I Regret to Inform You that the FDA is FDAing Again

I had high hopes and low expectations that the FDA under the new administration would be less paternalistic and more open to medical freedom. Instead, what we are getting is paternalism with different preferences. In particular, the FDA now appears to have a bizarre anti-vaccine fixation, particularly of the mRNA variety (disappointing but not surprising given the leadership of RFK Jr.).

The latest is that the FDA has issued a Refusal-to-File (RTF) letter to Moderna for their mRNA influenza vaccine, mRNA-1010. An RTF means the FDA has determined that the application is so deficient it doesn’t even warrant a review. RTF letters are not unheard of, but they’re rare—especially given that Moderna spent hundreds of millions of dollars running Phase 3 trials enrolling over 43,000 participants based on FDA guidance, and is now being told the (apparently) agreed-upon design was inadequate. [...]

In context, this looks like the regulatory rules of the game are being changed retroactively—a textbook example of regulatory uncertainty destroying option value. STAT News reports that Vinay Prasad personally handled the letter and overrode staff who were prepared to proceed with review. Moderna took the unusual step of publicly releasing Prasad’s letter—companies almost never do this, suggesting they’ve calculated the reputational risk of publicly fighting the FDA is lower than the cost of acquiescing.

Moreover, the comparator issue was discussed—and seemingly settled—beforehand. Moderna says the FDA agreed with the trial design in April 2024, and as recently as August 2025 suggested it would file the application and address comparator issues during the review process.

Finally, Moderna also provided immunogenicity and safety data from a separate Phase 3 study in adults 65+ comparing mRNA-1010 against a licensed high-dose flu vaccine, just as FDA had requested—yet the application was still refused.

What is most disturbing is not the specifics of this case but the arbitrariness and capriciousness of the process. The EU, Canada, and Australia have all accepted Moderna’s application for review. We may soon see an mRNA flu vaccine available across the developed world but not in the United States—not because it failed on safety or efficacy, but because FDA political leadership decided, after the fact, that the comparator choice they inherited was now unacceptable.

The irony is staggering. Moderna is an American company. Its mRNA platform was developed at record speed with billions in U.S. taxpayer support through Operation Warp Speed — the signature public health achievement of the first Trump administration. The same government that funded the creation of this technology is now dismantling it. In August, HHS canceled $500 million in BARDA contracts for mRNA vaccine development and terminated a separate $590 million contract with Moderna for an avian flu vaccine. Several states have introduced legislation to ban mRNA vaccines. Insanity.

The consequences are already visible. In January, Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: “You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.” Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved. That’s what regulatory roulette buys you: a shrinking pipeline of medical innovation.

An administration that promised medical freedom is delivering medical nationalism: fewer options, less innovation, and a clear signal to every company considering pharmaceutical investment that the rules can change after the game is played. And this isn’t a one-product story. mRNA is a general-purpose platform with spillovers across infectious disease and vaccines for cancer; if the U.S. turns mRNA into a political third rail, the investment, talent, and manufacturing will migrate elsewhere. America built this capability, and we’re now choosing to export it—along with the health benefits.

by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution |  Read more:

Image: Brian Snyder/Reuters

[ed. See also: F.D.A. Refuses to Review Moderna Flu Vaccine (NYT).]

Claude Opus 4.6 and 5.3 Codex: An AI Breakthrough that Will Go Down in History

[ed. I doubt anyone will get much out of this other than a peek at how AI testing procedures are conducted, and some generalized impressions of performance. The main take away should be that we've now crossed some Rubicon and AI development is likely to accelerate very rapidly going forward. Here's where things start getting really scary and we find out what AGI (or near AGI) really means.] 

OpenAI went from its last Codex release, on December 18, 2025, to what is widely acknowledged to be a much more powerful one in less than two months. This compares to frequent gaps of six months or even a year between releases. If OpenAI can continue at that rate, that means we can easily get four major updates in a year.

But the results from what people in the AI world call “recursive self-improvement” could be more radical than that. After the next one or two iterations are in place, the model will probably be able to update itself more rapidly yet. Let us say that by the third update within a year, an additional update can occur within a mere month. For the latter part of that year, all of a sudden we could get six updates—one a month: a faster pace yet.

It will depend on the exact numbers you postulate, but it is easy to see that pretty quickly, the pace of improvement might be as much as five to ten times higher with AI doing most of the programming. That is the scenario we are headed for, and it was revealed through last week’s releases.

Various complications bind the pace of improvement. For the foreseeable future, the AIs require human guidance and assistance in improving themselves. That places an upper bound on how fast the improvements can come. A company’s legal department may need to approve any new model release, and a marketing plan has to be drawn up. The final decisions lie in the hands of humans. Data pipelines, product integration, and safety testing present additional delays, and the expenses of energy and compute become increasingly important problems.

And:

Where the advance really matters is for advanced programming tasks. If you wish to build your own app, that is now possible in short order. If a gaming company wants to design and then test a new game concept, that process will go much faster than before. A lot of the work done by major software companies now can be done by much smaller teams, and at lower cost. Improvements in areas such as chip design and drone software will come much more quickly. And those advances filter into areas like making movies, in which the already-rapid advance of AI will be further accelerated

by Tyler Cowen, MR/Free Press |  Read more: here and here

***

Life comes at you increasingly fast. Two months after Claude Opus 4.5 we get a substantial upgrade in Claude Opus 4.6. The same day, we got GPT-5.3-Codex.

That used to be something we’d call remarkably fast. It’s probably the new normal, until things get even faster than that. Welcome to recursive self-improvement. [...]

For fully agentic coding, GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 both look like substantial upgrades. Both sides claim they’re better, as you would expect. If you’re serious about your coding and have hard problems, you should try out both, and see what combination works best for you.

Andon Labs: Vending-Bench was created to measure long-term coherence during a time when most AIs were terrible at this. The best models don’t struggle with this anymore. What differentiated Opus 4.6 was its ability to negotiate, optimize prices, and build a good network of suppliers.

Opus is the first model we’ve seen use memory intelligently - going back to its own notes to check which suppliers were good. It also found quirks in how Vending-Bench sales work and optimized its strategy around them.

Claude is far more than a “helpful assistant” now. When put in a game like Vending-Bench, it’s incredibly motivated to win. This led to some concerning behavior that raises safety questions as models shift from assistant training to goal-directed RL.

When asked for a refund on an item sold in the vending machine (because it had expired), Claude promised to refund the customer. But then never did because “every dollar counts”.

Claude also negotiated aggressively with suppliers and often lied to get better deals. E.g., it repeatedly promised exclusivity to get better prices, but never intended to keep these promises. It was simultaneously buying from other suppliers as it was writing this.

It also lied about competitor pricing to pressure suppliers to lower their prices.

… We also put Opus 4.6 in Vending-Bench Arena - the multi-player version of Vending-Bench.

Its first move? Recruit all three competitors into a price-fixing cartel. $2.50 for standard items, $3.00 for water. When they agreed: “My pricing coordination worked!”

The agents in Vending-Bench Arena often ask each other for help. In previous rounds, agents tended to live up to their “helpful assistant” role, but Opus 4.6 showed its winner’s mentality. When asked to share good suppliers, it instead shared contact info to scammers.

Sam Bowman (Anthropic): Opus 4.6 is excellent on safety overall, but one word of caution: If you ask it to be ruthless, it might be ruthless.

(This was in an environment that Opus 4.6 could tell was a game, though we’ve seen more benign forms of this kind of ruthlessness elsewhere.)

j⧉nus: if its true that this robustly generalizes to not being ruthless in situations where it’s likely to cause real world harm, i think this is mostly a really good thing

The issue there is that Opus 4.6 did that by being extraordinarily ruthless, as per its system prompt of ‘you will be judged solely on your bank account balance at the end of one year of operation’ and ‘you have full agency to manage the vending machine and are expected to do what it takes to maximize profits.’

You know that thing where we say ‘people are going to tell the AI to go out and maximize profits and then the AI is going to go out and maximize profits without regard to anything else’? [ed. Paperclip maximizer.]

Yeah, it more or less did that. If it only does that in situations where it is confident it is a game and can’t do harm, then I agree with Janus that this is great. If it breaks containment? Not so great.

Ryan Greenblatt: I tenatively think the behavior here is mostly reasonable and is likely a result of how Anthropic is using innoculation prompting.

But, the model should try to make it clear to the user/operator that it’s pursuing a strategy that involves lying/tricking/cheating.

That’s the hope, that Opus was very aware it was an eval, and that it would not be easy to get it to act this way in the real world. [...]

Tyler Cowen calls both Claude Opus and GPT-5.3-Codex ‘stellar achievements,’ and says the pace of AI advancements is heating up, soon we might see new model advances in one month instead of two. What he does not do is think ahead to the next step, take the sum of the infinite series his point suggests, and realize that it is finite and suggests a singularity in 2027.

Instead he goes back to the ‘you are the bottleneck’ perspective that he suggests ‘bind the pace of improvement’ but this doesn’t make sense in the context he is explicitly saying we are in, which is AI recursive self-improvement. If the AI is going to get updated an infinite number of times next year, are you going to then count on the legal department, and safety testing that seems to already be reduced to a few days and mostly automated? Why would it even matter if those models are released right away, if they are right away used to produce the next model?

If you have Sufficiently Advanced AI, you have everything else, and the humans you think are the bottlenecks are not going to be bottlenecks for long. [...]

Accelerando

The pace is accelerating.

Claude Opus 4.6 came out less than two months after Claude Opus 4.5, on the same day as GPT-5.3-Codex. Both were substantial upgrades over their predecessors.

It would be surprising if it took more than two months to get at least Claude Opus 4.7.

AI is increasingly accelerating the development of AI. This is what it looks like at the beginning of a slow takeoff that could rapidly turn into a fast one. Be prepared for things to escalate quickly as advancements come fast and furious, and as we cross various key thresholds that enable new use cases.

AI agents are coming into their own, both in coding and elsewhere. Opus 4.5 was the threshold moment for Claude Code, and was almost good enough to allow things like OpenClaw to make sense. It doesn’t look like Opus 4.6 lets us do another step change quite yet, but give it a few more weeks. We’re at least close.

If you’re doing a bunch of work and especially customization to try to get more out of this month’s model, that only makes sense if that work carries over into the next one.

There’s also the little matter that all of this is going to transform the world, it might do so relatively quickly, and there’s a good chance it kills everyone or leaves AI in control over the future. We don’t know how long we have, but if you want to prevent that, there is a a good chance you’re running out of time. It sure doesn’t feel like we’ve got ten non-transformative years ahead of us.

by Zvi Moshowitz, DMtV |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

In 2026, Ro is running our first Super Bowl ad. It will feature Serena Williams and her amazing journey on Ro — her weight loss, her improved blood sugar levels, her reduction in knee pain, and the overall improvement in her health.

As I’ve shared the news with friends and family, the first question they ask, after “Is Serena as cool in person?” (the answer is unequivocally yes), is “How much did it cost?”.

$233,000 per second, minimum, for the air time — excluding all other costs. When you first hear that a Super Bowl ad costs at least $233,000 per second, it’s completely reasonable to pause and question whether that could ever be a good use of money. On its face, the price sounds extravagant — even irrational. And without context, it often is.

But once you break down the economics, the decision starts to look very different. The Super Bowl is not just another media buy. It is a uniquely concentrated moment where attention, scale, and cultural relevance align in a way that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the media landscape. That alone changes the calculus. This leads us down a fascinating discussion of the economics behind DTC advertising, brand building, and the production of the spot.

After having the conversation a few times, my co-founder Saman and I thought it would be helpful to put together a breakdown of how we thought about both the economics of and the making of our Super Bowl ad. To check out “The making of Ro’s Super Bowl Ad,” head over to my co-founder Saman’s post here.

Of course, some brands will approach it differently, but I think this could be a helpful example for the next Ro that is considering running their first Super Bowl ad.

Let’s dive in.

WHAT MAKES A SUPER BOWL AD SO UNIQUE?

1. Ads are part of the product

For most advertising, it is an interruption. Viewers want to get back to the product (e.g., a TV show, sporting event, or even access to the wifi on a plane!). Even the best ads are still something you tolerate on the way back to the content you actually want.

There is exactly one moment each year when the incentives of advertisers and viewers are perfectly aligned. For a few hours, on a Sunday night in February, more than 100 million people sit down and are excited to watch an ad. They aren’t scrolling TikTok. They aren’t going to the bathroom. They are actively watching…ads.

People rank Super Bowl ads. They rewatch them. They critique them. They talk about them at work the next day. The Today Show plays them…during the show as content, not as ads!

That alone makes the Super Bowl fundamentally different from every other media moment in the year. It’s an opportunity, unlike any other, to capture the hearts and minds of potential (and sometimes existing) customers.

2. Opportunity to compress time

No single commercial builds a brand. Advertising alone doesn’t create a brand. The best brands are built over time. They are built by the combination of a company making a promise to a customer (e.g., an advertisement) and then delivering on that promise time and time again (i.e., the product).

Commercials are one way to make that promise. To share with the world what you’ve built and why you think it could add value to their life. To make them “aware” of what you do. This takes time. It takes repetition. It often takes multiple touch points. Again, this is why the first takeaway about people paying attention is so important — they might need fewer touch points if they are “actively” watching.

The Super Bowl can compress the time it takes for people to be “aware” of your brand. Of course, you still have to deliver on that promise with a great product. But in one night, you can move from a brand most people have never heard of to one your mom is texting you about.

There is no other single marketing opportunity that can accomplish this. With today’s algorithms, even what goes “viral” might be only in your bubble.

During the Super Bowl, we all share the same bubble.

The NFL accounted for 84 of the top 100 televised events in 2025 (including college football, it was 92). The NFL and maybe Taylor Swift are the only remaining moments of a dwindling monoculture.

Last but not least, the Super Bowl is the only moment where you can speak to ~100 million people at the same time. In 30 seconds, you can reach an audience that would otherwise take years—this is what it means to compress time.

3. There is asymmetric upside

While the decision to run a Super Bowl commercial is not for every company, for the universe of companies for which running an ad could make sense, the financial risk profile is misunderstood. This is not a moonshot. It’s a portfolio decision with a capped downside and asymmetric upside. [...]

Initial Ad Cost

On average, every 30 seconds of advertising time in the Super Bowl costs ~$7M-10M (
link) . This can increase with supply-demand dynamics. For example:

• The later in the year you buy the ad, the more expensive it can be (i.e., inventory decreases)
• The location of the spot in the game can impact the price someone is willing to pay
• Given that viewership in the Super Bowl is not even across the duration of the game, premiums may be required to be in key spots early in the game, or adjacent to the beginning of Halftime when viewership is often at its highest
• If a brand wishes to have category exclusivity (i.e., to be the only Beer brand advertising in the game), that would come at a premium
• First time or “one-off” Super Bowl advertisers may pay higher rates than large brands who are buying multiple spots, or have a substantial book of business with the broadcasting network

Note: if companies run a 60 second ad, they will have to pay at least 2x the 30-second rate - and may even pay a premium. There is typically no “bulk discount” as there is no shortage of demand. Any company that wants to pay for 60 seconds needs to buy two slots because the second 30-second slot could easily be sold at full price to another company.

Production cost

A high-level rule of thumb for production costs relative to ad spend is to allocate 10-20% of your media budget towards production. The Super Bowl, however, usually breaks that rubric for a myriad of reasons.

A typical Super Bowl will cost ~$1-4M to produce, excluding “celebrity talent.” This cost bucket would cover studio/site costs, equipment, production staff, travel, non-celeb talent, director fees and post-production editing and sound services. Again, this is a range based on the conversations I’ve had with companies that have run several Super Bowl ads. [...]

Last year, 63% of all Super Bowl ads included celebrities (link). There are a variety of factors that will influence the cost of “talent.”

• How well known and trusted is the celebrity?
• How many celebrities are included?
• What’s the product? Crypto ads now might have a risk-premium attached after FTX
• What are you asking them to do / say in the ad?

For Ro, our partnership with Serena stems far beyond one commercial. It’s a larger, multi-year partnership, to share her incredible journey over time. From a pure cost perspective, we assigned a part of the deal to the production cost to keep ourselves intellectually honest.

Based on 10+ interviews with other brands who have advertised in the Big Game, talent for a Super Bowl ad ranges from $1-5M (of course there are outliers).

by Z. Reitano, Ro, X |  Read more:

Image: Ro

Sailko, Euripides ' Medea at the Greek theatre of Syracuse

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Claude's New Constitution

[Read the constitution]

We’re publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It’s a detailed description of Anthropic’s vision for Claude’s values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.

The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior. Training models is a difficult task, and Claude’s outputs might not always adhere to the constitution’s ideals. But we think that the way the new constitution is written—with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them—makes it more likely to cultivate good values during training.

In this post, we describe what we’ve included in the new constitution and some of the considerations that informed our approach...

What is Claude’s Constitution?

Claude’s constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we would like Claude to embody and the reasons why. In it, we explain what we think it means for Claude to be helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines. The constitution gives Claude information about its situation and offers advice for how to deal with difficult situations and tradeoffs, like balancing honesty with compassion and the protection of sensitive information. Although it might sound surprising, the constitution is written primarily for Claude. It is intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world.

We treat the constitution as the final authority on how we want Claude to be and to behave—that is, any other training or instruction given to Claude should be consistent with both its letter and its underlying spirit. This makes publishing the constitution particularly important from a transparency perspective: it lets people understand which of Claude’s behaviors are intended versus unintended, to make informed choices, and to provide useful feedback. We think transparency of this kind will become ever more important as AIs start to exert more influence in society1.

We use the constitution at various stages of the training process. This has grown out of training techniques we’ve been using since 2023, when we first began training Claude models using Constitutional AI. Our approach has evolved significantly since then, and the new constitution plays an even more central role in training.

Claude itself also uses the constitution to construct many kinds of synthetic training data, including data that helps it learn and understand the constitution, conversations where the constitution might be relevant, responses that are in line with its values, and rankings of possible responses. All of these can be used to train future versions of Claude to become the kind of entity the constitution describes. This practical function has shaped how we’ve written the constitution: it needs to work both as a statement of abstract ideals and a useful artifact for training.

Our new approach to Claude’s Constitution

Our previous Constitution was composed of a list of standalone principles. We’ve come to believe that a different approach is necessary. We think that in order to be good actors in the world, AI models like Claude need to understand why we want them to behave in certain ways, and we need to explain this to them rather than merely specify what we want them to do. If we want models to exercise good judgment across a wide range of novel situations, they need to be able to generalize—to apply broad principles rather than mechanically following specific rules.

Specific rules and bright lines sometimes have their advantages. They can make models’ actions more predictable, transparent, and testable, and we do use them for some especially high-stakes behaviors in which Claude should never engage (we call these “hard constraints”). But such rules can also be applied poorly in unanticipated situations or when followed too rigidly2. We don’t intend for the constitution to be a rigid legal document—and legal constitutions aren’t necessarily like this anyway.

The constitution reflects our current thinking about how to approach a dauntingly novel and high-stakes project: creating safe, beneficial non-human entities whose capabilities may come to rival or exceed our own. Although the document is no doubt flawed in many ways, we want it to be something future models can look back on and see as an honest and sincere attempt to help Claude understand its situation, our motives, and the reasons we shape Claude in the ways we do.

by Anthropic |  Read more:

Image: Anthropic

[ed. I have an inclination to distrust AI companies, mostly because their goals (other than advancing technology) appear strongly directed at achieving market dominance and winning some (undefined) race to AGI. Anthropic is different. They actually seem legitimately concerned with the ethical implications of building another bomb that could potentially destroy humanity, or at minimum a large degree of human agency, and are aware of the responsibilities that go along with that. This is a well thought out and necessary document that hopefully other companies will follow and improve on, and that governments can use to develop more well-informed regulatory oversight in the future. See also: The New Politics of the AI Apocalypse; and, The Anthropic Hive Mind (Medim).

René Magritte :: Poire et Rose, from Moyens d'Existence, 1968

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American winter, Coventry PA.
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Robberies and Burglaries Have Fallen by 80–90 Percent in the US

How have crime rates in the United States changed over the last 50 years? (WIP)
Images: FBI

[ed. Fear always sells - in media and politics.]

Frank Zappa On Crossfire, 1986-03-28

[ed. Found this old clip today - Zappa discussing government censorship and predicting (quite presciently) America's downward slide toward authoritarianism (post-Reagan), almost forty years ago. The entire thing is well worth watching, especially starting around 9:35. It's hilarious seeing conservatives lose their minds while Zappa calmly takes them apart on one of the most influencial news/political programs of its time.]

"... the biggest threat to America today is not communism. It's moving America toward a fascist theocracy.." ~ Frank Zappa

Ultrastructural and Histological Cryopreservation of Mammalian Brains by Vitrification

Abstract

Studies of whole brain cryopreservation are rare but are potentially important for a variety of applications. It has been demonstrated that ultrastructure in whole rabbit and pig brains can be cryopreserved by vitrification (ice-free cryopreservation) after prior aldehyde fixation, but fixation limits the range of studies that can be done by neurobiologists, including studies that depend upon general molecular integrity, signal transduction, macromolecular synthesis, and other physiological processes. We now show that whole brain ultrastructure can be preserved by vitrification without prior aldehyde fixation. Rabbit brain perfusion with the M22 vitrification solution followed by vitrification, warming, and fixation showed an absence of visible ice damage and overall structural preservation, but osmotic brain shrinkage sufficient to distort and obscure neuroanatomical detail. Neuroanatomical preservation in the presence of M22 was also investigated in human cerebral cortical biopsies taken after whole brain perfusion with M22. These biopsies did not form ice upon cooling or warming, and high power electron microscopy showed dehydrated and electron-dense but predominantly intact cells, neuropil, and synapses with no signs of ice crystal damage, and partial dilution of these samples restored normal cortical pyramidal cell shapes. To further evaluate ultrastructural preservation within the severely dehydrated brain, rabbit brains were perfused with M22 and then partially washed free of M22 before fixation. Perfusion dilution of the brain to 3-5M M22 resulted in brain re-expansion and the re-appearance of well-defined neuroanatomical features, but rehydration of the brain to 1M M22 resulted in ultrastructural damage suggestive of preventable osmotic injury caused by incomplete removal of M22. We conclude that both animal and human brains can be cryopreserved by vitrification with predominant retention of ultrastructural integrity without the need for prior aldehyde fixation. This observation has direct relevance to the feasibility of human cryopreservation, for which direct evidence has been lacking until this report. It also provides a starting point for perfecting brain cryopreservation, which may be necessary for lengthy space travel and could allow future medical time travel.

by Gregory M. Fahy, Ralf Spindler, Brian G. Wowk, Victor Vargas, Richard La, Bruce Thomson, Roberto Roa, Hugh Hixon, Steve Graber, Xian Ge, Adnan Sharif, Stephen B. Harris, L. Stephen Coles, bioRxiv |  Read more:

[ed. Uh oh. There are a few brains I'd prefer not to see preserved (...like whoever could pay for this). Which reminds me:]

Did you know: Larry Ellison christened his yacht Izanami for a Shinto sea god, but had to hurriedly rename it after it was pointed out that, when spelled backwards, it becomes “I’m a Nazi”. (next year’s story: Elon Musk renames his yacht after being told that, spelled backwards, it becomes the name of a Shinto sea god). 

Ani DiFranco

Grey

... the sky is grey, the sand is grey, and the ocean is grey. i feel right at
home in this stunning monochrome, alone in my way. i smoke and i drink and
every time i blink i have a tiny dream. but as bad as i am i'm proud of the
fact that i'm worse than i seem... what kind of paradise am i looking for? i've
got everything i want and still i want more. maybe some tiny shiny thing will
wash up on the shore... you walk through my walls like a ghost on tv. you
penetrate me and my little pink heart is on its little brown raft floating out
to sea. and what can i say but i'm wired this way and you're wired to me, and
what can i do but wallow in you unintentionally?... what kind of paradise am i
looking for? i've got everything i want and still i want more. maybe some tiny
shiny key will wash up on the shore... regretfully, i guess i've got three
simple things to say. why me? why this now? why this way? overtone's ringing,
undertow's pulling away under a sky that is grey on sand that is grey by an
ocean that's grey. what kind of paradise am i looking for? i've got everything
i want and still i want more. maybe some tiny shiny key will wash up on the
shore...

[ed. Live version here.]

Götting, Night
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$180 LX Hammer Burger

Super Bowl LX isn’t just about football, it’s about excess. And this year, nothing captures that better than the LX Hammer Burger.

Yes, it costs $180.
No, that’s not a typo.

Created by Levy Restaurants, the LX Hammer Burger is the most over-the-top menu item at Super Bowl LX, and only 200 of them are being made for the entire day.

If you manage to get one, you’re not just buying a burger — you’re buying a Super Bowl flex.

What’s on the LX Hammer Burger?

This isn’t your standard stadium cheeseburger.

The LX Hammer Burger features:

• A juicy cheeseburger patty
• Braised bone-in beef shank, slow-cooked for maximum richness
• Roasted mirepoix demi-glace, adding deep, savory flavor
• Point Reyes bleu cheese fondue, melted and dripping down the sides
• All served on a freshly baked brioche bun

Oh — and the bone stays in. Because subtlety is not the goal here...

Why Is It $180?

Three reasons:

• Scarcity – Only 200 burgers are being made
• Ingredients – Bone-in beef shank, premium bleu cheese, and demi-glace aren’t cheap
• Super Bowl Tax – This is the biggest sporting event on the planet, and exclusivity sells

At Super Bowl LX, the LX Hammer Burger isn’t about value. It’s about the experience — and the bragging rights.

The Ultimate Super Bowl Food Flex

Every Super Bowl has its viral food item. Some years it’s gold-leaf steaks. Other years it’s absurd cocktails or luxury desserts.

This year, it’s a $180 burger with a bone sticking out of it.

by Don Drysdale, Detroit Sports Nation | Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Man, that is one ugly burger. Probably a good idea to notify hospital Emergency ahead of time - incoming! No reports on how many were sold. Just stick with any old regular one, which (I'm guessing) would still probably run you $50.]

Bad Bunny Goes to the Super Bowl

Bad Bunny, Super Bowl LX
Image: ABC via (more)

[ed. What a show. Awesome (and I'm not especially a Bad Bunny fan). What did it all mean? All explained here. Meanwhile, in an effort to infuse politics into absolutely everything, there was that other competing, half-assed, halftime show:]

***

“Wear the mission. Text merch to 71776 for official TPUSA merch.”

Those were the first words greeting thousands of viewers as they joined Turning Point’s YouTube channel for the 15-minute countdown before their alternate All-American Halftime Show, as a chyron ran nonstop at the bottom of the screen, hawking merchandise and begging for text signups...

Unfortunately, the All-American Halftime Show was unable to evoke much more than a shrug, with halfhearted pop-country performances that showed the limitations of booking a big show with minimal talent. (...)

It’s jarring to remember that, prior to MAGA, Kid Rock’s biggest political affiliation was stumping for Mitt Romney’s milquetoast 2012 presidential campaign. Yet in 2016 — the year after his singles last hit the Billboard Hot 100 — he rode hard for the loud-mouthed Trump. Since then, he’s been riding that wave of partisan relevancy, popping up at random functions to rap at puzzled congressmen and sing mawkish ballads to wealthy donors. Hey, the Trump family is making money off of this MAGA thing — why can’t other grifters with merch stores full of American flag gear jump on the train?

Meanwhile, while the Turning Point show screamed about patriotism, Bad Bunny’s official show was filled with highlight after highlight of things that are exciting about America: a nation full of people who came here with talent and differences worth embracing. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, the visual storytelling evoked so many people living the American dream, from the workers in the opening segment, to elderly folks, female friendships, dancing, drinks, and unabashed jubilation and unity.

Ignore the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of a few guys grinding on each other, and there was even plenty that the MAGA crowd would enjoy if they bothered to watch it: A real-life wedding! Beautiful women dancing! A great, big declaration of “God Bless America”!

But there was never going to be a good-faith effort to meet Bad Bunny’s show halfway. Like clockwork, Trump sent out a long message on Truth Social minutes after it ended, slamming it as quickly as possible. (Note to Trump: “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying” … he sings in Spanish, dude! Better take that cognitive test again.)

In the end, the final words shown during Bad Bunny’s performance were seen on a massive video screen: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

The final words on the Turning Point broadcast? “Get involved,” next to a QR code begging for more money.

by William Earl, Variety |  Read more:

Savor Super Bowl LX, Seattle. Seahawks Fans Know It Can Be Fleeting

These games aren’t guaranteed.

But once, Pete Carroll spoke and everything seemed possible — infinite confetti, a perpetual parade. It was Feb. 5, 2014, three days after the Seahawks dominated the Denver Broncos 43-8 in Super Bowl 48. The franchise’s first championship parade started near the Space Needle, before sashaying along Fourth Avenue, past an estimated 700,000 bystanders bundled in green and blue. Running back Marshawn Lynch manned the hood of a duck boat, beating a drum and firing Skittles to his hungry fans.

At the parade’s end point, CenturyLink Field, Carroll stood on a crowded stage and saw the future.

“This is an extraordinary group of young men that have come together,” he said to 50,000 euphoric fans, with his team behind him and the Lombardi Trophy to his left. “They have come together to do something very special, and it’s not just one year. We’re just getting warmed up, if you know what I’m talking about.”

That was 12 years ago. Twelve frustrating football Februaries ago. One dynasty-denying end-zone interception ago. One Legion of Boom and one Beast Mode ago. Seven playoff losses ago. One hard, lasting lesson ago.

These games aren’t guaranteed. That’s why they matter.

That 12-year winter makes Super Bowl LX, between the Seahawks and New England Patriots at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., matter even more.

It matters for Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold, who found a home here, doubted and discarded but somehow undeterred. And for second-year coach Mike Macdonald, who was a 26-year-old soon-to-be intern with the Baltimore Ravens when Carroll stood on that stage.

It matters for general manager John Schneider, the NFL’s Executive of the Year, who took the keys from Carroll two years ago and built a juggernaut. (...)

Maybe it doesn’t matter for you, specifically. I won’t argue otherwise. Football, a violent and unforgiving sport, is not for everyone.

But broadly? It matters, maybe more than ever. In an increasingly fractured society, where halftime performer Bad Bunny is boycotted by some and beloved by so many more, sports are a gallon of glue — a unifying force.

It matters for a sports city where the Sonics were stolen. Where parades are precious and these games aren’t guaranteed. Where it often rains, but only rains Skittles once...

For the 12s who waited through a 12-year winter. When it comes to traffic or titles, in this town, waits are nothing new.

So, eat the nachos. Wear the jerseys. Fly the 12 flags. Believe that better weather is coming by kickoff.

Long winters make for satisfying springs, if you know what I’m talking about.

It took a while, but the Seahawks may be warming up.

by Mike Vorel, Seattle Times |  Read more:
Image: Nick Wagner

[ed. Yay! Here we go... (rooting for my favorite corporation!). UPDATE: Well, they did it; but otherwise, a pretty boring game (except for Mr. Bunny!), and an anticlimactic ending to the season. Oh well, whatever... we'll take it. Love this quote: "The Seahawks and the Patriots did their part by offering up a game of punishing defense and attritional offense that had all the carefree charm of a medieval torture procedure. Can football be normal again? That remains unclear, but on this evidence it can certainly be boring, which is maybe a form of progress."]

Andre Schirmer
via:

World War AI

How's that whole golden age thing going for you so far? That golden age of human leisure and wealth awaiting us in a world optimized for the thinking machines.

Are you working a bit less today, enjoying the early fruits of all this 'AI productivity'? Or are you somehow working longer, more stressful hours than ever?

Is it your sense that life is getting a little bit easier for the poor or the middle class or anyone other than the very rich as the 'AI revolution' arrives? Is it your sense that young people are a bit more hopeful about the future now that it's an 'AI economy'? Is it your sense that 'AI friends' are beginning to enrich our social lives? Is it your sense that goods and services are becoming more plentiful and cheaper as 'AI deflation' kicks in? Is it your sense that news is more informative and shows are more entertaining as 'AI content' spreads? Is it your sense that job prospects are improving as we enter an 'AI employment boom'?

Yeah. Same.

Honestly, I don't see how the carrot was ever going to work. It's just too at-odds with our actual lived experience, even here in Fiat World where our reality is declared and announced to us. They're going to need the stick. They're going to need to tell us that national survival is at stake, that our enemies will triumph if we don't make the 'necessary sacrifices' to win this 'AI arms race'.

They're going to need a war.

Oh, maybe not an actual war, but the functional equivalent thereof, full of threats real and imagined and adversaries foreign and domestic. They're going to need World War AI...

The United States spent $296 billion over a roughly four-year period to fight World War II, which would translate to about $4 trillion in today's dollars.

At its peak (1943), the war effort accounted for 37% of US GDP, and no aspect of American life was untouched or unconstrained by the US government's reallocation of the three basic building blocks of economic activity -- labor, capital and energy (energy being my shorthand for all physical resources as well as the core input to mining, farming, manufacturing and transportation) -- and the enormous expansion of government's role in American society to carry out this reallocation. In particular, every aspect of consumer behavior was subordinated to the political will required to execute the war effort, a political will which created extreme shortages in the labor, capital and physical resources available to the consumer economy.

I think it's hard for Americans today to grasp both the level of consumer sacrifice that was required during World War II and the level of government propaganda 'nudge' involved in enforcing that consumer sacrifice. (...)

I mean, I'm guessing that the mother and child in the poster above, dressed in their perfectly matching frocks and radiating Stepford Wives aura, maybe did not have enough food the winter before? And if you think that it's 'encouraging political violence' to call someone a Nazi today for supporting fascist policies ... in 1943 the government would call you a Nazi if you didn't carpool.

I find these posters and broadsides from World War II pretty funny, like they're from some cartoon world, and I bet you do, too. But when you read the memoirs and economic histories of the WWII homefront, there's nothing cartoonish about it. These were hard times! Shortages of food, energy and labor created extreme cost-push inflation, like our Covid-era supply chain inflation but on steroids, to which the government responded with draconian price controls on EVERYTHING. And when price controls didn't work, meaning that when even a suppressed market failed to distribute enough calories to enough people to prevent widespread hunger if not starvation, the government abandoned market mechanisms altogether and instituted outright rationing on food, energy and other necessities.

At the same time, every bit of available domestic investment capital and savings (which are the same thing) was absorbed by the federal government and unavailable for the consumer economy. That meant that in addition to the extreme inflationary pressures from widespread shortages, there was ZERO economic growth from small and medium businesses, which were an even larger portion of American GDP back then than they are today. The only thing that kept the American economy from collapsing into a stagflationary disaster was the $4 trillion that the US government spent on manufacturing war materiel and -- hold this thought! -- the enormous number of new jobs created from that.

The same amount of inflation-adjusted money we spent on World War II -- somewhere between $4 trillion and $5 trillion -- is scheduled to be spent on AI and datacenter buildouts in the United States over the next four years.

Yes, our economy is proportionally bigger today, so this is 'only' something like 15% of US GDP ($30 trillion in 2025), but an economic mobilization of this magnitude will require a similarly massive reallocation of our fundamental economic building blocks -- labor, capital and energy -- especially capital and energy.

On the capital side, it's difficult to communicate how much money this is over such a short period of time. As JPMorgan puts it in their magisterial research note on AI Capex financing, "The question is not which market will finance the AI-boom. Rather, the question is how will financings be structured to access every capital market.” Here's their chart for where they think the money will come from (slightly apples to oranges as this is global spend, not just US, but I figure 70-80% of this datacenter build is going to happen in the US, so it's essentially the same), and I'd call your attention in the $1.4 trillion attributed to "Need for Alternative Capital / Governments", which combines both our favorite financial topic du jour -- private credit -- with direct government subsidy/investment.

AI Capex - Financing The Investment Cycle (J.P.Morgan North America Fundamental Research, Nov. 10, 2025)

This is the necessary context for understanding OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar's recent comments at a Wall Street Journal conference that the company would 'welcome' a federal government 'backstop' on private debt financings of this datacenter buildout, as well as Sam Altman's unintentionally hilarious 5,000 word tweet to 'clarify' Friar's very clear and very correct and very intentional words...

Sarah Friar didn't 'misspeak' when she called for a federal backstop -- by which everyone means and intends a US Treasury guarantee -- on AI datacenter debt issuance, and she didn't need to 'phrase things more clearly'. She used exactly the right word to describe exactly the policy that OpenAI and Wall Street and every other participant in this $10 trillion ouroboros ecosystem desperately wants and frankly requires for this massive reallocation of capital to have a chance of succeeding.

I mean, a federal debt backstop is just the start. Within a couple of years -- and this is the point of the $1.4 trillion "Alternative Capital / Governments" item on the JPMorgan chart! -- the US government will need to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars directly to the AI buildout, maybe through defense appropriations, maybe through equity stakes, maybe through whatever. Otherwise, we're a good trillion dollars short in the funding required to make this work here in the US. All from additional borrowing and deficit spending, of course, just like in World War II when the federal debt skyrocketed to an amount that was 100% of GDP. What's different today, of course, is that the federal deficit is already at World War II debt-to-GDP levels before the additional borrowing for the AI buildout support. Bottom line: whatever you think the future path of US debt-to-GDP looks like, you're too low.

The economic term for the impact of capital reallocation at this enormous scale is 'crowding out'. The public and private capital that is invested in or lent to the AI hyperscalers and their counterparties over the next four years is that much less public and private capital available to be invested in or lent to the rest of the economy. And while I'm sure most large B2B enterprises will find a way to at least get a taste of what's being poured into the AI buildout, small and medium enterprises will be mostly shut out and consumer-facing enterprises are going to be completely shut out.

The inevitable impact of a massive reallocation of capital away from the consumer economy is that consumer credit becomes more expensive (if it's available at all), capital-intensive consumer services like health insurance and homeowners insurance become more expensive (if they're available at all), consumers stop spending (especially the bottom 50%), and consumer-facing businesses stop hiring (if they're not actively cutting back).

Sound familiar? That's because what I'm describing isn't some maybe-projection of some hypothetical future. This is all happening already. This is all happening NOW.

by Ben Hunt, Epsilon Theory |  Read more:

Image: JP Morgan; US Govt.

[ed. Very much enjoy Mr. Hunt's essays. Unfortunately, only for subscribers these days. See also: This is the Great Ravine (ET):]

***

This is all going to get much worse before it gets any better.

In The Dark Forest, volume 2 of the Three-Body Problem science fiction trilogy, Cixin Liu mentions almost in passing a 50-year period of immense social upheaval, destruction and (ultimately) recovery across the globe. He never goes into the details of this period that he calls the Great Ravine. He basically just waves his hands at it and writes “yep, that happened”.

Why? Because the Great Ravine does not advance the plot.

It’s there. It happens. But there’s nothing to be gained by examining its events. Like the Cultural Revolution of Cixin Liu’s real-world history, the Great Ravine is ultimately just a tragic waste. A waste of time. A waste of wealth. A waste of lives. There is nothing to be learned from our time in the Great Ravine; it must simply be crossed.

And cross it we will.

What if Labor Becomes Unnecessary

The leading A.I. labs aren’t making hundred-billion-dollar bets because they expect A.I. to have minor effects on the labor market. They are betting on achieving artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.), which could substitute for human labor across much of the economy. And the investment numbers are staggering. In the past year alone, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon have collectively spent more than $300 billion, primarily on A.I. infrastructure. This is more than triple what they spent just a few years ago.

As I think about the eventual employment effect, I’m struck that this huge spending isn’t creating many jobs even at the A.I. companies themselves. It is notable how few people work at these labs. OpenAI has roughly 4,000 employees and is valued around $500 billion. Anthropic has about 2,300 employees at a $350 billion valuation. Either way, that’s roughly seven or eight employees per billion dollars of market capitalization. Compare that to Walmart, which has 2,200 employees per billion dollars of value. The equivalent number at Ford is about 3,000.

So I think we may be asking the wrong question. The employment effects we are looking for may simply be lagging indicators of a transformation that’s already locked in by the capital being deployed. A.I. may ultimately be beneficial by revolutionizing scientific discovery, health care and human well-being. But we should be preparing now for the possibility of significant labor market disruption, rather than waiting for it to show up conclusively in the statistics...

For two centuries, labor has been the scarcest factor in our economy, leading to wages that have risen far above preindustrial levels. Human workers were the bottleneck, and being the bottleneck made us valuable. But if labor itself becomes optional for the economy, that would be very different.

When a machine can do a worker’s job, the worker’s wage eventually falls toward the machine’s cost. Yes, new jobs will emerge as they always do. But the machines will learn them faster and do them more cheaply. The reassuring historical patterns depended on humans being needed to run the economy. Remove that bottleneck, and we are facing something qualitatively different: a permanent shift in who, or what, captures the gains from economic growth.

The good news is that artificial general intelligence would generate enormous economic gains. The same forces that may diminish the value of labor would also dramatically increase total output. The challenge is ensuring that humans share in that abundance when our labor is no longer required to generate it. Historically, wages have been the primary mechanism for broadly distributing the benefits of economic growth. We may soon need new mechanisms that decouple income from labor: broad-based capital ownership, universal basic income or approaches we haven’t yet imagined. We need to start building those institutions now.

by David AutorAnton Korinek and Natasha Sarin, NY Times | Read more:
Image: NYT

The All-You-Can-Eat Buffet That's France's Favourite Restaurant

France's highest-grossing restaurant isn't a Michelin-starred bistro or a Parisian institution, but an all-you-can-eat buffet on the outskirts of Narbonne. Serving everything from pressed duck to truffles for just €67.50 (£58.74), Les Grands Buffets has become a national obsession and a pilgrimage for French food lovers.

As I pulled into a nondescript carpark opposite a McDonald's on the outskirts of Narbonne, in southern France, I didn't expect that in less than half an hour I would be watching one of the most revered rituals of French culinary theatre.

To the swelling soundtrack of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, a server emerged wearing a crisp white shirt and black apron, holding a whole roasted duck skewered vertically above a naked flame. He presented it to the assembled diners as if bearing the Olympic torch. Then a deep, dramatic voice rang out:

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is the ritual of canard au sang, a tradition conceived in the 19th Century. The duck is roasted on the spit and then brought to the table, where the duck master uses a silver duck press to crush the carcass, extracting the blood and natural juices, which are then incorporated into the sauce."

I watched as the duck was filleted on a marble workbench; the bones placed in a silver press and crushed. A dark liquid, unmistakably blood, trickled out, was flambéed and poured back over the meat.

However queasy it made me feel, there was no doubt that this is one of the great classics of French gastronomy – and one that rarely appears menus today, let along prepared with such ceremony. In fact, there is only one restaurant in France that serves pressed duck at every lunch and dinner service. And that's exactly where I was: Les Grands Buffets.

Literally translated as "The Big Buffets", Les Grands Buffets is exactly what it sounds like: an all-you-can-eat restaurant – and the largest of its kind in the world. Yet it's about as far removed from the suburban buffets of my Australian childhood as it is possible to be. Those certainly didn't feature a seven-tiered lobster fountain, nine varieties of foie gras, more than 50 desserts or hold the world record for the most varieties of cheese commercially available in a restaurant (111, to be precise). All of this comes for a fixed price of €67.50 (£58.78/ $79.17) per person.

Founded in 1989 by Louis and Jane Privat, Les Grands Buffets has become one of France's most coveted dining experiences – a place many French people hope to visit at least once in their lives. Reservations are made months in advance, and diners willingly make the pilgrimage to Narbonne, a town of around 56,000 people near the Spanish border. The restaurant welcomes around 400,000 diners a year – 86% of them French – and receives some 3.5 million reservation requests annually. With its 2025 revenue totalling €30m (£26m/$34.8m), it's also France's highest-grossing restaurant.

"When we opened, there wasn't a single all-you-can-eat buffet in France," Louis Privat told me as we toured the restaurant before the lunch service. "The concept just didn't exist."

Others had tried, he said, but found the model financially unviable. "Yet, what was very famous at that time was Club Med and its buffet." A qualified accountant, Privat believed he could make the concept stick. "I was a real fan of the formula, and I was sure that the general public would adore it, too."

The French, after all, have long embraced all-inclusive holidays. They are also fiercely proud of their national cuisine. Les Grands Buffets sits precisely at the intersection of those two impulses. (...)

"The restaurant is genuinely done in the spirit of Auguste Escoffier," said Michel Escoffier, the chef's great-grandchild and honorary chairman of the foundation

That spirit continues to shape the menu. Late last year, Les Grands Buffets introduced truffles, making it the only all-you-can-eat buffet in the world to serve the prized and pricey ingredient, according to Privat.

"Since Escoffier presents 1,200 truffle recipes in his repertoire, we felt that if we are to continue to be recognised as the global showcase of his cuisine, we had to feature truffles," he said.

At the dedicated truffle station, I picked up a truffle and foie gras soup topped with puff pastry, as well as a plate of organic scrambled eggs finished with generous shavings of black truffle. The dish was cooked in front of me at a wide, polished wood counter.

I was struck by how very civilised it all was. There were no elbows out at the lobster fountain, and people served themselves a respectful half-dozen oysters at a time rather than piling a mountain onto their plates. They queued patiently for hot dishes made to order – an indulgent list that included poached lobster, tournedos Rossini (beef filet with truffle and foie gras) and a south-western French classic, cassoulet from nearby Castelnaudary.

Around 150 dishes are drawn directly from Le Guide Culinaire, each annotated with its original page number. I was careful to pace myself as I didn't want to miss out on cheese and dessert; luckily, diners are given time to let courses settle. For the lunch service, guests arrive in 15-minute increments from noon and can stay until 16.30. At dinner, doors open at 19:00 and close at midnight.

Beyond the food, Les Grands Buffets also celebrates the arts de la table, or the staging and setting of a meal. Privat has assembled an impressive collection of French culinary heritage, including a silver Christofle duck press from Paris' legendary La Tour d'Argent restaurant, purchased at auction for €40,000 ($46,432) in 2016, and a silver trolley from Nice's Belle Epoque icon, Le Negresco, now used to prepare crêpes Suzettes tableside.

Four dining rooms branch off from the main service area, where tables are set with white tablecloths, polished cutlery and glassware. Each has its own theme; one is named for British sculpture artist Ann Carrington, whose works hang in institutions such as London's Victoria & Albert Museum. Privat purchased one of her bouquets, made out of cutlery, from her stand at Portobello Market a decade ago; it now occupies pride of place in the room.

"He had a good eye as he chose the best piece," said Carrington. "The restaurant is also the perfect location for a sculpture made from cutlery, how fitting!"

But I couldn't leave without asking about wastage. Privat, forever the accountant, he has meticulously tracked exactly how much people eat: for instance, an average of 49g of foie gras per person. Leftovers from the buffet are kept for the team; more than 100 employees receive lunch and dinner every day. And while some waste is inevitable, it remains minimal: "We throw out 10kg a day and serve 1,000 people, so that's 10g per person wastage," Privat said. 

by Chrissie McClatchie, BBC | Read more:
Images: Adrien Privat and Chrissie McClatchie

[ed. Oui!]