Thursday, February 26, 2026
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
Political Amnesia
The Trump voters telling pollsters they never voted for him.
There is a curious polling phenomenon where a nontrivial share of respondents falsely claim to have voted for the winner of the last election. Whether they’re lying, misremembering, or rewriting history, “winner’s recall” is common enough that many reputable pollsters have observed it in past elections.
In our national polling of registered voters, though, we’re finding something different: a nontrivial chunk of people who are mad at Trump seem to suddenly have amnesia and no longer admit to having voted for him in 2024.
Voters abandoning the winning candidate is a pretty big reversal of a well-established phenomenon. But we now have enough data to suggest that it’s both real and the direct result of Trump’s unpopularity.
Let’s back up for a second. How do we even know who people voted for in the first place?
The day after the 2024 election, our polling partner Verasight collected data from every respondent in its panel about whom they voted for. For each new recruit who joined its pool post-2024, it asked for 2024 vote choice as part of the signup process.
In other words, a respondent’s 2024 vote is recorded as part of their profile at a time when it was fresh in their memory. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times explained, this kind of logging of past vote is more reliable (and significantly less noisy) than asking someone who they voted for months (or even years) down the line.
But every survey, we also separately ask respondents whom they voted for so that we can see how people’s responses and memories drift and diverge from reality over time.
Here’s what we’re finding: six percent of Trump voters — as determined by the recorded vote data we have, which we’ll treat as the ground truth — don’t even admit to voting for him in the last election.
The evidence suggests that unhappiness with Trump’s performance in office is the reason these voters don’t admit to having voted for him any longer.
Approximately 15% of Trump’s 2024 voters disapproved of his job performance. Among this group, almost one in four didn’t admit to having voted for the president. Thirteen percent even falsely claimed to have voted for Kamala Harris, while 12% claimed they actually didn’t vote at all.
But among the 84% who voted for Trump and still approve of him, 98% correctly recalled having voted for him.
So we know that if a Trump voter disapproves of Trump, they’re more likely to (incorrectly) say they never voted for him in the first place.
I suspect this is down to respondents attempting to reconcile their memory of their previous vote with the way they feel right now. I call this “preference reconciliation,” and there’s a good amount of research to reinforce this theory. [...]
Here’s more proof the effect is real: it also holds for Harris voters, as well as for nonvoters and third-party voters. For example, of the Harris voters who approve of Trump, 18% falsely recalled voting for him, while among Harris voters who disapprove of Trump, this number was just 0.4%.
And looking at respondents who didn’t vote for either Harris or Trump in 2024, those who approved of him wrongly claimed they voted for him over Harris by a margin of 43 percentage points to five, whereas those who disapproved of him reported voting for Harris over Trump by a margin of 19 points to five.
In other words, the evidence in favor of “preference reconciliation” is clear, consistent, and highly observable across every stripe of partisanship: Trump voters who dislike Trump are less likely to admit to voting for him, and non-Trump voters who like him are more likely to incorrectly claim they supported him.
You can imagine that at the start of his second term, when his political strength was arguably at its peak, this effect would have inflated Trump’s recalled vote share quite a bit. Now, the effect is the opposite; with the president’s approval rating sitting at a whopping -15 points in our most recent poll, there is no appetite among the electorate to align with Trump.
by Lakshya Jain, The Argument | Read more:
In our national polling of registered voters, though, we’re finding something different: a nontrivial chunk of people who are mad at Trump seem to suddenly have amnesia and no longer admit to having voted for him in 2024.
Let’s back up for a second. How do we even know who people voted for in the first place?
The day after the 2024 election, our polling partner Verasight collected data from every respondent in its panel about whom they voted for. For each new recruit who joined its pool post-2024, it asked for 2024 vote choice as part of the signup process.
In other words, a respondent’s 2024 vote is recorded as part of their profile at a time when it was fresh in their memory. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times explained, this kind of logging of past vote is more reliable (and significantly less noisy) than asking someone who they voted for months (or even years) down the line.
But every survey, we also separately ask respondents whom they voted for so that we can see how people’s responses and memories drift and diverge from reality over time.
Here’s what we’re finding: six percent of Trump voters — as determined by the recorded vote data we have, which we’ll treat as the ground truth — don’t even admit to voting for him in the last election.
The evidence suggests that unhappiness with Trump’s performance in office is the reason these voters don’t admit to having voted for him any longer.
Approximately 15% of Trump’s 2024 voters disapproved of his job performance. Among this group, almost one in four didn’t admit to having voted for the president. Thirteen percent even falsely claimed to have voted for Kamala Harris, while 12% claimed they actually didn’t vote at all.
But among the 84% who voted for Trump and still approve of him, 98% correctly recalled having voted for him.
So we know that if a Trump voter disapproves of Trump, they’re more likely to (incorrectly) say they never voted for him in the first place.
I suspect this is down to respondents attempting to reconcile their memory of their previous vote with the way they feel right now. I call this “preference reconciliation,” and there’s a good amount of research to reinforce this theory. [...]
Here’s more proof the effect is real: it also holds for Harris voters, as well as for nonvoters and third-party voters. For example, of the Harris voters who approve of Trump, 18% falsely recalled voting for him, while among Harris voters who disapprove of Trump, this number was just 0.4%.
And looking at respondents who didn’t vote for either Harris or Trump in 2024, those who approved of him wrongly claimed they voted for him over Harris by a margin of 43 percentage points to five, whereas those who disapproved of him reported voting for Harris over Trump by a margin of 19 points to five.
In other words, the evidence in favor of “preference reconciliation” is clear, consistent, and highly observable across every stripe of partisanship: Trump voters who dislike Trump are less likely to admit to voting for him, and non-Trump voters who like him are more likely to incorrectly claim they supported him.
You can imagine that at the start of his second term, when his political strength was arguably at its peak, this effect would have inflated Trump’s recalled vote share quite a bit. Now, the effect is the opposite; with the president’s approval rating sitting at a whopping -15 points in our most recent poll, there is no appetite among the electorate to align with Trump.
by Lakshya Jain, The Argument | Read more:
Image: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
[ed. I've seen this too but never seen it quantified.]
[ed. I've seen this too but never seen it quantified.]
'Banality of Evil Personified'
A fake ICE tip line reveals neighbors reporting neighbors.
Ben Palmer, a stand-up comic in Nashville, has built a following online with his signature style of elaborate deadpan pranks, stumbling his way onto court TV shows and pyramid-scheme calls to poke fun at the latent absurdities of American life.
Then last January, he had an idea for a new bit: He’d set up a fake tip line that people could use to report anyone they thought was an undocumented immigrant. It was darker than his other stunts, but it felt topical, the kind of challenge he wanted to try. At the very least, he thought, he might get a few calls he could talk about at his next show.
Instead, his website has received nearly 100 submissions from across the country: people reporting their neighbors, ex-lovers, Uber drivers, strangers they saw at the grocery store. One tip came from a teacher reporting the parents of a kindergarten student at her school.
“I mean, they seem like nice people or whatever,” the woman told Palmer on the call. “But if they’re taking up resources from our county, I’m not into illegal people being here.”
Will Johnson, a pro-Trump podcaster and content creator in Texas, said Palmer is “leading people on who think they’re reporting a crime” and that he could go to prison for impersonating law enforcement.
“He’s making people who are reporting people taking advantage of the system look like just bad human beings,” Johnson said in an interview. In cases like the kindergarten video, he added, it may “look bad, but at the same time we are a nation of laws.” (ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.)
But neither Palmer nor the website say they represent a government agency, and the sites’ privacy policies include disclaimers at the bottom saying they’re intended only for “parody, joke purposes and sociological research.” (Palmer spoke on the condition that The Washington Post not name the websites, so as not to ruin the bit.)
His supporters have argued the strategy is worth it because it has helped reveal the horrors of America’s immigration crackdown, exposing the moral contradictions and hidden inhumanities of deportation politics — and reaching viewers, through their TikTok and Instagram feeds, who might otherwise be politically disengaged. One commenter said the teacher video showed the “banality of evil personified.”
Matt Sienkiewicz, a Boston College professor who studies political comedy and saw the video on social media, said Palmer’s satire has been effective because he plays the conversations as straight as possible, letting the caller deliver an unimpeded justification that slowly crumbles under its own weight.
“It creates this uncomfortable irony, where he's letting the person deliver the argument and it just beats itself, because it's so morally problematic or hypocritical or wrong,” he said. “You can kind of sense that they think they're doing the right thing, and then he just repeats what they said, and they kind of realize they're doing something terrible.”
Palmer's project, Sienkiewicz said, feels especially distinctive in the short-video era because he does not copy the style of many social media ideologues by “rage-baiting” viewers into an immediate emotional response.
“So much of contemporary internet culture is showing something offensive and telling people how to feel about it,” he said. “It’s his refusal to act enraged that allows the audience to then choose their own level of anger.” [...]
After reading dozens of reports, he said he was stunned by how many people seemed driven by personal annoyance. One woman reported the new girlfriend of her ex-husband. Another homeowner reported his neighbor after he used his trash can.
One tipster called after she went to Publix and the worker who helped her find the water didn’t speak English. “And then she did help you find the water?” Palmer asked on the call, to which the woman responded, “Right, she walked me right to it.”
Many of the tipsters spoke as if the government was “their own personal army,” Palmer said. “If these are the calls I’m getting, as a fake, not legitimate person, imagine what’s happening at the actual ICE.”
In the kindergarten call, the teacher said she’d decided to report the student’s parents after looking them up in the school files and seeing that they were born in Honduras and El Salvador. She said the student was born in New York, and was 5 or 6 years old, but that she didn’t like people “taking up resources from our country.”
When Palmer read back her report in a flat tone, she scoffed. “You make it sound terrible,” she said. Later in the call, she asked to speak to Palmer’s supervisor after saying she didn’t like his attitude.
“I can’t help that they have a 6-year-old. That’s on them,” she said. [...]
Dannagal Young, a political communication professor at the University of Delaware, said Palmer’s videos could help reach Americans turned off by politics and uninformed about how deportations work. She noted that immigration, once one of Trump’s most popular policy issues, has become the one area where he’s lost the most support.
“There’s something really powerful about witnessing someone have to reckon with their own moral judgment in the moment, especially because they think they’re calling a welcome receiver, and they think they’re going to be applauded,” Young said.
“He is describing to them the reality of what they’re requesting as though it is completely fine and desirable, and through that calm matter-of-fact representation, it reveals itself to be absolutely inhumane,” she added. “The greatest nightmare for this administration is [normal people] paying attention.”
[ed. 'Banality of Evil' ~ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem]
Then last January, he had an idea for a new bit: He’d set up a fake tip line that people could use to report anyone they thought was an undocumented immigrant. It was darker than his other stunts, but it felt topical, the kind of challenge he wanted to try. At the very least, he thought, he might get a few calls he could talk about at his next show.
“I mean, they seem like nice people or whatever,” the woman told Palmer on the call. “But if they’re taking up resources from our county, I’m not into illegal people being here.”
What began as a comedy routine has become one of the most viral pieces of social satire during President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. The kindergarten video has been watched more than 20 million times on TikTok and exploded across Facebook, Reddit and YouTube, where one commenter called it “one of the most creative, nonviolent and effective acts of resistance” they’d ever seen. [...]
Will Johnson, a pro-Trump podcaster and content creator in Texas, said Palmer is “leading people on who think they’re reporting a crime” and that he could go to prison for impersonating law enforcement.
“He’s making people who are reporting people taking advantage of the system look like just bad human beings,” Johnson said in an interview. In cases like the kindergarten video, he added, it may “look bad, but at the same time we are a nation of laws.” (ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.)
But neither Palmer nor the website say they represent a government agency, and the sites’ privacy policies include disclaimers at the bottom saying they’re intended only for “parody, joke purposes and sociological research.” (Palmer spoke on the condition that The Washington Post not name the websites, so as not to ruin the bit.)
His supporters have argued the strategy is worth it because it has helped reveal the horrors of America’s immigration crackdown, exposing the moral contradictions and hidden inhumanities of deportation politics — and reaching viewers, through their TikTok and Instagram feeds, who might otherwise be politically disengaged. One commenter said the teacher video showed the “banality of evil personified.”
Matt Sienkiewicz, a Boston College professor who studies political comedy and saw the video on social media, said Palmer’s satire has been effective because he plays the conversations as straight as possible, letting the caller deliver an unimpeded justification that slowly crumbles under its own weight.
“It creates this uncomfortable irony, where he's letting the person deliver the argument and it just beats itself, because it's so morally problematic or hypocritical or wrong,” he said. “You can kind of sense that they think they're doing the right thing, and then he just repeats what they said, and they kind of realize they're doing something terrible.”
Palmer's project, Sienkiewicz said, feels especially distinctive in the short-video era because he does not copy the style of many social media ideologues by “rage-baiting” viewers into an immediate emotional response.
“So much of contemporary internet culture is showing something offensive and telling people how to feel about it,” he said. “It’s his refusal to act enraged that allows the audience to then choose their own level of anger.” [...]
After reading dozens of reports, he said he was stunned by how many people seemed driven by personal annoyance. One woman reported the new girlfriend of her ex-husband. Another homeowner reported his neighbor after he used his trash can.
One tipster called after she went to Publix and the worker who helped her find the water didn’t speak English. “And then she did help you find the water?” Palmer asked on the call, to which the woman responded, “Right, she walked me right to it.”
Many of the tipsters spoke as if the government was “their own personal army,” Palmer said. “If these are the calls I’m getting, as a fake, not legitimate person, imagine what’s happening at the actual ICE.”
In the kindergarten call, the teacher said she’d decided to report the student’s parents after looking them up in the school files and seeing that they were born in Honduras and El Salvador. She said the student was born in New York, and was 5 or 6 years old, but that she didn’t like people “taking up resources from our country.”
When Palmer read back her report in a flat tone, she scoffed. “You make it sound terrible,” she said. Later in the call, she asked to speak to Palmer’s supervisor after saying she didn’t like his attitude.
“I can’t help that they have a 6-year-old. That’s on them,” she said. [...]
Dannagal Young, a political communication professor at the University of Delaware, said Palmer’s videos could help reach Americans turned off by politics and uninformed about how deportations work. She noted that immigration, once one of Trump’s most popular policy issues, has become the one area where he’s lost the most support.
“There’s something really powerful about witnessing someone have to reckon with their own moral judgment in the moment, especially because they think they’re calling a welcome receiver, and they think they’re going to be applauded,” Young said.
“He is describing to them the reality of what they’re requesting as though it is completely fine and desirable, and through that calm matter-of-fact representation, it reveals itself to be absolutely inhumane,” she added. “The greatest nightmare for this administration is [normal people] paying attention.”
by Drew Harwell, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Natalie Vineberg/The Washington Post; Screenshots from Ben Palmer's YouTube and reportaliens.us; iStock
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
Does Anyone Know Why We're Still Doing Tariffs?
The ridiculous policy has taken on a life of its own.
In case you haven’t heard, the Supreme Court just ruled many of Donald Trump’s tariffs illegal:
Economists don’t actually have a good handle on what causes trade deficits, but whatever it is, it’s clear that tariffs have a hard time getting rid of them without causing severe damage to the economy. Trump seemed to sense this when stock markets fell and money started fleeing America, which is why he backed off on much of his tariff agenda.
Trump also seemed to believe that tariffs would lead to a renaissance in American manufacturing. Economists did know something about that — namely, they recognized that tariffs are taxes on intermediate goods, and would therefore hurt American manufacturing more than they helped. The car industry and the construction industry and other industries all use steel, so if you put taxes on imported steel, you protect the domestic market for American steel manufacturers, but you hurt all those other industries by making their inputs more expensive.
And guess what? The economists were right. Under Trump’s tariffs, the U.S. manufacturing sector has suffered. Here’s the WSJ:
Instead, the tariffs have mostly just caused inconvenience for American consumers, who have been cut off from being able to buy many imported goods. The Kiel Institute studied what happened to traded products after Trump put tariffs on their country of origin, and found out that they mostly just stopped coming:
A Fox News poll found the same, and Trump’s approval rating on both trade and the economy is underwater by over 16 points despite a solid labor market. Consumer sentiment, meanwhile, has crashed:
Trump has belatedly begun to realize the hardship he’s inflicting on voters. But instead of simply abandoning the tariff strategy, he’s issuing yet more exemptions and carve-outs in an attempt to placate consumers:
He called the liberals a “disgrace to our nation.” But he heaped particular vitriol on the three conservatives [who ruled against him]. They “think they’re being ‘politically correct,’ which has happened before, far too often, with certain members of this Court,” Mr. Trump said. “When, in fact, they’re just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats—and . . . they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. It’s my opinion that the Court has been swayed by foreign interests.”
Why are the President and his loyalists so incensed over the SCOTUS decision? The tariffs are a millstone weighing down Trump’s presidency, and his various walk-backs confirm that he realizes this. It would have been smarter, from a purely political standpoint, to just let SCOTUS do the administration a favor and cancel the tariffs. Instead, Trump is going to the mat for the policy. Why?
One possibility is simply that Trump hates having his authority challenged by anyone. Tariffs were his signature economic policy — something he probably decided on after hearing people like Lou Dobbs complain about trade deficits back in the 1990s. To give up and admit that tariffs aren’t a good solution to trade imbalances would mean a huge loss of face for Trump.
Another possibility is that Trump ideologically hates the idea of trade with other nations, viewing it as an unacceptable form of dependency on foreigners. Perhaps by using ever-shifting uncertainty about who would be hit by tariffs next, he hoped to prod other countries into simply giving up and not selling much to the United States.
A third possibility is that tariffs offer Trump a golden opportunity for corruption and personal enrichment. Trump issues blanket tariffs, and then offers carve-outs and exemptions to various companies and/or their products. This means companies line up to curry favor with Trump and his family, in the hopes that Trump will grant them a reprieve.
But the explanation I find most convincing is power. If all Trump wanted was to kick out against global trade, the Section 122 tariffs and all the other alternatives would surely suffice. Instead, he was very specifically attached to the IEEPA tariffs that SCOTUS struck down. Those tariffs allowed Trump to levy tariffs on specific countries, at rates of his own choosing, as well as to grant specific exemptions. That gave Trump an enormous amount of negotiating leverage with countries that value America’s big market.
This is the kind of personal power that no President had before Trump. It allowed him to conduct foreign policy entirely on his own. It allowed him to enrich himself and his family. It allowed him to gain influence domestically, by holding out the promise of tariff exemptions for businesses that toe his political line. And it allowed him to act as a sort of haphazard economic central planner, using tariffs like a scalpel to discourage the kinds of trade and production that he didn’t personally like.
In other words, I think that although the tariffs had their origin in 1990s-era worries about trade deficits, they ended up as a way to make the Presidency more like a dictatorship. That is almost certainly why the Supreme Court struck the IEEPA tariffs down, citing concerns over presidential overreach instead of more technical considerations.
For much of the modern GOP, I think, autocracy has become its own justification. To many Republicans, tariffs were good because they made the President powerful, and SCOTUS’ ruling is anathema because it pushes back on the imperial Presidency.
[ed. Look at the charts. Nothing penetrates with some people. See also: February 23, 2026 (LFaA).]
[T]he Supreme Court ruled that the unilaterally imposed [tariffs] were illegal…No longer does Trump have a tariff “on/off” switch…Future tariffs will need to be imposed by lengthy, more technical trade authorities — or through Congress…What was the point of these tariffs? It has never really been clear. Trump’s official justification was that they were about reducing America’s chronic trade deficit. In fact, the initial “Liberation Day” tariffs were set according to a formula based on America’s bilateral trade deficits with various countries. But trade deficits are not so easy to banish, and although America’s trade deficit bounced around a lot and shifted somewhat from China to other countries, it stayed more or less the same overall:
In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court said that affirming Trump's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) would "represent a transformative expansion of the President's authority over tariff policy."…Chief Justice John Roberts said that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs because the Constitution grants Congress — and only Congress — the power to levy taxes and duties. [...]
Economists don’t actually have a good handle on what causes trade deficits, but whatever it is, it’s clear that tariffs have a hard time getting rid of them without causing severe damage to the economy. Trump seemed to sense this when stock markets fell and money started fleeing America, which is why he backed off on much of his tariff agenda.
Trump also seemed to believe that tariffs would lead to a renaissance in American manufacturing. Economists did know something about that — namely, they recognized that tariffs are taxes on intermediate goods, and would therefore hurt American manufacturing more than they helped. The car industry and the construction industry and other industries all use steel, so if you put taxes on imported steel, you protect the domestic market for American steel manufacturers, but you hurt all those other industries by making their inputs more expensive.
And guess what? The economists were right. Under Trump’s tariffs, the U.S. manufacturing sector has suffered. Here’s the WSJ:
The manufacturing boom President Trump promised would usher in a golden age for America is going in reverse…Manufacturers shed workers in each of the eight months after Trump unveiled “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to federal figures…An index of factory activity tracked by the Institute for Supply Management shrunk in 26 straight months through December…[M]anufacturing construction spending, which surged with Biden-era funding for chips and renewable energy, fell in each of Trump’s first nine months in office. [...]
Macroeconomically, the tariffs haven’t been as big a deal as initially feared. Growth came in slightly weak in the final quarter of 2025, but that was mostly due to the government shutdown, and will rebound next quarter. Inflation keeps bumping along at a little bit above the official target, distressing the American consumer but failing to either explode or collapse. The President’s cronies have taken to holding up this lack of catastrophe as a great victory, but this sets the bar too low. If you back off of most of your tariffs and the economy fails to crash, you don’t get to celebrate — after all, the tariffs were ostensibly supposed to fix something in our economy, and they have fixed absolutely nothing.
Instead, the tariffs have mostly just caused inconvenience for American consumers, who have been cut off from being able to buy many imported goods. The Kiel Institute studied what happened to traded products after Trump put tariffs on their country of origin, and found out that they mostly just stopped coming:
The 2025 US tariffs are an own goal: American importers and consumers bear nearly the entire cost. Foreign exporters absorb only about 4% of the tariff burden—the remaining 96% is passed through to US buyers…Using shipment-level data covering over 25 million transactions…we find near-complete pass-through of tariffs to US import prices……Event studies around discrete tariff shocks on Brazil (50%) and India (25–50%) confirm: export prices did not decline. Trade volumes collapsed instead…Indian export customs data validates our findings: when facing US tariffs, Indian exporters maintained their prices and reduced shipments. They did not “eat” the tariff. [emphasis mine]So it’s no surprise that the most recent polls show that Americans despise the tariffs:
Source: ABC
Trump has belatedly begun to realize the hardship he’s inflicting on voters. But instead of simply abandoning the tariff strategy, he’s issuing yet more exemptions and carve-outs in an attempt to placate consumers:
Donald Trump is planning to scale back some tariffs on steel and aluminium goods as he battles an affordability crisis that has sapped his approval ratings…The US president hit steel and aluminium imports with tariffs of up to 50 per cent last summer, and has expanded the taxes to a range of goods made from those metals including washing machines and ovens…But his administration is now reviewing the list of products affected by the levies and plans to exempt some items, halt the expansion of the lists and instead launch more targeted national security probes into specific goods, according to three people familiar with the matter.Tariffs — or at least, broad, blanket tariffs on many products from many different countries — are simply a bad policy that accomplishes nothing while causing varying degrees of economic harm. But despite all his chicken-outs and walk-backs and exemptions, Trump is still deeply wedded to the idea. When news of the Supreme Court ruling reached him, he flew into a rage and accused the Justices of serving foreign interests:
He called the liberals a “disgrace to our nation.” But he heaped particular vitriol on the three conservatives [who ruled against him]. They “think they’re being ‘politically correct,’ which has happened before, far too often, with certain members of this Court,” Mr. Trump said. “When, in fact, they’re just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats—and . . . they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. It’s my opinion that the Court has been swayed by foreign interests.”
Why are the President and his loyalists so incensed over the SCOTUS decision? The tariffs are a millstone weighing down Trump’s presidency, and his various walk-backs confirm that he realizes this. It would have been smarter, from a purely political standpoint, to just let SCOTUS do the administration a favor and cancel the tariffs. Instead, Trump is going to the mat for the policy. Why?
One possibility is simply that Trump hates having his authority challenged by anyone. Tariffs were his signature economic policy — something he probably decided on after hearing people like Lou Dobbs complain about trade deficits back in the 1990s. To give up and admit that tariffs aren’t a good solution to trade imbalances would mean a huge loss of face for Trump.
Another possibility is that Trump ideologically hates the idea of trade with other nations, viewing it as an unacceptable form of dependency on foreigners. Perhaps by using ever-shifting uncertainty about who would be hit by tariffs next, he hoped to prod other countries into simply giving up and not selling much to the United States.
A third possibility is that tariffs offer Trump a golden opportunity for corruption and personal enrichment. Trump issues blanket tariffs, and then offers carve-outs and exemptions to various companies and/or their products. This means companies line up to curry favor with Trump and his family, in the hopes that Trump will grant them a reprieve.
But the explanation I find most convincing is power. If all Trump wanted was to kick out against global trade, the Section 122 tariffs and all the other alternatives would surely suffice. Instead, he was very specifically attached to the IEEPA tariffs that SCOTUS struck down. Those tariffs allowed Trump to levy tariffs on specific countries, at rates of his own choosing, as well as to grant specific exemptions. That gave Trump an enormous amount of negotiating leverage with countries that value America’s big market.
This is the kind of personal power that no President had before Trump. It allowed him to conduct foreign policy entirely on his own. It allowed him to enrich himself and his family. It allowed him to gain influence domestically, by holding out the promise of tariff exemptions for businesses that toe his political line. And it allowed him to act as a sort of haphazard economic central planner, using tariffs like a scalpel to discourage the kinds of trade and production that he didn’t personally like.
In other words, I think that although the tariffs had their origin in 1990s-era worries about trade deficits, they ended up as a way to make the Presidency more like a dictatorship. That is almost certainly why the Supreme Court struck the IEEPA tariffs down, citing concerns over presidential overreach instead of more technical considerations.
For much of the modern GOP, I think, autocracy has become its own justification. To many Republicans, tariffs were good because they made the President powerful, and SCOTUS’ ruling is anathema because it pushes back on the imperial Presidency.
by Noah Smith, Noahpinion | Read more:
Images: Joey Politano/ABC
Images: Joey Politano/ABC
Child’s Play
Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking
The first sign that something in San Francisco had gone very badly wrong was the signs. In New York, all the advertising on the streets and on the subway assumes that you, the person reading, are an ambiently depressed twenty-eight-year-old office worker whose main interests are listening to podcasts, ordering delivery, and voting for the Democrats. I thought I found that annoying, but in San Francisco they don’t bother advertising normal things at all. The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.
This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: TODAY, SOC 2 IS DONE BEFORE YOUR GIRLFRIEND BREAKS UP WITH YOU. IT'S DONE IN DELVE. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did. A few blocks away, I saw a billboard that read: NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR PRODUCT. MAKE THEM. UNIFY: TRANSFORM GROWTH INTO A SCIENCE. A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation. He was, I noticed, holding an alarmingly large baby-pink pocketknife. Passersby in sight of the billboard that read WEARABLE TECH SHAREABLE INSIGHTS did not seem piqued by the prospect of having their metrics constantly analyzed. I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to PROMPT IT. THEN PUSH IT. After spending slightly too long in the city, I found that the various forms of nonsense all started to bleed into one another. The motionless people drooling on the sidewalk, the Waymos whooshing around with no one inside. A kind of pervasive mindlessness. Had I seen a billboard or a madman preaching about “a CRM so smart, it updates itself”? Was it a person in rags muttering about how all his movements were being controlled by shadowy powers working out of a data center somewhere, or was it a car?
Somehow people manage to live here. But of all the strange and maddening messages posted around this city, there was one particular type of billboard that the people of San Francisco couldn’t bear. People shuddered at the sight of it, or groaned, or covered their eyes. The advertiser was the most utterly despised startup in the entire tech landscape. Weirdly, its ads were the only ones I saw that appeared to be written in anything like English:
What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before. For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.
The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men. I set out to meet them.
[ed. Seems like we're already creating artificial humans. That said, I have only the highest regard for Scott Alexander, one of the people profiled here. The article makes him sound like some kind of cult leader or something (he's a psychologist), but he's really just a smart guy with a wide range of interests that intelligent people gravitate to (also a great writer). Here's his response on his website ACX:]
Somehow people manage to live here. But of all the strange and maddening messages posted around this city, there was one particular type of billboard that the people of San Francisco couldn’t bear. People shuddered at the sight of it, or groaned, or covered their eyes. The advertiser was the most utterly despised startup in the entire tech landscape. Weirdly, its ads were the only ones I saw that appeared to be written in anything like English:
HI MY NAME IS ROY
I GOT KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL FOR CHEATINGBUY MY CHEATING TOOLCLUELY.COM
Cluely and its co-founder Chungin “Roy” Lee were intensely, and intentionally, controversial. They’re no longer in San Francisco, having been essentially chased out of the city by the Planning Commission. The company is loathed seemingly out of proportion to what its product actually is, which is a janky, glitching interface for ChatGPT and other AI models. It’s not in a particularly glamorous market: Cluely is pitched at ordinary office drones in their thirties, working ordinary bullshit email jobs. It’s there to assist you in Zoom meetings and sales calls. It involves using AI to do your job for you, but this is what pretty much everyone is doing already. The cafés of San Francisco are full of highly paid tech workers clattering away on their keyboards; if you peer at their screens to get a closer look, you’ll generally find them copying and pasting material from a ChatGPT window. A lot of the other complaints about Cluely seem similarly hypocritical. The company is fueled by cheap viral hype, rather than an actual workable product—but this is a strange thing to get upset about when you consider that, back in the era of zero interest rates, Silicon Valley investors sank $120 million into something called the Juicero, a Wi-Fi-enabled smart juicer that made fresh juice from fruit sachets that you could, it turned out, just as easily squeeze between your hands.
What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before. For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.
The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men. I set out to meet them.
by Sam Kriss, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Max Guther***
I agreed to be included, it’s basically fine, I’m not objecting to it, but a few small issues, mostly quibbles with emphasis rather than fact:1. The piece says rationalists believe “that to reach the truth you have to abandon all existing modes of knowledge acquisition and start again from scratch”. The Harper’s fact-checker asked me if this was true and I emphatically said it wasn’t, so I’m not sure what’s going on here.
2. The article describes me having dinner with my “acolytes”. I would have used the word “friends”, or, in one case, “wife”.
3. The article says that “When there weren’t enough crackers to go with the cheese spread, [Scott] fetched some, murmuring to himself, “I will open the crackers so you will have crackers and be happy.”” As written, this makes me sound like a crazy person; I don’t remember this incident but, given the description, I’m almost sure I was saying it to my two year old child, which would have been helpful context in reassuring readers about my mental state. (UPDATE: Sam says this isn’t his memory of the incident, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
4. The article assessed that AI was hitting a wall at the time of writing (September 2025). I explained some of the difficulties with AI agents, but I’m worried that as written it might suggest to readers think that I agreed with its assessment. I did not.
5. In the article, I say that I “never once actually made a decision [in my life]”. I don’t remember this conversation perfectly and he’s the one with the tape recorder, but I would have preferred to frame this as life mostly not presenting as a series of explicit decisions, although they do occasionally come up.
6. Everything else is in principle a fair representation of what I said, but it’s impossible to communicate clearly through a few sentences that get quoted in disjointed fragments, so a lot of things came off as unsubtle or not exactly how I meant them. If you have any questions, I can explain further in the comments.
Monday, February 23, 2026
Family Farms, Not Data Farms
US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land: ‘I’m not for sale’. Families are navigating the tough choice between unimaginable riches and the identity that comes with land.
When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.
According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company”, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement.
More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity.
When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.
More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity.
The unknown company was building a datacenter.
“You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.
As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.
Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land’s recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston’s neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price.
In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he’d worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre – prices unimaginable just a few years ago. [...]
Today, where residents see meandering creeks and open pastures, Silicon Valley executives see weak zoning protections, cheap power and abundant water.
Developers keep knocking because there are billions to be made. In northern Virginia last November, an investor paid $615m for less than 100 acres – property the seller had bought for just $57m four years prior. Days later, Amazon spent $700m on nearby farmland that had sold for a fraction of that price the year before. In Georgia, a local developer flipped land to Amazon for $270m after paying $4m for it 12 months earlier. For the middlemen scouting these deals, potential returns exceed 1,000%.
‘Name your price’
About 20 Mason county residents have reportedly been offered deals, with the datacenter project estimated to cover 2,000 acres.
After Dr Timothy Grosser, 75, rejected an $8m offer for his 250-acre farm – 3,500% more than he’d paid nearly four decades earlier – the developers came back with a new proposition: “Name your price.”
His answer: “There is none.” [...]
[ed. No disrespect to folks determined to keep their land (generational diffusion and family disageements usually take care of that), but something seems off here. Globally, 40000 acres of land are projected to be needed for data centers? That's almost nothing. So what are companies really paying for?]
“You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.
As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.
Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land’s recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston’s neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price.
In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he’d worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre – prices unimaginable just a few years ago. [...]
Today, where residents see meandering creeks and open pastures, Silicon Valley executives see weak zoning protections, cheap power and abundant water.
Developers keep knocking because there are billions to be made. In northern Virginia last November, an investor paid $615m for less than 100 acres – property the seller had bought for just $57m four years prior. Days later, Amazon spent $700m on nearby farmland that had sold for a fraction of that price the year before. In Georgia, a local developer flipped land to Amazon for $270m after paying $4m for it 12 months earlier. For the middlemen scouting these deals, potential returns exceed 1,000%.
‘Name your price’
About 20 Mason county residents have reportedly been offered deals, with the datacenter project estimated to cover 2,000 acres.
After Dr Timothy Grosser, 75, rejected an $8m offer for his 250-acre farm – 3,500% more than he’d paid nearly four decades earlier – the developers came back with a new proposition: “Name your price.”
His answer: “There is none.” [...]
‘Keeping our people here’
Local officials in Mason county insist the datacenter would sustain future generations by bringing much-needed tax revenue and jobs, an argument being made in town halls across the country.
Mason’s population has shrunk by around 10% since 1980, largely due to the loss of manufacturing. Developers say the datacenter project would bring 1,000 construction jobs, although it may only create 50 full-time operational jobs.
In places like Loudoun county, Virginia – home to “Data Center Alley”, where about a fifth of the world’s internet traffic goes through – datacenter tax revenue nearly equals the county’s entire operating budget.any
“We can continue to shrink – losing population, losing jobs and watching our young people leave for opportunities elsewhere – or we can chart a new course,” Tyler McHugh, Mason county’s industrial development director, said at a public hearing in December. “It’s about keeping our people here.”
Local officials in Mason county insist the datacenter would sustain future generations by bringing much-needed tax revenue and jobs, an argument being made in town halls across the country.
Mason’s population has shrunk by around 10% since 1980, largely due to the loss of manufacturing. Developers say the datacenter project would bring 1,000 construction jobs, although it may only create 50 full-time operational jobs.
In places like Loudoun county, Virginia – home to “Data Center Alley”, where about a fifth of the world’s internet traffic goes through – datacenter tax revenue nearly equals the county’s entire operating budget.any
“We can continue to shrink – losing population, losing jobs and watching our young people leave for opportunities elsewhere – or we can chart a new course,” Tyler McHugh, Mason county’s industrial development director, said at a public hearing in December. “It’s about keeping our people here.”
by Niamha Rowe, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jim West/Universal Images Group/Getty Images[ed. No disrespect to folks determined to keep their land (generational diffusion and family disageements usually take care of that), but something seems off here. Globally, 40000 acres of land are projected to be needed for data centers? That's almost nothing. So what are companies really paying for?]
Chicago Gets a Lift
They lifted the whole city up in the air.
Between four and fourteen feet. Buildings, streets and all. Straight up, using hydraulic jacks and jackscrews.
It was a titanic feat of engineering, imagination and sheer moxie. And it might just say a lot about that early Chicago character.
... buildings were lifted up using jackscrews and the occasional hydraulic lift. And we’re not just talking houses. Entire masonry buildings were raised in the air. Eventually, they even figured out how to raise an entire block at once. They placed 6000 jackscrews under the one-acre block between Lake, Clark and LaSalle streets, estimated at 35,000 tons in weight, and raised the whole thing over four days—buildings, sidewalks and all. The process was gradual enough that business continued in the buildings throughout.
Not every building went through the process. Not because it was too difficult, but because some of the buildings no longer fit with where the city was going. But waste not, want not. They put these old wooden buildings on rollers and drew them by horse to the edges of town. Of course, the enterprising owners of businesses operating in these buildings didn’t want to miss out on business, so many continued to serve customers even as the buildings were rolling down the street.[ed. Man, they really got things done back then. See also: American water is too clean (WIP).]
Sunday, February 22, 2026
IRS: First Time Penalty Abatement
Always an adventure calling the IRS
Me: "Hi, I'm calling about penalty relief for my client. He's disabled and --"
Me: "His anxiety is documented. He's been struggling for years. He literally couldn't handle opening the mail from you guys."
Agent: "What's the account number?"
Me: "He lost his job. Couldn't afford to file. He has severe anxiety and --"
Agent: "I see. The penalty is $847. Next?"
Agent: "Understood. The penalty stands."
Me: "He's on disability income. This is going to hurt him badly."
Agent: "I hear you. Still $847."
Me: "He was literally unable to function during this period. His doctor can verify --"
Agent: "That's unfortunate. The penalty is assessed."
Me: "So there's nothing we can do? No hardship exception? No compassion?"
Agent: "Not without something to base it on, sir."
Me: *long pause*
Me: "I mean - unless I..."
Agent: "You could...."
Me: "Could what?"
Agent: "Well. You'd have to say it."
Me: "Say..."
Agent: "THE words, sir."
Me: "What words?"
Agent: "I can't say them for you."
Me: "It's not even a sure thing though. Could it work?."
Agent: "Only one way to find out sir."
Me: *long pause*
Me: "I'm going to say it."
Agent: "I'm bracing, sir."
Me: "First time penalty abatement."
Agent: "Excellent. Your client is eligible. I'm releasing the penalty now. We're all set."
Me: "Wait. That's it? Just like that?"
Agent: "Yes sir. The penalty is gone."
Me: "It's automatic?"
Agent: "Exactly."
Me: "So why all the drama? Why couldn't you just tell me?"
Agent: "Because most people don't understand how serious a decision it is to say THE words."
Me: "It's that serious? Why?"
Agent: "You just used your one shot."
Me: "What do you mean my one shot?"
Agent: "First time penalty abatement. You can only invoke it once per client. Ever."
Me: "...once?"
Agent: "That's right. Once... And then it resets again in three years."
Me: "Wait, it resets? So we can do this again in a few years?"
Agent: "Is there anything else I can help you with?"
by Roger Ledbetter, CPA, X | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. Can you believe it? This is really a thing. Have some catastrophic medical bill (or windfall?) and can't or don't want to pay taxes this year? First time penalty abatement. See also: The IRS’s First-Time Penalty Abatement: What It Is And How To Get It (Forbes); and, other types of penalty relief (IRS). Also this.]
Plain Old Interviews
I recently applied for a job at a large publishing house and was pleased to clear the first hurdle. They sent me an email:
Hirevue was founded in Salt Lake City in 2004 by a twenty-year-old undergraduate, Mark Newman. In its infancy, the company sent webcams to candidates for jobs, allowing them to record interviews from anywhere in the world. As it grew, Hirevue was integrated into the hiring process of many large companies and evolved into an AI-driven biometric software platform. In a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, Hirevue was accused of bias, deceptive use of facial recognition technology and a lack of transparency and accountability in its use of AI for ranking candidates’ employability.
On the day of my interview I shaved, closed the window to muffle the roadworks and buttoned up my shirt. The first question appeared on the screen next to my face. I was interviewing myself. The question on problem-solving was straightforward. Though there was nothing to smile about, I smiled hard. Yes, I am that good at working intuitively, but boy, you should see me in a team! The next question had my hands waving about, which though unrehearsed felt expressive in a good way. I glanced away thoughtfully as I embarked on my final answer. Returning to the screen, I saw I had ten seconds to go and I’d not quite finished my anecdote about good timekeeping.
Consigned to the before world is the interviewer’s reminder to ‘ask us questions’, which was disappointing because I did have a couple: was that the interview? Is anyone out there? I ended the recording and went about my day with the carefree relief that usually comes from having cheated death.
I later discovered that Hirevue responded to the official complaints by announcing a plan to drop its facial recognition technology. Companies that use Hirevue for recruitment have the option to use its AI assessment features or to use the software with no algorithm, which is referred to as ‘just plain old interviews’. I don’t know if my potential employer was using AI or not, or whether I was chosen or rejected for a longlist, or indeed whether a human being ever saw my smiling face, the panic in my eyes or my lucky white shirt. In any case, I didn’t get the job.
by Alfred Nunney, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: uncredited via[ed. See also: Are ChatGPT conversations private? (iLind):]
The next question: “Do you use ChatGPT?” He answered that he did have some experience with it, as most people do.
Then came the unexpected.
“That’s when they asked me to take out my phone and open the app.
When the job candidate declined, the interview abruptly changed.
We were impressed with your application for our Editorial Assistant role, and would like to invite you to our Hirevue stage. You may have already used this virtual platform before, but it may be useful anyway to hear the info below.I had to film myself answering three questions, each with a three-minute time limit and two minutes preparation, at a time of my choosing within the next week. They recommended I download the Hirevue software, dress professionally and retain eye contact: ‘Even virtually this is incredibly important!’
On the day of my interview I shaved, closed the window to muffle the roadworks and buttoned up my shirt. The first question appeared on the screen next to my face. I was interviewing myself. The question on problem-solving was straightforward. Though there was nothing to smile about, I smiled hard. Yes, I am that good at working intuitively, but boy, you should see me in a team! The next question had my hands waving about, which though unrehearsed felt expressive in a good way. I glanced away thoughtfully as I embarked on my final answer. Returning to the screen, I saw I had ten seconds to go and I’d not quite finished my anecdote about good timekeeping.
Consigned to the before world is the interviewer’s reminder to ‘ask us questions’, which was disappointing because I did have a couple: was that the interview? Is anyone out there? I ended the recording and went about my day with the carefree relief that usually comes from having cheated death.
I later discovered that Hirevue responded to the official complaints by announcing a plan to drop its facial recognition technology. Companies that use Hirevue for recruitment have the option to use its AI assessment features or to use the software with no algorithm, which is referred to as ‘just plain old interviews’. I don’t know if my potential employer was using AI or not, or whether I was chosen or rejected for a longlist, or indeed whether a human being ever saw my smiling face, the panic in my eyes or my lucky white shirt. In any case, I didn’t get the job.
by Alfred Nunney, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: uncredited via
***
The author described what started as a typical interview, which went well. Then at some point, one of the interviewers said they had been trying a different method to get to know candidates better.The next question: “Do you use ChatGPT?” He answered that he did have some experience with it, as most people do.
Then came the unexpected.
“That’s when they asked me to take out my phone and open the app.
They wanted me to type this prompt:
“Based on my past conversations, can you analyze my behavioral tendencies?”
When the job candidate declined, the interview abruptly changed.
ICE vs. Everyone
At 9 AM I fall in love with Amy. We’re in my friend’s old Corolla, following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle in our neighborhood. We only know “Amy” through the Signal voice call we’re on together, alongside more than eight hundred others, all trying to coordinate sightings throughout South Minneapolis. Amy drives a silver Subaru and is directly in front of us, expertly tailing a black Wagoneer with two masked agents in front. The Wagoneer skips a red light to try and lose us, but Amy’s fast. She bolts across the intersection, Bullitt-style, and we follow just behind, shouting inside the car, GO AMY! WE LOVE YOU! “I’m gonna fucking marry Amy,” my friend says. “You think it’s chill to propose over this call?”
You can’t walk for ten minutes in my neighborhood without seeing them: boxy SUVs, mostly domestic-made, with tinted windows and out-of-state plates. Two men riding in front, dressed in tactical gear. Following behind is a train of three or four cars, honking. Sometimes there are bikers, too, blowing on neon-colored plastic whistles that local businesses give out for free. Every street corner has patrollers on foot, yelling and filming when a convoy rolls by.
If the ICE vehicles pull over, people flood the street. Crowds materialize seemingly out of nowhere. The honking and whistling amps up, becoming an unignorable wail, and more people stream out of their houses and businesses. When agents leave their cars they’re met with jeers, mostly variations on “Fuck you.” Usually someone starts throwing snowballs. Agents pull out pepper spray guns, threatening protesters who get too close. If there’s enough of a crowd, they use tear gas. Meanwhile they go about their barbaric business: they’ve pulled someone out of their car or home and are shoving them into a vehicle, handcuffed. Over the noise, an observer tries to ask the person being detained for their name and who they want contacted. Sometimes a detainee’s phone, keys, or a bag make it into an observer’s hands. Everyone is filming. The press is taking photos.
Soon the agents are back in their vehicles. They pull risky maneuvers to move through the crowd and speed off. No more than six or seven minutes have elapsed, and another neighbor has been kidnapped. Observers are left to deal with the wreckage: tow an abandoned car, contact family, sometimes collect children. There are lawyers on call, local tow companies offering free services, mutual aid groups to support families after an abduction. Some observers stay behind to do this kind of coordination, and some get back in their cars or on their bikes and speed off again. If enough people get there fast enough, ICE might back off next time. At a minimum, their cruelty can’t go unchallenged.
I’m in my kitchen typing out “do swim goggles protect you from tear gas.” The AI search response that I’ve failed to disable tells me they can “help significantly.” I laugh at this ridiculous tableau. The local ACE Hardware store posted on Facebook that they’ve stocked up on respirators and safety goggles. What I once considered hardcore riot gear is now essential for leaving the house.
I live near the intersection of Chicago Avenue and Lake Street, two major South Minneapolis thoroughfares that mark the northwest corner of the Powderhorn Park neighborhood. My house is a mile north of where George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 and even closer to where Renee Good was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross this month. Since the Department of Homeland Security initiated “Operation Metro Surge” in December, there have been at least half a dozen abductions that I know of on or around my block. A nearby house of recently arrived Ecuadorians used to be home to sixteen adults and six children. Six weeks into the federal invasion, only eight adults remain.
Citywide, hundreds of people are being abducted from their homes and separated from their families. Citizens are racially profiled and asked for papers. Exact numbers on detainees are unreliable, but the number of federal agents is roughly three thousand. These numbers are similar in scale to ICE operations in other cities across the US, including LA and Chicago, but what’s new in Minneapolis are the extreme tactics that federal agents are using to repress organized resistance. The stories circulating online and by word of mouth are harrowing: federal agents surrounding observer cars to trap them, then smashing car windows and dragging observers out; agents spraying mace six inches from someone’s face or spraying mace into intake vents so that the inside of cars are immediately flooded; agents suddenly braking at seventy miles per hour on the freeway and forcing tailing vehicles to swerve; agents throwing observers on the ground, punching observers in the face, agents taking observers on aimless rides around the city while taunting them with racial or sexual epithets; agents holding observers at the federal detention building for hours without access to phone calls or lawyers. (This is merely how ICE terrorizes US citizens.)
What also feels new is the frequent candor with which ICE agents are displaying hateful ideology. Two days after Good was murdered, DHS overtly referenced a Neo-Nazi anthem in a nationwide recruitment post. Agents seem to feel empowered to say new kinds of chilling things out loud. One told an observer: “Stop following us, that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” (He was referring to Good.) A friend of mine was sexually harassed by an ICE agent, who called them “too pretty” to stay locked up while in detention. Another was shoved to the ground and asked, “Do you like the dirt, queer?” Sometimes the behavior is simply bizarre. After an attempted abduction left a couple dozen observers standing on a neighborhood street, one ICE vehicle circled the block, broadcasting a looped audio recording of a woman screaming.
In these moments the whole situation can seem ridiculous. The professional kidnappers step out of their flashy American cars with their special outfits on. They wave their little mace guns at us, but we’re not scared—we have oversized ski goggles! A particularly comic element at play is that we’re in the middle of another winter with wild variations in temperature, meaning that Minneapolis streets are covered in thick sheets of ice. There are some heartwarming videos of agents falling down (“ICE on ice!”) but we slip too, running towards or away from them. It can feel kind of slapstick, until you remember that they will destroy someone’s life today, and that they can kill you.
A black gloved hand reaches out of the Wagoneer window and begins to give a princess wave to us, then the peace sign, then a thumbs up. They’re mocking us. The agents stop their vehicle suddenly but Amy brakes in time. Luckily, so do we. ICE has been using “brake-checks” as pretense for detaining observers. Another observer car pulls up and my city council member steps out. He strides up to the Wagoneer, blowing his whistle. (Absolutely everyone is confronting ICE—I’ve encountered my old boss from the local cafe scuffling with agents, too.) Someone on the street starts filming and the bicyclist we know in the chat as “small fry” shouts at the agents to get out of Minneapolis. We’re honking. The Wagoneer idles for a few minutes and then takes off towards the freeway. We follow until they’re on the exit ramp. It feels good to watch them leave the neighborhood, but I worry about where they’re headed next. We drive towards home and come across another two vehicles with observers tailing behind. Lake Street, a major corridor of immigrant businesses in the neighborhood, has been crawling with ICE vehicles every morning this week.
Powderhorn Park is a middle-class neighborhood known for its May Day parade, replete with larger-than-life puppets and steampunk Mad Max vehicles. Artists and families live here, and young queer people, and many immigrants, most arriving from Ecuador in recent years. The past few summers, the block south of me has become impassable every evening as hundreds of my Spanish-speaking neighbors use the park for massive volleyball tournaments. Food vendors set up tables and families bring lawn chairs to watch the games. Last year, two women sold grilled chicken on the corner closest to me. My neighbor’s lawn became a kind of informal restaurant, where customers would sit at the warping picnic table and eat. I bought their chicken a few times, and it was awesome.
A week into the invasion my neighbor with the picnic table called to ask if I was available to come with one of the two vendors to an immigration appointment. The woman had been contacted by USCIS that morning and was told to come in at 3 o’clock that same afternoon. She was worried she could be detained on the spot and had a newborn with her. Several neighbors gathered to arrange a ride, but in the end she only wanted a lawyer and translator to attend with her. I heard later that at the appointment she announced she wanted to self-deport, trading a planned exit for the fear of being taken at random. Her sister, the other vendor, is still here. The Saturday after Good’s murder, she and I sit with a small group of volunteers gathered to talk about how to improve rideshare coordination over WhatsApp. She tells us in Spanish that migrants can’t use corporate rideshare services because there have been reports of Uber drivers taking people directly to ICE. Of the more than two hundred people in the rideshare text thread, half are citizens offering rides and half are requesting. “I like being in this group because I’m meeting so many neighbors I would not have met otherwise,” someone says at the meeting. “I hope we stay connected after this is all over.”
If the ICE vehicles pull over, people flood the street. Crowds materialize seemingly out of nowhere. The honking and whistling amps up, becoming an unignorable wail, and more people stream out of their houses and businesses. When agents leave their cars they’re met with jeers, mostly variations on “Fuck you.” Usually someone starts throwing snowballs. Agents pull out pepper spray guns, threatening protesters who get too close. If there’s enough of a crowd, they use tear gas. Meanwhile they go about their barbaric business: they’ve pulled someone out of their car or home and are shoving them into a vehicle, handcuffed. Over the noise, an observer tries to ask the person being detained for their name and who they want contacted. Sometimes a detainee’s phone, keys, or a bag make it into an observer’s hands. Everyone is filming. The press is taking photos.
Soon the agents are back in their vehicles. They pull risky maneuvers to move through the crowd and speed off. No more than six or seven minutes have elapsed, and another neighbor has been kidnapped. Observers are left to deal with the wreckage: tow an abandoned car, contact family, sometimes collect children. There are lawyers on call, local tow companies offering free services, mutual aid groups to support families after an abduction. Some observers stay behind to do this kind of coordination, and some get back in their cars or on their bikes and speed off again. If enough people get there fast enough, ICE might back off next time. At a minimum, their cruelty can’t go unchallenged.
I’m in my kitchen typing out “do swim goggles protect you from tear gas.” The AI search response that I’ve failed to disable tells me they can “help significantly.” I laugh at this ridiculous tableau. The local ACE Hardware store posted on Facebook that they’ve stocked up on respirators and safety goggles. What I once considered hardcore riot gear is now essential for leaving the house.
I live near the intersection of Chicago Avenue and Lake Street, two major South Minneapolis thoroughfares that mark the northwest corner of the Powderhorn Park neighborhood. My house is a mile north of where George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 and even closer to where Renee Good was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross this month. Since the Department of Homeland Security initiated “Operation Metro Surge” in December, there have been at least half a dozen abductions that I know of on or around my block. A nearby house of recently arrived Ecuadorians used to be home to sixteen adults and six children. Six weeks into the federal invasion, only eight adults remain.
Citywide, hundreds of people are being abducted from their homes and separated from their families. Citizens are racially profiled and asked for papers. Exact numbers on detainees are unreliable, but the number of federal agents is roughly three thousand. These numbers are similar in scale to ICE operations in other cities across the US, including LA and Chicago, but what’s new in Minneapolis are the extreme tactics that federal agents are using to repress organized resistance. The stories circulating online and by word of mouth are harrowing: federal agents surrounding observer cars to trap them, then smashing car windows and dragging observers out; agents spraying mace six inches from someone’s face or spraying mace into intake vents so that the inside of cars are immediately flooded; agents suddenly braking at seventy miles per hour on the freeway and forcing tailing vehicles to swerve; agents throwing observers on the ground, punching observers in the face, agents taking observers on aimless rides around the city while taunting them with racial or sexual epithets; agents holding observers at the federal detention building for hours without access to phone calls or lawyers. (This is merely how ICE terrorizes US citizens.)
What also feels new is the frequent candor with which ICE agents are displaying hateful ideology. Two days after Good was murdered, DHS overtly referenced a Neo-Nazi anthem in a nationwide recruitment post. Agents seem to feel empowered to say new kinds of chilling things out loud. One told an observer: “Stop following us, that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” (He was referring to Good.) A friend of mine was sexually harassed by an ICE agent, who called them “too pretty” to stay locked up while in detention. Another was shoved to the ground and asked, “Do you like the dirt, queer?” Sometimes the behavior is simply bizarre. After an attempted abduction left a couple dozen observers standing on a neighborhood street, one ICE vehicle circled the block, broadcasting a looped audio recording of a woman screaming.
In these moments the whole situation can seem ridiculous. The professional kidnappers step out of their flashy American cars with their special outfits on. They wave their little mace guns at us, but we’re not scared—we have oversized ski goggles! A particularly comic element at play is that we’re in the middle of another winter with wild variations in temperature, meaning that Minneapolis streets are covered in thick sheets of ice. There are some heartwarming videos of agents falling down (“ICE on ice!”) but we slip too, running towards or away from them. It can feel kind of slapstick, until you remember that they will destroy someone’s life today, and that they can kill you.
A black gloved hand reaches out of the Wagoneer window and begins to give a princess wave to us, then the peace sign, then a thumbs up. They’re mocking us. The agents stop their vehicle suddenly but Amy brakes in time. Luckily, so do we. ICE has been using “brake-checks” as pretense for detaining observers. Another observer car pulls up and my city council member steps out. He strides up to the Wagoneer, blowing his whistle. (Absolutely everyone is confronting ICE—I’ve encountered my old boss from the local cafe scuffling with agents, too.) Someone on the street starts filming and the bicyclist we know in the chat as “small fry” shouts at the agents to get out of Minneapolis. We’re honking. The Wagoneer idles for a few minutes and then takes off towards the freeway. We follow until they’re on the exit ramp. It feels good to watch them leave the neighborhood, but I worry about where they’re headed next. We drive towards home and come across another two vehicles with observers tailing behind. Lake Street, a major corridor of immigrant businesses in the neighborhood, has been crawling with ICE vehicles every morning this week.
Powderhorn Park is a middle-class neighborhood known for its May Day parade, replete with larger-than-life puppets and steampunk Mad Max vehicles. Artists and families live here, and young queer people, and many immigrants, most arriving from Ecuador in recent years. The past few summers, the block south of me has become impassable every evening as hundreds of my Spanish-speaking neighbors use the park for massive volleyball tournaments. Food vendors set up tables and families bring lawn chairs to watch the games. Last year, two women sold grilled chicken on the corner closest to me. My neighbor’s lawn became a kind of informal restaurant, where customers would sit at the warping picnic table and eat. I bought their chicken a few times, and it was awesome.
A week into the invasion my neighbor with the picnic table called to ask if I was available to come with one of the two vendors to an immigration appointment. The woman had been contacted by USCIS that morning and was told to come in at 3 o’clock that same afternoon. She was worried she could be detained on the spot and had a newborn with her. Several neighbors gathered to arrange a ride, but in the end she only wanted a lawyer and translator to attend with her. I heard later that at the appointment she announced she wanted to self-deport, trading a planned exit for the fear of being taken at random. Her sister, the other vendor, is still here. The Saturday after Good’s murder, she and I sit with a small group of volunteers gathered to talk about how to improve rideshare coordination over WhatsApp. She tells us in Spanish that migrants can’t use corporate rideshare services because there have been reports of Uber drivers taking people directly to ICE. Of the more than two hundred people in the rideshare text thread, half are citizens offering rides and half are requesting. “I like being in this group because I’m meeting so many neighbors I would not have met otherwise,” someone says at the meeting. “I hope we stay connected after this is all over.”
by Erin West, N+1 | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Embryo Selection Company Herasight Goes All In On Eugenics
Multiple commercial companies are now offering polygenic embryo selection on a wide range of traits, including genetic predictors of behavior and IQ. I’ve previously written about the methodological unknowns around this technology but I haven’t commented on the ethics. I think having a child is a very personal decision and it’s not my place to tell people how to do it. But the new embryo selection company, Herasight, has started advocating for eugenic societal norms that I find disturbing and worth raising alarm over. Because this is a fraught topic, I’ll start with some basic definitions.
What is eugenics?
Eugenics is an ideology that advocates for conditioning reproductive rights on the perceived genetic quality of the parents. Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, declared that eugenics’ “first object is to check the birth-rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being”. This goal was to be achieved through social stigma and, if necessary, by force. The Eugenics Education Society, for instance, advocated for education, segregation, and — “perhaps” — compulsory sterilization to prevent the “unfit and degenerate” from reproducing:
A core component of defining “the unfit” was heredity. Eugenicists are not just interested in improving people’s phenotypes — a goal that is widely shared by modern society — but the future genotypic distribution. The genetic stock. This is why eugenic policies historically focus on sterilization, including the sterilization of unaffected relatives who harbor genotype but not phenotype. If someone commits a crime, they face time in prison for their actions, but under eugenic reasoning their law-abiding sibling or child is also suspect and should be stigmatized (or forcefully prevented) from passing on deficient genetic material.
A simple two-part test for eugenics is then: (1) Is it concerned with the future genetic stock? (2) Is it advocating for restricted reproduction, either through stigma or force, for those deemed genetically inferior?
Is embryo selection eugenics?
I have publicly resisted applying the “eugenics” label to embryo selection writ large and I continue to do so. Embryo selection is a tool and its use is morally complex. A couple can choose to have embryo screening for a variety of reasons ranging from frivolous (“we want to have a blue eyed baby”) to widely supported (“we carry a recessive mutation that would be fatal in our baby”), none of which have eugenic intent. Embryo selection can even be an anti-eugenic tool, as in the case of high-risk couples who have already decided against having children. If embryo selection technology allows them to lower the risk to a comfortable level and have a child they would otherwise have avoided, then the outcome is literally the opposite of eugenic selection: “unfit” individuals (at least as they see themselves) now have an incentive to produce more offspring than they would have. In practice, IVF remains a physically and emotionally demanding procedure, and my guess is that individual eugenic intentions — the desire to select out unfit embryos with the specific motivation of improving the “genetic stock” of the population — are exceedingly rare.
Is Herasight advocating for eugenics?
While I do not think embryo selection is eugenic in itself, like any reproductive technology, it can be wielded for eugenic purposes. The new embryo selection company Herasight, in my opinion, is advocating for exactly that. To understand why, it is useful to first understand the theories put forth by Herasight’s director of scientific research and communication Jonathan Anomaly (in case you’re wondering, that is a chosen last name). Anomaly is a self-proclaimed eugenicist [Update: Anomaly has clarified that this description was not provided by him and he requested that it be removed]:
Prior to joining Herasight, Anomaly wrote extensively on the ethics of embryo selection, notably in a 2018 article titled “Defending eugenics”. How does Anomaly defend eugenics? First, he reiterates the classic position that eugenics is a resistance to the uncontrolled reproduction of the “unfit” (emphasis mine, throughout):
Anomaly then proposes several potential eugenic interventions, one of which is a “parental licensing” scheme that prevents unfit parents from having children:
Today, Anomaly is the spokesperson for a company that screens parents for “undesirable genetic endowments” and, for a price, promises to boost their genetic desirability and their value to future people. It is easy to see how Herasight fits directly into the eugenic parental licensing scheme Anomaly proposed. Having an open eugenicist as the spokesperson for an embryo selection company seems, to me, akin to hiring Hannibal Lecter to do PR for a hospital, but perhaps Anomaly has radically changed his views since billing himself as a eugenicist in 2023?
Herasight (with Anomaly as first author) recently published a perspective white-paper on the ethics polygenic selection, from which we can glean their corporate position. The perspective outlines the potential benefits and harms of embryo selection. The very first positive benefit listed? The “benefits to future people”. While this section starts with a focus the welfare of individual children, it ends with the same societal motivations as classical eugenics: the social costs of the unfit on communities and the benefits of the fit to scientific innovation and the public good: [...]
What is eugenics?
A core component of defining “the unfit” was heredity. Eugenicists are not just interested in improving people’s phenotypes — a goal that is widely shared by modern society — but the future genotypic distribution. The genetic stock. This is why eugenic policies historically focus on sterilization, including the sterilization of unaffected relatives who harbor genotype but not phenotype. If someone commits a crime, they face time in prison for their actions, but under eugenic reasoning their law-abiding sibling or child is also suspect and should be stigmatized (or forcefully prevented) from passing on deficient genetic material.
A simple two-part test for eugenics is then: (1) Is it concerned with the future genetic stock? (2) Is it advocating for restricted reproduction, either through stigma or force, for those deemed genetically inferior?
Is embryo selection eugenics?
I have publicly resisted applying the “eugenics” label to embryo selection writ large and I continue to do so. Embryo selection is a tool and its use is morally complex. A couple can choose to have embryo screening for a variety of reasons ranging from frivolous (“we want to have a blue eyed baby”) to widely supported (“we carry a recessive mutation that would be fatal in our baby”), none of which have eugenic intent. Embryo selection can even be an anti-eugenic tool, as in the case of high-risk couples who have already decided against having children. If embryo selection technology allows them to lower the risk to a comfortable level and have a child they would otherwise have avoided, then the outcome is literally the opposite of eugenic selection: “unfit” individuals (at least as they see themselves) now have an incentive to produce more offspring than they would have. In practice, IVF remains a physically and emotionally demanding procedure, and my guess is that individual eugenic intentions — the desire to select out unfit embryos with the specific motivation of improving the “genetic stock” of the population — are exceedingly rare.
Is Herasight advocating for eugenics?
While I do not think embryo selection is eugenic in itself, like any reproductive technology, it can be wielded for eugenic purposes. The new embryo selection company Herasight, in my opinion, is advocating for exactly that. To understand why, it is useful to first understand the theories put forth by Herasight’s director of scientific research and communication Jonathan Anomaly (in case you’re wondering, that is a chosen last name). Anomaly is a self-proclaimed eugenicist [Update: Anomaly has clarified that this description was not provided by him and he requested that it be removed]:
Prior to joining Herasight, Anomaly wrote extensively on the ethics of embryo selection, notably in a 2018 article titled “Defending eugenics”. How does Anomaly defend eugenics? First, he reiterates the classic position that eugenics is a resistance to the uncontrolled reproduction of the “unfit” (emphasis mine, throughout):
Darwin argued that social welfare programs for the poor and sick are a natural expression of our sympathy, but also a danger to future populations if they encourage people with serious congenital diseases and heritable traits like low levels of impulse control, intelligence, or empathy to reproduce at higher rates than other people in the population. Darwin feared that in developed nations “the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members”Anomaly goes on to sympathize with Darwin’s position and that of the classic eugenicists, arguing that “While Darwin’s language is shocking to contemporary readers, we should take him seriously”, later that “there is increasingly good evidence that Darwin was right to worry about demographic trends in developed countries”, and that we should “stop allowing [the Holocaust] to silence any discussion of the merits of eugenic thinking”.
Anomaly then proposes several potential eugenic interventions, one of which is a “parental licensing” scheme that prevents unfit parents from having children:
The typical response is for the state to step in and pay for all of these things, and in extreme cases to remove children from their parents and put them in foster care. But it would be more cost-effective to prevent unwanted pregnancies than treating their consequences, especially if we could achieve this goal by subsidizing the voluntary use of contraception. It may also be more desirable from the standpoint of future people.The phrase “future people” figures repeatedly in Anomaly’s writing as a euphemism for the more conventional eugenic concept of genetic stock. This connection is made explicit when he explains the most compelling reason for supporting parental licensing:
The most compelling reason (though certainly not a decisive reason) for supporting parental licensing is that traits like impulse control, health, intelligence, and empathy have significant genetic components. What matters is not just that some parents are unwilling or unable to take care of their children; but that in many cases they are passing along an undesirable genetic endowment.What are we really talking about here? Anomaly has proposed a technocratic rebranding of eugenic sterilization: instead of taking away your reproductive rights clinically, the state will take away your reproductive license and, if you still have children, impose “fines or other costs” (though Anomaly does not make the “other costs” explicit, eugenic sterilization is mentioned as an example in the very next sentence). How would the state decide who should lose their license? Anomaly explains:
For a parental licensing scheme to be fair, we would need to devise criteria that are effective at screening out only parents who impose significant risks of harm on their children or (through their children) on other people.A fundamental normative principle of our society is that all members are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. What Anomaly envisions instead is a society where the state can seize one of the most intimate of human freedoms — the right to become a parent — based on innate factors. How does the state determine whether a future child imposes significant risk on future people? By inspecting the biological makeup of the parents and identifying “undesirable genetic endowments” that will harm others “through their children”. This is a policy built explicitly on genetic desirability and undesirability, where those deemed genetically unfit are stripped of their rights to have children and/or fined for doing so — aka bog-standard coercive eugenics.
Today, Anomaly is the spokesperson for a company that screens parents for “undesirable genetic endowments” and, for a price, promises to boost their genetic desirability and their value to future people. It is easy to see how Herasight fits directly into the eugenic parental licensing scheme Anomaly proposed. Having an open eugenicist as the spokesperson for an embryo selection company seems, to me, akin to hiring Hannibal Lecter to do PR for a hospital, but perhaps Anomaly has radically changed his views since billing himself as a eugenicist in 2023?
Herasight (with Anomaly as first author) recently published a perspective white-paper on the ethics polygenic selection, from which we can glean their corporate position. The perspective outlines the potential benefits and harms of embryo selection. The very first positive benefit listed? The “benefits to future people”. While this section starts with a focus the welfare of individual children, it ends with the same societal motivations as classical eugenics: the social costs of the unfit on communities and the benefits of the fit to scientific innovation and the public good: [...]
When eugenics goes mainstream
Let’s review: eugenics has as a goal of limiting the birthrate of the “unfit” or “undesirable” for the benefit of the group. Anomaly describes himself as a eugenicist and explicitly echoes this goal through, among other policies, a parental licensing proposal. Anomaly now runs a genetic screening company. The company recently published a perspective paper advocating for the stigmatization of “unfit” parents who do not screen. Anomaly, as spokesperson, reiterates that their goal is indeed eugenics — “Yes, and it’s great!”. With any other person one could argue that they were clueless or trolling; but if anyone knows what eugenics means, it is a person who has spent the past decade defending it.
I have to say I am floored by how strange this all is. My personal take on embryo selection has been decidedly neutral. I think the expected gains are limited by the genetic architecture of the traits being scored and the companies are mostly fudging the numbers to look good. As noted above, I also think a common use of this technology will be to calm the nerves of parents who otherwise would have gone childless. So I have no actual concerns about changes to the genetic make-up of the population or genetic inequality or any of the other utopian/dystopian predictions. But I am concerned that the marketing around the technology revives and normalizes classic eugenic arguments: that society is divided into the genetically fit and the genetically unfit, and the latter need to be stigmatized away from parenthood for the benefit of the former. I am particularly disturbed by the giddiness with which Anomaly and Herasight have repeatedly courted eugenics-related controversy as part of their launch campaign.
Even stranger has been the response, or rather non-response, from the genetics community. Social science geneticists and organizations spent the past decade writing FAQs warning against the use of their methods and data for individual prediction and against genetic essentialism. Many conference presentations and seminars start with a section on the sordid history of eugenics and the sterilization programs in the US and Nazi Germany, vowing not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Now, a company is openly advocating for eugenics (in fact, a company with direct connections to these social science organizations) and these organizations are silent. It is hard not to conclude that the FAQs and warnings were just lip service. And if the experts aren’t raising alarms, why would the public be alarmed?
Let’s review: eugenics has as a goal of limiting the birthrate of the “unfit” or “undesirable” for the benefit of the group. Anomaly describes himself as a eugenicist and explicitly echoes this goal through, among other policies, a parental licensing proposal. Anomaly now runs a genetic screening company. The company recently published a perspective paper advocating for the stigmatization of “unfit” parents who do not screen. Anomaly, as spokesperson, reiterates that their goal is indeed eugenics — “Yes, and it’s great!”. With any other person one could argue that they were clueless or trolling; but if anyone knows what eugenics means, it is a person who has spent the past decade defending it.
I have to say I am floored by how strange this all is. My personal take on embryo selection has been decidedly neutral. I think the expected gains are limited by the genetic architecture of the traits being scored and the companies are mostly fudging the numbers to look good. As noted above, I also think a common use of this technology will be to calm the nerves of parents who otherwise would have gone childless. So I have no actual concerns about changes to the genetic make-up of the population or genetic inequality or any of the other utopian/dystopian predictions. But I am concerned that the marketing around the technology revives and normalizes classic eugenic arguments: that society is divided into the genetically fit and the genetically unfit, and the latter need to be stigmatized away from parenthood for the benefit of the former. I am particularly disturbed by the giddiness with which Anomaly and Herasight have repeatedly courted eugenics-related controversy as part of their launch campaign.
Even stranger has been the response, or rather non-response, from the genetics community. Social science geneticists and organizations spent the past decade writing FAQs warning against the use of their methods and data for individual prediction and against genetic essentialism. Many conference presentations and seminars start with a section on the sordid history of eugenics and the sterilization programs in the US and Nazi Germany, vowing not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Now, a company is openly advocating for eugenics (in fact, a company with direct connections to these social science organizations) and these organizations are silent. It is hard not to conclude that the FAQs and warnings were just lip service. And if the experts aren’t raising alarms, why would the public be alarmed?
by Sasha Gusev, The Infinitesimal | Read more:
Image: Anselm Kiefer, Die Ungeborenen (The Unborn), 2002[ed. With neophyte Nazis seemingly everywhere these days, CRISPR advances, and technocrats who want to live forever, it's perhaps not surprising that eugenics would be making a comeback. Update: Jonathan Anomaly, director of scientific research and communication for Herasight and whose articles I criticize here, responds in a detailed comment. I recommend reading his response together with this post. Anomaly’s role in the company has also been clarified. See also: Have we leapt into commercial genetic testing without understanding it? (Ars Technica).]
Alcohol Death Rates in Europe
via:
[ed. A few surprises.]
"Alcohol death rates in Europe. Apparently very low in cultures where drunkenness is frowned upon and where alcohol is only consumed in company of others and served alongside meals. Spain and Italy for example." via:
Family Deepfakes Help With Grieving
When the lights dimmed at Jaideep Sharma’s wedding reception in the north Indian city of Ajmer, guests expected to see a cheesy montage of the young couple in various attractive locations. Instead, they saw Sharma’s father — dead for more than a year — on the screen, smiling and blessing the newlyweds.
The video was created using artificial intelligence by a local creator Sharma found on Instagram. Using pictures of Sharma’s father, the creator produced a minute-long video in about a week, and charged about 50,000 rupees ($600), Sharma told Rest of World. It was worth it, he said.
“It was like a bombardment of emotions for everyone,” said the 33-year-old garment trader, who felt his father’s absence keenly at his wedding. “He was like a central force in the entire family. So when the video played, everyone was very happy and emotional at the same time.”
Sharma is among a growing number of Indians discovering the power of AI deepfakes to resurrect dead family members, create voice clones of the departed, and add absent guests to family celebrations. AI tools such as OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Nano Banana, and Midjourney have made it easier to create images and videos that can fool even experts. Cashing in are entrepreneurs in small towns and cities, who have learned how to use these tools from YouTube tutorials and online forums.
Like Akhil Vinayak, a film buff, who posts deepfake videos of popular dead actors on Instagram for fun. A client in the south Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram approached him with an unusual request: Could he create a deepfake video of her dead mother-in-law blessing her baby?
“She wanted to surprise her husband,” the 29-year-old told Rest of World. “Her mother-in-law had passed away before the baby was born.”
Vinayak created a video showing the dead woman stepping down from heaven and visiting her son, then holding the baby she hadn’t met. The client was thrilled, and sent Vinayak a recording of the family’s stunned reaction. That video has more than 1 million likes on Instagram.
The video was created using artificial intelligence by a local creator Sharma found on Instagram. Using pictures of Sharma’s father, the creator produced a minute-long video in about a week, and charged about 50,000 rupees ($600), Sharma told Rest of World. It was worth it, he said.
Sharma is among a growing number of Indians discovering the power of AI deepfakes to resurrect dead family members, create voice clones of the departed, and add absent guests to family celebrations. AI tools such as OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Nano Banana, and Midjourney have made it easier to create images and videos that can fool even experts. Cashing in are entrepreneurs in small towns and cities, who have learned how to use these tools from YouTube tutorials and online forums.
Like Akhil Vinayak, a film buff, who posts deepfake videos of popular dead actors on Instagram for fun. A client in the south Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram approached him with an unusual request: Could he create a deepfake video of her dead mother-in-law blessing her baby?
“She wanted to surprise her husband,” the 29-year-old told Rest of World. “Her mother-in-law had passed away before the baby was born.”
Vinayak created a video showing the dead woman stepping down from heaven and visiting her son, then holding the baby she hadn’t met. The client was thrilled, and sent Vinayak a recording of the family’s stunned reaction. That video has more than 1 million likes on Instagram.
Such uses — and reactions — stand in sharp contrast to the growing pushback to AI-generated videos and voice clones, which are most commonly used for harassment, extortion, financial scams, political misinformation, and election manipulation.
For Vinayak’s clients, though, the deepfakes are not just practical but also deeply emotional, he said. Vinayak uses open-source models like Stable Diffusion and editing systems such as Adobe Premiere Pro to create them, charging about 18,000 rupees ($200) on average for minute-long videos.
by Hanan Zaffar and Jyoti Thakur, Rest of World | Read more:
Images: Ishan Tankha for Rest of World/Akhil Vinayak
For Vinayak’s clients, though, the deepfakes are not just practical but also deeply emotional, he said. Vinayak uses open-source models like Stable Diffusion and editing systems such as Adobe Premiere Pro to create them, charging about 18,000 rupees ($200) on average for minute-long videos.
Images: Ishan Tankha for Rest of World/Akhil Vinayak
Saturday, February 21, 2026
Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump Tariffs
Why the “Lesser Included Action” Argument for IEEPA Tariffs Fails
The Supreme Court yesterday struck down Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, holding that the statute’s authorization to “regulate… importation” doesn’t include the power to impose tariffs. The majority’s strongest argument is simple: every time Congress actually delegates tariff authority, it uses the word “duty,” caps the rate, sets a time limit, and requires procedural prerequisites. IEEPA has none of these.
The dissent pushes back with an intuitively appealing argument: IEEPA authorizes the President to prohibit imports entirely, so surely it authorizes the lesser action of merely taxing them. If Congress handed over the nuclear option, why would it withhold the conventional weapon? Indeed in his press conference Trump, in his rambling manner, made exactly this argument:
Congress wants the President to move fast in a real emergency, but it doesn’t want to hand over routine control of trade policy. The right delegation design is therefore a screening device: give the President authority he will exercise only when the situation is truly an emergency.
An import ban works as a screening device precisely because it is very disruptive. A ban creates immediate and substantial harm. It is a “costly signal.” A President who invokes it is credibly saying: this is serious enough that I am willing to absorb a large cost. Tariffs, in contrast, are cheaper–especially to the President. Tariffs raise revenue, which offsets political pain. Tariff incidence is diffuse and easy to misattribute—prices creep, intermediaries take blame, consumers don’t observe the policy lever directly. Most importantly tariffs are adjustable, which makes them a weapon useful for bargaining, exemptions, and targeted favors. Tariffs under executive authority implicitly carry the message–I am the king; give me a gold bar and I will reduce your tariffs. Tariff flexibility is more politically appealing than a ban and thus a less credible signal of an emergency. The “lesser-included” argument gets the logic backwards. The asymmetry is the point.
Not surprisingly, the same structure appears in real emergency services. A fire chief may have the authority to close roads during an emergency but that doesn’t imply that the fire chief has the authority to impose road tolls. Road closure is costly and self-limiting — it disrupts traffic, generates immediate complaints, and the chief has every incentive to lift it as soon as possible. Tolls are cheap, adjustable, and once in place tend to persist; they generate revenue that can fund the agency and create constituencies for their continuation. Nobody thinks granting a fire chief emergency closure authority implicitly grants them taxing authority, even if the latter is a lesser authority. The closure and toll instruments have completely different political economy properties despite operating on the same roads.
The majority reaches the right conclusion by noting that tariffs are a tax over which Congress, not the President, has authority. That is constitutionally correct but the deeper question is why the Framers lodged the taxing power in Congress — and the answer is political economy. Revenue instruments are especially easy for an executive to exploit because they can be targeted. The constitutional rule exists to solve that incentive problem.
by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution | Read more:
“I am allowed to cut off any and all trade…I can destroy the trade, I can destroy the country, I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country destroying embargo…I can do anything I want to do to them…I’m allowed to destroy the country, but I can’t charge a little fee.”The argument is superficially appealing but it fails due to a standard result in principal-agent theory.
Congress wants the President to move fast in a real emergency, but it doesn’t want to hand over routine control of trade policy. The right delegation design is therefore a screening device: give the President authority he will exercise only when the situation is truly an emergency.
An import ban works as a screening device precisely because it is very disruptive. A ban creates immediate and substantial harm. It is a “costly signal.” A President who invokes it is credibly saying: this is serious enough that I am willing to absorb a large cost. Tariffs, in contrast, are cheaper–especially to the President. Tariffs raise revenue, which offsets political pain. Tariff incidence is diffuse and easy to misattribute—prices creep, intermediaries take blame, consumers don’t observe the policy lever directly. Most importantly tariffs are adjustable, which makes them a weapon useful for bargaining, exemptions, and targeted favors. Tariffs under executive authority implicitly carry the message–I am the king; give me a gold bar and I will reduce your tariffs. Tariff flexibility is more politically appealing than a ban and thus a less credible signal of an emergency. The “lesser-included” argument gets the logic backwards. The asymmetry is the point.
Not surprisingly, the same structure appears in real emergency services. A fire chief may have the authority to close roads during an emergency but that doesn’t imply that the fire chief has the authority to impose road tolls. Road closure is costly and self-limiting — it disrupts traffic, generates immediate complaints, and the chief has every incentive to lift it as soon as possible. Tolls are cheap, adjustable, and once in place tend to persist; they generate revenue that can fund the agency and create constituencies for their continuation. Nobody thinks granting a fire chief emergency closure authority implicitly grants them taxing authority, even if the latter is a lesser authority. The closure and toll instruments have completely different political economy properties despite operating on the same roads.
The majority reaches the right conclusion by noting that tariffs are a tax over which Congress, not the President, has authority. That is constitutionally correct but the deeper question is why the Framers lodged the taxing power in Congress — and the answer is political economy. Revenue instruments are especially easy for an executive to exploit because they can be targeted. The constitutional rule exists to solve that incentive problem.
by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution | Read more:
Image: uncredited/via
[ed. Making Congress do their job, even when they don't want to... See also: Justice Gorsuch Tries to Revive Congress (WSJ):]
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As they wait out the latest winter storm, Members of Congress ought to spend time reading Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s rejection of President Trump’s claim of emergency power to impose tariffs (Learning Resources v. Trump). The Justice has more confidence in Congress than the Members themselves do these days.
Justice Gorsuch rides shotgun to Chief Justice John Roberts’s excellent majority opinion, and he mows down both the dissents and the concurring opinion by liberal Justice Elena Kagan. It’s an intellectual tour de force. But his main theme isn’t an assertion of judicial power. It’s an effort to encourage Congress to reclaim its proper authority under the Constitution’s separation of powers. [...]
In our view, the recent weakness of Congress vis-à-vis the President has many causes. Political polarization and narrow majorities make it harder for bipartisan coalitions to form. Media focus on the Presidency draws more readers than do stories on legislative process. The failure of civic education about the American system produces a public that is more susceptible to demagoguery and political idolatry.
But as Justice Gorsuch makes clear, the difficulty of passing legislation is a constitutional feature, not a fault. “Deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions,” he writes. “And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure.” He rightly calls the legislative process “the bulwark of liberty.”
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