IRS: First Time Penalty Abatement

Always an adventure calling the IRS 

Me: "Hi, I'm calling about penalty relief for my client. He's disabled and --" 

Agent: "What's the account number?" 

Me: "He lost his job. Couldn't afford to file. He has severe anxiety and --" 

Agent: "I see. The penalty is $847. Next?" 

Me: "His anxiety is documented. He's been struggling for years. He literally couldn't handle opening the mail from you guys." 

Agent: "Understood. The penalty stands." 

Me: "He's on disability income. This is going to hurt him badly." 

Agent: "I hear you. Still $847." 

Me: "He was literally unable to function during this period. His doctor can verify --" 

Agent: "That's unfortunate. The penalty is assessed." 

Me: "So there's nothing we can do? No hardship exception? No compassion?" 

Agent: "Not without something to base it on, sir." 

Me: *long pause* 

Me: "I mean - unless I..." 

Agent: "You could...." 

Me: "Could what?" 

Agent: "Well. You'd have to say it." 

Me: "Say..." 

Agent: "THE words, sir." 

Me: "What words?" 

Agent: "I can't say them for you." 

Me: "It's not even a sure thing though. Could it work?." 

Agent: "Only one way to find out sir." 

Me: *long pause* 

Me: "I'm going to say it." 

Agent: "I'm bracing, sir." 

Me: "First time penalty abatement." 

Agent: "Excellent. Your client is eligible. I'm releasing the penalty now. We're all set." 

Me: "Wait. That's it? Just like that?" 

Agent: "Yes sir. The penalty is gone." 

Me: "It's automatic?" 

Agent: "Exactly." 

Me: "So why all the drama? Why couldn't you just tell me?" 

Agent: "Because most people don't understand how serious a decision it is to say THE words." 

Me: "It's that serious? Why?" 

Agent: "You just used your one shot." 

Me: "What do you mean my one shot?" 

Agent: "First time penalty abatement. You can only invoke it once per client. Ever." 

Me: "...once?" 

Agent: "That's right. Once... And then it resets again in three years." 

Me: "Wait, it resets? So we can do this again in a few years?" 

Agent: "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

by Roger Ledbetter, CPA, X |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Can you believe it? This is really a thing. Have some catastrophic medical bill (or windfall?) and can't or don't want to pay taxes this year? First time penalty abatement. See also: The IRS’s First-Time Penalty Abatement: What It Is And How To Get It (Forbes); and, other types of penalty relief (IRS). Also this.]

Plain Old Interviews

I recently applied for a job at a large publishing house and was pleased to clear the first hurdle. They sent me an email:

We were impressed with your application for our Editorial Assistant role, and would like to invite you to our Hirevue stage. You may have already used this virtual platform before, but it may be useful anyway to hear the info below.

I had to film myself answering three questions, each with a three-minute time limit and two minutes preparation, at a time of my choosing within the next week. They recommended I download the Hirevue software, dress professionally and retain eye contact: ‘Even virtually this is incredibly important!’

Hirevue was founded in Salt Lake City in 2004 by a twenty-year-old undergraduate, Mark Newman. In its infancy, the company sent webcams to candidates for jobs, allowing them to record interviews from anywhere in the world. As it grew, Hirevue was integrated into the hiring process of many large companies and evolved into an AI-driven biometric software platform. In a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, Hirevue was accused of bias, deceptive use of facial recognition technology and a lack of transparency and accountability in its use of AI for ranking candidates’ employability.

On the day of my interview I shaved, closed the window to muffle the roadworks and buttoned up my shirt. The first question appeared on the screen next to my face. I was interviewing myself. The question on problem-solving was straightforward. Though there was nothing to smile about, I smiled hard. Yes, I am that good at working intuitively, but boy, you should see me in a team! The next question had my hands waving about, which though unrehearsed felt expressive in a good way. I glanced away thoughtfully as I embarked on my final answer. Returning to the screen, I saw I had ten seconds to go and I’d not quite finished my anecdote about good timekeeping.

Consigned to the before world is the interviewer’s reminder to ‘ask us questions’, which was disappointing because I did have a couple: was that the interview? Is anyone out there? I ended the recording and went about my day with the carefree relief that usually comes from having cheated death.

I later discovered that Hirevue responded to the official complaints by announcing a plan to drop its facial recognition technology. Companies that use Hirevue for recruitment have the option to use its AI assessment features or to use the software with no algorithm, which is referred to as ‘just plain old interviews’. I don’t know if my potential employer was using AI or not, or whether I was chosen or rejected for a longlist, or indeed whether a human being ever saw my smiling face, the panic in my eyes or my lucky white shirt. In any case, I didn’t get the job.

by Alfred Nunney, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: uncredited via

[ed. See also: Are ChatGPT conversations private? (iLind):]

***

The author described what started as a typical interview, which went well. Then at some point, one of the interviewers said they had been trying a different method to get to know candidates better.

The next question: “Do you use ChatGPT?” He answered that he did have some experience with it, as most people do.

Then came the unexpected.

“That’s when they asked me to take out my phone and open the app.

They wanted me to type this prompt:

“Based on my past conversations, can you analyze my behavioral tendencies?”

When the job candidate declined, the interview abruptly changed.

ICE vs. Everyone

At 9 AM I fall in love with Amy. We’re in my friend’s old Corolla, following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle in our neighborhood. We only know “Amy” through the Signal voice call we’re on together, alongside more than eight hundred others, all trying to coordinate sightings throughout South Minneapolis. Amy drives a silver Subaru and is directly in front of us, expertly tailing a black Wagoneer with two masked agents in front. The Wagoneer skips a red light to try and lose us, but Amy’s fast. She bolts across the intersection, Bullitt-style, and we follow just behind, shouting inside the car, GO AMY! WE LOVE YOU! “I’m gonna fucking marry Amy,” my friend says. “You think it’s chill to propose over this call?”

You can’t walk for ten minutes in my neighborhood without seeing them: boxy SUVs, mostly domestic-made, with tinted windows and out-of-state plates. Two men riding in front, dressed in tactical gear. Following behind is a train of three or four cars, honking. Sometimes there are bikers, too, blowing on neon-colored plastic whistles that local businesses give out for free. Every street corner has patrollers on foot, yelling and filming when a convoy rolls by.

If the ICE vehicles pull over, people flood the street. Crowds materialize seemingly out of nowhere. The honking and whistling amps up, becoming an unignorable wail, and more people stream out of their houses and businesses. When agents leave their cars they’re met with jeers, mostly variations on “Fuck you.” Usually someone starts throwing snowballs. Agents pull out pepper spray guns, threatening protesters who get too close. If there’s enough of a crowd, they use tear gas. Meanwhile they go about their barbaric business: they’ve pulled someone out of their car or home and are shoving them into a vehicle, handcuffed. Over the noise, an observer tries to ask the person being detained for their name and who they want contacted. Sometimes a detainee’s phone, keys, or a bag make it into an observer’s hands. Everyone is filming. The press is taking photos.

Soon the agents are back in their vehicles. They pull risky maneuvers to move through the crowd and speed off. No more than six or seven minutes have elapsed, and another neighbor has been kidnapped. Observers are left to deal with the wreckage: tow an abandoned car, contact family, sometimes collect children. There are lawyers on call, local tow companies offering free services, mutual aid groups to support families after an abduction. Some observers stay behind to do this kind of coordination, and some get back in their cars or on their bikes and speed off again. If enough people get there fast enough, ICE might back off next time. At a minimum, their cruelty can’t go unchallenged.

I’m in my kitchen typing out “do swim goggles protect you from tear gas.” The AI search response that I’ve failed to disable tells me they can “help significantly.” I laugh at this ridiculous tableau. The local ACE Hardware store posted on Facebook that they’ve stocked up on respirators and safety goggles. What I once considered hardcore riot gear is now essential for leaving the house.

I live near the intersection of Chicago Avenue and Lake Street, two major South Minneapolis thoroughfares that mark the northwest corner of the Powderhorn Park neighborhood. My house is a mile north of where George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 and even closer to where Renee Good was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross this month. Since the Department of Homeland Security initiated “Operation Metro Surge” in December, there have been at least half a dozen abductions that I know of on or around my block. A nearby house of recently arrived Ecuadorians used to be home to sixteen adults and six children. Six weeks into the federal invasion, only eight adults remain.

Citywide, hundreds of people are being abducted from their homes and separated from their families. Citizens are racially profiled and asked for papers. Exact numbers on detainees are unreliable, but the number of federal agents is roughly three thousand. These numbers are similar in scale to ICE operations in other cities across the US, including LA and Chicago, but what’s new in Minneapolis are the extreme tactics that federal agents are using to repress organized resistance. The stories circulating online and by word of mouth are harrowing: federal agents surrounding observer cars to trap them, then smashing car windows and dragging observers out; agents spraying mace six inches from someone’s face or spraying mace into intake vents so that the inside of cars are immediately flooded; agents suddenly braking at seventy miles per hour on the freeway and forcing tailing vehicles to swerve; agents throwing observers on the ground, punching observers in the face, agents taking observers on aimless rides around the city while taunting them with racial or sexual epithets; agents holding observers at the federal detention building for hours without access to phone calls or lawyers. (This is merely how ICE terrorizes US citizens.)

What also feels new is the frequent candor with which ICE agents are displaying hateful ideology. Two days after Good was murdered, DHS overtly referenced a Neo-Nazi anthem in a nationwide recruitment post. Agents seem to feel empowered to say new kinds of chilling things out loud. One told an observer: “Stop following us, that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” (He was referring to Good.) A friend of mine was sexually harassed by an ICE agent, who called them “too pretty” to stay locked up while in detention. Another was shoved to the ground and asked, “Do you like the dirt, queer?” Sometimes the behavior is simply bizarre. After an attempted abduction left a couple dozen observers standing on a neighborhood street, one ICE vehicle circled the block, broadcasting a looped audio recording of a woman screaming.

In these moments the whole situation can seem ridiculous. The professional kidnappers step out of their flashy American cars with their special outfits on. They wave their little mace guns at us, but we’re not scared—we have oversized ski goggles! A particularly comic element at play is that we’re in the middle of another winter with wild variations in temperature, meaning that Minneapolis streets are covered in thick sheets of ice. There are some heartwarming videos of agents falling down (“ICE on ice!”) but we slip too, running towards or away from them. It can feel kind of slapstick, until you remember that they will destroy someone’s life today, and that they can kill you.

A black gloved hand reaches out of the Wagoneer window and begins to give a princess wave to us, then the peace sign, then a thumbs up. They’re mocking us. The agents stop their vehicle suddenly but Amy brakes in time. Luckily, so do we. ICE has been using “brake-checks” as pretense for detaining observers. Another observer car pulls up and my city council member steps out. He strides up to the Wagoneer, blowing his whistle. (Absolutely everyone is confronting ICE—I’ve encountered my old boss from the local cafe scuffling with agents, too.) Someone on the street starts filming and the bicyclist we know in the chat as “small fry” shouts at the agents to get out of Minneapolis. We’re honking. The Wagoneer idles for a few minutes and then takes off towards the freeway. We follow until they’re on the exit ramp. It feels good to watch them leave the neighborhood, but I worry about where they’re headed next. We drive towards home and come across another two vehicles with observers tailing behind. Lake Street, a major corridor of immigrant businesses in the neighborhood, has been crawling with ICE vehicles every morning this week.

Powderhorn Park is a middle-class neighborhood known for its May Day parade, replete with larger-than-life puppets and steampunk Mad Max vehicles. Artists and families live here, and young queer people, and many immigrants, most arriving from Ecuador in recent years. The past few summers, the block south of me has become impassable every evening as hundreds of my Spanish-speaking neighbors use the park for massive volleyball tournaments. Food vendors set up tables and families bring lawn chairs to watch the games. Last year, two women sold grilled chicken on the corner closest to me. My neighbor’s lawn became a kind of informal restaurant, where customers would sit at the warping picnic table and eat. I bought their chicken a few times, and it was awesome.

A week into the invasion my neighbor with the picnic table called to ask if I was available to come with one of the two vendors to an immigration appointment. The woman had been contacted by USCIS that morning and was told to come in at 3 o’clock that same afternoon. She was worried she could be detained on the spot and had a newborn with her. Several neighbors gathered to arrange a ride, but in the end she only wanted a lawyer and translator to attend with her. I heard later that at the appointment she announced she wanted to self-deport, trading a planned exit for the fear of being taken at random. Her sister, the other vendor, is still here. The Saturday after Good’s murder, she and I sit with a small group of volunteers gathered to talk about how to improve rideshare coordination over WhatsApp. She tells us in Spanish that migrants can’t use corporate rideshare services because there have been reports of Uber drivers taking people directly to ICE. Of the more than two hundred people in the rideshare text thread, half are citizens offering rides and half are requesting. “I like being in this group because I’m meeting so many neighbors I would not have met otherwise,” someone says at the meeting. “I hope we stay connected after this is all over.”

by Erin West, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Embryo Selection Company Herasight Goes All In On Eugenics

Multiple commercial companies are now offering polygenic embryo selection on a wide range of traits, including genetic predictors of behavior and IQ. I’ve previously written about the methodological unknowns around this technology but I haven’t commented on the ethics. I think having a child is a very personal decision and it’s not my place to tell people how to do it. But the new embryo selection company, Herasight, has started advocating for eugenic societal norms that I find disturbing and worth raising alarm over. Because this is a fraught topic, I’ll start with some basic definitions.

What is eugenics?

Eugenics is an ideology that advocates for conditioning reproductive rights on the perceived genetic quality of the parents. Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, declared that eugenics’ “first object is to check the birth-rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being”. This goal was to be achieved through social stigma and, if necessary, by force. The Eugenics Education Society, for instance, advocated for education, segregation, and — “perhaps” — compulsory sterilization to prevent the “unfit and degenerate” from reproducing:

A core component of defining “the unfit” was heredity. Eugenicists are not just interested in improving people’s phenotypes — a goal that is widely shared by modern society — but the future genotypic distribution. The genetic stock. This is why eugenic policies historically focus on sterilization, including the sterilization of unaffected relatives who harbor genotype but not phenotype. If someone commits a crime, they face time in prison for their actions, but under eugenic reasoning their law-abiding sibling or child is also suspect and should be stigmatized (or forcefully prevented) from passing on deficient genetic material.

A simple two-part test for eugenics is then: (1) Is it concerned with the future genetic stock? (2) Is it advocating for restricted reproduction, either through stigma or force, for those deemed genetically inferior?

Is embryo selection eugenics?

I have publicly resisted applying the “eugenics” label to embryo selection writ large and I continue to do so. Embryo selection is a tool and its use is morally complex. A couple can choose to have embryo screening for a variety of reasons ranging from frivolous (“we want to have a blue eyed baby”) to widely supported (“we carry a recessive mutation that would be fatal in our baby”), none of which have eugenic intent. Embryo selection can even be an anti-eugenic tool, as in the case of high-risk couples who have already decided against having children. If embryo selection technology allows them to lower the risk to a comfortable level and have a child they would otherwise have avoided, then the outcome is literally the opposite of eugenic selection: “unfit” individuals (at least as they see themselves) now have an incentive to produce more offspring than they would have. In practice, IVF remains a physically and emotionally demanding procedure, and my guess is that individual eugenic intentions — the desire to select out unfit embryos with the specific motivation of improving the “genetic stock” of the population — are exceedingly rare.

Is Herasight advocating for eugenics?

While I do not think embryo selection is eugenic in itself, like any reproductive technology, it can be wielded for eugenic purposes. The new embryo selection company Herasight, in my opinion, is advocating for exactly that. To understand why, it is useful to first understand the theories put forth by Herasight’s director of scientific research and communication Jonathan Anomaly (in case you’re wondering, that is a chosen last name). Anomaly is a self-proclaimed eugenicist [Update: Anomaly has clarified that this description was not provided by him and he requested that it be removed]:

Prior to joining Herasight, Anomaly wrote extensively on the ethics of embryo selection, notably in a 2018 article titled “Defending eugenics”. How does Anomaly defend eugenics? First, he reiterates the classic position that eugenics is a resistance to the uncontrolled reproduction of the “unfit” (emphasis mine, throughout):

Darwin argued that social welfare programs for the poor and sick are a natural expression of our sympathy, but also a danger to future populations if they encourage people with serious congenital diseases and heritable traits like low levels of impulse control, intelligence, or empathy to reproduce at higher rates than other people in the population. Darwin feared that in developed nations “the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members”

Anomaly goes on to sympathize with Darwin’s position and that of the classic eugenicists, arguing that “While Darwin’s language is shocking to contemporary readers, we should take him seriously”, later that “there is increasingly good evidence that Darwin was right to worry about demographic trends in developed countries”, and that we should “stop allowing [the Holocaust] to silence any discussion of the merits of eugenic thinking”.

Anomaly then proposes several potential eugenic interventions, one of which is a “parental licensing” scheme that prevents unfit parents from having children:

The typical response is for the state to step in and pay for all of these things, and in extreme cases to remove children from their parents and put them in foster care. But it would be more cost-effective to prevent unwanted pregnancies than treating their consequences, especially if we could achieve this goal by subsidizing the voluntary use of contraception. It may also be more desirable from the standpoint of future people.

The phrase “future people” figures repeatedly in Anomaly’s writing as a euphemism for the more conventional eugenic concept of genetic stock. This connection is made explicit when he explains the most compelling reason for supporting parental licensing:

The most compelling reason (though certainly not a decisive reason) for supporting parental licensing is that traits like impulse control, health, intelligence, and empathy have significant genetic components. What matters is not just that some parents are unwilling or unable to take care of their children; but that in many cases they are passing along an undesirable genetic endowment.

What are we really talking about here? Anomaly has proposed a technocratic rebranding of eugenic sterilization: instead of taking away your reproductive rights clinically, the state will take away your reproductive license and, if you still have children, impose “fines or other costs” (though Anomaly does not make the “other costs” explicit, eugenic sterilization is mentioned as an example in the very next sentence). How would the state decide who should lose their license? Anomaly explains:

For a parental licensing scheme to be fair, we would need to devise criteria that are effective at screening out only parents who impose significant risks of harm on their children or (through their children) on other people.

A fundamental normative principle of our society is that all members are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. What Anomaly envisions instead is a society where the state can seize one of the most intimate of human freedoms — the right to become a parent — based on innate factors. How does the state determine whether a future child imposes significant risk on future people? By inspecting the biological makeup of the parents and identifying “undesirable genetic endowments” that will harm others “through their children”. This is a policy built explicitly on genetic desirability and undesirability, where those deemed genetically unfit are stripped of their rights to have children and/or fined for doing so — aka bog-standard coercive eugenics.

Today, Anomaly is the spokesperson for a company that screens parents for “undesirable genetic endowments” and, for a price, promises to boost their genetic desirability and their value to future people. It is easy to see how Herasight fits directly into the eugenic parental licensing scheme Anomaly proposed. Having an open eugenicist as the spokesperson for an embryo selection company seems, to me, akin to hiring Hannibal Lecter to do PR for a hospital, but perhaps Anomaly has radically changed his views since billing himself as a eugenicist in 2023?

Herasight (with Anomaly as first author) recently published a perspective white-paper on the ethics polygenic selection, from which we can glean their corporate position. The perspective outlines the potential benefits and harms of embryo selection. The very first positive benefit listed? The “benefits to future people”. While this section starts with a focus the welfare of individual children, it ends with the same societal motivations as classical eugenics: the social costs of the unfit on communities and the benefits of the fit to scientific innovation and the public good: [...]

When eugenics goes mainstream

Let’s review: eugenics has as a goal of limiting the birthrate of the “unfit” or “undesirable” for the benefit of the group. Anomaly describes himself as a eugenicist and explicitly echoes this goal through, among other policies, a parental licensing proposal. Anomaly now runs a genetic screening company. The company recently published a perspective paper advocating for the stigmatization of “unfit” parents who do not screen. Anomaly, as spokesperson, reiterates that their goal is indeed eugenics — “Yes, and it’s great!”. With any other person one could argue that they were clueless or trolling; but if anyone knows what eugenics means, it is a person who has spent the past decade defending it.

I have to say I am floored by how strange this all is. My personal take on embryo selection has been decidedly neutral. I think the expected gains are limited by the genetic architecture of the traits being scored and the companies are mostly fudging the numbers to look good. As noted above, I also think a common use of this technology will be to calm the nerves of parents who otherwise would have gone childless. So I have no actual concerns about changes to the genetic make-up of the population or genetic inequality or any of the other utopian/dystopian predictions. But I am concerned that the marketing around the technology revives and normalizes classic eugenic arguments: that society is divided into the genetically fit and the genetically unfit, and the latter need to be stigmatized away from parenthood for the benefit of the former. I am particularly disturbed by the giddiness with which Anomaly and Herasight have repeatedly courted eugenics-related controversy as part of their launch campaign.

Even stranger has been the response, or rather non-response, from the genetics community. Social science geneticists and organizations spent the past decade writing FAQs warning against the use of their methods and data for individual prediction and against genetic essentialism. Many conference presentations and seminars start with a section on the sordid history of eugenics and the sterilization programs in the US and Nazi Germany, vowing not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Now, a company is openly advocating for eugenics (in fact, a company with direct connections to these social science organizations) and these organizations are silent. It is hard not to conclude that the FAQs and warnings were just lip service. And if the experts aren’t raising alarms, why would the public be alarmed?

by Sasha Gusev, The Infinitesimal |  Read more:

Image: Anselm Kiefer, Die Ungeborenen (The Unborn), 2002

[ed. With neophyte Nazis seemingly everywhere these days, CRISPR advances, and technocrats who want to live forever, it's perhaps not surprising that eugenics would be making a comeback. Update: Jonathan Anomaly, director of scientific research and communication for Herasight and whose articles I criticize here, responds in a detailed comment. I recommend reading his response together with this post. Anomaly’s role in the company has also been clarified. See also: Have we leapt into commercial genetic testing without understanding it? (Ars Technica).]

Alcohol Death Rates in Europe

Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (OWID)
via:
[ed. A few surprises.]

"Alcohol death rates in Europe. Apparently very low in cultures where drunkenness is frowned upon and where alcohol is only consumed in company of others and served alongside meals. Spain and Italy for example." via:

Family Deepfakes Help With Grieving

When the lights dimmed at Jaideep Sharma’s wedding reception in the north Indian city of Ajmer, guests expected to see a cheesy montage of the young couple in various attractive locations. Instead, they saw Sharma’s father — dead for more than a year — on the screen, smiling and blessing the newlyweds.

The video was created using artificial intelligence by a local creator Sharma found on Instagram. Using pictures of Sharma’s father, the creator produced a minute-long video in about a week, and charged about 50,000 rupees ($600), Sharma told Rest of World. It was worth it, he said.

“It was like a bombardment of emotions for everyone,” said the 33-year-old garment trader, who felt his father’s absence keenly at his wedding. “He was like a central force in the entire family. So when the video played, everyone was very happy and emotional at the same time.”

Sharma is among a growing number of Indians discovering the power of AI deepfakes to resurrect dead family members, create voice clones of the departed, and add absent guests to family celebrations. AI tools such as OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Nano Banana, and Midjourney have made it easier to create images and videos that can fool even experts. Cashing in are entrepreneurs in small towns and cities, who have learned how to use these tools from YouTube tutorials and online forums.

Like Akhil Vinayak, a film buff, who posts deepfake videos of popular dead actors on Instagram for fun. A client in the south Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram approached him with an unusual request: Could he create a deepfake video of her dead mother-in-law blessing her baby?

“She wanted to surprise her husband,” the 29-year-old told Rest of World. “Her mother-in-law had passed away before the baby was born.”

Vinayak created a video showing the dead woman stepping down from heaven and visiting her son, then holding the baby she hadn’t met. The client was thrilled, and sent Vinayak a recording of the family’s stunned reaction. That video has more than 1 million likes on Instagram.

Such uses — and reactions — stand in sharp contrast to the growing pushback to AI-generated videos and voice clones, which are most commonly used for harassment, extortion, financial scams, political misinformation, and election manipulation.

For Vinayak’s clients, though, the deepfakes are not just practical but also deeply emotional, he said. Vinayak uses open-source models like Stable Diffusion and editing systems such as Adobe Premiere Pro to create them, charging about 18,000 rupees ($200) on average for minute-long videos. 

by Hanan Zaffar and Jyoti Thakur, Rest of World | Read more:
Images: Ishan Tankha for Rest of World/Akhil Vinayak

Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump Tariffs

Why the “Lesser Included Action” Argument for IEEPA Tariffs Fails

The Supreme Court yesterday struck down Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, holding that the statute’s authorization to “regulate… importation” doesn’t include the power to impose tariffs. The majority’s strongest argument is simple: every time Congress actually delegates tariff authority, it uses the word “duty,” caps the rate, sets a time limit, and requires procedural prerequisites. IEEPA has none of these.

The dissent pushes back with an intuitively appealing argument: IEEPA authorizes the President to prohibit imports entirely, so surely it authorizes the lesser action of merely taxing them. If Congress handed over the nuclear option, why would it withhold the conventional weapon? Indeed in his press conference Trump, in his rambling manner, made exactly this argument:

“I am allowed to cut off any and all trade…I can destroy the trade, I can destroy the country, I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country destroying embargo…I can do anything I want to do to them…I’m allowed to destroy the country, but I can’t charge a little fee.”

The argument is superficially appealing but it fails due to a standard result in principal-agent theory.

Congress wants the President to move fast in a real emergency, but it doesn’t want to hand over routine control of trade policy. The right delegation design is therefore a screening device: give the President authority he will exercise only when the situation is truly an emergency.

An import ban works as a screening device precisely because it is very disruptive. A ban creates immediate and substantial harm. It is a “costly signal.” A President who invokes it is credibly saying: this is serious enough that I am willing to absorb a large cost. Tariffs, in contrast, are cheaper–especially to the President. Tariffs raise revenue, which offsets political pain. Tariff incidence is diffuse and easy to misattribute—prices creep, intermediaries take blame, consumers don’t observe the policy lever directly. Most importantly tariffs are adjustable, which makes them a weapon useful for bargaining, exemptions, and targeted favors. Tariffs under executive authority implicitly carry the message–I am the king; give me a gold bar and I will reduce your tariffs. Tariff flexibility is more politically appealing than a ban and thus a less credible signal of an emergency. The “lesser-included” argument gets the logic backwards. The asymmetry is the point.

Not surprisingly, the same structure appears in real emergency services. A fire chief may have the authority to close roads during an emergency but that doesn’t imply that the fire chief has the authority to impose road tolls. Road closure is costly and self-limiting — it disrupts traffic, generates immediate complaints, and the chief has every incentive to lift it as soon as possible. Tolls are cheap, adjustable, and once in place tend to persist; they generate revenue that can fund the agency and create constituencies for their continuation. Nobody thinks granting a fire chief emergency closure authority implicitly grants them taxing authority, even if the latter is a lesser authority. The closure and toll instruments have completely different political economy properties despite operating on the same roads.

The majority reaches the right conclusion by noting that tariffs are a tax over which Congress, not the President, has authority. That is constitutionally correct but the deeper question is why the Framers lodged the taxing power in Congress — and the answer is political economy. Revenue instruments are especially easy for an executive to exploit because they can be targeted. The constitutional rule exists to solve that incentive problem.

by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution | Read more:

Image: uncredited/via

[ed. Making Congress do their job, even when they don't want to...]

How Scarcity Politics Eats Liberalism

American politics is increasingly organized around a simple conviction: There’s only so much to go around. Only so many good jobs, decent homes, and slots in the social hierarchy. If someone else starts doing better, that’s a threat—it means someone else (maybe you) is getting screwed.

The throughline of MAGA politics is this zero-sum worldview.

Whether it is immigrants taking all the good jobs or other nations developing domestic manufacturing at the expense of American industry or even women’s advancement in the workplace coming at the expense of men, the story is the same: When someone else wins, you lose. You are in a fight over scarce resources, and you have to protect your own.

Now, of course, many interactions are zero-sum: If someone passes you before the finish line of a race, their gain comes directly at your expense. But many other interactions and games are or can be positive-sum. For instance, if more kids know how to read, that’s better for everyone; it doesn’t necessarily come at another person’s expense.

But are the most important economic, political, and cultural questions more like the 50-meter dash or childhood literacy?

Zero-sum thinking is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think every extension of opportunity to one group necessarily hurts another, you’ll oppose immigration, trade, new housing, and eventually basic rights for anyone who isn’t already inside the circle. Eventually you get a politics of permanent siege, where every reform is framed as an attack on “heritage” Americans. That doesn’t just leave the country poorer; it makes it almost impossible to sustain a liberal society where people believe rights and prosperity can expand rather than being rationed.

But this isn’t a story about right vs. left. Zero-sum thinking cleaves both parties, and in fact Democrats are more likely than Republicans to hold such views. In a new paper, economists Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva ran a massive survey of 20,400 U.S. residents to investigate the roots of zero-sum thinking.

Their analysis reveals that people who exhibit zero-sum thinking are more likely to support more restrictive immigration policies, yes, but also redistribution and affirmative action. The logic of this is that people who believe that some groups are behind because of other groups are more likely to support policies that rebalance that.

Quick caveat here that you can support redistribution, affirmative action, and restrictive immigration policies without holding zero-sum views. For instance, I support redistribution because I think poverty is bad and society is better off when people have a basic standard of living. I don’t think my gains have come at the expense of a homeless person in California, but I do think I should be taxed to help house them.

The crucial difference is that I see these transfers as part of a bigger positive-sum project making the country richer, safer, and more stable — not as payback in a never-ending war between groups. Zero-sum thinkers see only the war, and they vote and govern accordingly.

Liberalism’s scarcity problem

Liberalism is a bet that rights and prosperity can expand together. Zero-sum politics tells people that bet is insane, that any gain for immigrants, minorities, or newcomers must be stolen from “heritage” Americans. If one group’s gain comes at another group’s loss, then it would be masochistic or, at best, extremely altruistic to fight for the political or economic rights of another group.

Not all scarcities are like rainfall, some are choices. Land-use regulations that choke off housing supply are policy-created scarcities that make it rational to fear “competition,” and they keep zero-sum intuitions alive even in a rich country. Research shows that these regulations have limited regional and economic mobility, slowed economic growth, and reduced worker wages. All ingredients for creating a zero-sum society.

by Jerusalem Demsas, The Argument |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. From the comments (Chris Wasden):]

***

Zero-sum thinking flows from victim identity—the belief that my gain requires your loss, producing Maladaptive responses: immigration restrictions, housing freezes, endless redistribution battles. But as Foster showed, this isn't irrational when growth has genuinely stalled.

The deeper question: Why do wealthy societies manufacture scarcity through zoning, occupational licensing, and educational monopolies? Because victim identity demands control over fixed resources rather than expansion of opportunity.

Classical liberalism bet everything on abundance through creative tension—not just material prosperity, but expanding rights, mobility, and human potential...

The alternative isn't abandoning those in need—it's recognizing that genuine help means expanding opportunity, not managing dependency. Equal access to excellent education. Economic mobility through deregulation. Housing abundance through builder-friendly policies.

...We have chosen scarcity. Liberalism survives when it delivers what those peasant societies never experienced: visible, tangible proof that the pie grows. That's not just policy—it's identity transformation from competitor to architect.

Sigmar Polke - Untitled, 1983
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Migo Kamandag, The Parasol Maker
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The Beast of Bentonville

Who needs the state, when Walmart provides?

In retrospect, the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration was an inopportune time for Walmart to hold the grand opening of its new corporate campus. Conceptualized in 2017 and under construction since 2019, the January 2025 opening of the 350-acre mini-city filled with mixed-use office buildings, food halls, hiking trails, and retail storefronts was meant to make Walmart modern––to keep it in the mix of companies that could attract top corporate and tech talent to Bentonville, Arkansas in an era when it all seemed headed to Silicon Valley.

Glittering office buildings now line Walmart-owned streets with names like Excellence and Integrity. The “Maverick” building sits at the corner of 10th and Customer; the Moon Pie and Ol’ Roy buildings are between Martin Luther King, Jr. Parkway and Respect Drive. To the south of campus is Bud’s Preserve, a large park which houses the headquarters’ utility buildings and a “lake” that supplies water to the campus. Walmart’s new home feels much more urban than the town it’s in, and it’s meant to. It’s a massive corporate footprint in a city that’s become synonymous with the company, populated by Walmart corporate executives, employees, and the executive teams of Walmart’s suppliers and vendors.

Walmart—still the country’s largest private employer, the world’s largest retailer, and the world’s largest company by revenue—was founded in the 1960s in this small corner of Arkansas by Sam Walton and his brother Bud when they opened their first discount store in my hometown, Rogers, immediately south of Bentonville. Starting in one rural locale and rapidly expanding to others across the Midwest and South, Walmart (then Wal-Mart, its hyphen since lost to the 21st century) grew quickly by tapping into consumer markets other chains had written off. By 1984, the New York Times wrote that Walton was “gyrating awkwardly to a hula” on Wall Street in celebration of record profit margins. Walmart’s workers were “happy and productive” and Walton a “wiry bundle of energy, company boosterism, and general enthusiasm,” a “folksy, down-home businessman who just happened to be one of the richest people in the country.” By the 2000s, Walmart had expanded successfully into grocery, wholesaling, and international markets, cornering not just rural but suburban and even some urban retail markets, dominating supply chains, able to bend manufacturers and even governments to its will. “Is Wal-Mart Too Powerful?” Businessweek asked in a 2003 cover story. “In business, there is big and there is Wal-Mart.”

The Beast of Bentonville, as the press took to calling it, was foundational in ushering in a new era of the globalized economy. It kept prices murderously and profitably low by strong-arming its suppliers into ever-cheaper modes of production. It capitalized on and pushed forward the liberalization of global trade, sourcing goods ever more cheaply from suppliers reliant on exploited labor in China, Mexico, India, and elsewhere around the globe. As retail and service-sector corporations captured the domestic economy, Walmart’s claim to market dominance helped mark the end of the American industrial economy. And its old corporate headquarters were a relic of the cost-cutting era it helped usher into being. The previous iteration of Walmart’s home office was stark, windowless, and fluorescently lit. A former Procter & Gamble executive recalled his Walmart counterpart by comparing the headquarters to a bus station. At the time, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote, the company’s executives were proud of their “ostentatiously shabby surroundings,” which gave credibility to its slogan of “Always Low Prices—Always”: everything in service of the customer’s wallet, even if it meant employees working in the dark, dank cave of the unassuming brick building.

Walmart has always been more of a tech and data company than it gets credit for, but with the onslaught of online retail, it’s had to pivot more aggressively, in search both of higher-income customers and of alternatives to Amazon Prime. Also, it was looking for labor. Walmart today employs twenty thousand tech workers—about a third of its corporate workforce. Its ideal white-collar worker is no longer the homegrown son of the rural South who had to choose between the farm, the factory, and the office. Now, it seeks out employees whose other options may be tech companies in the San Franciscos and New Yorks of the world—urban metropoles that outstrip Bentonville in vibes, opportunity, and work environment. As the political and cultural zeitgeist has bent toward firms like Amazon and the tech giants of Silicon Valley, Walmart’s spot on top of the Fortune 500 began to feel unstable. (It’s soon expected to lose its status as the world’s largest retailer to Amazon.) Something new seemed in order as the retailer moved increasingly into ecommerce and the “omnichannel” space. Tech company or retail giant? Walmart is trying to be both.

It’s only a testament to Walmart’s business savvy that the new corporate campus pays homage to the brand of decadent, neoliberal, tech sector-infused capitalism that seemed to have supplanted the era of cheap. Its physical transformation was self-consciously in the model of Silicon Valley and the Pacific Northwest’s corporate campuses: Walmart hired the SWA Group (which counts among its other projects the campuses of Apple, PayPal, Google, and Stanford) to do landscape design, and the architecture firm Gensler (Meta, Airbnb, Salesforce, etc.) as the design architect. The Palo Alto wish-casting is evident.

Like its tech-world models, the new campus is a small city replete with childcare (“Little Squiggles Children Enrichment Center” is now the largest childcare provider in the northwest Arkansas region), a health and fitness center (“Walton Family Whole Health and Fitness,” a 360,000 square foot facility featuring gyms, pickleball courts, meditation spaces, and cryotherapy), and a food hall (“8th and Plate”). It contains seven miles of walking and biking trails, three hundred EV charging stations, and its own rentable bike fleet. Storefronts throughout the campus hold local outdoor retailers, breweries, and barbecue joints. But for all the expense, ambition, and decadence, the Walmart play-city feels like a copy of a Silicon Valley gone by, the company playing catch-up to a tech economy that no longer exists. In his recent book The Technological Republic, Palantir founder Alex Karp writes (notably, in the past tense):

The Sunnyvales, Palo Altos, and Mountain Views of the world were company towns and city-states, walled off from society and offering something that the national project could no longer provide. Technology companies formed internally coherent communities whose corporate campuses attempted to provide for all the wants and needs of daily life.

It’s a company city within a company town. Walmart needed something like this bizarro-world place, straight out of HBO’s Silicon Valley title sequence, to solidify its own future in a shifting economic terrain. But its weirdness reveals the anachronisms of the retail giant’s political and economic legacy, and of its future—not quite conservative enough, not quite liberal enough, not quite a tech company, not just a brick-and-mortar retailer, either. [...]

These are the kinds of things you build when you need to lure people away from cities, which has been the motivation for northwest Arkansas’s (or “Oz,” as recent efforts have tried to rebrand it) economic development machine that also includes other local corporate powerhouses like meat giant Tyson Foods and logistics behemoth J. B. Hunt Transportation. It’s part of Walmart’s transparent effort to make the region a desirable place to live not just for its own workforce, but for those of its suppliers too, which it unofficially requires to maintain an office and executive team within the region. As parts of the tech world—SpaceX, Hewlett Packard, Oracle—make lots of noise about moving their headquarters off the coasts, the region’s boosters are making an explicit play for tech workers, and maybe companies too, to move here. In recent years the Northwest Arkansas Council has placed billboards in places like Austin and Seattle that read, “Go South, young tech workers” and “It’s like Austin, but affordable.”

The Walton dynasty presides in the background of Arkansas politics, but the family has largely stayed out of the culture wars, at least in public. The Walton Family Foundation has put millions of dollars into funding climate projects and environmental journalism, with recent grants to NPR and PBS. After much pressure, in 2021, the Foundation issued a statement opposing the Arkansas legislature’s attacks on trans rights; later that year, it established a special “Arkansas LGBTQ+ Advancement Fund” to “improve the quality of life for LGBTQ+ Arkansans.” But the fund made just one round of grants, in 2022, and its promotional webpage was pulled down last year. More recently, the foundation seems to be tacking to the center: It commissioned a cross-partisan study of nonprofits (“The problems our nation faces are too big for any one sector or political party to solve on its own. They require people with a range of beliefs and experiences to come together to find answers”) and is framing its climate work in similar terms (“Support for Clean, Safe, and Secure Water Supplies Transcends Partisan Politics”).

In order to keep up with the Walton’s benevolent stewardship of Bentonville, and its presumed-to-be-liberal workforce, the Walmart of the 2010s had combined its historic commitment to anti-unionism and conservative economics with a more liberal outlook on identity and inclusion, like its corporate peers. Recently, however, spurred on by Trump’s second term, Walmart’s DEI initiatives have hit the chopping block: Pride merchandise has been pulled, and inclusion and diversity have been renamed “belonging,” even as the company tries desperately to convince its employees to make the move to Arkansas.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s approach to international trade has taken straight aim at these economic interests through its protectionism—or, at least, heavy-handed and chaotic attempts at it. [...]

As Trump’s trade war dawdles along, the cracks between business conservatism and Trump conservatism have been showing in earnest. CEO Doug McMillon, who will retire at the end of this month, sat down with Trump at Mar-a-Lago before his inauguration and reportedly told him, “We’re here long term. We’re a large employer. We serve a lot of people. We want the country to thrive. How can we be helpful?” Just a few months later, he was at an Oval Office meeting in April where, alongside the heads of Home Depot and Target, he tried to impress upon the chief executive that broad-based tariffs would mean an uptick in prices. A Walmart spokesperson called the meeting “productive.” But nothing changed; a few weeks after this meeting, at the company’s first-quarter earnings call, Walmart told investors that its prices would soon start to rise. “The magnitude and speed at which these prices are coming to us is somewhat unprecedented in history,” its chief financial officer told the Wall Street Journal. Trump reacted quickly (and characteristically) on Truth Social:

“Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”

In the months since then, Walmart’s prices have been rising, some slightly and some by more than 50 percent; still, the company claims that the trade war has not affected prices. “Costs increase each week,” McMillon said, but also that the company has been “keeping our prices as low as we can for as long as we can,” crediting a recent increase in high-income shoppers for keeping sales high. It’s no stretch to imagine overseas suppliers are taking the brunt of this trade showmanship.

American companies eating tariffs imposed by a Republican president, a conservative chain up against a conservative president; this can’t have been the future Sam Walton envisioned, nor can it have been what his offspring or his corporate successors thought was coming when they dumped millions of dollars into their new corporate playground.

The world the Walmart campus was built to accommodate is slipping away. As the new HQ fills with workers pedaling to any number of its fully windowed buildings, soaking up the sun in its outdoor spaces, playing pickleball in its associate-use courts, these same workers are no longer a fought-over commodity. To an industry enhanced with layoffs and firings, they’re a dime a dozen. Even if the AI bubble collapses in spectacular fashion, it will have transformed the tech and e-commerce sector. Palantir, Meta, Google, Amazon are falling in line with the Trump circus, having determined that their owners’ interests (and government contracts) are better served by playing nice with the administration than by pissing it off. In a way, Walmart seems adrift, a Spark flag waving in the wind, once at the forefront of changes in global capitalism and now something of a dinosaur figuring out how to respond, economically and politically, to them.

by Olivia Paschal, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Kung Fu Robots Steal the Show

 

Cyber kung fu show at Chinese New Year Gala

Dozens of G1 robots from Unitree Robotics delivered the world's first fully autonomous humanoid robot kung fu performance, featuring rapid position changes. The show pushed the limits of robotic movement and set multiple global records.

[ed. Not your mom's old roomba anymore. Robotics + AI the next frontier.]

Jeffery Czum
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[ed. Don't know where this is, but reminds me of Nome.]

Proposed AI Policy Framework for Congress

Sam Altman (Open AI): "The world may need something like an IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] for international coordination on AI". (source)

Alex Bores proposes his AI policy framework for Congress.

1. Protect kids and students: Parental visibility. Age verification for risky AI services. Require scanning for self-harm. Teach kids about AI. Clear guidelines for AI use in schools, explore best uses. Ban AI CSAM.

2. Take back control of your data. Privacy laws, data ownership, no sale of personal data, disclosure of AI interactions and data collections and training data.

3. Stop deepfakes. Metadata standards, origin tracing, penalties for distribution.

4. Make datacenters work for people. No rate hikes, enforce agreements, expedite data centers using green energy, repair the grid with private funds, monitor water use, close property tax loopholes.

5. Protect and support workers. Require large companies to report AI-related workforce changes. Tax incentives for upskilling, invest in retraining, ban AI as sole decider for hiring and firing, transitional period where AI needs same licensing as a human, tax large companies for an ‘AI dividend.’

6. Nationalize the Raise Act for Frontier AI. Require independent safety testing, mandate cybersecurity incident reporting, restrict government use of foreign AI tools, create accountability mechanisms for AI systems that harm, engage in diplomacy on AI issues.

7. Build Government Capacity to Oversee AI. Fund CAISI, expand technical expertise, require developers to disclose key facts to regulators, develop contingency plans for catastrophic risks.

8. Keep America Competitive. Federal funding for academic research, support for private development of safe, beneficial applications, ‘reasonable regulation that protects people without strangling innovation,’ work with allies to establish safety standards, strategic export controls, keep the door open for international agreements.

[ed. Given the pace of AI development, the federal government needs to get its act together soon or anything they do will be irrelevant and way too late. Bores is a NY State Assemblyman running for Congress. A former data scientist and project lead for Palantir Technologies - one of the leading defense and security companies in the world - he joined in 2014 and left in 2019 when Palantir renewed its contract with ICE. Wikipedia entry here. His official Framework policy can be found here (pdf). The proposed goals, which seem well thought out and easily understandable, should, with minor tweaks, gain bi-partisian support (in a saner world anyway...who knows now). Better than 50 states proposing 50 different versions. Dean Ball (former White House technology advisor) has proposed something similar called the AI Action Plan (pdf). Both are thoughtful efforts that provide ample talking points for querying your congressperson about what they're doing at this critical inflection point (if anything).] [See also: The AI-Panic Cycle—And What’s Actually Different Now (Atlantic).]

Karen Ducey, Reflections in a bus window

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Eric Escanes

Bored of Peace

In Washington, D.C., today, President Donald J. Trump held the first meeting of his so-called Board of Peace at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), newly renamed the “Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace,” a change being legally challenged. Last year, officials from the Trump administration seized the USIP building, which housed an independent entity created by Congress in 1984, and fired nearly all the employees.

Trump has made it clear he wants his new board to replace the United Nations. Twenty-seven countries have said they will participate, but so far none appear to have tossed in the $1 billion that would give them permanent status. The countries participating include Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. Trump extended invitations to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, both of whom have been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

Trump withdrew an invitation to the board from Canada after Prime Minister Mark Carney denounced Trump’s foreign policy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, so Canada is out. Rejecting Trump’s invitation are Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and the Vatican. They cite their continuing support for the United Nations, concerns about Russian influence in Trump’s board, and concerns about the board’s organization, which gives Trump final say in all decisions, including how to spend the board’s money.

Today, Trump announced that the U.S. will put $10 billion into the Board of Peace, although since Congress is the only body that can legally appropriate money in our system, it’s unclear how he intends to do this.

The event at the board appeared to be the Trump Show. Representatives from the countries who had accepted Trump’s invitation stood awkwardly on stage waiting for him while his favorite songs blared. Once he arrived, he rambled for an hour and then appeared to fall asleep at points in the meeting as dignitaries spoke. [...]

Today Trump’s Commission of Fine Arts swore in two new members, including Chamberlain Harris, Trump’s 26-year-old executive assistant, who has no experience in the arts. Then the commission, now entirely made up of Trump appointees, approved Trump’s plans for a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to stand, although the chair did note that public comments about the project were over 99% negative.

According to CNN’s Sunlen Serfaty, Harris said the White House is the “greatest house in [the] world. We want this to be the greatest ballroom in the world.” Trump says the ballroom is being funded by private donations through the Trust for the National Mall, which is not required to disclose its donors.

Today workers hung a banner with a giant portrait of Trump on the Department of Justice building.

On Air Force One as Trump traveled to Georgia this afternoon for a speech on the economy, Peter Doocy of the Fox News Channel asked Trump about the arrest of Mountbatten-Windsor. “Do you think people in this country at some point, associates of Jeffrey Epstein, will wind up in handcuffs, too?”

Trump answered: “Well, you know I’m the expert in a way, because I’ve been totally exonerated. It’s very nice, I can actually speak about it very nicely. I think it’s a shame. I think it’s very sad. I think it’s so bad for the royal family. It’s very, very sad to me. It’s a very sad thing. When I see that, it’s a very sad thing. To see it, and to see what’s going on with his brother, who’s obviously coming to our country very soon and he’s a fantastic man. King. So I think it’s a very sad thing. It’s really interesting ‘cause nobody used to speak about Epstein when he was alive, but now they speak. But I’m the one that can talk about it because I’ve been totally exonerated. I did nothing. In fact, the opposite—he was against me. He was fighting me in the election, which I just found out from the last three million pages of documents.”

In fact, Trump has not been exonerated.

When he got to Georgia, Trump’s economic message was that “I’ve won affordability.” More to the point was his focus on his Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and that Congress must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act to secure elections. In fact, in solving a nonexistent problem, the law dramatically restricts voting. Republicans in the House have already passed it. If the Senate passes it, Trump told an audience in Rome, Georgia, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American |  Read more:

Image: Getty/via

[We should just get it over with and skip all the preliminaries - the Donald J. Trump States of America. I'm sure many Republicans would be thrilled. Isn't it ominous that during two civilizational threats, Covid and AI, this is the guy in charge? We get what (at least half of us) deserve, I guess.]

February 18, 2026: J.B. Pritzker State of the State Address

Today Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker delivered the State of the State address. The underlying purpose of the address is to explain the state budget, but Pritzker, a Democrat, used the occasion to talk far more broadly about the state of Illinois and the nation.

Pritzker anchored his speech by reaching back to the days of John Peter Altgeld, a German-born American who helped to lead the Progressive movement and served as governor of Illinois from 1893 to 1897. Altgeld oversaw passage of some of the strongest laws in the country for workplace safety and protection of child workers, invested heavily in education, and appointed women to important positions in state government despite the fact that women could not yet vote.

Pritzker noted that in his State of the State speech in January 1895, Altgeld talked about “the need to ensure that science would govern the practice of medicine in Illinois; the high cost of insurance; the condition of Illinois prisons; the funding of state universities; a needed revision of election laws; the concentration of wealth in large businesses.” Altgeld expressed pride for appointing women to office and his statement that “[j]ustice requires that the same rewards and honors that encourage and incite men should be equally in reach of women in every field and activity.”

Pritzker said he brought up Altgeld’s defense of equal rights “to highlight one enduring human truth—injustice can become a genetic condition we bequeath on future generations if we fail to face it forthrightly.”

Pritzker then turned to the year that has passed since President Donald J. Trump took office. “To be perfectly candid,” Pritzker said, “as Illinois is one of the states whose taxpayers send more dollars to the federal government than we receive back in services, I was hoping that his threats to gut programs that support working families [were] the kind of unrealistic hyperbole that fuels a presidential campaign but then is abandoned when cooler heads prevail.” But, he said, “Unfortunately, there are no cooler heads at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.”

The Trump administration has cost Illinois $8.4 billion, Pritzker said, “illegally confiscating money that has already been promised and appropriated by the Congress to the people of Illinois.” Pritzker was clear that this money is not handouts but “dollars that real Illinoisans paid in federal taxes and that have been constitutionally approved by our elected Democratic and Republican representatives in Washington.”

Unlike the federal government, states must balance their budgets every year. Trump’s billions in illegally withheld funds inflict a cost on the state’s residents, while Illinois has been “forced to spend enormous time and taxpayer money going to court and fighting to get what is rightfully ours.” Pritzker said: “It is impossible to tally the hours, days, and weeks our state government has spent chasing news of Presidential executive orders, letters, and edicts that read like proclamations from the Lollipop Guild.” [...]

He noted the growth of Illinois’s economy and economic stability over the past eight years even as the state had balanced its budget every year and made historic investments in education, child welfare, disability services, and job creation in the private sector. In the past year, Illinois’s gross domestic product was more than $1.2 trillion, up from $881 billion when Pritzker took office.

Looking forward, Pritzker outlined plans to address the top three economic issues on the mind of most Americans: the cost of housing, electricity, and healthcare. He promised to reduce the cost of housing by cutting local regulations and providing more options for financing. He promised to address the skyrocketing cost of electricity first by pausing the authorization of new data center tax credits and then by investing in renewable energy and nuclear power. Finally, he announced that, as of this week, the state had eliminated $1 billion in medical debt for more than 500,000 people in the state by purchasing and erasing it for pennies on the dollar...

“I’m committed to doing everything government can to rein in the worst of the price gouging and profiteering we are seeing,” Pritzker said. “But I implore the titans of industry who regularly ask government to make their lives easier—what are you doing to make your employers’ and your customers’ lives easier?”

Then Pritzker turned to the crisis federal agents created on the streets of Chicago. “A year ago, I stood before you and asked a provocative question: After we have discriminated against, disparaged, and deported all our immigrant neighbors—and the problems we started with still remained—what comes next?” Pritzker said. He recalled that when he asked that question, some people walked out.

“But a year later, we have an answer—don’t we?” he said. “Masked, unaccountable federal agents—with little training—occupied our streets, brutalized our people, tear-gassed kids and cops, kidnapped parents in front of their children, detained and arrested and at times attempted to deport U.S. citizens, and killed innocent Americans in the streets.”

Pritzker identified Trump and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as the architects of that plan to “drip authoritarianism…into our veins.”

But, he noted, people in Illinois did not accept that authoritarianism.

Pritzker reminded the audience that President Grover Cleveland had similarly tried to “subdue the Illinois population with hired thugs” during the 1894 Pullman strike after the Pullman Company, which made railroad cars, cut workers’ wages by about 25%. When workers struck, Cleveland deputized U.S. Marshals to end the strike. They fired into crowds of bystanders and, according to a Chicago paper, “seemed to be hunting trouble.” Twenty-five people died and more were wounded before the strike ended.

Altgeld had opposed the arrival of federal troops, and his fury at their intrusion still smoldered when he gave his State of the State speech almost six months later. “If the President can, at his pleasure, send troops into any city, town, or hamlet…whenever and wherever he pleases, under pretense of enforcing some law,” Altgeld wrote, “his judgment, which means his pleasure being the sole criterion—then there can be no difference whatever in this respect between the powers of the President and those of...the Czar of Russia.”

Pritzker joked that he wished he “could spend just one year of my governorship presiding over precedented times. I yearn for normal problems,” he said. But these are not normal times.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about love—about loving people and loving your country and the power involved in both,” the governor said. “I know, right now, there are a lot of people out there who love their country and feel like their country is not loving them back. I know that.” But he told those people that “your country is loving you back—just not in the way you are used to hearing.”

“It’s not speaking in anthems or flags or ostentatious displays of patriotism. It will never come from the people who say the only way to love America is to hate Americans. Love is found in every act of courage—large and small—taken to preserve the country we once knew. You will find it in homes and schools and churches and art. It is there; it has not been squashed.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Sounds good to me. The entire text of Governor Pritzker's speech can be found here. Really worth a full read.]

Seattle Seahawks Begin Sale Process

Less than 2 weeks after winning the Super Bowl.

Ten days after the Seattle Seahawks won Super Bowl 60, the estate of Paul G. Allen announced Wednesday that it has begun a formal sale process for the franchise, adhering to Allen’s directive to eventually sell his sports assets and donate the proceeds to philanthropic efforts.

The Athletic reported last month that the team would be put up for sale following the Super Bowl, though the exact timing was unclear.

The investment bank Allen & Company and law firm Latham & Watkins will lead the sale process, which is expected to continue through the offseason. The last NFL team to change controlling owners was the Washington Commanders, which sold for a then-record $6.05 billion to a group led by private equity investor Josh Harris in 2023. The process took more than eight months, from the time former owner Daniel Snyder announced he was considering selling to when the deal closed. The Denver Broncos, which were held in a trust established by former owner Pat Bowlen, sold in 2022 to the Walton-Penner family for $4.65 billion after a relatively swift four-month process.

Because the Seahawks are held in a trust, as the Broncos were, it’s Jody Allen’s fiduciary duty as executor of the estate to maximize the franchise’s value in a sale. [...]

Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, purchased the Seahawks from Ken Behring for around $200 million in 1997, saving the franchise from leaving Seattle. Nearly 17 years after taking control of the team, he hoisted its first Lombardi Trophy after the Seahawks’ lopsided win over the Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII. Allen died four years later from complications of non-Hodgkin lymphoma at 65, and his sister took over as chair of the Seahawks and trustee of her brother’s estate.

During the Allen family’s near three decades of control, the Seahawks have won two Super Bowls, four NFC championships and 11 division titles.

The NFL’s ownership policy differs from those of other sports leagues, mandating that an individual controlling owner must own at least 30 percent of the team and the number of minority investors cannot top 24 people (for family ownerships, the individual in control needs only 1 percent so long as the family as a whole has 30 percent).

Because of that policy, along with the ballooning cost of franchises — the Broncos’ sale price more than doubled the previous NFL high ($2.3 billion for the Carolina Panthers in 2018) — and the prospect of new media rights deals soon, the pool of potential buyers for NFL franchises is limited to the ultra-rich.

Rob Walton, the controlling owner of the Broncos after the sale, is worth around $144.8 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires list. (The Broncos’ controlling owner designation was later transferred from Rob Walton to his son-in-law, Greg Penner.) Forbes estimates that Harris’ wealth is around $11 billion.

Sportico estimated last year that the Seahawks are worth around $6.59 billion, the 14th-highest in the NFL and up 18 percent from the team’s estimated value in 2024. Should the team sell for $8 billion and set a new record for an NFL franchise, the prospective buyer would need to put down at least $2.4 billion for control and fundraise the other $5.6 billion.

by Nicki Jhabvala, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: Dean Rutz. Seattle Times 

[ed. It's a rich man (and woman's) game for sure. You have to be ultra-wealthy just to have a seat at the table. Paul Allen was really an amazing guy (and a mean guitar player). Wikipedia bio: here

Defense Dept. and Anthropic Square Off in Dispute Over A.I. Safety

For months, the Department of Defense and the artificial intelligence company Anthropic have been negotiating a contract over the use of A.I. on classified systems by the Pentagon.

This week, those discussions erupted in a war of words.

On Monday, a person close to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Axios that the Pentagon was “close” to declaring the start-up a “supply chain risk,” a move that would sever ties between the company and the U.S. military. Anthropic was caught off guard and internally scrambled to pinpoint what had set off the department, two people with knowledge of the company said.

At the heart of the fight is how A.I. will be used in future battlefields. Anthropic told defense officials that it did not want its A.I. used for mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons that had no humans in the loop, two people involved in the discussions said.

But Mr. Hegseth and others in the Pentagon were furious that Anthropic would resist the military’s using A.I. as it saw fit, current and former officials briefed on the discussions said. As tensions escalated, the Department of Defense accused the San Francisco-based company of catering to an elite, liberal work force by demanding additional protections.

The disagreement underlines how political the issue of A.I. has become in the Trump administration. President Trump and his advisers want to expand technology’s use, reducing export restrictions on A.I. chips and criticizing state regulations that could be perceived as inhibitors to A.I. development. But Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, has long said A.I. needs strict limits around it to prevent it from potentially wrecking the world.

Emelia Probasco, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said it was important that the relationship between the Pentagon and Anthropic not be doomed.

“There are war fighters using Anthropic for good and legitimate purposes, and ripping this out of their hands seems like a total disservice,” she said. “What the nation needs is both sides at the table discussing what can we do with this technology to make us safer.” [...]

The Defense Department has used Anthropic’s technology for more than a year as part of a $200 million A.I. pilot program to analyze imagery and other intelligence data and conduct research. Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI are also part of the program. But Anthropic’s A.I. chatbot, Claude, was the most widely used by the agency — and the only one on classified systems — thanks to its integration with technology from Palantir, a data analytics company that works with the federal government, according to defense officials with knowledge of the technology...

On Jan. 9, Mr. Hegseth released a memo calling on A.I. companies to remove restrictions on their technology. The memo led A.I. companies including Anthropic to renegotiate their contracts. Anthropic asked for limits to how its A.I. tools could be deployed.

Anthropic has long been more vocal than other A.I. companies on safety issues. In a podcast interview in 2023, Dr. Amodei said there was a 10 to 25 percent chance that A.I. could destroy humanity. Internally, the company has strict guidelines that bar its technology from being used to facilitate violence.

In January, Dr. Amodei wrote in an essay on his personal website that “using A.I. for domestic mass surveillance and mass propaganda” seemed “entirely illegitimate” to him. He added that A.I.-automated weapons could greatly increase the risks “of democratic governments turning them against their own people to seize power.”

In contract negotiations, the Defense Department pushed back against Anthropic, saying it would use A.I. in accordance with the law, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.

by Sheera Frenkel and Julian E. Barnes, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times
[ed. The baby's having a tantrum. So, Anthropic is now a company "catering to an elite, liberal work force"? I can't even connect the dots. Somebody (Big Daddy? Congress? ha) needs to take him out of the loop on these critical issues (AI safety) or we're all, in technical terms, 'toast'. The military should not be dictating AI safety. It's also important that other AI companies show support and solidarity on this issue or face the same dilemma.]