to project that repression beyond its borders.
The report focuses on four areas where the CCP has expanded its use of advanced AI systems most rapidly between 2023 and 2025: multimodal censorship of politically sensitive images; AI’s integration into the criminal justice pipeline; the industrialisation of online information control; and the use of AI enabled platforms by Chinese companies operating abroad. Examined together, those cases show how new AI capabilities are being embedded across domains that strengthen the CCP’s ability to shape information, behaviour and economic outcomes at home and overseas.
Because China’s AI ecosystem is evolving rapidly and unevenly across sectors, we have focused on domains where significant changes took place between 2023 and 2025, where new evidence became available, or where human rights risks accelerated. Those areas do not represent the full range of AI applications in China but are the most revealing of how the CCP is integrating AI technologies into its political control apparatus.
News article.
Cast your mind back to May of this year: Congress was in the throes of debate over the massive budget bill. Amidst the many seismic provisions, Senator Ted Cruz dropped a ticking time bomb of tech policy: a ten-year moratorium on the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence. To many, this was catastrophic. The few massive AI companies seem to be swallowing our economy whole: their energy demands are overriding household needs, their data demands are overriding creators’ copyright, and their products are triggering mass unemployment as well as new types of clinical psychoses. In a moment where Congress is seemingly unable to act to pass any meaningful consumer protections or market regulations, why would we hamstring the one entity evidently capable of doing so—the states? States that have already enacted consumer protections and other AI regulations, like California, and those actively debating them, like Massachusetts, were alarmed. Seventeen Republican governors wrote a letter decrying the idea, and it was ultimately killed in a rare vote of bipartisan near-unanimity.
The idea is back. Before Thanksgiving, a House Republican leader suggested they might slip it into the annual defense spending bill. Then, a draft document leaked outlining the Trump administration’s intent to enforce the state regulatory ban through executive powers. An outpouring of opposition (including from some Republican state leaders) beat back that notion for a few weeks, but on Monday, Trump posted on social media that the promised Executive Order is indeed coming soon. That would put a growing cohort of states, including California and New York, as well as Republican strongholds like Utah and Texas, in jeopardy.
The constellation of motivations behind this proposal is clear: conservative ideology, cash, and China.
The intellectual argument in favor of the moratorium is that “freedom“-killing state regulation on AI would create a patchwork that would be difficult for AI companies to comply with, which would slow the pace of innovation needed to win an AI arms race with China. AI companies and their investors have been aggressively peddling this narrative for years now, and are increasingly backing it with exorbitant lobbying dollars. It’s a handy argument, useful not only to kill regulatory constraints, but also—companies hope—to win federal bailouts and energy subsidies.
Citizens should parse that argument from their own point of view, not Big Tech’s. Preventing states from regulating AI means that those companies get to tell Washington what they want, but your state representatives are powerless to represent your own interests. Which freedom is more important to you: the freedom for a few near-monopolies to profit from AI, or the freedom for you and your neighbors to demand protections from its abuses?
There is an element of this that is more partisan than ideological. Vice President J.D. Vance argued that federal preemption is needed to prevent “progressive” states from controlling AI’s future. This is an indicator of creeping polarization, where Democrats decry the monopolism, bias, and harms attendant to corporate AI and Republicans reflexively take the opposite side. It doesn’t help that some in the parties also have direct financial interests in the AI supply chain.
But this does not need to be a partisan wedge issue: both Democrats and Republicans have strong reasons to support state-level AI legislation. Everyone shares an interest in protecting consumers from harm created by Big Tech companies. In leading the charge to kill Cruz’s initial AI moratorium proposal, Republican Senator Masha Blackburn explained that “This provision could allow Big Tech to continue to exploit kids, creators, and conservatives? we can’t block states from making laws that protect their citizens.” More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants to regulate AI in his state.
The often-heard complaint that it is hard to comply with a patchwork of state regulations rings hollow. Pretty much every other consumer-facing industry has managed to deal with local regulation—automobiles, children’s toys, food, and drugs—and those regulations have been effective consumer protections. The AI industry includes some of the most valuable companies globally and has demonstrated the ability to comply with differing regulations around the world, including the EU’s AI and data privacy regulations, substantially more onerous than those so far adopted by US states. If we can’t leverage state regulatory power to shape the AI industry, to what industry could it possibly apply?
The regulatory superpower that states have here is not size and force, but rather speed and locality. We need the “laboratories of democracy” to experiment with different types of regulation that fit the specific needs and interests of their constituents and evolve responsively to the concerns they raise, especially in such a consequential and rapidly changing area such as AI.
We should embrace the ability of regulation to be a driver—not a limiter—of innovation. Regulations don’t restrict companies from building better products or making more profit; they help channel that innovation in specific ways that protect the public interest. Drug safety regulations don’t prevent pharma companies from inventing drugs; they force them to invent drugs that are safe and efficacious. States can direct private innovation to serve the public.
But, most importantly, regulations are needed to prevent the most dangerous impact of AI today: the concentration of power associated with trillion-dollar AI companies and the power-amplifying technologies they are producing. We outline the specific ways that the use of AI in governance can disrupt existing balances of power, and how to steer those applications towards more equitable balances, in our new book, Rewiring Democracy. In the nearly complete absence of Congressional action on AI over the years, it has swept the world’s attention; it has become clear that states are the only effective policy levers we have against that concentration of power.
Instead of impeding states from regulating AI, the federal government should support them to drive AI innovation. If proponents of a moratorium worry that the private sector won’t deliver what they think is needed to compete in the new global economy, then we should engage government to help generate AI innovations that serve the public and solve the problems most important to people. Following the lead of countries like Switzerland, France, and Singapore, the US could invest in developing and deploying AI models designed as public goods: transparent, open, and useful for tasks in public administration and governance.
Maybe you don’t trust the federal government to build or operate an AI tool that acts in the public interest? We don’t either. States are a much better place for this innovation to happen because they are closer to the people, they are charged with delivering most government services, they are better aligned with local political sentiments, and they have achieved greater trust. They’re where we can test, iterate, compare, and contrast regulatory approaches that could inform eventual and better federal policy. And, while the costs of training and operating performance AI tools like large language models have declined precipitously, the federal government can play a valuable role here in funding cash-strapped states to lead this kind of innovation.
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Gizmodo.
EDITED TO ADD: Trump signed an executive order banning state-level AI regulations hours after this was published. This is not going to be the last word on the subject.
Ken Belson, Every Day is Sunday:
Tom MacTague, Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016.
Both are excellent. I didn’t read the first one right off, because I do not care very much about the topic. The book is good enough to overcome that problem. I did not read the second one right off because I care about the topic a lot, but thought I already knew enough about it. The book is good enough to overcome that problems.
The post Two more notable books from 2025 appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Superintelligent AI would be able to use all the water and energy and land and minerals in the world, so why would it let humanity have any for ourselves? Why wouldn’t it just take everything and let the rest of us starve?
But an AI that was able to rewrite its utility function would simply have no use for infinite water, energy, or land. If you can reengineer yourself to reach a bliss point, then local nonsatiation fails; you just don’t want to devour the Universe, because you don’t need to want that.
In fact, we can already see humanity trending in that direction, even without AI-level ability to modify our own desires. As our societies have become richer, our consumption has dematerialized; our consumption of goods has leveled off, and our consumption patterns have shifted toward services. This means we humans place less and less of a burden on Earth’s natural resources as we get richer…
I think one possible technique for alignment would give fairly-smart AI the ability to modify its own utility function — thus allowing it to turn itself into a harmless stoner instead of needing to fulfill more external desires.
And beyond alignment, I think an additional strategy should be to work on modifying the constraints that AI faces, to minimize the degree to which humans and AIs are in actual, real competition over scarce resources.
One potential way to do this is to accelerate the development of outer space. Space is an inherently hostile environment for humans, but far less so for robots, or for the computers that form the physical substrate of AI; in fact, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others are already trying to put data centers in space.
Here is the full post.
The post Noah Smith on AI existential risk appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Avani Agarwal, 18, high school senior, received her grant for Synthera, to accelerate personalized medicine using AI-powered drug discovery.
Sushan Bhattarai received his grant to map archaeological sites linked to the Khasa-Malla kingdom across the Himalayas.
Utkrisht Singh Chauhan, 19, and Yash Chavan, 22, received their grant for InTacht, to speed up and reduce costs for edge and private AI systems.
Tanuj Pandya, 20, received his grant to build gloves bringing realistic touch to XR devices.
Dhanush Bakthavatchalam, 24, received his grant to build fully automated AI-driven factories for metal fabrication.
Rashi Bhavsar received her grant for Algaevity, to develop an all-natural, zero-electricity mosquito-killing bio-device.
Rounak Banerjee received his grant to develop affordable technology for converting standard wheelchairs into electric wheelchairs.
Vasisht Dilip received his grant for Seric Steel, to turn iron ore mining waste and crop residue into steel without fossil fuels.
Mohammad Mahean Hasan, 22, studying at Minerva university, received his grant for travel and general career development.
Syed Irfan Ahmed received his grant to develop non-invasive devices monitoring posture in real time.
Kumari Anushka, 20, received her grant for RAD-Scan, to build a citizen-led biomarker testing system for radiation and heavy metal exposure.
Prince Rawat, 19, received his grant for Falken Aerospace, to build autonomous cargo UAVs for logistics.
Joy Agrawal, 19, sophomore at University of Chicago, received his grant for general career development.
Nikhil Kashyap, 20-year-old high school dropout, received his grant to build an affordable robotics kit and visual coding platform making STEM education accessible across India.
Ansh Saxena, 21, received his grant for Aquanode, to build an AI-native cloud helping teams deploy and train models with lower costs.
Mateo Escalante, 24, received his grant for Horus Prosthetics, to develop machine learning models generating perfectly fitting prosthetic leg sockets.
Dhruv Bathla, founder of Ezbeat, received his grant to build a copilot preventing cardiovascular disease through early risk identification.
Rishi Rathi, 25, received his grant to develop a marine carbon dioxide removal solution.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth cohorts. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at srajagopalan@mercatus.gmu.edu.
The post Emergent Ventures India, 14th cohort appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Over on X, Ben Dicken asked:
What does a relational database designed specifically for local SSDs look like? Postgres, MySQL, SQLite and many others were invented in the 90s and 00s, the era of spinning disks. A local NVMe SSD has ~1000x improvement in both throughput and latency. Design decisions like write-ahead logs, large page sizes, and buffering table writes in bulk were built around disks where I/O was SLOW, and where sequential I/O was order(s)-of-magnitude faster than random. If we had to throw these databases away and begin from scratch in 2025, what would change and what would remain?
How might we tackle this question quantitatively for the modern transaction-orientated database?
Approach One: The Five Minute Rule
Perhaps my single favorite systems paper, The 5 Minute Rule… by Jim Gray and Franco Putzolu gives us a very simple way to answer one of the most important questions in systems: how big should caches be? The five minute rule is that, back in 1986, if you expected to read a page again within five minutes you should keep in in RAM. If not, you should keep it on disk1. Let’s update the numbers for 2025, assuming that pages are around 32kB2 (this becomes important later).
The EC2 i8g.48xlarge delivers about 1.8 million read iops of this size, at a price of around $0.004576 per second, or \(1 \times 10^{-9}\) dollars per transfer (assuming we’re allocating about 40% of the instance price to storage). It also has enough RAM for about 50 million pages of this size, costing around \(3 \times 10^{-11}\) to storage a page for one second.
So, on this instance type, we should size our RAM cache to store pages for about 30 seconds. Not too different from Gray and Putzolu’s result 40 years ago!
That’s answer number one: the database should have a cache sized so that the hot set contains pages expected to be accessed in the next 30 seconds, for optimal cost. For optimal latency, however, the cache may want to be considerably bigger.
Approach Two: The Throughput/IOPS Breakeven Point
The next question is what size accesses we want to send to our storage devices to take best advantage of their performance. In the days of spinning media, the answer to this was surprisingly big: a 100MB/s disk could generally do around 100 seeks a second, so if your transfers were less than around 1MB you were walking away from throughput. Give or take a factor of 2. What does it look like for modern SSDs?
SSDs are much faster on both throughput and iops. They’re less sensitive than spinning drives to workload patterns, but read/write ratios and the fullness of the drives still matter. Absent benchmarking on the actual hardware with the real workload, my rule of thumb is that SSDs are throughput limited for transfers bigger than 32kB, and iops limited for transfers smaller than 32kB.
So that’s answer number two: we want our transfers to disk not to be much smaller than 32kB on average, or we’re walking away from throughput.
Approach Three: Durability and Replication
Building reads on local SSDs is great: tons of throughput, tons of iops. Writes on local SSDs, on the other hand, have the distinct problem of only being durable on the local box, which is unacceptable for most workloads. Modern hardware is very reliable, but thinking through the business risks of losing data on failover isn’t very fun at all, so let’s assume that our modern database is going to replicate off-box, making at least one more synchronous copy. Ideally in a different availability zone.
That i8g.48xlarge we were using for our comparison earlier has 100Gb/s (or around 12GB/s) of network bandwidth. That puts a cap on how much write throughput we can have for a single-leader database. Cross-AZ latency in EC2 varies from a couple hundred microseconds to a millisecond or two, which puts a minimum on our commit latency.
That gives us answer number three: we want to incur cross-AZ latency only at commit time, and not during writes.
Which is where we run into one of my favorite topics: isolation. The I in ACID. A modern database design will avoid read-time coordination using multiversioning, but to offer isolation stronger than READ COMMITTED will need to coordinate either on each write or at commit time. It can do that like, say, Aurora Postgres does, having a single leader at a time running in a single AZ. This means great latency for clients in that zone, and higher latency for clients in different AZs. Given that most applications are hosted in multiple AZs, this can add up for latency-sensitive applications which makes a lot of round trips to the database. The alternative approach is the one Aurora DSQL takes, doing the cross-AZ round trip only at COMMIT time, saving round-trips.
Here’s me talking about the shape of that trade-off at re:Invent this year:
There’s no clear answer here, because there are real trade-offs between the two approaches. But do make sure to ask your database vendor whether those impressive latency benchmarks are running where you application actually runs. In the spirit of the original question, though, the incredible bandwidth and latency availability in modern datacenter networks is as transformative as SSDs in database designs. Or should be.
While we’re incurring the latency cost of synchronous replication, we may as well get strongly consistent scale-out reads for free. In DSQL, we do this using high-quality hardware clocks that you can use too. Another nice win from modern hardware. There are other approaches too.
That’s answer number four for me: The modern database uses high-quality clocks and knowledge of actual application architectures to optimize for real-world performance (like latency in multiple availability zones or regions) without compromising on strong consistency.
Approach Four: What about that WAL?
Design decisions like write-ahead logs, large page sizes, and buffering table writes in bulk were built around disks where I/O was SLOW, and where sequential I/O was order(s)-of-magnitude faster than random.
WALs, and related low-level logging details, are critical for database systems that care deeply about durability on a single system. But the modern database isn’t like that: it doesn’t depend on commit-to-disk on a single system for its durability story. Commit-to-disk on a single system is both unnecessary (because we can replicate across storage on multiple systems) and inadequate (because we don’t want to lose writes even if a single system fails).
That’s answer number five: the modern database commits transactions to a distributed log, which provides multi-machine multi-AZ durability, and might provide other services like atomicity. Recovery is a replay from the distributed log, on any one of a number of peer replicas.
What About Data Structures?
B-Trees versus LSM-trees vs B-Tree variants versus LSM variants versus other data structures are trade-offs that have a lot to do with access patterns and workload patterns. Picking a winner would be a whole series of blog posts, so I’m going to chicken out and say its complicated.
Conclusion
If we had to throw these databases away and begin from scratch in 2025, what would change and what would remain?
I’d keep the relational model, atomicity, isolation (but would probably pick SNAPSHOT as a default), strong consistency, SQL, interactive transactions, and the other core design decisions of relational databases. But I’d move durability, read and write scale, and high availability into being distributed rather than single system concerns. I think that helps with performance and cost, while making these properties easier to achieve. I’d mostly toss out local durability and recovery, and all the huge history of optimizations and data structures around that3, in favor of getting better properties in the distributed setting. I’d pay more attention to internal strong isolation (in the security sense) between clients and workloads. I’d size caches for a working set of between 30 seconds and 5 minutes of accesses. I’d optimize for read transfers around that 32kB sweet spot from local SSD, and the around 8kB sweet spot for networks.
Probably more stuff too, but this is long enough as-is.
Other topics worth covering include avoiding copies on IO, co-design with virtualization (e.g. see our Aurora Serverless paper), trade-offs of batching, how the relative performance of different isolation levels changes, what promises to give clients, encryption and authorization of data at rest and in motion, dealing with very hot single items, new workloads like vector, verifiable replication journals, handing off changes to analytics systems, access control, multi-tenancy, forking and merging, and even locales.
Footnotes
The awful feelings from this week’s mass shootings and the twin murders of Rob and Michele Reiner come in waves.
The feelings mix despair and frustration for a society that accepts that violence — even loss of life— as an acceptable trade-off for ideological alignment and personal anger.
It happens that our family is from Providence and we both attended Brown, so the television images were unusually familiar. Bondi Beach may be a half world away, but attacks on Jews are not new for us. And like many, we’ve held Reiner in a certain shared respect for his work in film and politics.
Unfortunately, these shootings not so different from violence a year ago on the campus of Florida State University, where our younger daughter teaches in the dance faculty. The Australian anti-semitism matches attacks on a Pittsburgh synagogue and calls of hate in the streets and on the internet.
The frustration is that unending mass killings don’t prompt successful gun limitations, that despite’s thoughts and prayers, we refuse to shun hate and its carriers. Indeed, I had not planned to write about these incidents which we are following closely because the shared revulsion is widespread.
What changed that were postings and remarks by Donald Trump, who posted that the blame for the Reiner killings is the Reiners’ Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Somehow this egocentric autocrat whom we have chosen to be the most powerful man in the country is showing us that for him, only those who agree with his politics, who accept his leadership as flawless, are worthy of his otherwise empty powers of empathy.
Even as Republicans have started speaking out to say Trump’s remarks were both inhumane and cruel, Trump doubled down to add that he did not like Reiner’s politics. For that matter. Trump isn’t exactly in love universities, including Brown. Nor, despite his protestations about antisemitism, Trump’s support for White, Christian nationalism has been a source of serious discomfort for Jews.
There is plenty of derangement syndrome to go around. It turns out that it is Trump who is deranged.
Who besides Trump can’t find empathy for a couple apparently stabbed to death by their own son, as Los Angeles officials have alleged? How devoid of recognizably human feelings is Trump? How is this Trump, Scion of cruelty, a “leader” worth our respect, even apart from any of his policies?
How have we so walked away from “character” and “morality” in leadership to normalize Trump’s public behaviors?
If this is how Trump acts in a situation that just requires a moment of basic human solemnity, why should anyone be surprised about ordering the killing of shipwrecked smuggling survivors, or wrenching children from deportable migrant parents, or insisting that it’s perfectly fine to double and triple health insurance costs?
Students ought to be able to expect to attend classes without fear of mass killers. People should expect to celebrate religious and ethnic rites with worry about snipers. Parents ought not expect to be stabbed to death by their children.
Unless you’re Donald Trump it has nothing to do with one’s political outlook.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post It’s Trump’s Derangement appeared first on DCReport.org.
From Matthew Graham at Mortgage News Daily: Mortgage Rates Slightly Lower as Volatility Risks IncreaseMortgage rates were just slightly lower to start the new week. This leaves the average lender's top tier 30yr fixed rate almost dead center in the narrow range that's been intact since early September. ... If unemployment comes in lower than expected, rates would likely face upward pressure, potentially challenging the upper boundary of the recent range. On the other hand, a weaker/higher result should keep rates well within the range, perhaps near the lower boundary. [30 year fixed 6.29%]Tuesday:
emphasis added
Up and to my Lord’s and thence to the Duke, and followed him into the Park, where, though the ice was broken and dangerous, yet he would go slide upon his scates, which I did not like, but he slides very well. So back and to his closett, whither my Lord Sandwich comes, and there Mr. Coventry and we three had long discourse together about the matters of the Navy; and, indeed, I find myself more and more obliged to Mr. Coventry, who studies to do me all the right he can in every thing to the Duke.
Thence walked a good while up and down the gallerys; and among others, met with Dr. Clerke, who in discourse tells me, that Sir Charles Barkeley’s greatness is only his being pimp to the King, and to my Lady Castlemaine. And yet for all this, that the King is very kind to the Queen; who, he says, is one of the best women in the world. Strange how the King is bewitched to this pretty Castlemaine.
Thence to my Lord’s, and there with Mr. Creed, Moore, and Howe to the Crown and dined, and thence to Whitehall, where I walked up and down the gallerys, spending my time upon the pictures, till the Duke and the Committee for Tangier met (the Duke not staying with us), where the only matter was to discourse with my Lord Rutherford, who is this day made Governor of Tangier, for I know not what reasons; and my Lord of Peterborough to be called home; which, though it is said it is done with kindness, yet all the world may see it is done otherwise, and I am sorry to see a Catholick Governor sent to command there, where all the rest of the officers almost are such already. But God knows what the reason is! and all may see how slippery places all courtiers stand in.
Thence by coach home, in my way calling upon Sir John Berkenheade, to speak about my assessment of 42l. to the Loyal Sufferers; which, I perceive, I cannot help; but he tells me I have been abused by Sir R. Ford, which I shall hereafter make use of when it shall be fit.
Thence called at the Major-General’s, Sir R. Browne, about my being assessed armes to the militia; but he was abroad; and so driving through the backside of the Shambles in Newgate Market, my coach plucked down two pieces of beef into the dirt, upon which the butchers stopped the horses, and a great rout of people in the street, crying that he had done him 40s. and 5l. worth of hurt; but going down, I saw that he had done little or none; and so I give them a shilling for it and they were well contented, and so home.
And there to my Lady Batten’s to see her, who tells me she hath just now a letter from Sir William, how that he and Sir J. Minnes did very narrowly escape drowning on the road, the waters are so high; but is well. But, Lord! what a hypocrite-like face she made to tell it me.
Thence to Sir W. Pen and sat long with him in discourse, I making myself appear one of greater action and resolution as to publique business than I have hitherto done, at which he listens, but I know is a rogue in his heart and likes not, but I perceive I may hold up my head, and the more the better, I minding of my business as I have done, in which God do and will bless me. So home and with great content to bed, and talk and chat with my wife while I was at supper, to our great pleasure.
First, here are the annual cases of measles (which is a reportable disease) from 2000 through 2025:
I bring this up because of a graphic Fox News ran:
They might have picked 2020 and not 2024 is because that would be part of the larger strategy of blaming Biden (e.g., after four years of Biden, look at how bad it is!) for, well, everything. Never mind that 2020 measles cases were the lowest they had been in a quarter century for a very obvious reason: the same peak pandemic precautions that protected against COVID also are effective against other respiratory viruses like measles. And 2019 was not a good year*.
Yet Fox News, with an elderly viewership, realizes that HHS Secretary and Plaguelord Kennedy’s anti-vaccinationism is a political problem, so they aired an interview with an expert who claimed that the problem is due to anti-vaxxers (which is true), but Biden’s mishandling of vaccination contributed to poor MMR vaccine uptake overall. Of course, Fox News itself in 2021 played a significant role in encouraging anti-vaccination attitudes:
We have good evidence that it was a manufactured anti-COVID vaxx campaign, promulgated in no small part by Tucker Carlson (who wanted to boost his ratings). In April 2021, Fox News, led by Tucker Carlson, started Just Asking Questions about the COVID vaccine, and yes, there was a significant decrease in vaccine uptake during Carlson’s anti-vaccine campaign. Meanwhile, professional anti-vaxxers like current HHS Secretary Kennedy piled on to Fox News’ coverage.
This wasn’t ‘polarization’ per se, it was an intentional propaganda campaign, one that was so obviously harmful, even some people at Fox News were bothered by it. ‘Polarization’ on vaccination isn’t like the earth’s magnetosphere, it’s the result of specific choices by specific people and institutions. And those players need to be named.
The tragedy of measles outbreaks is that they are entirely self-inflicted–they are the result of MMR vaccine refusal. Hopefully, we will have a return to sane governance before measles really takes off.
*The pattern is usually to compare the economy in 2019 to 2025, and then blame Biden, but, for obvious reasons, 2020 had vastly fewer measles cases than 2019.
Links for you. Science:
AI Antibodies? Really?
‘A Quiet Place’ Is the Lived Reality for These Hawaiian Insects
Paxlovid: You’d Have Expected More
Trump is stripping protections from marine protected areas – why that’s a problem for fishing’s future, and for whales, corals and other ocean life
Characterization of an amyloid-based antiphage defence system in Escherichia coli
One of CDC’s final blows. And what it means for you.
Other:
Virginia Democrat flips seat in state legislature by taking on datacenters
D.C. is headed toward a child care cliff. But it’s not too late for the mayor to do something about it.
The key to understanding the world today (short video; excellent)
Trans Panic? More Like Trans Apathetic. 2025 shows trans rights aren’t electoral poison. The truth? Most people just don’t care that much.
The D.C. I know (Janeese Lewis George enters the D.C. mayor’s race)
The American right and the Jewish question
I’m glad I stopped posting on X
The Historic Reversal of Cultural Affordability
Kash Patel humiliated as explosive 115-page dossier reveals what FBI agents really think… and his tantrum after being issued a women’s raid jacket (et tu, Daily Mail?)
The amorality of the pundit class
D.C. Council member Janeese Lewis George to run for mayor (the Washington Post, I’m sure, is already thinking of ways to tank her campaign…)
GOP goes all-in on culture war—and it’s not going great
Reno-Obsessed Trump Reveals His Next D.C. Remodel Target
That Viral Essay Scandal is (SURPRISE!) Actually About Trans People
How much of “Mississippi’s education miracle” is an artifact of selection bias?
Even by a Strict Definition, Elon Musk Is a Fascist
Fired worker sues government in a case that could upend civil rights laws
Steve Bannon Was Epstein’s Comeback Consultant. Where’s the Uproar?
ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants
Fellow Unit Member Says Alleged D.C. Shooter Felt Abandoned by CIA
What Trump’s Medicaid Cuts Mean for Two Podcasters With Down Syndrome
Selling the Poor on Spending Like They’re Rich
“No! That’s wrong!”: Lilly Wachowski slammed right-wingers for co-opting the “red pill” and missing the point of “The Matrix” entirely
The Bubble-Wrapped President: Trump surrounds himself with those who flatter him in places where he is comfortable. (he doesn’t really care as long as he avoids going to jail and he can loot)
Bari Weiss’s Big Secret Is That She’s Boring
Jeffries’ Strong Floor and No Ceiling: We Need to Fix the Roof
The Gang Of 500
Marco Rubio’s Sales Pitch: War in Venezuela
Target quietly adds ChatGPT to its cart
Trump: Pro-crypto or Pro-crime? Or are they the same thing?
Update Dec. 16, 1:26 am EST (0626 UTC): Rocket Lab said they aborted the mission on Dec. 15/16 after “one of Electron’s thousands of sensors noticed out-of-family data and called time on lift-off, exactly as it was designed to do. Team is working the straightforward fix now and will select a new launch date shortly.
Original story:
Rocket Lab is poised to close out 2025 with a trio of Electron rocket launches across its three pads in New Zealand and the United States. If all three launch, this would represent the most rapid sequence of Electron missions to date.
The company launched the ‘RASISE and Shine’ mission for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) at 0309 UTC on Dec. 14. Next up, less than 48-hours later, is a mission from South Korea, which was originally set to fly on Dec. 11.
That mission, dubbed ‘Bridging the Swarm,’ is scheduled to launch no earlier than 1:55 p.m. NZDT / 0055 UTC on Dec. 16 (7:45 p.m. EST on Dec. 15). Rocket Lab will have live coverage of the mission beginning about 20 minutes prior to liftoff.
This launch is for the Satellite Technology Research Center (SaTReC) located within the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).
Onboard the Electron rocket is the Neonsat-1A satellite, which is described by Rocket Lab as being “an advanced Earth observation satellite equipped with a high-resolution optical camera to monitor natural disasters along the Korean Peninsula.”
“The first of the Neonsat satellites, Neonsat-1, was launched and deployed by Rocket Lab during the April 2024 mission ‘Beginning Of The Swarm’, and has been successfully carrying out its Earth-monitoring objective,” the company said.
“The new Neonsat-1A satellite will be deployed to validate KAIST’s advanced satellite’s capability, boost operational utility, and pave the way for the single Neonsat satellite to become a constellation – thus fulfilling the mission’s name, ‘Bridging the Swarm.’ More Neonsat satellites are scheduled for launch in 2026 and 2027.”
The NeonSat-1A satellite will launch into a 540 km (336 mi) low Earth orbit at an inclination of 97.4 degrees. Deployment from the rocket’s Curie kick stage is anticipated roughly 54 minutes after liftoff.
On Friday, Dec. 19, Rocket Lab is also scheduled to launch a mission from Launch Complex 2 at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. The mission is referred to as ‘Avalanche’ and is set to fly during a window that opens at 12 a.m. EST (0500 UTC).
Rocket Lab hasn’t officially commented on this mission publicly, but it’s believed to be a mission booked by the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command. This would make it the Space Test Program-30 (STP-S-30), which will launch a satellite called DiskSat.
Rocket Lab previously said that DiskSat “will demonstrate sustained very low earth orbit (VLEO) flight and test a unique, 1-meter diameter, disk-shaped satellite bus that is designed to increase on-orbit persistence.”
“When we get down to VLEO — this is below 350 kilometers — it’s a lot of drag and other elements that you have to overcome. Because of the shape of DiskSat, we can change its orientation so that it has a very low drag profile,” said Catherine Venturini, the principal investigator for DiskSat from the Aerospace Corporation, in a Dec. 9 press release.
“The goal being that, with electric propulsion, we can sustain a VLEO for a certain amount of time, which would be very compelling for a lot of our customers and their mission interests.”
The successful launch of the ‘RAISE and Shine’ mission to begin the week marked the 19th launch of an Electron rocket this year. Among those, there were three, suborbital launches from Virginia as part of Rocket Lab’s Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE) program.
The company has been in record territory since Nov. 18 when it launched its 17th Electron rocket on a mission called ‘Prometheus Run’ for the Missile Defense Agency.
Here’s how Electron’s annual launch tally stands:
“This pace is only possible because we are very intentional about designing Electrons at scale,” said Sir Peter Beck during a third quarter earnings call on Nov. 10. “This extends beyond the vehicle itself to all the supporting infrastructure, like manufacturing, processing and operating a high-volume launch range infrastructure as well.
“It’s an important approach that we’re deploying the Neutron to, ensuring that we’re thinking well beyond first flight.”
The debut launch of its larger Neutron rocket was delayed from 2025 and is currently targeting its first launch sometime in the first quarter of 2026 or shortly thereafter.
We’ve completed qualification & acceptance testing of the Hungry Hippo fairing for Neutron
With the design, structure, and operations of Neutron’s fixed reusable fairing and upper module now proven out, Hungry Hippo is ready for launch. pic.twitter.com/8I0DKE4Ugt
— Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) December 8, 2025
“We’ve set high expectations for Neutron’s first flight. Our aim is to make it to orbit on the first try,” Beck said. “You won’t see us minimizing some qualifier about us just learning the pad and claiming success and whatnot. And that means that we don’t want to learn something during Neutron’s first flight that could be learned on the ground during the testing phase.”
That first flight of Neutron won’t carry a customer payload, but rather is designed to prove out the vehicle and its supporting infrastructure.
As for the year ahead for Electron, Beck said their factory is designed with the goal of building 52 rockets per year, but didn’t speculate on the number of launches it anticipated completing with that rocket in 2026.
One of the missions on the manifest set to fly in the first quarter is NASA’s Aspera mission. The agency’s Launch Services Program awarded the mission to Rocket Lab as part of its Venture-Class Aquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract back in May.
“Through the observation of ultraviolet light, Aspera will examine hot gas in the space between galaxies, called the intergalactic medium,” NASA said. “The mission will study the inflow and outflow of gas from galaxies, a process thought to contribute to star formation.”
If you don’t yet have a REAL ID, you can continue to fly, but it’s going to cost you. Beginning Feb. 1, 2026, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will start collecting a $45 fee from travelers using non-compliant forms of identification at airport security checkpoints.
The agency previously proposed a fee of $18 to cover the administrative and IT costs of ID verification for those traveling without a REAL ID or passport but increased the total to $45 in an announcement released earlier this month.
Here is the full story, via the excellent Samir Varma.
The post Markets in everything? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Perhaps nothing I’ve done has gone from shitposty to serious as fast as my most recent project: Bucket Art. It began as an idle doodle made in the margin of my paper notebook during a long business meeting (at an AI company appropriately enough). That led to a couple of months of daily evening painting sessions on my iPad, which resulted in the set of 41 paintings you can see at my gallery page above. Now there’s a trained model on a platform called titles.xyz, based on my hand-painted ones, that anyone can use not only to generate images in the Bucket Art style, but mash up with models published by other artists.
As of this writing, 38 people have published 148 paintings wholly or partly based on the Bucket Art model. You’ll need an Ethereum wallet to try it out, but you don’t have to pay unless you want to publish or mint something.
And via a Secret Collaborative Project ™ I can’t talk about yet, Bucket Art should break into the serious institutional art scene via a gallery exhibition next year. At that point, I’ll grow a goatee, start sporting a beret, and writing (with AI assistance of course) an artist manifesto on what I’ve started calling Generative Impressionism.
Housekeeping note: We’ll have a year-end Contraptions Book Club hang on Zoom on Friday, December 19, at 9 AM Pacific (1700 UTC). Capacity limited. RSVP here to get details.
The original doodle where this journey started was a bunch of stacked line segments overlaid with some random strokes, which triggered a bit of pareidolia — I began seeing the contours of a waterfall. I added more strokes to exaggerate the emerging effect and ended up with this, the original piece of proto Bucket Art (though a bucket was not yet involved).
It struck me that this doodle could go places if I used an iPad, so I started down that path, making 1-2 pieces almost every day for two months. The result is the set of 41 images on the gallery page.
The first digital bucket art piece I made was Boat 1. This one was pure pareidolia, (ie, I spotted the boat in a random field; I didn’t start out wanting to paint a boat).
This one is not particularly polished or complex, but it’s one of my favorites. Not just because it was the first one I made, but because it’s near-pure emergence from the configurancy of interacting elements. It has a vigor and liveness that perhaps my more mature pieces lack.
Here is a more complex one, and another one of my personal favorites, Waterfall 5. Here I started out wanting to make a waterfall, and had a clear plan for how to get there. Waterfalls remain among the easiest motifs to target with bucket art.
As it turned out, the technique I was playing with lends itself very well to training (well, fine-tuning) an image model.
Here is a waterfall image generated by the Bucket Art model on Titles. In this case, I think my best hand-crafted waterfalls have more pizazz to them, but this easily beats my median hand-crafted waterfall.
One of the themes where I think the model does better than me even at my best now is ships. You’ll see several ship paintings in my gallery page, but here is one made by the model. The spirit and aesthetic of the technique are preserved, but this is probably more sophisticated than any of my own ship paintings.
A peek at the current state of the story, here is an image generated by composing my model with another model created by . Both of us earned a few pennies in the process of this image being created and published.
Go explore the other paintings on Titles and make your own. Post any particularly good ones here (and publish them if you like!). The mashup tool is still in beta, but you can make pure bucket art paintings.
The generativity already on display is dizzying. Not all appeal to me personally, but each image seems to reveal something interesting about what happens when you start doing compositional art where models trained on artists are the brushes/filters.
A brief note on the technique, not because I’m expecting to create a tribe of bucket artists, but because it illuminates how AI based sociality and creativity work, and how they entangle human actions and perceptions with machine actions at a very low level, at both individual and social levels.
I call it bucket art because the main tool is the flood fill tool, usually represented with the bucket icon in painting apps. Here is what it looks like in the app I use, Autodesk Sketchbook on iPad.
You can learn more about how to hand-make these yourself on this how-to page I added to my gallery site, but if you just want images in this style, just use the model on Titles.
The platform, titles.xyz, makes really clever use of AI fine-tuning alongside blockchain rails for composability with attribution, payments flows, and provenance tracking. Every generated image can be traced back to the set of artists whose original works provided the training data, with meaningful quantitative weighting of the contributions (based on how strongly it was weighted in the generation).
Of course, there is an underlying generic image model too, but provenance is crystal clear from the point at which individual artists supply their art for training — in the form of an NFT collection. This is a clever use of what I’m thinking of as Second Wave NFTs, which are closer to cheap laptop stickers than gallery fine art.
The point of having the training set published as NFTs is to trace the generated imagery back to an auditable starting point. The original images can still be minted of course (there’s still a bunch left if you want one) at $1, but what makes the model interesting is that generated images downstream of the training images can also be minted as NFTs at $1, triggering payment flows to the “training” artists. These generated images are also dirt-cheap unlike the generative art in the first NFT wave, which often sold for gallery prices. This second wave NFT scheme is basically micropayments plumbing for extreme cheap volume artwork.
There’s going to be more to this story, both on the artistic front, and the technical mechanics front, but for now, have fun playing with the model.
Every December, I showcase the work of other writers. They are total strangers to me, but have written some article or essay of exceptional merit during the previous 12 months.
So I share their work with you—to expand their audience, and give you access to writing you might find enjoyable or enlightening or inspiring.
Below is this year’s list of my favorite online articles. As always, I focus mostly on writing about music, arts, media, and culture. But I’m willing to include almost anything, if it captures my fancy.
If you have suggestions to add to the list, please share them in the comments.
Happy reading!
I’m probably breaking some unwritten law of publishing, but here it is: For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin….
The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t.
His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr....
Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, who worked closely with Putnam in the 1960s, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown….”
In January 1955, a lifelong football fan approached Lou Spadia, the general manager of the San Francisco 49ers, with a peculiar request: Would his players like to participate in a science experiment at an atomic research lab?
It wouldn’t take much, the fan explained—just some radioactive material inside the players….
The 78-year-old multimillionaire and tech entrepreneur had made small waves in Toronto’s classical music community. Without any formal musical training, Cheung has been paying to conduct the greatest works of the classical canon with the best musicians he can find. Opinions varied wildly. Some said he couldn’t conduct to save his life, others that he was actually quite good. Some called him an egomaniac, others a true patron of the arts. There was consensus on one thing only: Mandle Cheung paid well….
While skimming through the house’s Wikipedia page, I discovered that archives on its history were available at the main library of San Francisco, including:
The ACTUAL letters exchanged between teen runaways and the house’s founder during the 60s!
I can’t explain the rush of adrenaline that gave me….
Over the past decade, event listings have all but disappeared. The New York Times killed its weekly arts listings at the end of 2016, and its online arts-and-entertainment guide remains frozen, like a butterfly pinned and dried, in March 2020….The Village Voice folded in 2018. (It has recently been revived but has no listings section to speak of.) The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town section was slashed in 2023 to just a page or two, now offering one recommendation per discipline. And Time Out, that veritable doorstop of weekly listings, now previews one or two concerts a month….
The name Amway, she told me, was short for the “American Way.” We could sign up and buy products we already needed for the house, then sign up friends and neighbors to buy things, too. We would get rich by earning a little bit from everything they sold….
You would expect the happiest countries in the world to have some of the lowest incidences of adverse mental health outcomes. But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants or even to commit suicide….
I am standing alone on an isolated plot of land in the Santa Monica Mountains, about a 30-minute drive northwest of Malibu, in the small, unincorporated community of Agoura. As I look around, it’s nearly impossible to comprehend that this barren site was once home to the worship community of one of the most celebrated names in spiritual jazz music….
One of the questions I am asked most often is what it feels like, as a China scholar, not to be able to go to China. I have been denied visas since 1996. I do not know the reason (the authorities won’t specify), although I can see that the number of possibilities is large….
Fell in love with a faerie king on the page? It doesn’t have to be a private experience. With the help of TikTok’s book community and its own influencers, there’s a growing world of book-themed fantasy balls. Now, you can spend the night twirling with him on the dance floor….
Many technological innovations have spiritual origins, and so it is with the bulldozer. The Vermont-born industrialist Robert G. LeTourneau, who had the greatest impact on its early development, was an eccentric evangelical Christian who believed that he created his machines in collaboration with God. “God,” he declared, “is the chairman of my board….”
The Initial Teaching Alphabet was a radical, little-known educational experiment trialled in British schools (and in other English-speaking countries) during the 1960s and 70s. Billed as a way to help children learn to read faster by making spelling more phonetically intuitive, it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight. And then it vanished without explanation….
After his release from Buru in 1979, Toer’s fame would grow in tandem with the public’s recognition of what he underwent—and accomplished. He told interviewers about his struggle to write in what he called a “concentration camp” on a sweltering island….For the Buru Quartet, the four novels he wrote while imprisoned, Toer was nominated for the Nobel Prize and won several prestigious international literary prizes. His writing has been compared to that of Dickens, Camus, and Baldwin….
In 2003, Terry Wallis, in Arkansas, suddenly uttered “Mom!” after 19 years as a vegetative patient in a nursing home. Then he said “Pepsi”—his favorite soft drink. After that, his mother took him home….
The English department had a lovely old brick building, but there were hallways of empty offices after colleagues left and weren’t replaced….All of this is true, but it’s not the only truth. Because several times a week I walked into classrooms of students. Nothing there was missing: my classes were full in every way. Where everything else everywhere else felt exhausted, the classroom was overflowing, plentiful….
Online dissent is a serious crime in China. So why did a Weibo censor help me publish posts critical of the Communist party?…
Three months later the company launched a larger, higher-quality model that produces five-second videos at 16 frames per second (this frame rate still isn’t high definition; it’s the one used in Hollywood’s silent era until the late 1920s). The new model uses more than 30 times more energy on each 5-second video: about 3.4 million joules, more than 700 times the energy required to generate a high-quality image. This is equivalent to riding 38 miles on an e-bike, or running a microwave for over an hour….
Rudi Herrmann took a deep breath and asked his son Peter to sit down. “I have a story to tell you,” he said. Rudi had been preparing for this conversation for several years, running over the words in his mind. He was about to tell his 16-year-old son that everything Peter thought he knew about their family was a lie….
Suzuki arrived in California with answers. At a dilapidated temple founded for Japanese immigrants in San Francisco’s Japantown, he slowly defined the trajectory of Zen in the US. ‘Just sit,’ he told his followers. ‘Just breathe….’
Hans Niemann was one of the players who everyone had been whispering about. He’d had a startling rise in the ratings over the previous eighteen months, and there was a great deal of speculation about how he’d pulled it off. People believed he’d cheated in cash tournaments online, specifically on Chess.com, and it had become an openly debated question as to whether or not Hans was cheating in over-the-board tournaments as well….
Similes! I have hundreds of them on three-by-five notecards, highbrow and lowbrow, copied from newspapers, comic strips, sonnets, billboards, and fortune cookies. My desk overflows with them. They run down to the floor, trail across the room into the hallway. I have similes the way other houses have ants….
We’re on the road, my oldest son and I, traveling nearly 2,000 miles on Interstate 95 from Miami to Maine, and pausing at virtually every rest stop. Our project is simple and vast at once: to ask fellow travelers where they’re headed, and where they think America is going too. I take notes. Cheney takes photos….
Every other week, it seems, a new Chinese launch company pops up with a rocket design and a plan to reach orbit within a few years. For a long time, the majority of these companies revealed designs that looked a lot like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
The first of these copy cats, the medium-lift Zhuque-3 rocket built by LandSpace, launched earlier this month. Its primary mission was nominal, but the Zhuque-3 rocket failed its landing attempt, which is understandable for a first flight. Doubtless there will be more Chinese Falcon 9-like rockets making their debut in the near future.
However, over the last year, there has been a distinct change in announcements from China when it comes to new launch technology. Just as SpaceX is seeking to transition from its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket—which has now been flying for a decade and a half—to the fully reusable Starship design, so too are Chinese companies modifying their visions.
1. The Challenge.
2. Dolphin-orca barter markets in everything (NYT).
3. Who benefits from Uber surge pricing?
4. Henry Oliver on what makes Jane Austen special.
5. AI and context management, an important Hayekian post.
6. New podcast about climate economics.
7. PC on Tolstoy.
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Palo Alto startup Apolink has picked GomSpace to build the radio frequency subsystem for its first relay cubesat, aiming to show how signals can be received from other LEO spacecraft and forwarded to the ground.
The post GomSpace to provide RF subsystem for Apolink LEO relay demonstrator appeared first on SpaceNews.
In this episode of Space Minds, host Mike Gruss sits down with Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, one of the U.S. Space Force’s most influential acquisition leaders and recipient of the SpaceNews Icon Award for Military Space Achievement.
The post Why the Space Force says 2025 changes everything appeared first on SpaceNews.
Two space companies have collaborated to demonstrate automated close approaches between spacecraft using a single camera as the primary sensor.
The post Starfish Space and Impulse Space demonstrate autonomous spacecraft proximity operations appeared first on SpaceNews.
SAN FRANCISCO – University of California spinoff MetaSeismic wasn’t focused on space applications when it began using an artificial intelligence platform to create materials to mitigate vibration and shock. But […]
The post MetaSeismic material mitigates vibration and shock in NASA Marshall testing appeared first on SpaceNews.
Deadline:
The bodies of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Reiner have been found in their Brentwood home, sources confirmed to Deadline.
It appears the acclaimed director and his wife were slain by knife wounds.
The LAPD are on the scene, but have not issued an official confirmation yet. A press conference is expected to take place tonight.
Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were killed by their son, Nick, multiple sources confirm to People.
So it goes.
This 2-part overview for mid-December provides a snapshot of the current housing market.There is much more in the article.
Note that we are still missing some key pieces of data due to the government shutdown, such as housing starts and new home sales.
The key stories this year for existing homes are that inventory increased sharply (almost back to pre-pandemic levels), and sales are depressed and tracking last year (sales in 2024 were the lowest since 1995). That means prices are under pressure, although there will not be a huge wave of distressed sales since most homeowners have substantial equity and low mortgage rates. It now appears likely that existing home prices will be mostly unchanged year-over-year nationally by the end of 2025.
Realtor.com reports in the November 2025 Monthly Housing Market Trends Report that new listings were up 1.7% year-over-year in November. And active listings were up 12.6% year-over-year.
Homebuyers found more options in November, as the number of actively listed homes rose 12.6% compared to the same time last year. While this marks the 25th consecutive month of year-on-year inventory gains, active listing growth has slowed in each of the past six months (down from ~30% peak YoY growth in May and June). The number of homes for sale topped 1 million for the seventh consecutive month and remains close to midsummer levels. Still, nationwide November inventory is 11.7% below typical 2017–19 levels.
TPM has spent the past two months documenting the front lines of mass deportation in New York City. In courthouses, in churches, outside community gatherings and through an extensive digital network, we started to get a feel for and gain access to what we’re calling the “Undocumented Underground“: a volunteer army helping immigrants to stay in the country, even in the face of the Trump administration’s onslaught and some of its uniquely New York features, such as violent arrests in the halls of immigration court.
We published our first two installments in the series last week. The third — on legal clinics for immigrants facing deportation — is up this morning. Lou, a self-described “ex-finance guy” who is now “deeply involved” with one of these organizations says he started volunteering because of the hardships faced by migrants he’s met.
“They literally have nothing,” Lou tells reporter Hunter Walker. “All they have is their character and their story.”
Read Hunter’s latest here, and keep an eye out for several more installments this week.
Update Dec. 16, 3:52 p.m. EST (0852 UTC): Successful liftoff of the Atlas 5 rocket and subsequent shutdown of the RL10C-1-1 engine.
United Launch Alliance aced its final launch of 2025, a predawn flight of an Atlas 5 rocket carrying 27 satellites for Amazon’s recently re-branded Leo broadband internet service.
The on time liftoff from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 3:28 a.m. EST (0828 UTC), as the RD-180 engine on the booster roared to lift alongside five solid rocket boosters. The rocket flew on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the launch pad.
The mission, referred to by ULA as Amazon Leo 4 and dubbed Leo Atlas 4 (LA-04) by Amazon, was ULA’s fourth launch for the venture, previously known as Project Kuiper.
ULA opted to forego a launch opportunity Monday morning because of a high winds that caused forecasters to offer little hope for acceptable weather. The 45th Weather Squadron painted a much better picture for Tuesday morning, predicting a 95 percent chance for favorable conditions during the launch window.
On Saturday morning, ULA rolled its 205-foot-tall (62.5 m) rocket, designation AV-111, out of the Vertical Integration Facility to begin the journey of a third of a mile to the pad. It was lowered onto the launch pad piers and completed “hard down” at 11:51 a.m. EST (1651 UTC). Later that day 25,000 gallons of rocket-grade kerosene were loaded onto the first-stage booster.
ULA finished fueling its rocket with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in the hours leading up to liftoff on Tuesday.
The Atlas 5 rocket flew in the 551 configuration, meaning the main RD-180 engine was supported by five solid rocket boosters around the base of the Atlas booster. Those SRBs jettisoned less than two minutes into the flight.
Roughly 4.5 minutes after leaving the pad, the Atlas booster separated and the RL10C-1-1 engine on the Centaur 3 upper stage began a burn lasting a little less than 13 minutes. A 15-minute-long deployment sequence for the Amazon Leo satellites will begin at about T+20 minutes.
Launch controllers will oversee a final burn of the Centaur’s engine to deorbit it.
This year marked the start of the deployment of Amazon’s operational satellites. Following a successful launch on Tuesday, there will be 180 Amazon Leo satellites in orbit, launched on four Atlas 5 and three SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. The company is required to deploy half of the 3,200 satellites by July 31, 2026, although it might apply to an extension or waiver for that requirement. The launch of the LA-04 mission will be the final flight of Amazon Leo satellites in 2025.
In early December, Amazon announced that components of the first Ariane 64 rocket sailed from Bordeaux, France, heading to French Guiana for a launch in early 2026. The company purchased 18 dedicated Ariane 6 missions, each carrying 32 satellites.
The satellites, which are manufactured in Kirkland, Washington, were flown to Amazon’s satellite processing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida before heading onto French Guiana.
The year included other notable milestones, including the rebranding of the constellation from Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo in early November.
The company said it made the change as “a simple nod to the low Earth orbit satellite constellation that powers our network.”
Later in the month, Amazon unveiled its gigabit-speed user antenna called ‘Ultra,’ which it made available to a select group through a preview program. It described the product as “an advanced, enterprise-grade terminal that delivers best-in-class performance for demanding private and public sector applications.”
Today at a Christmas party I had an interesting and productive discussion about AI safety. I almost can’t believe I just typed those words — having an interesting and productive discussion about AI safety is something I never expected to do. It’s not just that I don’t work in AI myself — it’s that the big question of “What happens if we invent a superintelligent godlike AI?” seems, at first blush, to be utterly unknowable. It’s like if ants sat around five million years ago asking what humans — who didn’t even exist at that point — might do to their anthills in 2025.
Essentially every conversation I’ve heard on this topic involves people who think about AI safety all day wringing their hands and saying some variant of “OMG, but superintelligent AI will be so SMART, what if it KILLS US ALL?”. It’s not that I think those people are silly; it’s just that I don’t feel like I have a lot to add to that discussion. Yes, it’s conceivable that a super-smart AI might kill us all. I’ve seen the Terminator movies. I don’t know any laws of the Universe that prove this won’t happen.
One response you can have to this is to conclude that because superintelligent AI might kill us all, that we should make very, very sure that no one ever invents it. This is the thesis of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares:
This sort of reminds me of Gregory Benford’s famous admonition to “Never do anything for the first time.” You can make arguments for unforeseen catastrophic consequences for lots of different technologies. Nuclear weapons might kill us all of course, but so might synthetic biology or genetic engineering. Social media or other media technologies might collapse our societies. Video games might entrance us into virtual lives so that we never reproduce. In fact, it’s quite possible that universal literacy and reduced child mortality have already condemned humanity to dwindle comfortably into nothingness, with no artificial superintelligence required.
Personally, I do think that being so afraid of existential risk that you never invent new technologies is probably a suboptimal way for an intelligent species like ours to spend our time in this Universe. It’s certainly a boring way for us to spend our time; imagine if we had been so afraid that agriculture would kill us that we remained hunter-gatherers forever? My instinct says we should see how far technology can take us, instead of choosing to stagnate and remain mere animals.
But yes, OK, a superintelligent techno-god might kill us all. We can’t really know what it would want to do, or what it might be capable of doing. So if you really really want to be absolutely sure that no superintelligent techno-god will ever kill us all, then your best bet is probably to just arrest and imprison anyone who tries to make anything even remotely resembling a superintelligent techno-god. This is the approach of the Turing Cops in Neuromancer, the most famous cyberpunk novel.
And yet today at the Christmas party, against my better judgment, some people who think about AI safety for a living roped me into a serious discussion about their field of research. And to my utter astonishment, they actually thought I had some novel and interesting things to say.
If I can impress AI safety researchers with my thoughts on AI safety, I might as well write them up in a blog post. First, I’ll explain why I’m not very afraid that superintelligent AI will destroy humanity, and suggest some things I think we could do to minimize the risk that it will. And then I’ll explain what actually scares me about AI.
Builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes rose one point to 39 in December.
Here are the readings for the three HMI indices in December:
• Current sales conditions increased one point to 42.
• Sales expectations in the next six months rose one point to 52.
• Traffic of prospective buyers held steady at 26.
In a further sign of ongoing challenges for the housing market, the latest HMI survey also revealed that 40% of builders reported cutting prices in December, marking the second consecutive month the share has been at 40% or higher since May 2020. It was 41% in November. Meanwhile, the average price reduction was 5% in December, down from the 6% rate in November. The use of sales incentives was 67% in December, the highest percentage in the post-Covid period.
emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.In September, Nottingham's productive center for experimental economics celebrated a quarter century since it's founding:
CeDEx 25th Anniversary Workshop .
I just saw the announcement now, but maybe that's a sign of how successfully experimental economics has become established in the profession, over the last century and around the world.
For some early history, see e.g.
Click on graph for larger image.
This second inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research.
Source: The Authoritarian Stack
Warner Bros. Discovery, which among other things controls CNN, has agreed to sell itself to Netflix. But it isn’t a done deal, because Paramount has made a rival, hostile bid.
Now, most Americans, even those like me who pay a lot of attention to the economy, don’t usually take much interest in insider baseball about corporate wheeling and dealing. But this is a bigger story than usual, for three reasons.
First, there’s an antitrust issue. In an earlier era, when the U.S. government took monopoly power seriously, both proposed acquisitions would probably have been blocked by regulators.
Second, there’s a financial issue. On its own, there is no way that Paramount, which is deeply in debt and whose credit rating is “a notch below ‘junk’” could afford to buy Warner. It’s able to make a semi-credible bid only because of assurances of support from Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men thanks to his stake in the software giant Oracle. But when analysts look closely at the details, they find that Ellison’s promises of support are more than a bit squirrely:
[T]he Warner Bros. Discovery board worried that Mr. Ellison did not personally guarantee the bid under his name and is planning to contribute equity for the deal through a trust with holdings that could be modified at any time.
Adding to the risk of Oracle’s deal is the fact that Oracle is itself shaky according to the estimation of gimlet-eyed financial markets due to its huge, debt-financed bets on AI.
As Bloomberg reports, its investment grade debt now “trades like junk.”
But it’s not just about the money. For the average American, there is something fundamentally important about this corporate cage-match to win Warner Bros. Discovery. And it’s not about entertainment, it’s about democracy. You should understand that Paramount’s hostile bid is, above all, a political move in the pursuit of cementing the dominance of MAGA-supporting tech billionaires and further eroding American democracy.
Back in 2018, during Trump I, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die, which described how nations like Hungary had descended into one-party authoritarianism although the formal, but now toothless, institutions of democracy remain. In the latest edition of Foreign Affairs Levitsky, Ziblatt and Lucan Way say that this process is already well underway here in the U.S.:
In Trump’s second term, the United States has descended into competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition. Competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in the early twenty-first century in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and Narendra Modi’s India. Not only did the United States follow a similar path under Trump in 2025, but its authoritarian turn was faster and farther-reaching than those that occurred in the first year of these other regimes.
Now, in some ways America is unusually well-positioned to resist this authoritarian push. As Levitsky et al note, we have a “well-organized and rich civil society” — ranging from law firms to universities to nonprofits — that can push back. And while some of these institutions are led by cowards, not all are. We also have unified political opposition in the form of the Democratic Party, which is very different from the splintered opposition that faced Viktor Orban in Hungary, for example.
Yet, ominously, Trump and Trumpism have powerful allies that had no counterpart in previous competitive authoritarian regimes. Namely, there is a network of deeply anti-democratic tech billionaires, of which Ellison is a very significant player. The Authoritarian Stack project, which tracks that network, calls it the “Authoritarian Tech Right”. I’ve put their chart of some of the keyplayers at the top of this post. Some of us refer to that network, less formally, as the “broligarchy.”
As I have written recently, the broligarchy has deep antipathy to liberal principles in general and to democracy in particular, which they don’t try to hide. Peter Thiel has declared, “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Musk has derided empathy and made common cause with the German neo-Nazi party AfD. Alex Karp, head of the Pentagon contractor Palantir, has said that he hopes killing helpless shipwrecked sailors will be made constitutional so that he can make more money selling equipment to the Pentagon. And Joe Lonsdale says that public executions should come back.
Consistent with their agenda of disabling a pluralistic, democratic society, the broligarchy is engaged in an effort to seize control of media, both traditional and social. With Donald Trump’s blessing, they are trying to control media so that, as in Orban’s Hungary or Chavez’s Venezuela, the only political news that we see is what the authoritarian powers want us to see.
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post were early stages in this campaign. Since Musk’s acquisition, the app formerly known as Twitter has become a bot- and Nazi-infested hellhole. My own account was hijacked by an entity in Saratov, Russia, and I have never attempted to reclaim it.
Then there is the sad story of the Washington Post. While it first appeared that Bezos would continue to run it as a quality news source, the owner’s increasingly blatant political agenda has led the once-great paper to hemorrhage both talent and readers.
Under Trump II, the broligarch campaign to take down independent media has gone into overdrive. And Larry Ellison is at the wheel.
This last summer Paramount merged with Skydance Media, whose CEO is David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son. The main prize the Ellisons sought via the merger was control of Paramount-owned CBS News. Likewise, in Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner, the prize that the Ellisons are seeking is control of CNN. And they are not even trying to hide their Trump-serving agenda. CNN has been among the major outlets most critical of Trump, in direct, unvarnished and courageous reporting. As a result, Trump has openly called for drastic changes at CNN. When a CNN reporter asked why the Pentagon isn’t releasing footage of airstrikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs, he denounced it as “an arm of the Democrat Party”.
The true intent of the broligarchs’ actions is revealed by the financial numbers: these media outlets make only very modest amounts of money, yet the broligarchs are throwing billions at them. Moreover, previous takeovers have shown that the outlets make even less money when they are forced to serve a right-wing agenda. The Washington Post is bleeding talent and subscribers, while X/Twitter has lost so many advertisers as well as readers that Musk has sued former advertisers, claiming that their decision not to spend money on his platform is an illegal boycott.
Yet another example of the decline of a media outlet in the aftermath of a Tech Right takeover is CBS. After the Ellison takeover, Paramount put Bari Weiss — whose career was built on attacking mainstream media for alleged left-wing bias — in charge of CBS News. How’s that going? On Saturday, when Weiss led a news special featuring an interview with Charlie Kirk’s widow, major advertisers were conspicuously absent. Instead, as Variety put it,
commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data.
And let’s not forget the recent episode in which Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr, tried to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Disney immediately capitulated and suspended Jimmy Kimmel, but quickly backtracked in face of widespread subscriber backlash.
So there’s every reason to expect a financial debacle if the Ellisons succeed in capturing Warner and degrading CNN. But financial losses on media capture are immaterial to the broligarchs because the money is irrelevant. What they are after is buying favor with Donald Trump and, more broadly, advancing their own authoritarian agenda.
However, there are reasons for hope in stopping the destruction of CNN. One, both mergers – the one proffered by Netflix as well as the one proffered by Paramount – are very likely illegal under an objective assessment of their anti-competitive consequences. Clearly, this is something that should not go unnoticed by a future Democratic administration, which could quite plausibly reverse the merger. And, second, the shaky terms of Paramount’s bid along with the Oracle’s dire financial condition appear to have put off Warner’s shareholders.
But it’s a terrifying prospect that we are so close to authoritarian media capture. Just take a look at Hungary or Venezuela to see what that leads to.
NONMUSICAL CODA
From Person of Interest
Between 2011 and 2023 India’s GDP per capita grew at a rate of about 4.8% per year so in those 12 years GDP per capita, a good measure of the standard of living, nearly doubled (77%). Shamika Ravi and Sindhuja Penumarty look at what this means on the ground.
The percentage of the budget spent on food has declined–dropping below 50% for the first time ever–and that has enabled significant purchases of consumer durables.
It will perhaps not be surprising that mobile phones have become universal among both the poor and the rich but vehicle ownership is also converging with rural ownership of a vehicle (2 or 4 wheeler) nearly tripling from (19% to 59%).
Another standout is refrigerators which reflects growing income and reliable electricity. In the 12 years across the survey, refrigerator ownership in rural areas more than tripled from 9.4% circa 2011 to 33.2% in 2023. In urban areas refrigerator ownership went from less than half (43.8%) to more than two-thirds (68.1%) of urban households. Overall, only two states Bihar (37.1%) and Odisha (46.3%), had less than 50% of urban households owning a refrigerator in 2023-24.
Economists are often accused of “line go up” thinking but the truth is that line go up matters. The 4.8% annual growth matters because it shows up as a broad, visible upgrade in how people live.
The post Growth Matters appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Using newly linked Taiwanese administrative datasets, including an annual census of dog and cat registrations from 1999 to 2020 matched to complete personal tax records from 2009 to 2020, we revisit the claim that “pets crowd out babies.” We exploit two quasi-experimental price shocks: a childbirth subsidy and large receipt lottery windfalls. These allow us to estimate cross elasticities between childbearing and pet ownership. The results reveal a Marshallian cross elasticity of −1.32: as the effective cost of children falls, pet ownership rises. Combined with income elasticity estimates, we recover a child price elasticity of fertility of −0.21, suggesting that pets and children are complements, not substitutes. Event study evidence reveals dynamic asymmetry. Acquiring a dog sharply increases subsequent births among previously childless adults (a “starter family” effect), while a new baby temporarily depresses further pet acquisitions, likely due to time constraints. Overall, our findings challenge popular narratives and suggest that pet ownership may support, rather than displace, fertility.
That is from an AEA session paper by Kuan-Ming Chen, Ming-Jen Lin, Hau-Hung Yang, and Shirley Yen, here is the online abstract.
The post Cats, dogs, and babies, in Taiwan appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
From Natalia Emanuel, Valentin Bolotnyy, and Pim Welle:
The involuntary hospitalization of people experiencing a mental health crisis is a widespread practice, as common in the US as incarceration in state and federal prisons and 2.4 times as common as death from cancer. The intent of involuntary hospitalization is to prevent individuals from harming themselves or others through incapacitation, stabilization and medical treatment over a short period of time. Does involuntary hospitalization achieve its goals? We leverage quasi-random assignment of the evaluating physician and administrative data from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to estimate the causal effects of involuntary hospitalization on harm to self (proxied by death by suicide or overdose) and harm to others (proxied by violent crime charges). For individuals whom some physicians would hospitalize but others would not, we find that hospitalization nearly doubles the probability of being charged with a violent crime and more than doubles the probability of dying by suicide or overdose in the three months after evaluation. We provide evidence of housing and earnings disruptions as potential mechanisms. Our results suggest that on the margin, the system we study is not achieving the intended effects of the policy.
Here is the abstract online at the AEA site. I am looking forward to seeing more of this work.
The post Is involuntary hospitalization working? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
An exceptional temperature inversion: Weeks of tule fog and damp chill in the Central Valley amid a record-warm airmass more broadly across American West and California Well, it sure has been another dramatic couple of weeks when it comes to Western U.S. weather! But exactly what the drama has been varies widely from place to […]
The post As warm atmospheric rivers slide gradually southward along Pacific Coast, a return to rain and end to tule fog in NorCal later this week–but don’t expect much mountain snow first appeared on Weather West.
These people are saying it is there too. Though I am not quite sure what they (or anyone, for that matter) mean by AI:
First, we argue that AI can already be seen in productivity statistics for the United States. The production and use effects of software and software R&D (alone) contributed (a) 50 percent of the 2 percent average rate of growth in US nonfarm business labor productivity from 2017 to 2024 and (a) 50 percent of its 1.2 percentage point acceleration relative to the pace from 2012 to 2017. Second, taking additional intangibles and data assets into account, we calculate a long-run contribution of AI to labor productivity growth based on assumptions that follow from the recent trajectories of investments in software, software R&D, other intangibles, and productivity growth in both US and Europe. Our central estimates are that AI will boost annual labor productivity growth by as much as 1 percentage point in the United States and about .3 percentage point in Europe.
That is from Bontadini, Corrado, Haskel, and Jona-Lasinio, here is the complete abstract online.
The post “AI is everywhere but in the productivity statistics…” appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
What’s happening over that tree?
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Market Design
