America's Military Is Never Coming Back From This

'America' is a good military like Cristiano Ronaldo is a good footballer. They was, but their careers are over in Saudi Arabia. And whereas Ronaldo is still in good shape (but a bad person), America is in terrible shape (and bad people). Vital links in their kill chain (refuelers and control planes) are decades old and being put out of their misery by Iran.

Ozymandias

Just look at the shattered ‘pedestal’ of the 50-year-old E-3 AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) and let me read Shelley over its grave situation,

And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

People really do not understand how old and crustified the US military is. This is not your grandfather's US Army, or more precisely it is, without many updates since. They're still relying on primordial technology like the E-3 and KC-135 that have no modern replacements. Every new weapon these corruption engineers have come up with (like littoral combat ships or the F-35) have either failed or flailed in the field.

People talk about how Iran is a ‘second-tier military’ but they ain't Iraq and this ain't Desert Storm. This is Desert Shitstorm and Iran is not just a peer military to 'America's', they are demonstrably superior. Just look at the scoreboard, which isn't school massacres but military targets. Behold, then, 'American' airframes burning in the sun while Iran's rockets are safe underground. The White Empire stood astride the Middle East like Colossus, but now they lie there in a wreck, colossal morons.

What I want you to understand is that the US military is never coming back from this. There are no modern replacements for these refuelers and control systems. The NGAS is a render and the E-7 Wedgetail was cancelled. They simply don't make ‘em like they used to anymore. As the meme template goes, “My father is a builder. We were in [Prince Sultan Air Base] I asked him what it would cost to build [an E-3 Sentry] today. I will never forget his answer… ‘We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.’”

Taking these planes to a war of choice was like taking Grandpa's ‘65 Mustang to a demolition derby and getting your nose out of joint. The White press keeps saying these planes are worth millions or billions which is missing the point. They cannot make these planes anymore, these assets are effectively priceless.

Killing The Kill Chain

Iran has found the kill switch on the kill chain which is that every rich man's house has a servants entrance. America never built underground or even hardened shelters for its fighters, so they have to be served by ancient refuelers, which are about as limber as an ancestral butler. America also lost their ground-radars in the first week, so they have to get surveillance from airborne units, which still have to park somewhere.

As the US itself said in a 2024 report called, somewhat hilariously, The Tyranny of Geography,

Moreover, the thousands of short-range missiles that Iran possesses are a factor here. There is no strategic depth. An F-35 is very hard to hit in the air. On the ground it is nothing more than a very expensive and vulnerable chunk of metal sitting in the sun. The refueling and rearming facilities on these bases are also vulnerable, and they cannot be moved. These bases are all defended by Patriot and other defensive systems. Unfortunately, at such close range to Iran, the ability of the attacker to mass fires and overwhelm the defense is very real.

They should have made this report a 15-second ad and run it on Fox because it's obviously news to Donald Trump. He can see it now anyways, because this is precisely what happened.

If you're asking ‘are these images real?’ The Wall Street Infernal has confirmed the ‘damage’. This is just damage like that Monty Python knight had just a flesh wound.

These guys have to lie, even when they're telling the truth. As I've said, the White media can no longer cover up the collapse of White Empire because Iran is the subject of history now, acting upon them.

In Appreciation Of Depreciation

People really do not appreciate how depreciated the US military is. To rust and dust and gone bust. Some of their vaunted aircraft carriers are supposed to be retired already, they just keep extending their retirement dates because they have no replacements. This moves stuff around on paper, but doesn't make these lumbering beasts any more limber.

Their newest carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was almost immediately defeated by Iran and fled the battlefield, beds burning and toilets leaking. They chalk this up to inanimate objects, but everyone can see the writing on the wall, Iran is a new subject of history and 'America' is exiting stage right, pursued by bear market. The Gerald Fart needs over a year of repairs, which in American military-industrial terms might as well be forever. These deindustrialized demons can't rebuild a bridge in Baltimore, let alone an aircraft carrier.

'America' certainly cannot rebuild their ground-based radar in the Gulf, that's all returned to the rare earths whence it came from. For example, Iran has turned the FPS-132s in Qatar into First-Person-Shooter 404. This poor thing has been hit multiple times over, just stop, it's dead already. These radars are never being rebuilt because even if 'America' could (they can't), they would need resources from China (they won't), and permission from Iran (they don't). It is pointless talking about the dollar value of these assets, as the White media does... These radars are never coming back again, and they can't be bought in colonial cash.The only currency in the Strait of Hormuz is yuan, that USD is in the past.

In the bigotry of low expectations, people say Iran's hits required Russian or Chinese intelligence, but you can find these dumb-assets on Google Maps. US bases are sore spots in the desert, visible from high ground Iran holds without much effort. The real innovation has been the rocket science of Iran hitting radomes with surgical precision. If you look at the whacking of the AWACS, they hit that plane right in the radar and nowhere else. This is liking Ulysses getting the cyclops right in the eye, and then it didn't matter how big he was. Iran blinded the White Empire all across the Gulf and is now blinding Jordan and Saudi. [...]

In this view, which I think is true, Iran isn't waging guerrilla warfare. If anything, the 'Americans' holed up in hotels are the guerrillas in their midst.

Farewell To Arms

... It's not just that the American military is crashing under its own weight, they're going the wrong way. They brought a fighter jet to a rocket fight and are getting eviscerated. Observe that Iran has no fighter jets to speak of, just as Apple never made phones with keyboards. It's a completely different business model. This is the age of Tunnel and Rocket Wars, and 'America's' still geared to fight World War II against enemies that don't exist anymore. Even if they could right their ship tactically, it's gone wrong strategically long ago.

As that Tyranny of Geography report said, “U.S. bases in the region were originally designed to prevent Soviet encroachment into the oil-rich gulf during the late Cold War... And here is the problem. Today, these aircraft are largely based at locations along the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf—the bases that are an artifact of planning against Russian incursions in the 1970s, and the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns of the early decades of this century. They are close to Iran, which means they have a short trip to the fight … but that is also their great vulnerability. They are so close to Iran that it takes but five minutes or less for missiles launched from Iran to reach their bases.” And, as this played out, it took only five days to clear them.

Now 'America', in retreat, is parking its 60-year-old airframes out in the open while Iran has modern missiles in tunnel cities. The White media talks about Iran running out of missiles, but that is just another accufession. They follow Don Tzu's dictum, that war is the art of self-deception. In reality, it as the martyr Commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh told them, “If we start today unveiling a missile city every week, it won't be finished even in two years.” They keep killing the messenger, but as one of Khamenei the Elder's favorite authors (Victor Hugo) said, “The whole current phenomenon is summed up in these few words. An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted.” You can't kill an idea whose time has come. We live in the age of tunnel and rocket wars, and fighter jets with vintage supply lines are just dumb.

by Indrajit Samarajiva, indi.ca | Read more:
Images: uncredited

Wile E. Coyote
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Situational Unawareness - The Rise of OSINT

In the leadup to the war with Iran—and in the harrowing days since—a dizzying number of tools like WorldView have appeared seemingly out of thin air, bringing the once niche hobbyist community of OSINT (short for “open source intelligence”) into the mainstream. With names like “World Monitor” or “The Big Brother V3.0,” these dashboards make “your own room feel like the CIA,” according to one observer. Though it sounds like the tradecraft of spies, at a basic level they simply visualize publicly available data: from conflict zone maps to air traffic to global market fluctuations. In theory, this information, when collected and aggregated in creative ways, can help the user make some surprising inferences.

That may be true for an actual intelligence analyst, but for most users, these snazzy dashboards cram a chaotic amount of information on screen, from which no sane person can draw logical conclusions. Instead of offering actionable intelligence, the illegible cacophony just leads to a type of hypercharged doomscrolling. “The amount of vibe coded ‘situation monitor’ slop being produced these days is absolutely astronomical,” one OSINT researcher complained. Another X user tried to impose some quality control by ranking several of these new dashboards in a post called “Monitoring the Situation Monitors.” For others, it’s a fantasy come to life: every person at the center of their own personal panopticon, the world stretched out before them as they omnisciently swivel their desk chair from cell to cell, screen to screen. [...]

It is tempting to think that anyone with an internet connection can pull a fast one on the world’s most powerful military or that you can bypass a presidential administration hostile to the very notion of an informed public simply by monitoring something as simple as airplane traffic. Even more seductive is the idea that everything is knowable. The digital age has blanketed the world in cameras and sensors, which generate dizzying quantities of data—in other words, noise. But in that vast noise, the OSINT thinking goes, are signals. You just have to know how to find and interpret those signals, and all will be revealed.

The OSINT revolution in many ways democratized the powerful capabilities to gather information traditionally associated with spy agencies and put them into the hands of intrepid citizens who have identified perpetrators of human rights abuses or exposed vast disinformation networks. These impressive investigations have elevated OSINT to a near-mythic status in certain corners of the internet. But the widespread misuse and abuse of these same methods have also spread conspiracy theories, incited internet mobs, and fostered the illusion that anyone can know anything—as long as you “monitor the situation.” [...]

Everyday people who may never have even heard the term “OSINT” have devised ingenious ways to help their communities. When Hurricane Beryl knocked out power for 2.2 million of his neighbors in 2024, one enterprising Texan opened his app for the beloved fast food chain Whataburger, which has a live map tracking the status of restaurant closures in his area—a near perfect proxy for the geographic distribution of power outages. Indeed, good OSINT abounds. “This is how real OSINT should be done,” declared The OSINT Newsletter, which described how Bellingcat “reconstructed the Minneapolis ICE shooting by syncing five different videos, mapping movements and analysing multiple camera angles,” adding: “No doxxing, no speculation—just sources and methods.” [...]

Take the Pentagon Pizza Report. In early January, after the U.S. military’s strike on Venezuela and capture of President Nicolás Maduro, one of their posts on X went viral. At 2:04 a.m. EST, as the Maduro raid was underway yet still unknown to the American public, the account posted a Google Maps screenshot with the caption: “Pizzato Pizza, a late night pizzeria nearby the Pentagon, has suddenly surged in traffic,” implying that the abnormally high traffic could be attributed to Defense Department staffers ordering food in anticipation of holing up in the Pentagon for a long night of handling a major international crisis the public has yet to know about. For the Pentagon Pizza Report, the surge occurring around the time of the raid was a vindication of their method. A similar project called the Pentagon Pizza Index, which “tracks potential correlations between late-night pizza orders and military activity,” even developed an alert system called DOUGHCON, a play on DEFCON, the U.S. military’s multitiered “Defense Readiness Condition” alert system. [...]

Even the Pentagon Pizza Index, which created Polyglobe, a marriage of OSINT and prediction markets—an industry not known for having an abundance of scruples—has its own “Operational Disclaimer.” The notice informs users that the dashboard is “for informational and educational purposes only,” and reminds them that “pizza consumption patterns should not be used as a basis for financial, political, or strategic decisions.” Though I only found it after scrolling to the bottom of the page, where it sat partially obscured by a banner overlay and a button entreating me to “trade geopolitics on Polymarket.”

In some cases, irresponsible OSINT cowboying can have darker consequences. After the Boston bombing in 2013, armchair investigators pored over videos and photos purportedly of the incident, swapping theories in online public forums. Within days, these OSINT cowboys thought they had their guy. When that suspect did not pan out, they thought another guy was their guy again. Every time the internet sleuths named a new “suspect”—which were overwhelmingly people of color—abuse inevitably followed. A similar pattern occurred following the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s assassination attempt in July 2024. [...]

These problems have only intensified as vibe coding makes it easier than ever to deploy trackers and dashboards that look sharp from a design perspective and therefore authoritative, as people tend to believe visual content that looks good. Incentives to feed the insatiable desire to “monitor the situation” have only grown more entrenched now that prediction markets are transforming global conflict into a competitive spectator sport, one in which the advantage goes to the player with the most reliable, real-time information.

Apophenia is the common tendency for people to detect patterns or connections in otherwise random stimuli. People see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast or a man on the moon because the human brain craves order and familiarity as it searches for meaning in a meaningless world. It is natural and understandable to try and establish some semblance of control in the entropy, even if that control is only an illusion. But the hard truth is no amount of public data nor hours logged monitoring the situation will give you the power to predict the future. This is as true in Tehran as it is in Kyiv or Gaza.

by Tyler McBrien, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Nick Sheeran

McCartney In Tokyo, 1966.
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[ed. Tuned left-handed?]

Emil Bisttram - The Storm, c. 1950

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Marcin Wasilewski Trio

She Left a Silicon Valley VC to Solve a Problem Left Untouched for 88 years

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, here’s a little bit of trivia for you: One of the premier patents in bras hadn’t been touched or improved upon in 88 years. That was until Bree McKeen went after it. 

[ed. I'd say the problem has been touched quite a bit in 88 years. But, anyway...]

In 1931, inventor Helene Pons was granted a U.S. patent for a brassiere featuring an open-ended wire loop that encircled the bottom and sides of each breast. That uncomfortable, unyielding design had largely been left unchanged for nearly a century—and remains the dominant style in the global bra market, which is expected to reach nearly $60 billion by 2032.

Nobody had filed a patent for an underwire replacement until McKeen, founder of Evelyn & Bobbie, left her Silicon Valley job to try to fix a personal problem. At the end of long work days working at a boutique venture capital firm doing due diligence on consumer health care companies, she would come home with divots on her shoulders and chronic tension headaches after being hunched over her desk for hours on end.

 

While the world was demanding, the culprit wasn’t her workload. It was her bra.

But McKeen had zero experience in fashion. She studied medical anthropology and earned her MBA from Stanford. The turning point for her, though, came in a physiologist’s office, where McKeen had been working on her posture, along with regular barre training.

“He’s like, your posture looks great,’” McKeen recalled to Fortune. “And I kind of blurt it out: When I stand like this, I get pain from my bra.”

The physiologist explained it was a neuromuscular feedback loop, or the body’s automatic response to pain, like a pebble in a shoe.

“Here I am doing all this work to carry myself with authority and poise, and my bra, I find out, is totally doing the opposite,” McKeen said. “You don’t have to tell your body to curl around the pain. It just does.”

She had zero fashion experience. She filed a patent anyway

That realization kickstarted McKeen on a major career switch, costing her a career in VC—but earning her one of the most quietly disruptive brands in women’s fashion (Evelyn & Bobbie is now the fastest-growing brand at Nordstrom). She moved to Portland, home to Nike, Adidas, and Columbia for inspiration from major brands and proximity to new connections.

She started tinkering with prototypes in her garage and immediately filed for intellectual property rights. That was based on her VC knowledge that a woman’s company would need that to get funded.

McKeen got her first works utility patent (the harder, more defensible kind that covers how something works, not just how it looks) within a year. The brand declined to disclose how much funding it has raised, but now holds 16 international patents protecting its proprietary EB Core technology, which mimics the support and structure of a wire without causing discomfort.

To put into perspective how critical it was to protect her intellectual property, only 12% of patents in the U.S. were awarded to women, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as of 2019. McKeen has six of them, protecting the unique 3D-sling technology in her bras.

The brand McKeen built, Evelyn & Bobbie, was named for her maternal grandmother and her aunt, and operates on a simple premise: a bra that fits well and feels good all day.

“I wanted a bra that made me look better in my clothes,” McKeen said—an inspiration reminiscent of how Spanx founder Sara Blakely started her now-$1.2 billion shapewear empire. “Wire-free bras give you that mono boob—not a nice silhouette. They make your clothes look frumpy. I wanted nice lift, separation, a beautiful silhouette. I could not find that bra. How outrageous, really.”

The average U.S. bra size is 34F. Most brands design for something much smaller

With major brands like Victoria’s Secret, Aerie, Third Love, Savage X Fenty, and countless others on the market, Evelyn & Bobbie is undoubtedly in a crowded, competitive space. But as all women know, not all bras are comfortable to wear, especially for extended periods.

What sets Evelyn & Bobbie apart is their approach to sizing. McKeen designs with 270 fit models across seven easy sizes, grading each style individually rather than scaling up from a single sample.

“Most bra companies have like one or two fit models,” she said. “They’ll make a 34B and just scale it up, which is why it doesn’t fit well in larger sizes.

The average bra size in the U.S., McKeen pointed out, is a 34F, a stat that’s surprising to most people—including initial investors she once had to convince that comfort was even a relevant selling point.

“I had many investor meetings where they were 60-minute meetings, and 50 minutes of it was me trying to convince them that comfort was relevant,” she said. “I mean, Victoria’s Secret kind of figured it out, right? Like it’s just sexy, isn’t that what women want?” [...]

With a luxury product comes a luxury price point: Evelyn & Bobbie bras retail for $98 each. But that price tag could be worth avoiding chronic pain for some women.

by Sydney Lake, Fortune |  Read more:

Image: Evelyn & Bobbie

[ed. An entire article about bras but mostly about protecting intellectual property rights (16 international patents!), never fully explaining what the new technology actually is, other than it uses more fit models to ensure proper sizing. FYI: according to E&B's website EB Core uses "bonded internal structures and a soft, adaptive material, that stretches, molds, and supports—delivering wire-free lift.". Well, guess that explains it.] 

Lost In Space

No one is happy with NASA’s new idea for private space stations (Ars Technica):

"Most elements of a major NASA event this week that laid out spaceflight plans for the coming decade were well received: a Moon base, a focus on less talk and more action, and working with industry to streamline regulations so increased innovation can propel the United States further into space.

However, one aspect of this event, named Ignition, has begun to run into serious turbulence. It involves NASA’s attempt to navigate a difficult issue with no clear solution: finding a commercial replacement for the aging International Space Station.

During the Ignition event on Tuesday, NASA leaders had blunt words for the future of commercial activity in low-Earth orbit. Essentially, they are not confident in the viability of a commercial marketplace for humans there, and the agency’s plan to work with private companies to develop independent space stations does not appear to be headed toward success. Plenty of people in the industry share these concerns, but NASA officials have not expressed them out loud before.

“We’re on a path that’s not leading us where we thought it would,” said Dana Weigel, manager of the International Space Station program for NASA.

NASA proposed a new solution that would bind the private companies more closely to NASA, requiring them not to build free-flying space stations but rather to work directly with the space agency on modules that would, at least initially, dock with the International Space Station. This change was not well-received."

***

[ed. See also: SpaceX offers details on orbital data center satellites (Space News):]

"At a March 21 event in Austin, Texas, Musk outlined an initiative by SpaceX, along with automaker Tesla and artificial intelligence company xAI — also run by Musk — to massively increase production of high-end computer chips needed for both terrestrial and space applications.

The Terafab project seeks to produce one terawatt of processors annually, which Musk said is 50 times the combined production rate of all manufacturers of chips used today in advanced applications such as AI.

Those processors, he said, are the “missing ingredient” in his plans to deploy a large constellation of satellites to serve as an orbital data center.

“We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we’re going to build the Terafab,” he said.

"SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission in late January for a constellation of up to one million satellites that would be used as an orbital data center for AI applications. The company provided few technical details about the constellation, including the size of the satellites, in that application."

The Last Useful Man

About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the film’s AI antagonist. The cultist sneaks up behind Cruise and lunges with a knife. Things look dicey for a moment — until Cruise gains some distance and kicks him repeatedly in the head. While doing so, he imparts a few words of wisdom: “You spend too much time on the internet.”

What divides the heroes and villains in Final Reckoning is simple: the villains have to Google things, and the heroes do not. There are three bad guys, more or less. First, the Entity, a rogue AI halfway through its plan for global domination. Second, Gabriel, the Entity’s meat puppet. Third, a gang of surprisingly likable Russians who take Cruise’s team hostage in a house in Alaska. What unites the villains isn’t malice so much as it is uselessness. I mean that precisely. They are often effective, even successful. But never useful. [...]

This division between characters with embodied knowledge and those without runs through all of Cruise’s recent work. His own impossible mission is to teach the value of physical competence: not just knowing things, but knowing how to do them. In Final Reckoning, this idea finds its clearest form. [...]

Like Forster, Cruise and his long-time collaborator Christopher McQuarrie invent machines to dramatize the age they live in. Forster gave us the Machine; McQuarrie, the Entity. But unlike Forster, their imagination of technology is not apocalyptic but diagnostic — they aren’t warning us of the machine age so much as asking what it demands of us, and what it reveals.

This brings us to what looks, at first glance, like a paradox: How does a franchise so lovingly built on disguises, gadgets, and inventions of all kinds — from the eye-tracking projector that gets Cruise into the Kremlin to the single suction glove that lets him cling to the Burj Khalifa — end with a villain made of pure technology?

If you asked Cruise, his answer would be simple: technology is good when it roots you in your body and bad when it lets you forget you have one. That’s why Final Reckoning, for all its AI villainy and suspicion of the terminally-online, still treats technology with a near-Romantic sensibility. Hand-soldered pen drives, aging aircraft carriers, and vintage biplanes carry Cruise and his team on their mission to save the world. At times subtlety disappears altogether; the film’s most inviting location is a candle-lit Arctic hideout filled with analogue comforts: old books and gramophones, telescopes and soldering tools.

The same ideas return — turned up to eleven — in Cruise and McQuarrie’s two other collaborations this decade outside the Mission: Impossible franchise. The first, Edge of Tomorrow, in which Cruise relives the same day on repeat until he generates enough embodied knowledge to defeat an autonomous alien race, is, even for the purposes of this essay, too on the nose, so I’ll focus instead on Top Gun: Maverick.

The film opens with Cruise test-piloting an experimental stealth aircraft in a last-ditch attempt to save the program from cancellation by the “drone ranger,” an admiral who wants the budget for his autonomous fleet. For the program to survive, Cruise needs to hit Mach 10: a speed no vehicle has ever reached. As the team watches on, he delivers the impossible. Gauzy wisps of supersonic air stream across the cockpit windows as Maverick stares out into the black of space. He whispers softly to his dead best friend, “Talk to me, Goose.”

Soon afterwards, Maverick is sent back to Top Gun to train a new generation of pilots. He begins his first lesson holding up the flight manual for the F-18, which makes the Riverside Chaucer look like a novella, before throwing it in the bin. “I assume you know this book inside and out. So does your enemy.” What matters instead is the knowledge that can’t be written down: the things his students already know by instinct, but cannot yet express  “Today we’ll start with only what you think you know.”

The quest to ‘“know more than we can tell,”’ as Michael Polanyi put it, drives the rest of the film. The pilots even have their own version of the phrase, a near-religious catechism recited at almost every decisive moment: “Don’t think. Just do.”

Beyond the screen, the same principle applies. In the Mission: Impossible franchise, filming begins with no plot or script, only a commitment to figuring it out in the process. It’s most evident in each film’s tentpole action sequences, where the line between Cruise the actor and Cruise the stuntman blurs beyond recognition.

The art critic Robert Hughes once wrote of his love for “the spectacle of skill” — the thrill of watching an expert at work, whatever the discipline. Nowhere is this more evident than in Cruise’s increasingly daring plane sequences. In Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Cruise clings to a real Airbus A400M as it lifts off from an airfield in Lincolnshire. He sprints across the field, in that inimitable Tom Cruise style, mounts the wing with practiced ease, and seats himself by the cargo door. The plane taxis. So far, so cool. Then it lifts off. The perfect hair vanishes, blown back and forwards, alternating second by second between old skeleton and boy with bowl cut. His clothes are shapeless and billowing, pulled off him by the force of the air.

This is no country for sprezzatura, nor the embodiment preached by the wellness industry with its vocabulary of “balance” and “equilibrium.” Here, we are meant to feel the effort. To know yourself is to know your limits, and so push your body to the edge of failure. When they are about to perform stunts, Cruise often briefs his team with an unusual mantra: ‘Don’t be safe, be competent.”

At the end of Final Reckoning, Cruise plummets through the sky as his parachute burns to cinders above him. To film it, the stunt team soaked a parachute in flammable liquid, flew him to altitude in a helicopter, and pushed him out as it ignited. He did this 19 times. When he asked to go again, the stunt coordinator told him there were no parachutes left. This was a lie. McQuarrie was more direct: “You’re done. Do not anger the gods.”

It’s interesting to see this return to embodiment and strange to find myself drawn to it. Like many default clever people, I’d long paid lip service to Merleau-Ponty and his ilk while living as a dualist; my brain was the moneymaker, my body just along for the ride. It was only after having children that I began to understand what it meant to inhabit a body rather than simply use one.

In an essay for Granta earlier this year, the writer Saba Sams contrasted her son’s love of leaping from benches and walls with her own unease: “For them, the body is not a constraint, is not a ticking clock, is not something to be moulded or hidden. The body is the window to movement, and movement is a window to joy.”

Sams captures something larger. This renewed fascination with embodiment isn’t spontaneous, it’s a reaction to technologies so powerful and frictionless they’re impossible to ignore. Even the most grounded among us now move through the world not through our bodies but through screens, which is why so many make the negative case for technology, urging us, thankfully without a Cruise-style kick to the head, to spend less time on the internet.

What Cruise gives us is the positive case: not just resistance to disembodiment but a reminder of what is beautiful about being physical in the first place. The skilled things bodies can do are inherently satisfying. They can be thrilling, reassuring, even a little terrifying. But, as David Foster Wallace put it in his essay on Roger Federer:

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

That’s the mission, if we choose to accept it. The target is not the recent bugbear of AI, but instead the more gentle conditions of modernity. When we use Google Maps instead of a printed atlas, or when CGI is used to sell a stunt instead of the performers doing it themselves, something is lost. It’s why the focus on AI can sometimes be misguided. It’s not so much a revolution, it’s simply the next step on the ladder of disembodiment: another in a long line of technologies to make humans a little less self-reliant. Why learn, if you can ask?

In the final biplane sequence, we watch Cruise commandeer a plane, fly it to another, board that plane midair, and take control of it — a feat so exhausting it beggars belief. Gabriel, the villain, in order to survive his defeat, needs only do something a hundredth as difficult: jump from the plane and deploy a parachute. He laughs. This is easy. But he doesn’t know the complexities of leaving a biplane with a parachute — the correct moment to release, the parts to steer clear from. He’s never bothered to learn. He frees himself, clips the rudder, cracks his skull open, and dies.

Here we see the real villain: not intelligence, but convenience. The mission so often feels impossible because we keep trying to do things without effort. Cruise’s answer is simple: Stop. Remember your body. Sometimes, it’s better to take the hard way.

Final Reckoning’s closing scene presents us with two intelligences and two bodies. One is Cruise, a 62-year-old body who we’ve seen, for the last two hours, run fast, dive deep, and hang from planes. The other is the Entity, trapped in a glorified USB stick: a golden nugget incapable of anything other than being flushed down a toilet.

One still moves. The other never could.

by Aled Maclean-Jones, The Metropolictan Review | Read more:
Image: Getty

Flea

[ed. Quite an evolution from his Chili Pepper days. See also: a live performance of this song on Jimmy Fallon.]

The 49MB Web Page

If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

It is the same story across top publishers today.

To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let's quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took up around 4 to 5 MB. This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album's worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the global average broadband internet speed back then was about 1.5 Mbps. Your browser would continue loading this monstrosity for several minutes, enough time for you to walk away and make a cup of coffee.

If hardware has improved so much over the last 20 years, has the modern framework/ad-tech stack completely negated that progress with abstraction and poorly architected bloat?

CPU throttles, tracking and privacy nightmares

For the example above, taking a cursory look at the network waterfall for a single article load reveals a sprawling, unregulated programmatic ad auction happening entirely in the client's browser. Before the user finishes reading the headline, the browser is forced to process dozens of concurrent bidding requests to exchanges like Rubicon Project (fastlane.json) and Amazon Ad Systems. While these requests are asynchronous over the network, their payloads are incredibly hostile to the browser's main thread. To facilitate this, the browser must download, parse and compile megabytes of JS [ed. javascript]. As a publisher, you shouldn't run compute cycles to calculate ad yields before rendering the actual journalism.

1. The user requests text.
2. The browser downloads 5MB of tracking JS.
3. A silent auction happens in the background, taxing the mobile CPU.
4. The winning bidder injects a carefully selected interstitial ad you didn't ask for.

Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user's cross-site identity together across different ad networks.

When you open a website on your phone, it's like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.

Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe's IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.

So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background. But that's enough about NYT.

The Economics of Hostile Architecture

Publishers aren't evil but they are desperate. Caught in this programmatic ad-tech death spiral, they are trading long-term reader retention for short-term CPM pennies. The modern ad industry is slowly de-coupling the creator from the advertiser. They weaponize the UI because they think they have to.

Viewability and time-on-page are very important metrics these days. Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The longer you're trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you, the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.

The reader is not respected enough by the software. The publisher is held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only encourages but also rewards dark patterns.

And almost all modern news websites are guilty of some variation of anti-user patterns. As a reminder, the NNgroup defines interaction cost as the sum of mental and physical efforts a user must exert to reach their goal. In the physical world, hostile architecture refers to a park bench with spikes that prevent people from sleeping. In the digital world, we can call it a system carefully engineered to extract metrics at the expense of human cognitive load. Let's also cover some popular user-hostile design choices that have gone mainstream.

The Pre-Read Ambush

Selected GDPR examplesThe advantage and disadvantages of these have been discussed in tech circles ever since they launched.

When a user clicks a news link, they have a singular purpose of reading the headline and going through the text. The problem is that upon page load, users are greeted by what I call Z-Index Warfare. The GDPR/Cookie banners occupy the bottom 30%. The user scrolls once and witnesses a "Subscribe to our Newsletter" modal. Meanwhile the browser has started hammering them with allow notification prompts.

The user must perform visual triage, identify the close icons (which are deliberately given low contrast) and execute side quests just to access the 5KB of text they came for. Let's look at how all these anti-patterns combine into a single, user-hostile experience.

by Shubham Bose, Thatshubham |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

Hawaii’s Small Farmers Begin Recovery After Catastrophic Flooding

Eddie Oroyan’s farm was thriving when the storms hit. He and his wife had started LewaTerra Farm last year on a gorgeous stretch of land on the north shore of Oahu. They were delivering vegetables to customers in the community, selling at farmer’s markets and to local restaurants.

Then, on the week of 10 March, a first kona low storm hit the island, bringing copious amounts of water, flooding their land and wiping out crops. Nearly all their papayas were gone. And the tomatoes didn’t survive. But the couple quickly began cleaning, replanting and tying down crops, confident that they would get back on their feet shortly.

“It was looking really positive. We were like, OK, we’re going to make it out of this,” Oroyan said.

But days later the Hawaiian Islands were hit with yet another storm – this one even more perilous. It inundated neighborhoods, leading to more than 200 rescues, washing houses off their foundations and leaving wide swaths of the land underwater.

Oroyan and his wife evacuated in chest-deep water. They returned to find an almost complete loss.

“The crops were completely covered and had already been underwater earlier that week. The disease was already setting in,” he said.

One week on, Hawaii is only just beginning to grapple with the aftermath of both storms, which saw as much as 50in of rain and caused some of the state’s worst flooding since 2004. The damage is immense – with officials estimating costs at $1bn, and farmers have been hit hard, particularly on Oahu. More than 300 farms have reported about $17.5m in damage as of this week, said Brian Miyamoto, the executive director of the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau.

“This is so widespread that the need is astronomical,” he said.

And with significant debris, damaged roads, and thick mud indoors and outside, cleanup will take time. [...]

Blake Briddell and Brit Yim, who for the last eight years have run an eight-acre farm on land that used to serve as a sugarcane plantation on the north shore, went through their nursery and storage sheds, elevating everything off the ground to protect their breadfruit, mango and citrus trees.

The storm came sooner than expected. The first front brought incessant rain, dropping about 20in in McKinnon’s area, which typically sees an average of 30in for the year. The water levels on Briddell’s farm were steadily rising, and the couple soon had to evacuate.

The heavy rains didn’t stay for long, but caused significant damage, including flooding fields and saturating the ground, and harvested crops were lost to power outages and damaged equipment.

Much of the land that Oroyan and his wife, Jessica Eirado Enes, tend had been left coated in a thick layer of mud thanks to the dense clay soil. Millions of years of erosion from the mountains produced that mineral-rich clay soil, which is good for planting, but that doesn’t soak up water well, Oroyan said, and swallows shoes and tractors.

The couple spent days cleaning up their land, trying to get things back in order and leaving soaked equipment out to dry. They got to work replanting crops that had tipped over, including eggplant and okra.

So did McKinnon and Briddell. Another kona storm was forecast, but was expected to be less severe than the previous ones. “It’s silly looking back, but we were talking about how it might be nice to get a little bit of rain to wash the mud off of everything. Like a little bit of rain would be welcome,” Briddell said.

Briddell woke up at 1.30am on the morning of 20 March to the see water surrounded his farm’s small living space, an alarming development given that it is located on the most elevated area of the property. The water was already shin-deep, meaning the road was too flooded for the couple to drive out, he said.

“We knew we were stuck at that point and it was just a matter of ‘OK, everything that we can get back up elevated, let’s do it’” Briddell said. “The water at that stage was raising about a foot every 20 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it. You could literally see the water line climbing.”

Meanwhile, as the storm made landfall, Oroyan had been harvesting beets and lettuce in the rain, trying to get them out of the ground before it became too muddy to do so. As he prepared to go to bed, he saw that water was already overwhelming a nearby culvert and coming to the edge of a drainage ditch on the property.

He and his wife began to prepare once more. They gathered their things and moved valuable heavy equipment, a solar generator and a washing machine.

“Within 20 minutes of me saying we should start prepping it was at the foot of the living space,” Oroyan said. Twenty minutes later it was up to their knees, and they drove their vehicles to higher ground with water submerging the hoods of their cars. They made it to a neighbors after walking through chest-deep water.

Briddell and Yim put on wetsuits, and placed their dry clothes in a cooler. The couple knew their cats would not leave, and that they couldn’t swim out with them, so they left wet food on the rafters of their home where they knew they’d be safe. They swam a quarter of a mile to their kayak and met with a friend who offered them a vehicle to drive out in.

“The drive was scarier than the swim. The water ripping down the roads. You’re driving with the tailpipe pipes submerged for miles where you can’t let off the gas,” Briddell said.

by Dani Anguiano, The Guardian | Read more:
Images: Eddie Oroyan of LewaTerra Farm

[ed. Climate change. We lost the fight before ever getting started because it was a hoax. Because we needed to protect our corporations and our economy, 401Ks, consumptive standards of living. Because it was too complex and too far in the future. Because it was just too hard. See also: They’re Rich but Not Famous—and They’re Suddenly Everywhere.]

Séamus and Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta feat. Malinda

“Eileanóir na Rún”. An Irish song performed in the sean-nós style, originally composed by Cearbhall Óg Ó Dálaigh in the 17th century.

[ed. Beautiful and heartfelt. No wonder this song has survived for centuries.]

History is Made by Those Who Show Up

The powerful adage, “History is made by those who show up,” serves as a profound reminder that passive observation rarely shapes the world. Its meaning is layered, emphasizing that the first and most crucial step toward any form of impact, change, or achievement is simply being present. It champions action over intention, participation over critique, and engagement over apathy. This quote suggests that grand historical narratives are not solely written by geniuses or leaders in isolation, but are collectively forged by the countless individuals who choose to participate—by attending the meeting, casting the vote, joining the movement, or lending a hand. The essence of the “history is made by those who show up” quote is an empowering call to agency, asserting that showing up is the foundational act upon which all else is built.

Origin and Attribution of the Quote

Unlike many famous sayings tied to a single historical figure, the exact origin of “history is made by those who show up” is pleasingly democratic—it has emerged from the collective consciousness. It is often attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to various figures including President Harry S. Truman or Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, reflecting its political resonance. The sentiment echoes the writings of philosopher and psychologist William James, who emphasized the power of habit and action. Regardless of its precise source, the quote’s endurance lies in its universal truth. It has been adopted by community organizers, business coaches, and motivational speakers alike, becoming a modern mantra for proactive living. The ambiguity of its origin, in a way, proves its point: the quote’s history was made by the many who showed up to use it, share it, and live by it.

A Curated List of “Show Up” Quotes and Their Meanings

The central theme of showing up resonates across time and disciplines. Here is a collection of quotes that expand on this vital principle, each followed by an explanation of its significance.

“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” – Often attributed to Woody Allen. This variation focuses on the disproportionate reward for the simple act of presence. It suggests that consistency and availability are primary drivers of achievement, often outweighing raw talent or perfect conditions.

“Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Take the moment and make it perfect.” – Zoey Sayward. This quote challenges the paralysis of waiting for ideal circumstances. Its meaning is that showing up imperfectly is better than not showing up at all, and that action itself transforms a situation.

“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” – Paulo Coelho. While related, this quote shifts focus from mere presence to exemplary action. Its meaning highlights that showing up authentically and living your values has far more impact than simply voicing critiques or beliefs.

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky. A classic in the sports world, this quote is a mathematical argument for participation. Its meaning is clear: without the courage to “show up” and attempt, failure is guaranteed. Opportunity only exists where there is engagement.

“It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” – Theodore Roosevelt. This is the grand philosophical counterpart to our core quote. Its meaning glorifies the person who shows up, strives, and dares greatly, while dismissing the value of those who only observe and criticize from the sidelines.

“Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.” – Peter Marshall. This quote prioritizes tangible, completed action over grand, unfinished intentions. Its meaning reinforces that showing up to do a small part is historically more significant than drafting a perfect, unmaterialized blueprint.

“Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso. A succinct statement linking action to all achievement. Its meaning posits that showing up is the first action, the essential spark from which all other possibilities—creativity, success, history—ignite.

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” – Andy Warhol. This quote adds a layer of agency to the passage of time. Its meaning is that showing up is an active intervention, a deliberate force required to steer history, as time alone does not guarantee progress.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Often attributed to Abraham Lincoln or Peter Drucker. This forward-looking statement frames showing up as a creative, future-building act. Its meaning is that by participating today, you are actively drafting the chapters of tomorrow’s history.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead. This anthropological perspective gives social weight to the “show up” quote. Its meaning confirms that history is indeed made by those who show up—specifically, by committed groups who choose to engage collectively.

How to Apply the “History is Made by Those Who Show Up” Quote in Modern Life

Understanding the “history is made by those who show up” quote is one thing; living it is another. Here’s how to translate this philosophy into daily practice. In your career, it means volunteering for challenging projects, attending networking events (even virtually), and consistently contributing in meetings. Your voice and ideas cannot shape your team’s direction if you are silent or absent. In civic life, it translates to informed voting, attending town halls, or participating in local clean-up drives. Democracy and community are built entirely on the principle of showing up. For personal goals, it means lacing up your running shoes even when you’re tired, writing the first page of that book, or finally enrolling in that course. Progress is a series of “show-ups.” In relationships, it means being emotionally present for friends and family, making time for connections, and doing the small, consistent acts that build trust. The history of any strong relationship is written by these moments of dedicated presence. The digital age offers new avenues: showing up can mean contributing thoughtfully to online discussions, supporting meaningful causes, or creating content that adds value. The core principle remains—passive scrolling does not build a legacy; active participation does.

by Befagi |  Read more:

[ed. I was reminded of this while posting the essay below.]

Shoot the Messenger

Media criticism these days is usually focused on ideological bias. The right argues the media is full of left-wing hacks, and the left points out that many media moguls are right-wingers. But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning than the more fundamental problem that the class of people who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of demographic and experiential traits that they don’t recognize as distinctive.

This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.”

The messenger class’s distinctive experiences — like living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the parts of New York highlighted in red — shape the boundaries of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological or partisan bias.

The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.

But if our mediating institutions are all staffed by people drawn from the same narrow demographic band, then the picture they produce will be skewed in ways nobody intends and few notice. This isn’t about whether the messenger class is full of bad people — it’s largely not — it’s about whether it’s even possible to know when you’re acting as a mirror to society, or a spotlight on what you personally happen to care about. [...]

[ed. Examples: Gentrification; Opioid Epidemic; AI Job Displacement; Rising Unionization:]

The psychology of projection

There is a name for what’s happening here. Psychologists call it the false consensus effect — the tendency to overestimate how much others share your beliefs, behaviors, and experiences.

First established by Ross, Greene, and House in 1977, it has been confirmed in a meta-analysis of 115 hypothesis tests and found to be a robust, moderate-sized effect. Later research shows that it persists even when people are warned about it.

Neuroimaging research has shown that projecting your views onto others activates the brain’s reward centers; it feels good to believe everyone is like you. And a 2021 study found that social media use amplifies the effect: The more time you spend in an environment where your views are echoed back to you, the more convinced you become that those views are universal.

The false consensus effect is usually studied at the individual level. But what I’m describing is a class-wide and industry-wide version.

It’s not just that any one journalist overestimates how representative her experience is; it’s that an entire class of professionals shares a similar set of experiences, confirms those experiences with each other on the same platforms, and then produces a body of public knowledge that reflects those experiences as though they were the norm.

And even when people from nontraditional backgrounds join the fray, they are incentivized to conform through social media, company cohesion, editorial norms, and the normal human urge to get along with your peers and be taken seriously by the people you respect.

So many problems, so little time

Agenda-setting is zero-sum.

There’s only so much time elected officials, charities, nonprofits, or businesses have to respond to the public’s needs. So if something is getting more coverage than may be warranted, that means other things are getting less. And that means fewer solutions are being explored.

Remember that gentrification report? It found that 15% of urban neighborhoods showed signs of gentrification over 50 years, while 26% experienced substantial population decline.

The far more common trajectory for a poor urban neighborhood is not invasion by white yuppies — it’s continued segregation, disinvestment, and deteriorating housing stock. But that story doesn’t get told with anywhere near the same intensity.

The same asymmetry shows up in the AI conversation. The workers most likely to struggle if displaced by AI are not the ones getting the most ink.

A Brookings analysis found that roughly 6.1 million workers face both high AI exposure and low adaptive capacity — limited savings, advanced age, narrow skill sets, scarce local opportunities. Eighty-six percent of these workers are women, and they’re concentrated in clerical and administrative roles in smaller metro areas.

I’m not arguing that journalists are dishonest, that scholars are corrupt, or that the messenger class is engaged in some conspiracy to distort public reality. The people I’m describing are, by and large, doing their best to tell the truth about the world.

The problem is that they’re drawing on their own experiences, their own social networks, and their own platform ecosystems as raw material — and those inputs are unrepresentative in ways they have no easy mechanism for detecting.

Part of this could be resolved with an increased fluency with quantitative data. But that’s not actually enough. Many stories — like the opioid epidemic — are ones that require journalists to respond to anecdotes before the quantitative data has been assembled, analyzed, and produced by the academy.

by Jerusalem Demsas, The Argument |  Read more:

Image: Klaus Vedfelt via Getty Images

Vietnamese men on a vintage postcard, mailed in 1907

via:

Bruno Liljefors

via:

Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster

The global economy has become dependent on the AI industry. Trillions of dollars are being invested into the technology and the infrastructure it relies on; in the final months of 2025, functionally all economic growth in the United States came from AI investments. This would be risky even in ideal conditions. And we are very far from ideal conditions.

Much of the AI supply chain—chips, data centers, combustion turbines, and so on—relies on key materials that are produced in or transported through just a few places on Earth, with little overlap. In particular, the industry is highly dependent on the Middle East, which has been destabilized by the war in Iran. A global energy shock seems all but certain to come soon—the kind where even the best-case scenario is a disaster. The war could grind the AI build-out to a halt. This would be devastating for the tech firms that have issued historic amounts of debt to race against their highly leveraged competitors, and it would be devastating for the private lenders and banks that have been buying up that debt in the hope of ever bigger returns.

For the better part of the past year, Wall Street analysts and tech-industry observers have fretted publicly about an AI bubble. The fear is that too much money is coming in too fast and that generative-AI companies still have not offered anything close to a viable business model. If growth were to stall or the technology were to be seen as failing to deliver on its promises, the bubble might burst, triggering a chain reaction across the financial system. Everyone—big banks, private-equity firms, people who have no idea what’s mixed into their 401(k)—would be hit by the AI crash.

Until recently, that kind of crash felt hypothetical; today, it feels plausible and, to some, almost inevitable. “What’s unusual about this, unlike commercial real estate during the global financial crisis,” Paul Kedrosky, an investor and financial consultant, told us, “is all of these interlocking points of fragility.”

Perhaps the clearest examples are advanced memory and training chips, which are among the most important—and are by far the most expensive—components of training any AI model. Currently, most of them are produced by two companies in South Korea and one in Taiwan. These countries, in turn, get a large majority of their crude oil and much of their liquefied natural gas—which help fuel semiconductor manufacturing—from the Persian Gulf. The chip companies also require helium, sulfur, and bromine—three key inputs to silicon wafers—largely sourced from the region. In addition, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other regional petrostates have become key investors in the American AI firms that purchase most of those chips.

Because of the war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed to most shipping vessels, stranding one-fifth of the world’s exports of natural gas, one-third of the world’s exports of crude oil, and significant quantities of the planet’s exportable fertilizer, helium, and sulfur. Meanwhile, Iran and Israel have begun bombing much of the fossil-fuel infrastructure in the region, which could take many years to replace. In only a month of war, the price of Brent crude—a global oil benchmark—has jumped by 40 percent and could more than double, liquefied-natural-gas prices are soaring in Europe and Asia, and helium spot prices have already doubled. The strait is “critical to basically every aspect of the global economy,” Sam Winter-Levy, a technology and national-security researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told us. “The AI supply chain is not insulated.”

The situation could quickly deteriorate from here. A helium crunch could trigger a shortage of AI chips or cause chip prices to rise. AI companies need ever more advanced chips to fill their data centers—at higher prices, the massive server farms, already hurting from elevated energy costs caused by the war, would have almost no hope of becoming profitable. Without these chips, new data centers would not be built or would sit empty. Astronomical tech valuations, and in turn the entire stock market, could collapse.

One industry’s precarious position isn’t usually everyone’s problem. Unfortunately, AI is different. The biggest data-center players, known as hyperscalers, are among the biggest corporations in the history of capitalism; they include Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon. But even they will be pressed by collectively spending nearly $700 billion on AI in a single year. In order to get the money for these unprecedented projects, data-center providers are beginning to take on colossal amounts of debt. Some of this is done through creative deals with private-equity firms including Blackstone, BlackRock, and Blue Owl Capital—which themselves operate as sort of shadow banks that, since the most recent financial crisis, have arguably become as powerful and as influential as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were prior to 2008. Endowments, pensions, insurance funds, and other major institutions all trust private equity to invest their money.

For a while, it seemed like every time Google or Microsoft announced more data-center investments, their stock prices rose. Now the opposite occurs: The hyperscalers are spending far more, but investors have started to notice that they are not generating anything near the revenue they need to. The data-center boom’s top players—Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Oracle—have all lost 8 to 27 percent of their value since the start of the year, making them a huge drag on the overall stock market. And the $121 billion of debt that hyperscalers issued in 2025, four times more than what they averaged for years prior, is expected to grow dramatically.

All of the major players in this investment ecosystem are vulnerable. Private-equity firms are being squeezed on both ends by generative AI: During the coronavirus pandemic, they bought up software companies, which are now plummeting in value because AI is expected to eat their lunch. Meanwhile, private equity’s new investment strategy, data centers, is also falling apart because of AI. Blackstone, Blue Owl, and the like are sinking huge sums into data-center construction with the assumption that lease payments from tech companies will pay for their debt. In order to pay for their investments, private-equity companies raised money from major financial institutions—but now the viability of those lease payments is coming into question as the hyperscalers’ cash flow is strained. “There’s a reason to think we’re seeing some of the same 2008 dynamics now,” Brad Lipton, a former senior adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and now the director of corporate power and financial regulation at the Roosevelt Institute, told us. “Everyone’s getting tied up together. Banks are lending money to private credit, which in turn lends it elsewhere. That amps up the risk.” [...]

The war in Iran affects data-center finances as well. Should energy prices continue to skyrocket, so will the cost of this already very expensive computing equipment, because it needs tremendous amounts of energy to manufacture and operate. And the war has exposed physical risks to these buildings. Janet Egan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, described data centers to us as “large, juicy targets.” It is impossible to hide these facilities, which can cover 1 million square feet. Earlier this month, Iran bombed Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. American hyperscalers had been planning to build far more data centers in the region, because the Trump administration and the AI industry have sought funding from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman. Now there’s a two-way strain on those relationships. The physical security of the data centers is more precarious, and the conflict is damaging the economic health of the petrostates, thereby jeopardizing a major source of further investment in American AI firms. The Trump administration “staked a lot on the Gulf as their close AI partner, and now the war that they’ve launched poses a huge threat to the viability of the Gulf as that AI partner,” Winter-Levy said.

Plus, “what’s to prevent Iran or a proxy group, or another maligned actor, from tomorrow launching an armed drone against a data center in Northern Virginia?” Chip Usher, the senior director for intelligence at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a national-security and AI think tank, told us. “It could happen. Our defenses are not adequate.” State-sponsored cyberattacks of the variety Iran is known for could also knock a data center offline. You can build all manner of defenses—reinforced concrete, drone-interception systems—but doing so adds cost and time to already costly and slow construction. [...]

Even if Iran and the Strait of Hormuz don’t directly trigger an AI-driven financial crisis, the odds are decent that another vector could. (Remember tariffs?) Energy prices could stay elevated for years, because the targeted fossil-fuel facilities in the Persian Gulf will take a long time to restore. As the U.S. directs huge amounts of attention and military resources toward Iran, it’s easy to imagine China launching an invasion of Taiwan—a scenario that terrifies Silicon Valley, because it would halt the production of chips needed to train frontier models. That’s not even considering the single Dutch company that makes the high-tech lithography machines used to print virtually all AI chips, or the German company that makes the mirrors used in those machines. “There are too many ways for it to fail for it not to fail,” Kedrosky said of the AI industry’s web of risk. “All you can say for sure is this is a fragile and overdetermined system that must break, so it will.”

by Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: An Amazon Web Services data center in Manassas, Virginia (Nathan Howard / Bloomberg / Getty)

[ed. See also: 

They’re Rich but Not Famous—and They’re Suddenly Everywhere

They’re not billionaires, but they’re still very, very rich.

 
The number of Americans worth tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars has boomed in the past few decades, thanks to a rising stock market, lucrative private investments and swelling valuations for small and midsize businesses. This growing class is now a huge force in the economy, driving the demand for everything from lavish hotel rooms to private jet travel.

“The ultrawealthy have grown really substantially,” said Owen Zidar, a Princeton economics professor who studies wealth. While some of these people made their money in technology or finance and live on the coasts, many others live outside of the highest-cost areas and own small businesses like car dealerships, he said.

 
Here is data on the rise of this group. Wealth measures a household’s assets, like stocks, bank accounts and home equity, minus liabilities like mortgages, car loans and credit-card debt.

More ultrawealthy people

There are about 430,000 U.S. households worth $30 million or more, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Zidar. Within that, there are about 74,000 worth $100 million or more. Over the past few decades, the growth in the number of very rich households has surpassed general population growth.

The Fed’s data runs through 2022 and shows a small dip in some categories of the ultrawealthy in 2019. Many well-off households have further benefited from the big stock market gains of the past few years.

Get rich quick(er)

There are more very rich people in large part because their wealth has grown much faster than everyone else’s. Even adjusted for inflation, the wealth of the top 0.1% of households has grown more than 13-fold over the past 50 years, according to Realtime Inequality, a tracker developed by economists Emmanuel Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman, a professor at the Paris School of Economics. In this analysis, American families with a net worth of $43 million and higher in 2024 are in the top 0.1%.

The bottom 50% have long struggled to build any wealth at all, but they have made some progress.

Average inflation-adjusted wealth turned negative for this group starting in the mid-1990s and then sank further during the 2008-09 financial crisis and housing collapse. It was only after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought stimulus checks and rising home values, that average wealth turned positive for the bottom 50% of households again.

Stocks and businesses

The typical American family leans heavily on homeownership to build their net worth, and homeowners of all wealth levels have benefited from the recent rise in home prices. 

Over time, though, the very wealthy have amassed more wealth, in part because they own the kinds of assets that have risen particularly dramatically. They have a lot of stocks, in some cases because they are top employees of publicly traded companies paid partially in shares. Many also own stakes in private businesses.

 
For the top 0.1%, nearly 72% of their wealth is made up of corporate equities, mutual fund shares and private businesses, according to the Fed. The S&P 500 has more than tripled in the past decade. And many private businesses have seen valuations rise, too.

Boomer wealth boom

Baby boomers collectively have far more wealth than any other living generation. That is largely because they bought homes and stocks decades ago and are benefiting from the long run-up in the values of those assets.

 
About two-thirds of households worth $30 million and up are headed by boomers, according to an analysis of Fed data by Zidar.

Spending it

Because there are so many more multimillionaires, products and services that cater to this group are also booming. Hermès, Brunello Cucinelli and Ferrari all recently reported strong sales from the richest customers, while some companies that target the merely well-off are facing flagging demand. 

by Rachel Louise Ensign, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

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