Sunday, March 29, 2026
The 49MB Web Page
If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.
I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.
It is the same story across top publishers today.
If hardware has improved so much over the last 20 years, has the modern framework/ad-tech stack completely negated that progress with abstraction and poorly architected bloat?
CPU throttles, tracking and privacy nightmares
For the example above, taking a cursory look at the network waterfall for a single article load reveals a sprawling, unregulated programmatic ad auction happening entirely in the client's browser. Before the user finishes reading the headline, the browser is forced to process dozens of concurrent bidding requests to exchanges like Rubicon Project (fastlane.json) and Amazon Ad Systems. While these requests are asynchronous over the network, their payloads are incredibly hostile to the browser's main thread. To facilitate this, the browser must download, parse and compile megabytes of JS [ed. javascript]. As a publisher, you shouldn't run compute cycles to calculate ad yields before rendering the actual journalism.
1. The user requests text.
2. The browser downloads 5MB of tracking JS.
3. A silent auction happens in the background, taxing the mobile CPU.
4. The winning bidder injects a carefully selected interstitial ad you didn't ask for.
Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user's cross-site identity together across different ad networks.
When you open a website on your phone, it's like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.
Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe's IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.
So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background. But that's enough about NYT.
2. The browser downloads 5MB of tracking JS.
3. A silent auction happens in the background, taxing the mobile CPU.
4. The winning bidder injects a carefully selected interstitial ad you didn't ask for.
Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user's cross-site identity together across different ad networks.
When you open a website on your phone, it's like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.
Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe's IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.
So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background. But that's enough about NYT.
The Economics of Hostile Architecture
Publishers aren't evil but they are desperate. Caught in this programmatic ad-tech death spiral, they are trading long-term reader retention for short-term CPM pennies. The modern ad industry is slowly de-coupling the creator from the advertiser. They weaponize the UI because they think they have to.
Viewability and time-on-page are very important metrics these days. Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The longer you're trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you, the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.
The reader is not respected enough by the software. The publisher is held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only encourages but also rewards dark patterns.
And almost all modern news websites are guilty of some variation of anti-user patterns. As a reminder, the NNgroup defines interaction cost as the sum of mental and physical efforts a user must exert to reach their goal. In the physical world, hostile architecture refers to a park bench with spikes that prevent people from sleeping. In the digital world, we can call it a system carefully engineered to extract metrics at the expense of human cognitive load. Let's also cover some popular user-hostile design choices that have gone mainstream.
The Pre-Read Ambush
Selected GDPR examplesThe advantage and disadvantages of these have been discussed in tech circles ever since they launched.
When a user clicks a news link, they have a singular purpose of reading the headline and going through the text. The problem is that upon page load, users are greeted by what I call Z-Index Warfare. The GDPR/Cookie banners occupy the bottom 30%. The user scrolls once and witnesses a "Subscribe to our Newsletter" modal. Meanwhile the browser has started hammering them with allow notification prompts.
The user must perform visual triage, identify the close icons (which are deliberately given low contrast) and execute side quests just to access the 5KB of text they came for. Let's look at how all these anti-patterns combine into a single, user-hostile experience.
by Shubham Bose, Thatshubham | Read more:
Images: uncredited
Hawaii’s Small Farmers Begin Recovery After Catastrophic Flooding
Eddie Oroyan’s farm was thriving when the storms hit. He and his wife had started LewaTerra Farm last year on a gorgeous stretch of land on the north shore of Oahu. They were delivering vegetables to customers in the community, selling at farmer’s markets and to local restaurants.
Then, on the week of 10 March, a first kona low storm hit the island, bringing copious amounts of water, flooding their land and wiping out crops. Nearly all their papayas were gone. And the tomatoes didn’t survive. But the couple quickly began cleaning, replanting and tying down crops, confident that they would get back on their feet shortly.
“It was looking really positive. We were like, OK, we’re going to make it out of this,” Oroyan said.
But days later the Hawaiian Islands were hit with yet another storm – this one even more perilous. It inundated neighborhoods, leading to more than 200 rescues, washing houses off their foundations and leaving wide swaths of the land underwater.
Oroyan and his wife evacuated in chest-deep water. They returned to find an almost complete loss.
“The crops were completely covered and had already been underwater earlier that week. The disease was already setting in,” he said.
One week on, Hawaii is only just beginning to grapple with the aftermath of both storms, which saw as much as 50in of rain and caused some of the state’s worst flooding since 2004. The damage is immense – with officials estimating costs at $1bn, and farmers have been hit hard, particularly on Oahu. More than 300 farms have reported about $17.5m in damage as of this week, said Brian Miyamoto, the executive director of the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau.
“This is so widespread that the need is astronomical,” he said.
And with significant debris, damaged roads, and thick mud indoors and outside, cleanup will take time. [...]
Blake Briddell and Brit Yim, who for the last eight years have run an eight-acre farm on land that used to serve as a sugarcane plantation on the north shore, went through their nursery and storage sheds, elevating everything off the ground to protect their breadfruit, mango and citrus trees.
The storm came sooner than expected. The first front brought incessant rain, dropping about 20in in McKinnon’s area, which typically sees an average of 30in for the year. The water levels on Briddell’s farm were steadily rising, and the couple soon had to evacuate.
The heavy rains didn’t stay for long, but caused significant damage, including flooding fields and saturating the ground, and harvested crops were lost to power outages and damaged equipment.
Much of the land that Oroyan and his wife, Jessica Eirado Enes, tend had been left coated in a thick layer of mud thanks to the dense clay soil. Millions of years of erosion from the mountains produced that mineral-rich clay soil, which is good for planting, but that doesn’t soak up water well, Oroyan said, and swallows shoes and tractors.
The couple spent days cleaning up their land, trying to get things back in order and leaving soaked equipment out to dry. They got to work replanting crops that had tipped over, including eggplant and okra.
So did McKinnon and Briddell. Another kona storm was forecast, but was expected to be less severe than the previous ones. “It’s silly looking back, but we were talking about how it might be nice to get a little bit of rain to wash the mud off of everything. Like a little bit of rain would be welcome,” Briddell said.
Briddell woke up at 1.30am on the morning of 20 March to the see water surrounded his farm’s small living space, an alarming development given that it is located on the most elevated area of the property. The water was already shin-deep, meaning the road was too flooded for the couple to drive out, he said.
“We knew we were stuck at that point and it was just a matter of ‘OK, everything that we can get back up elevated, let’s do it’” Briddell said. “The water at that stage was raising about a foot every 20 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it. You could literally see the water line climbing.”
Meanwhile, as the storm made landfall, Oroyan had been harvesting beets and lettuce in the rain, trying to get them out of the ground before it became too muddy to do so. As he prepared to go to bed, he saw that water was already overwhelming a nearby culvert and coming to the edge of a drainage ditch on the property.
He and his wife began to prepare once more. They gathered their things and moved valuable heavy equipment, a solar generator and a washing machine.
“Within 20 minutes of me saying we should start prepping it was at the foot of the living space,” Oroyan said. Twenty minutes later it was up to their knees, and they drove their vehicles to higher ground with water submerging the hoods of their cars. They made it to a neighbors after walking through chest-deep water.
Briddell and Yim put on wetsuits, and placed their dry clothes in a cooler. The couple knew their cats would not leave, and that they couldn’t swim out with them, so they left wet food on the rafters of their home where they knew they’d be safe. They swam a quarter of a mile to their kayak and met with a friend who offered them a vehicle to drive out in.
“The drive was scarier than the swim. The water ripping down the roads. You’re driving with the tailpipe pipes submerged for miles where you can’t let off the gas,” Briddell said.
by Dani Anguiano, The Guardian | Read more:
Images: Eddie Oroyan of LewaTerra Farm
Then, on the week of 10 March, a first kona low storm hit the island, bringing copious amounts of water, flooding their land and wiping out crops. Nearly all their papayas were gone. And the tomatoes didn’t survive. But the couple quickly began cleaning, replanting and tying down crops, confident that they would get back on their feet shortly.
But days later the Hawaiian Islands were hit with yet another storm – this one even more perilous. It inundated neighborhoods, leading to more than 200 rescues, washing houses off their foundations and leaving wide swaths of the land underwater.
Oroyan and his wife evacuated in chest-deep water. They returned to find an almost complete loss.
“The crops were completely covered and had already been underwater earlier that week. The disease was already setting in,” he said.
“This is so widespread that the need is astronomical,” he said.
And with significant debris, damaged roads, and thick mud indoors and outside, cleanup will take time. [...]
Blake Briddell and Brit Yim, who for the last eight years have run an eight-acre farm on land that used to serve as a sugarcane plantation on the north shore, went through their nursery and storage sheds, elevating everything off the ground to protect their breadfruit, mango and citrus trees.
The storm came sooner than expected. The first front brought incessant rain, dropping about 20in in McKinnon’s area, which typically sees an average of 30in for the year. The water levels on Briddell’s farm were steadily rising, and the couple soon had to evacuate.
The heavy rains didn’t stay for long, but caused significant damage, including flooding fields and saturating the ground, and harvested crops were lost to power outages and damaged equipment.
Much of the land that Oroyan and his wife, Jessica Eirado Enes, tend had been left coated in a thick layer of mud thanks to the dense clay soil. Millions of years of erosion from the mountains produced that mineral-rich clay soil, which is good for planting, but that doesn’t soak up water well, Oroyan said, and swallows shoes and tractors.
So did McKinnon and Briddell. Another kona storm was forecast, but was expected to be less severe than the previous ones. “It’s silly looking back, but we were talking about how it might be nice to get a little bit of rain to wash the mud off of everything. Like a little bit of rain would be welcome,” Briddell said.
Briddell woke up at 1.30am on the morning of 20 March to the see water surrounded his farm’s small living space, an alarming development given that it is located on the most elevated area of the property. The water was already shin-deep, meaning the road was too flooded for the couple to drive out, he said.
“We knew we were stuck at that point and it was just a matter of ‘OK, everything that we can get back up elevated, let’s do it’” Briddell said. “The water at that stage was raising about a foot every 20 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it. You could literally see the water line climbing.”
Meanwhile, as the storm made landfall, Oroyan had been harvesting beets and lettuce in the rain, trying to get them out of the ground before it became too muddy to do so. As he prepared to go to bed, he saw that water was already overwhelming a nearby culvert and coming to the edge of a drainage ditch on the property.
He and his wife began to prepare once more. They gathered their things and moved valuable heavy equipment, a solar generator and a washing machine.
“Within 20 minutes of me saying we should start prepping it was at the foot of the living space,” Oroyan said. Twenty minutes later it was up to their knees, and they drove their vehicles to higher ground with water submerging the hoods of their cars. They made it to a neighbors after walking through chest-deep water.
Briddell and Yim put on wetsuits, and placed their dry clothes in a cooler. The couple knew their cats would not leave, and that they couldn’t swim out with them, so they left wet food on the rafters of their home where they knew they’d be safe. They swam a quarter of a mile to their kayak and met with a friend who offered them a vehicle to drive out in.
“The drive was scarier than the swim. The water ripping down the roads. You’re driving with the tailpipe pipes submerged for miles where you can’t let off the gas,” Briddell said.
by Dani Anguiano, The Guardian | Read more:
Images: Eddie Oroyan of LewaTerra Farm
[ed. Climate change. We lost the fight before it ever got started. Because it was a hoax. Because we needed to protect our corporations and our economy, 401Ks, consumptive standards of living. Because it was too complex and too far in the future. Because it was just too hard. See also: They’re Rich but Not Famous—and They’re Suddenly Everywhere.]
Séamus and Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta feat. Malinda
“Eileanóir na Rún”. An Irish song performed in the sean-nós style, originally composed by Cearbhall Óg Ó Dálaigh in the 17th century.
[ed. Beautiful and heartfelt. No wonder this song has survived for centuries.]
History is Made by Those Who Show Up
The powerful adage, “History is made by those who show up,” serves as a profound reminder that passive observation rarely shapes the world. Its meaning is layered, emphasizing that the first and most crucial step toward any form of impact, change, or achievement is simply being present. It champions action over intention, participation over critique, and engagement over apathy. This quote suggests that grand historical narratives are not solely written by geniuses or leaders in isolation, but are collectively forged by the countless individuals who choose to participate—by attending the meeting, casting the vote, joining the movement, or lending a hand. The essence of the “history is made by those who show up” quote is an empowering call to agency, asserting that showing up is the foundational act upon which all else is built.
Origin and Attribution of the Quote
Unlike many famous sayings tied to a single historical figure, the exact origin of “history is made by those who show up” is pleasingly democratic—it has emerged from the collective consciousness. It is often attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to various figures including President Harry S. Truman or Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, reflecting its political resonance. The sentiment echoes the writings of philosopher and psychologist William James, who emphasized the power of habit and action. Regardless of its precise source, the quote’s endurance lies in its universal truth. It has been adopted by community organizers, business coaches, and motivational speakers alike, becoming a modern mantra for proactive living. The ambiguity of its origin, in a way, proves its point: the quote’s history was made by the many who showed up to use it, share it, and live by it.
A Curated List of “Show Up” Quotes and Their Meanings
The central theme of showing up resonates across time and disciplines. Here is a collection of quotes that expand on this vital principle, each followed by an explanation of its significance.
“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” – Often attributed to Woody Allen. This variation focuses on the disproportionate reward for the simple act of presence. It suggests that consistency and availability are primary drivers of achievement, often outweighing raw talent or perfect conditions.
“Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Take the moment and make it perfect.” – Zoey Sayward. This quote challenges the paralysis of waiting for ideal circumstances. Its meaning is that showing up imperfectly is better than not showing up at all, and that action itself transforms a situation.
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” – Paulo Coelho. While related, this quote shifts focus from mere presence to exemplary action. Its meaning highlights that showing up authentically and living your values has far more impact than simply voicing critiques or beliefs.
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky. A classic in the sports world, this quote is a mathematical argument for participation. Its meaning is clear: without the courage to “show up” and attempt, failure is guaranteed. Opportunity only exists where there is engagement.
“It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” – Theodore Roosevelt. This is the grand philosophical counterpart to our core quote. Its meaning glorifies the person who shows up, strives, and dares greatly, while dismissing the value of those who only observe and criticize from the sidelines.
“Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.” – Peter Marshall. This quote prioritizes tangible, completed action over grand, unfinished intentions. Its meaning reinforces that showing up to do a small part is historically more significant than drafting a perfect, unmaterialized blueprint.
“Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso. A succinct statement linking action to all achievement. Its meaning posits that showing up is the first action, the essential spark from which all other possibilities—creativity, success, history—ignite.
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” – Andy Warhol. This quote adds a layer of agency to the passage of time. Its meaning is that showing up is an active intervention, a deliberate force required to steer history, as time alone does not guarantee progress.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Often attributed to Abraham Lincoln or Peter Drucker. This forward-looking statement frames showing up as a creative, future-building act. Its meaning is that by participating today, you are actively drafting the chapters of tomorrow’s history.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead. This anthropological perspective gives social weight to the “show up” quote. Its meaning confirms that history is indeed made by those who show up—specifically, by committed groups who choose to engage collectively.
How to Apply the “History is Made by Those Who Show Up” Quote in Modern Life
Understanding the “history is made by those who show up” quote is one thing; living it is another. Here’s how to translate this philosophy into daily practice. In your career, it means volunteering for challenging projects, attending networking events (even virtually), and consistently contributing in meetings. Your voice and ideas cannot shape your team’s direction if you are silent or absent. In civic life, it translates to informed voting, attending town halls, or participating in local clean-up drives. Democracy and community are built entirely on the principle of showing up. For personal goals, it means lacing up your running shoes even when you’re tired, writing the first page of that book, or finally enrolling in that course. Progress is a series of “show-ups.” In relationships, it means being emotionally present for friends and family, making time for connections, and doing the small, consistent acts that build trust. The history of any strong relationship is written by these moments of dedicated presence. The digital age offers new avenues: showing up can mean contributing thoughtfully to online discussions, supporting meaningful causes, or creating content that adds value. The core principle remains—passive scrolling does not build a legacy; active participation does.
Origin and Attribution of the Quote
Unlike many famous sayings tied to a single historical figure, the exact origin of “history is made by those who show up” is pleasingly democratic—it has emerged from the collective consciousness. It is often attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to various figures including President Harry S. Truman or Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, reflecting its political resonance. The sentiment echoes the writings of philosopher and psychologist William James, who emphasized the power of habit and action. Regardless of its precise source, the quote’s endurance lies in its universal truth. It has been adopted by community organizers, business coaches, and motivational speakers alike, becoming a modern mantra for proactive living. The ambiguity of its origin, in a way, proves its point: the quote’s history was made by the many who showed up to use it, share it, and live by it.
A Curated List of “Show Up” Quotes and Their Meanings
The central theme of showing up resonates across time and disciplines. Here is a collection of quotes that expand on this vital principle, each followed by an explanation of its significance.
“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” – Often attributed to Woody Allen. This variation focuses on the disproportionate reward for the simple act of presence. It suggests that consistency and availability are primary drivers of achievement, often outweighing raw talent or perfect conditions.
“Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Take the moment and make it perfect.” – Zoey Sayward. This quote challenges the paralysis of waiting for ideal circumstances. Its meaning is that showing up imperfectly is better than not showing up at all, and that action itself transforms a situation.
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” – Paulo Coelho. While related, this quote shifts focus from mere presence to exemplary action. Its meaning highlights that showing up authentically and living your values has far more impact than simply voicing critiques or beliefs.
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky. A classic in the sports world, this quote is a mathematical argument for participation. Its meaning is clear: without the courage to “show up” and attempt, failure is guaranteed. Opportunity only exists where there is engagement.
“It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” – Theodore Roosevelt. This is the grand philosophical counterpart to our core quote. Its meaning glorifies the person who shows up, strives, and dares greatly, while dismissing the value of those who only observe and criticize from the sidelines.
“Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.” – Peter Marshall. This quote prioritizes tangible, completed action over grand, unfinished intentions. Its meaning reinforces that showing up to do a small part is historically more significant than drafting a perfect, unmaterialized blueprint.
“Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso. A succinct statement linking action to all achievement. Its meaning posits that showing up is the first action, the essential spark from which all other possibilities—creativity, success, history—ignite.
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” – Andy Warhol. This quote adds a layer of agency to the passage of time. Its meaning is that showing up is an active intervention, a deliberate force required to steer history, as time alone does not guarantee progress.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Often attributed to Abraham Lincoln or Peter Drucker. This forward-looking statement frames showing up as a creative, future-building act. Its meaning is that by participating today, you are actively drafting the chapters of tomorrow’s history.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead. This anthropological perspective gives social weight to the “show up” quote. Its meaning confirms that history is indeed made by those who show up—specifically, by committed groups who choose to engage collectively.
How to Apply the “History is Made by Those Who Show Up” Quote in Modern Life
Understanding the “history is made by those who show up” quote is one thing; living it is another. Here’s how to translate this philosophy into daily practice. In your career, it means volunteering for challenging projects, attending networking events (even virtually), and consistently contributing in meetings. Your voice and ideas cannot shape your team’s direction if you are silent or absent. In civic life, it translates to informed voting, attending town halls, or participating in local clean-up drives. Democracy and community are built entirely on the principle of showing up. For personal goals, it means lacing up your running shoes even when you’re tired, writing the first page of that book, or finally enrolling in that course. Progress is a series of “show-ups.” In relationships, it means being emotionally present for friends and family, making time for connections, and doing the small, consistent acts that build trust. The history of any strong relationship is written by these moments of dedicated presence. The digital age offers new avenues: showing up can mean contributing thoughtfully to online discussions, supporting meaningful causes, or creating content that adds value. The core principle remains—passive scrolling does not build a legacy; active participation does.
by Befagi | Read more:
[ed. I was reminded of this quote while posting the essay below.]
Shoot the Messenger
Media criticism these days is usually focused on ideological bias. The right argues the media is full of left-wing hacks, and the left points out that many media moguls are right-wingers. But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning than the more fundamental problem that the class of people who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of demographic and experiential traits that they don’t recognize as distinctive.
This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.”
The messenger class’s distinctive experiences — like living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the parts of New York highlighted in red — shape the boundaries of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological or partisan bias.
The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.
But if our mediating institutions are all staffed by people drawn from the same narrow demographic band, then the picture they produce will be skewed in ways nobody intends and few notice. This isn’t about whether the messenger class is full of bad people — it’s largely not — it’s about whether it’s even possible to know when you’re acting as a mirror to society, or a spotlight on what you personally happen to care about. [...]
[ed. Examples: Gentrification; Opioid Epidemic; AI Job Displacement; Rising Unionization:]
The psychology of projection
There is a name for what’s happening here. Psychologists call it the false consensus effect — the tendency to overestimate how much others share your beliefs, behaviors, and experiences.
First established by Ross, Greene, and House in 1977, it has been confirmed in a meta-analysis of 115 hypothesis tests and found to be a robust, moderate-sized effect. Later research shows that it persists even when people are warned about it.
Neuroimaging research has shown that projecting your views onto others activates the brain’s reward centers; it feels good to believe everyone is like you. And a 2021 study found that social media use amplifies the effect: The more time you spend in an environment where your views are echoed back to you, the more convinced you become that those views are universal.
The false consensus effect is usually studied at the individual level. But what I’m describing is a class-wide and industry-wide version.
It’s not just that any one journalist overestimates how representative her experience is; it’s that an entire class of professionals shares a similar set of experiences, confirms those experiences with each other on the same platforms, and then produces a body of public knowledge that reflects those experiences as though they were the norm.
And even when people from nontraditional backgrounds join the fray, they are incentivized to conform through social media, company cohesion, editorial norms, and the normal human urge to get along with your peers and be taken seriously by the people you respect.
So many problems, so little time
Agenda-setting is zero-sum.
There’s only so much time elected officials, charities, nonprofits, or businesses have to respond to the public’s needs. So if something is getting more coverage than may be warranted, that means other things are getting less. And that means fewer solutions are being explored.
Remember that gentrification report? It found that 15% of urban neighborhoods showed signs of gentrification over 50 years, while 26% experienced substantial population decline.
The far more common trajectory for a poor urban neighborhood is not invasion by white yuppies — it’s continued segregation, disinvestment, and deteriorating housing stock. But that story doesn’t get told with anywhere near the same intensity.
The same asymmetry shows up in the AI conversation. The workers most likely to struggle if displaced by AI are not the ones getting the most ink.
A Brookings analysis found that roughly 6.1 million workers face both high AI exposure and low adaptive capacity — limited savings, advanced age, narrow skill sets, scarce local opportunities. Eighty-six percent of these workers are women, and they’re concentrated in clerical and administrative roles in smaller metro areas.
I’m not arguing that journalists are dishonest, that scholars are corrupt, or that the messenger class is engaged in some conspiracy to distort public reality. The people I’m describing are, by and large, doing their best to tell the truth about the world.
The problem is that they’re drawing on their own experiences, their own social networks, and their own platform ecosystems as raw material — and those inputs are unrepresentative in ways they have no easy mechanism for detecting.
Part of this could be resolved with an increased fluency with quantitative data. But that’s not actually enough. Many stories — like the opioid epidemic — are ones that require journalists to respond to anecdotes before the quantitative data has been assembled, analyzed, and produced by the academy.
This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.”
The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.
But if our mediating institutions are all staffed by people drawn from the same narrow demographic band, then the picture they produce will be skewed in ways nobody intends and few notice. This isn’t about whether the messenger class is full of bad people — it’s largely not — it’s about whether it’s even possible to know when you’re acting as a mirror to society, or a spotlight on what you personally happen to care about. [...]
[ed. Examples: Gentrification; Opioid Epidemic; AI Job Displacement; Rising Unionization:]
The psychology of projection
There is a name for what’s happening here. Psychologists call it the false consensus effect — the tendency to overestimate how much others share your beliefs, behaviors, and experiences.
First established by Ross, Greene, and House in 1977, it has been confirmed in a meta-analysis of 115 hypothesis tests and found to be a robust, moderate-sized effect. Later research shows that it persists even when people are warned about it.
Neuroimaging research has shown that projecting your views onto others activates the brain’s reward centers; it feels good to believe everyone is like you. And a 2021 study found that social media use amplifies the effect: The more time you spend in an environment where your views are echoed back to you, the more convinced you become that those views are universal.
The false consensus effect is usually studied at the individual level. But what I’m describing is a class-wide and industry-wide version.
It’s not just that any one journalist overestimates how representative her experience is; it’s that an entire class of professionals shares a similar set of experiences, confirms those experiences with each other on the same platforms, and then produces a body of public knowledge that reflects those experiences as though they were the norm.
And even when people from nontraditional backgrounds join the fray, they are incentivized to conform through social media, company cohesion, editorial norms, and the normal human urge to get along with your peers and be taken seriously by the people you respect.
So many problems, so little time
Agenda-setting is zero-sum.
There’s only so much time elected officials, charities, nonprofits, or businesses have to respond to the public’s needs. So if something is getting more coverage than may be warranted, that means other things are getting less. And that means fewer solutions are being explored.
Remember that gentrification report? It found that 15% of urban neighborhoods showed signs of gentrification over 50 years, while 26% experienced substantial population decline.
The far more common trajectory for a poor urban neighborhood is not invasion by white yuppies — it’s continued segregation, disinvestment, and deteriorating housing stock. But that story doesn’t get told with anywhere near the same intensity.
The same asymmetry shows up in the AI conversation. The workers most likely to struggle if displaced by AI are not the ones getting the most ink.
A Brookings analysis found that roughly 6.1 million workers face both high AI exposure and low adaptive capacity — limited savings, advanced age, narrow skill sets, scarce local opportunities. Eighty-six percent of these workers are women, and they’re concentrated in clerical and administrative roles in smaller metro areas.
I’m not arguing that journalists are dishonest, that scholars are corrupt, or that the messenger class is engaged in some conspiracy to distort public reality. The people I’m describing are, by and large, doing their best to tell the truth about the world.
The problem is that they’re drawing on their own experiences, their own social networks, and their own platform ecosystems as raw material — and those inputs are unrepresentative in ways they have no easy mechanism for detecting.
Part of this could be resolved with an increased fluency with quantitative data. But that’s not actually enough. Many stories — like the opioid epidemic — are ones that require journalists to respond to anecdotes before the quantitative data has been assembled, analyzed, and produced by the academy.
by Jerusalem Demsas, The Argument | Read more:
Image: Klaus Vedfelt via Getty Images
Saturday, March 28, 2026
Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster
The global economy has become dependent on the AI industry. Trillions of dollars are being invested into the technology and the infrastructure it relies on; in the final months of 2025, functionally all economic growth in the United States came from AI investments. This would be risky even in ideal conditions. And we are very far from ideal conditions.
Much of the AI supply chain—chips, data centers, combustion turbines, and so on—relies on key materials that are produced in or transported through just a few places on Earth, with little overlap. In particular, the industry is highly dependent on the Middle East, which has been destabilized by the war in Iran. A global energy shock seems all but certain to come soon—the kind where even the best-case scenario is a disaster. The war could grind the AI build-out to a halt. This would be devastating for the tech firms that have issued historic amounts of debt to race against their highly leveraged competitors, and it would be devastating for the private lenders and banks that have been buying up that debt in the hope of ever bigger returns.
For the better part of the past year, Wall Street analysts and tech-industry observers have fretted publicly about an AI bubble. The fear is that too much money is coming in too fast and that generative-AI companies still have not offered anything close to a viable business model. If growth were to stall or the technology were to be seen as failing to deliver on its promises, the bubble might burst, triggering a chain reaction across the financial system. Everyone—big banks, private-equity firms, people who have no idea what’s mixed into their 401(k)—would be hit by the AI crash.
Until recently, that kind of crash felt hypothetical; today, it feels plausible and, to some, almost inevitable. “What’s unusual about this, unlike commercial real estate during the global financial crisis,” Paul Kedrosky, an investor and financial consultant, told us, “is all of these interlocking points of fragility.”
Perhaps the clearest examples are advanced memory and training chips, which are among the most important—and are by far the most expensive—components of training any AI model. Currently, most of them are produced by two companies in South Korea and one in Taiwan. These countries, in turn, get a large majority of their crude oil and much of their liquefied natural gas—which help fuel semiconductor manufacturing—from the Persian Gulf. The chip companies also require helium, sulfur, and bromine—three key inputs to silicon wafers—largely sourced from the region. In addition, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other regional petrostates have become key investors in the American AI firms that purchase most of those chips.
Because of the war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed to most shipping vessels, stranding one-fifth of the world’s exports of natural gas, one-third of the world’s exports of crude oil, and significant quantities of the planet’s exportable fertilizer, helium, and sulfur. Meanwhile, Iran and Israel have begun bombing much of the fossil-fuel infrastructure in the region, which could take many years to replace. In only a month of war, the price of Brent crude—a global oil benchmark—has jumped by 40 percent and could more than double, liquefied-natural-gas prices are soaring in Europe and Asia, and helium spot prices have already doubled. The strait is “critical to basically every aspect of the global economy,” Sam Winter-Levy, a technology and national-security researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told us. “The AI supply chain is not insulated.”
The situation could quickly deteriorate from here. A helium crunch could trigger a shortage of AI chips or cause chip prices to rise. AI companies need ever more advanced chips to fill their data centers—at higher prices, the massive server farms, already hurting from elevated energy costs caused by the war, would have almost no hope of becoming profitable. Without these chips, new data centers would not be built or would sit empty. Astronomical tech valuations, and in turn the entire stock market, could collapse.
One industry’s precarious position isn’t usually everyone’s problem. Unfortunately, AI is different. The biggest data-center players, known as hyperscalers, are among the biggest corporations in the history of capitalism; they include Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon. But even they will be pressed by collectively spending nearly $700 billion on AI in a single year. In order to get the money for these unprecedented projects, data-center providers are beginning to take on colossal amounts of debt. Some of this is done through creative deals with private-equity firms including Blackstone, BlackRock, and Blue Owl Capital—which themselves operate as sort of shadow banks that, since the most recent financial crisis, have arguably become as powerful and as influential as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were prior to 2008. Endowments, pensions, insurance funds, and other major institutions all trust private equity to invest their money.
For a while, it seemed like every time Google or Microsoft announced more data-center investments, their stock prices rose. Now the opposite occurs: The hyperscalers are spending far more, but investors have started to notice that they are not generating anything near the revenue they need to. The data-center boom’s top players—Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Oracle—have all lost 8 to 27 percent of their value since the start of the year, making them a huge drag on the overall stock market. And the $121 billion of debt that hyperscalers issued in 2025, four times more than what they averaged for years prior, is expected to grow dramatically.
All of the major players in this investment ecosystem are vulnerable. Private-equity firms are being squeezed on both ends by generative AI: During the coronavirus pandemic, they bought up software companies, which are now plummeting in value because AI is expected to eat their lunch. Meanwhile, private equity’s new investment strategy, data centers, is also falling apart because of AI. Blackstone, Blue Owl, and the like are sinking huge sums into data-center construction with the assumption that lease payments from tech companies will pay for their debt. In order to pay for their investments, private-equity companies raised money from major financial institutions—but now the viability of those lease payments is coming into question as the hyperscalers’ cash flow is strained. “There’s a reason to think we’re seeing some of the same 2008 dynamics now,” Brad Lipton, a former senior adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and now the director of corporate power and financial regulation at the Roosevelt Institute, told us. “Everyone’s getting tied up together. Banks are lending money to private credit, which in turn lends it elsewhere. That amps up the risk.” [...]
The war in Iran affects data-center finances as well. Should energy prices continue to skyrocket, so will the cost of this already very expensive computing equipment, because it needs tremendous amounts of energy to manufacture and operate. And the war has exposed physical risks to these buildings. Janet Egan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, described data centers to us as “large, juicy targets.” It is impossible to hide these facilities, which can cover 1 million square feet. Earlier this month, Iran bombed Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. American hyperscalers had been planning to build far more data centers in the region, because the Trump administration and the AI industry have sought funding from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman. Now there’s a two-way strain on those relationships. The physical security of the data centers is more precarious, and the conflict is damaging the economic health of the petrostates, thereby jeopardizing a major source of further investment in American AI firms. The Trump administration “staked a lot on the Gulf as their close AI partner, and now the war that they’ve launched poses a huge threat to the viability of the Gulf as that AI partner,” Winter-Levy said.
Plus, “what’s to prevent Iran or a proxy group, or another maligned actor, from tomorrow launching an armed drone against a data center in Northern Virginia?” Chip Usher, the senior director for intelligence at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a national-security and AI think tank, told us. “It could happen. Our defenses are not adequate.” State-sponsored cyberattacks of the variety Iran is known for could also knock a data center offline. You can build all manner of defenses—reinforced concrete, drone-interception systems—but doing so adds cost and time to already costly and slow construction. [...]
Even if Iran and the Strait of Hormuz don’t directly trigger an AI-driven financial crisis, the odds are decent that another vector could. (Remember tariffs?) Energy prices could stay elevated for years, because the targeted fossil-fuel facilities in the Persian Gulf will take a long time to restore. As the U.S. directs huge amounts of attention and military resources toward Iran, it’s easy to imagine China launching an invasion of Taiwan—a scenario that terrifies Silicon Valley, because it would halt the production of chips needed to train frontier models. That’s not even considering the single Dutch company that makes the high-tech lithography machines used to print virtually all AI chips, or the German company that makes the mirrors used in those machines. “There are too many ways for it to fail for it not to fail,” Kedrosky said of the AI industry’s web of risk. “All you can say for sure is this is a fragile and overdetermined system that must break, so it will.”
Much of the AI supply chain—chips, data centers, combustion turbines, and so on—relies on key materials that are produced in or transported through just a few places on Earth, with little overlap. In particular, the industry is highly dependent on the Middle East, which has been destabilized by the war in Iran. A global energy shock seems all but certain to come soon—the kind where even the best-case scenario is a disaster. The war could grind the AI build-out to a halt. This would be devastating for the tech firms that have issued historic amounts of debt to race against their highly leveraged competitors, and it would be devastating for the private lenders and banks that have been buying up that debt in the hope of ever bigger returns.
Until recently, that kind of crash felt hypothetical; today, it feels plausible and, to some, almost inevitable. “What’s unusual about this, unlike commercial real estate during the global financial crisis,” Paul Kedrosky, an investor and financial consultant, told us, “is all of these interlocking points of fragility.”
Perhaps the clearest examples are advanced memory and training chips, which are among the most important—and are by far the most expensive—components of training any AI model. Currently, most of them are produced by two companies in South Korea and one in Taiwan. These countries, in turn, get a large majority of their crude oil and much of their liquefied natural gas—which help fuel semiconductor manufacturing—from the Persian Gulf. The chip companies also require helium, sulfur, and bromine—three key inputs to silicon wafers—largely sourced from the region. In addition, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other regional petrostates have become key investors in the American AI firms that purchase most of those chips.
Because of the war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed to most shipping vessels, stranding one-fifth of the world’s exports of natural gas, one-third of the world’s exports of crude oil, and significant quantities of the planet’s exportable fertilizer, helium, and sulfur. Meanwhile, Iran and Israel have begun bombing much of the fossil-fuel infrastructure in the region, which could take many years to replace. In only a month of war, the price of Brent crude—a global oil benchmark—has jumped by 40 percent and could more than double, liquefied-natural-gas prices are soaring in Europe and Asia, and helium spot prices have already doubled. The strait is “critical to basically every aspect of the global economy,” Sam Winter-Levy, a technology and national-security researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told us. “The AI supply chain is not insulated.”
The situation could quickly deteriorate from here. A helium crunch could trigger a shortage of AI chips or cause chip prices to rise. AI companies need ever more advanced chips to fill their data centers—at higher prices, the massive server farms, already hurting from elevated energy costs caused by the war, would have almost no hope of becoming profitable. Without these chips, new data centers would not be built or would sit empty. Astronomical tech valuations, and in turn the entire stock market, could collapse.
One industry’s precarious position isn’t usually everyone’s problem. Unfortunately, AI is different. The biggest data-center players, known as hyperscalers, are among the biggest corporations in the history of capitalism; they include Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon. But even they will be pressed by collectively spending nearly $700 billion on AI in a single year. In order to get the money for these unprecedented projects, data-center providers are beginning to take on colossal amounts of debt. Some of this is done through creative deals with private-equity firms including Blackstone, BlackRock, and Blue Owl Capital—which themselves operate as sort of shadow banks that, since the most recent financial crisis, have arguably become as powerful and as influential as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were prior to 2008. Endowments, pensions, insurance funds, and other major institutions all trust private equity to invest their money.
For a while, it seemed like every time Google or Microsoft announced more data-center investments, their stock prices rose. Now the opposite occurs: The hyperscalers are spending far more, but investors have started to notice that they are not generating anything near the revenue they need to. The data-center boom’s top players—Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Oracle—have all lost 8 to 27 percent of their value since the start of the year, making them a huge drag on the overall stock market. And the $121 billion of debt that hyperscalers issued in 2025, four times more than what they averaged for years prior, is expected to grow dramatically.
All of the major players in this investment ecosystem are vulnerable. Private-equity firms are being squeezed on both ends by generative AI: During the coronavirus pandemic, they bought up software companies, which are now plummeting in value because AI is expected to eat their lunch. Meanwhile, private equity’s new investment strategy, data centers, is also falling apart because of AI. Blackstone, Blue Owl, and the like are sinking huge sums into data-center construction with the assumption that lease payments from tech companies will pay for their debt. In order to pay for their investments, private-equity companies raised money from major financial institutions—but now the viability of those lease payments is coming into question as the hyperscalers’ cash flow is strained. “There’s a reason to think we’re seeing some of the same 2008 dynamics now,” Brad Lipton, a former senior adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and now the director of corporate power and financial regulation at the Roosevelt Institute, told us. “Everyone’s getting tied up together. Banks are lending money to private credit, which in turn lends it elsewhere. That amps up the risk.” [...]
The war in Iran affects data-center finances as well. Should energy prices continue to skyrocket, so will the cost of this already very expensive computing equipment, because it needs tremendous amounts of energy to manufacture and operate. And the war has exposed physical risks to these buildings. Janet Egan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, described data centers to us as “large, juicy targets.” It is impossible to hide these facilities, which can cover 1 million square feet. Earlier this month, Iran bombed Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. American hyperscalers had been planning to build far more data centers in the region, because the Trump administration and the AI industry have sought funding from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman. Now there’s a two-way strain on those relationships. The physical security of the data centers is more precarious, and the conflict is damaging the economic health of the petrostates, thereby jeopardizing a major source of further investment in American AI firms. The Trump administration “staked a lot on the Gulf as their close AI partner, and now the war that they’ve launched poses a huge threat to the viability of the Gulf as that AI partner,” Winter-Levy said.
Plus, “what’s to prevent Iran or a proxy group, or another maligned actor, from tomorrow launching an armed drone against a data center in Northern Virginia?” Chip Usher, the senior director for intelligence at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a national-security and AI think tank, told us. “It could happen. Our defenses are not adequate.” State-sponsored cyberattacks of the variety Iran is known for could also knock a data center offline. You can build all manner of defenses—reinforced concrete, drone-interception systems—but doing so adds cost and time to already costly and slow construction. [...]
Even if Iran and the Strait of Hormuz don’t directly trigger an AI-driven financial crisis, the odds are decent that another vector could. (Remember tariffs?) Energy prices could stay elevated for years, because the targeted fossil-fuel facilities in the Persian Gulf will take a long time to restore. As the U.S. directs huge amounts of attention and military resources toward Iran, it’s easy to imagine China launching an invasion of Taiwan—a scenario that terrifies Silicon Valley, because it would halt the production of chips needed to train frontier models. That’s not even considering the single Dutch company that makes the high-tech lithography machines used to print virtually all AI chips, or the German company that makes the mirrors used in those machines. “There are too many ways for it to fail for it not to fail,” Kedrosky said of the AI industry’s web of risk. “All you can say for sure is this is a fragile and overdetermined system that must break, so it will.”
by Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: An Amazon Web Services data center in Manassas, Virginia (Nathan Howard / Bloomberg / Getty)
Image: An Amazon Web Services data center in Manassas, Virginia (Nathan Howard / Bloomberg / Getty)
[ed. See also:
They’re Rich but Not Famous—and They’re Suddenly Everywhere
They’re not billionaires, but they’re still very, very rich.
The number of Americans worth tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars has boomed in the past few decades, thanks to a rising stock market, lucrative private investments and swelling valuations for small and midsize businesses. This growing class is now a huge force in the economy, driving the demand for everything from lavish hotel rooms to private jet travel.
“The ultrawealthy have grown really substantially,” said Owen Zidar, a Princeton economics professor who studies wealth. While some of these people made their money in technology or finance and live on the coasts, many others live outside of the highest-cost areas and own small businesses like car dealerships, he said.
Here is data on the rise of this group. Wealth measures a household’s assets, like stocks, bank accounts and home equity, minus liabilities like mortgages, car loans and credit-card debt.
More ultrawealthy people
There are about 430,000 U.S. households worth $30 million or more, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Zidar. Within that, there are about 74,000 worth $100 million or more. Over the past few decades, the growth in the number of very rich households has surpassed general population growth.
The Fed’s data runs through 2022 and shows a small dip in some categories of the ultrawealthy in 2019. Many well-off households have further benefited from the big stock market gains of the past few years.
Get rich quick(er)
There are more very rich people in large part because their wealth has grown much faster than everyone else’s. Even adjusted for inflation, the wealth of the top 0.1% of households has grown more than 13-fold over the past 50 years, according to Realtime Inequality, a tracker developed by economists Emmanuel Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman, a professor at the Paris School of Economics. In this analysis, American families with a net worth of $43 million and higher in 2024 are in the top 0.1%.
The bottom 50% have long struggled to build any wealth at all, but they have made some progress.
Average inflation-adjusted wealth turned negative for this group starting in the mid-1990s and then sank further during the 2008-09 financial crisis and housing collapse. It was only after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought stimulus checks and rising home values, that average wealth turned positive for the bottom 50% of households again.
Stocks and businesses
The typical American family leans heavily on homeownership to build their net worth, and homeowners of all wealth levels have benefited from the recent rise in home prices.
Over time, though, the very wealthy have amassed more wealth, in part because they own the kinds of assets that have risen particularly dramatically. They have a lot of stocks, in some cases because they are top employees of publicly traded companies paid partially in shares. Many also own stakes in private businesses.
For the top 0.1%, nearly 72% of their wealth is made up of corporate equities, mutual fund shares and private businesses, according to the Fed. The S&P 500 has more than tripled in the past decade. And many private businesses have seen valuations rise, too.
Boomer wealth boom
Baby boomers collectively have far more wealth than any other living generation. That is largely because they bought homes and stocks decades ago and are benefiting from the long run-up in the values of those assets.
About two-thirds of households worth $30 million and up are headed by boomers, according to an analysis of Fed data by Zidar.
Spending it
Because there are so many more multimillionaires, products and services that cater to this group are also booming. Hermès, Brunello Cucinelli and Ferrari all recently reported strong sales from the richest customers, while some companies that target the merely well-off are facing flagging demand.
Image: uncredited
Friday, March 27, 2026
Politics as Bad Group Therapy
The [MAGA] rallies are set to return Saturday—the third such round in the past year—built around a slogan that suggests Americans are living under something closer to tyranny than democracy. It’s a striking claim for a country that fought a revolution to overthrow a king and hasn’t had one since. Still, it’s revealing. It reflects a broader shift in how political disagreement is understood—not as a clash of views, but as a struggle between victims and villains.
The U.S. remains what it has long been: a contentious, often frustrating democracy shaped by competing interests and imperfect leadership. But describing it in more dramatic terms raises the emotional stakes. It transforms ordinary political conflict into something more absolute—and more psychologically satisfying.
In my work as a psychotherapist, I’ve seen a parallel change in how people interpret their personal lives. Feelings are increasingly treated not as signals to examine but as conclusions to affirm. Discomfort is no longer something to work through but something to explain—often by projecting blame onto an external source. This mindset doesn’t stay in the therapy room. It has begun to shape political life, and the [MAGA] rallies offer a framework that favors affirmation over scrutiny: a clean moral narrative in which there are those who are wronged, and those responsible for the wrongdoing.
At their core, the rallies resemble bad group therapy—gatherings that offer validation, solidarity and emotional release. They feel good in the moment. Participants vent, find reinforcement among like-minded people, and leave feeling heard and aligned. The experience can seem productive, even clarifying. But like bad group therapy, it stops at validation. The feelings are processed but not challenged, reinforced but not examined. There is relief but little resolution, and the underlying problems remain. It offers the feeling of progress without the substance of it. [...]
This helps explain why disagreement in these settings can feel less like a difference of opinion and more like a breach of reality. That is part of their appeal. These gatherings offer not only political expression but psychological alignment—a sense of being among others who see the world the same way. The effect can be energizing but also insulating, as politics organized around shared feeling begins to drift away from shared fact.
The atmosphere often reflects this shift. Many rallies have taken on a performative, even theatrical quality, with costumes and exaggerated symbolism replacing direct political engagement. That approach lowers the stakes of confrontation but reinforces the idea that the primary goal is expression rather than persuasion. [...]
This style of politics rewards intensity over accuracy and certainty over nuance. It makes compromise difficult and disagreement suspect, shifting the goal from persuasion to affirmation. This helps explain why such movements can feel more effective than they are.
That cycle—expression, validation, temporary relief—can be powerful. It gives the impression that something meaningful has occurred. But without friction, challenge or genuine engagement with opposing views, little is resolved. Participants are left with a sense of involvement but few tangible outcomes.
As the rallies return, they will likely generate energy, visibility and a sense of shared purpose. But they will also illustrate a familiar trade-off: When politics becomes organized around emotional validation, it can feel more satisfying even as it becomes less effective.
Democratic systems depend on something more demanding: the ability to tolerate disagreement, engage with complexity and distinguish between what feels true and what is demonstrably so. That process is often uncomfortable. It requires restraint, patience and a willingness to confront ideas that don't affirm one’s own perspective.
The [MAGA] rallies, for all their intensity, transform frustration into clarity. They turn disagreement into moral certainty. In doing so, they risk turning politics into something that feels good in the moment—and accomplishes almost nothing.
[ed. Haha, psych! Substitute No Kings for MAGA and you have a classic case of delusional projection. You'd think that if the Wall Steet Journal wanted to platform some random psychotherapist in their Op-ed section, they'd be a little more careful about who they select and what he has to contribute. Apparently not.]
The U.S. remains what it has long been: a contentious, often frustrating democracy shaped by competing interests and imperfect leadership. But describing it in more dramatic terms raises the emotional stakes. It transforms ordinary political conflict into something more absolute—and more psychologically satisfying.
At their core, the rallies resemble bad group therapy—gatherings that offer validation, solidarity and emotional release. They feel good in the moment. Participants vent, find reinforcement among like-minded people, and leave feeling heard and aligned. The experience can seem productive, even clarifying. But like bad group therapy, it stops at validation. The feelings are processed but not challenged, reinforced but not examined. There is relief but little resolution, and the underlying problems remain. It offers the feeling of progress without the substance of it. [...]
This helps explain why disagreement in these settings can feel less like a difference of opinion and more like a breach of reality. That is part of their appeal. These gatherings offer not only political expression but psychological alignment—a sense of being among others who see the world the same way. The effect can be energizing but also insulating, as politics organized around shared feeling begins to drift away from shared fact.
The atmosphere often reflects this shift. Many rallies have taken on a performative, even theatrical quality, with costumes and exaggerated symbolism replacing direct political engagement. That approach lowers the stakes of confrontation but reinforces the idea that the primary goal is expression rather than persuasion. [...]
This style of politics rewards intensity over accuracy and certainty over nuance. It makes compromise difficult and disagreement suspect, shifting the goal from persuasion to affirmation. This helps explain why such movements can feel more effective than they are.
That cycle—expression, validation, temporary relief—can be powerful. It gives the impression that something meaningful has occurred. But without friction, challenge or genuine engagement with opposing views, little is resolved. Participants are left with a sense of involvement but few tangible outcomes.
As the rallies return, they will likely generate energy, visibility and a sense of shared purpose. But they will also illustrate a familiar trade-off: When politics becomes organized around emotional validation, it can feel more satisfying even as it becomes less effective.
Democratic systems depend on something more demanding: the ability to tolerate disagreement, engage with complexity and distinguish between what feels true and what is demonstrably so. That process is often uncomfortable. It requires restraint, patience and a willingness to confront ideas that don't affirm one’s own perspective.
The [MAGA] rallies, for all their intensity, transform frustration into clarity. They turn disagreement into moral certainty. In doing so, they risk turning politics into something that feels good in the moment—and accomplishes almost nothing.
by Jonathan Alpert, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: Scott McIntyre for The New York Times[ed. Haha, psych! Substitute No Kings for MAGA and you have a classic case of delusional projection. You'd think that if the Wall Steet Journal wanted to platform some random psychotherapist in their Op-ed section, they'd be a little more careful about who they select and what he has to contribute. Apparently not.]
Fuzz: Wildlife Conflict in the Modern Era
Recently, I read Fuzz: When Natures Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. Like all of her books, it is a meandering journey that touches on a common theme. Although the subtitle makes it seem that the theme is nature crime, the theme is more about conflicts between bureaucracy, modernity and nature rather than crime itself. A more accurate but worse title would be Fuzz: The Weird Ways Humans Deal with Nature while Navigating Bureaucracy and the Impossibility of People Wanting to be around Wildlife without Ever Being Inconvenienced. Some examples Roach explores include the Indian government’s attempt to sterilize monkeys, how the city of Aspen deals with bears raiding trash cans, and the many failed attempts at getting rid of birds including the infamous Australian emu war.
Reading Fuzz was often frustrating because most of the problems share the same basic structure regardless of time or place. Humans disturb a local ecosystem through moving there or extracting resources. Animals then wander into human settlements in response to ecosystem change that has worsened their food supply, altered the predator-prey ratio, or made it easier to get caloric rich food. Humans react by engaging in one of two strategies. Strategy one is to kill everything, which is usually ineffective because it does not affect the population levels or results in extinction (at least in the region) which results in further ecosystem change. Strategy two is to feed the wild animals because that seems like the nice thing to do except that feeding them encourages the animals to keep going into the human settlements which makes the animals bolder which leads to more conflict and potentially leads to attacks. Once this has started, the animals become so used to relying on people for food that they cannot be integrated back into the wild. Sometimes people become so frustrated and angry that they go back to the first strategy of kill everything.
These problems can seem intractable. People have a hard time being convinced that killing everything doesn’t work and the people who don’t want to kill the animals have a hard time accepting that their help may makes things worse. They continue to feed the wild animals, resist methods that would discourage the animals (such as locking trashcans), and mainly advocate translocation (moving the animal to a different area) even though translocation rarely works. Whether because of blinding love or hate, people have a hard time handling wild animals wandering into their homes and cities.
Even though reading about these issues was frustrating, Fuzz left me feeling more inspired than dejected. There are examples of humans humanely and successfully addressing human-wildlife conflict and limiting the presence of introduced flora and fauna. They do so through careful study of local ecosystems, which includes the humans who live there and how they feel about wildlife. What was the most inspiring thing in the book was seeing how much the animal rights and environmental movements have changed how the public handles these wildlife issues. Before the 1970s, the kill everything approach was the norm. Now it is not.
Throughout these stories, Roach makes the case that the best way to deal with wildlife conflict is to find better ways to live with animals that isn’t killing them or making them reliant on humans. Sometimes the solution is simple and easy. After multiple chapters of ridiculous attempts to stop birds from eating crops, Roach argues that it’s better to do nothing or to hire a human to scare the birds off. Other times the solution is complicated. In New Zealand, there’s research being done on using genetic engineering to induce infertility among mice and other destructive, introduced species as a way to reduce the population without mass poisoning. The researchers are trying to limit unintended consequences but there will always be risk. The important question is whether the unknown risk of doing something is worth the known risk of doing nothing. I appreciate that there are people out there doing the often thankless work of trying to make humans and wildlife happy. Roach did an excellent job of showing the myriad of ways this plays out and, unlike other books I’ve read, Roach discusses these issues without claiming that now is the first time humans have tried caring about nature and ecological balance.
These problems can seem intractable. People have a hard time being convinced that killing everything doesn’t work and the people who don’t want to kill the animals have a hard time accepting that their help may makes things worse. They continue to feed the wild animals, resist methods that would discourage the animals (such as locking trashcans), and mainly advocate translocation (moving the animal to a different area) even though translocation rarely works. Whether because of blinding love or hate, people have a hard time handling wild animals wandering into their homes and cities.
Even though reading about these issues was frustrating, Fuzz left me feeling more inspired than dejected. There are examples of humans humanely and successfully addressing human-wildlife conflict and limiting the presence of introduced flora and fauna. They do so through careful study of local ecosystems, which includes the humans who live there and how they feel about wildlife. What was the most inspiring thing in the book was seeing how much the animal rights and environmental movements have changed how the public handles these wildlife issues. Before the 1970s, the kill everything approach was the norm. Now it is not.
Throughout these stories, Roach makes the case that the best way to deal with wildlife conflict is to find better ways to live with animals that isn’t killing them or making them reliant on humans. Sometimes the solution is simple and easy. After multiple chapters of ridiculous attempts to stop birds from eating crops, Roach argues that it’s better to do nothing or to hire a human to scare the birds off. Other times the solution is complicated. In New Zealand, there’s research being done on using genetic engineering to induce infertility among mice and other destructive, introduced species as a way to reduce the population without mass poisoning. The researchers are trying to limit unintended consequences but there will always be risk. The important question is whether the unknown risk of doing something is worth the known risk of doing nothing. I appreciate that there are people out there doing the often thankless work of trying to make humans and wildlife happy. Roach did an excellent job of showing the myriad of ways this plays out and, unlike other books I’ve read, Roach discusses these issues without claiming that now is the first time humans have tried caring about nature and ecological balance.
by Mia Milne, Solar Thoughts | Read more:
Image: Fuzz
[ed. This issue has played out forever in my old hometown of Anchorage, Alaska (as you can imagine), and will probably never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. It's a form of politics. What's the science say, and what are the options? How feasible are mitigative policies, and how much will they cost? Finally arriving at the most relevant question: what kind of city do you want to live in (that would perpetually kill its animal populations and modify its natural environment)?]
Q Day is Coming
Google is dramatically shortening its readiness deadline for the arrival of Q Day, the point at which existing quantum computers can break public-key cryptography algorithms that secure decades’ worth of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments, and nearly every individual on earth.
In a post published on Wednesday, Google said it is giving itself until 2029 to prepare for this event. The post went on to warn that the rest of the world needs to follow suit by adopting PQC—short for post-quantum cryptography—algorithms to augment or replace elliptic curves and RSA, both of which will be broken.
The end is nigh
“As a pioneer in both quantum and PQC, it’s our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline,” wrote Heather Adkins, Google’s VP of security engineering, and Sophie Schmieg, a senior cryptography engineer. “By doing this, we hope to provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google, but also across the industry.”
Separately, Google detailed its timeline for making Android quantum resistant, the first time the company has publicly discussed PQC support on the operating system. Starting with the beta version, Android 17 will support ML-DSA, a digital signing algorithm standard advanced by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. ML-DSA will be added to Android’s hardware root of trust. The move will allow developers to have PQC keys for signing their apps and verifying other software signatures. [...]
So what’s spooking Google so much?
Wednesday’s hard deadline came as a surprise to many cryptography engineers, including those who have been active in the PQC transition for years.
“That is certainly a significant acceleration/tightening of the public transition timelines we’ve seen to date, and is accelerated over even what we’ve seen the US government ask for,” Brian LaMacchia, a cryptography engineer who oversaw Microsoft’s post-quantum transition from 2015 to 2022 and now works at Farcaster Consulting Group, said in an interview. “The 2029 timeline is an aggressive speedup but raises the question of what’s motivating them.”
Google didn’t lay out the rationale for the revision in either of its posts. A spokeswoman didn’t immediately provide answers to questions sent by email.
Estimates for when Q Day will arrive have varied widely since the mid-1990s, when mathematician Peter Shor first showed that a quantum computer of sufficient strength could factor integers in polynomial time, much faster than classical computers. That put the world on notice that RSA’s days were limited. Follow-on research showed quantum computers provided a similar speed-up in solving the discrete log problem that underpins elliptic curves. [...]
In preparation for Q Day, cryptographers have devised new encryption algorithms that rely on problems that quantum computers don’t have an advantage over classical computers in solving. Rather than factoring or solving the discrete log, one approach involves mathematical structures known as lattices. A second approach involves a stateless hash-based digital signature scheme. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has advanced several algorithms that have yet to be broken and are presumed to be secure.
In 2022 the NSA set a deadline for PQC readiness in national security systems by 2033 and for 2030 for a few specific applications.
The end is nigh
“As a pioneer in both quantum and PQC, it’s our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline,” wrote Heather Adkins, Google’s VP of security engineering, and Sophie Schmieg, a senior cryptography engineer. “By doing this, we hope to provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google, but also across the industry.”
Separately, Google detailed its timeline for making Android quantum resistant, the first time the company has publicly discussed PQC support on the operating system. Starting with the beta version, Android 17 will support ML-DSA, a digital signing algorithm standard advanced by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. ML-DSA will be added to Android’s hardware root of trust. The move will allow developers to have PQC keys for signing their apps and verifying other software signatures. [...]
So what’s spooking Google so much?
Wednesday’s hard deadline came as a surprise to many cryptography engineers, including those who have been active in the PQC transition for years.
“That is certainly a significant acceleration/tightening of the public transition timelines we’ve seen to date, and is accelerated over even what we’ve seen the US government ask for,” Brian LaMacchia, a cryptography engineer who oversaw Microsoft’s post-quantum transition from 2015 to 2022 and now works at Farcaster Consulting Group, said in an interview. “The 2029 timeline is an aggressive speedup but raises the question of what’s motivating them.”
Google didn’t lay out the rationale for the revision in either of its posts. A spokeswoman didn’t immediately provide answers to questions sent by email.
Estimates for when Q Day will arrive have varied widely since the mid-1990s, when mathematician Peter Shor first showed that a quantum computer of sufficient strength could factor integers in polynomial time, much faster than classical computers. That put the world on notice that RSA’s days were limited. Follow-on research showed quantum computers provided a similar speed-up in solving the discrete log problem that underpins elliptic curves. [...]
In preparation for Q Day, cryptographers have devised new encryption algorithms that rely on problems that quantum computers don’t have an advantage over classical computers in solving. Rather than factoring or solving the discrete log, one approach involves mathematical structures known as lattices. A second approach involves a stateless hash-based digital signature scheme. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has advanced several algorithms that have yet to be broken and are presumed to be secure.
In 2022 the NSA set a deadline for PQC readiness in national security systems by 2033 and for 2030 for a few specific applications.
by Dan Goodin, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: JuSun/Getty
[ed. So does this mean we don't need passwords anymore? Or the old ones won't work? I can't tell. Tech companies have been telling us that'd happen for years, too. It's coming! And, how does strong AI affect any of this? If I have to change all my passwords everywhere I'm going to go crazy.]
The End of Taylor and Travis
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will be extraordinarily rich until they’re dead. They may keep dating, they may marry, and they may have children. Or, they could break up. Their personal lives, played out so much on the public stage, shouldn’t concern us too much. They deserve happiness, like anyone else.
What’s become clear, with the passage of a year, is just how thoroughly they once dominated the culture and how such a phenomenon is unlikely to repeat itself. Neither individual, barring an unforeseen twist, will approach the heights of 2023, when Swift embarked on her Eras Tour and entered into a relationship with the Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs tight end. They each enjoyed fame, for a wedge of time at the end of last year, that rivaled any twentieth century celebrity’s at the apogee of the old analog culture. It was, in retrospect, the last gasp of what can be called Empire. We are not going back to Elvis and Marilyn, the Beatles and Michael Jackson. Swift and Kelce, for a fleeting number of months, almost brought us there, with Swift donning red in her luxury suite during prime time to cheer on a future Hall of Famer playing America’s most popular sport. Kelce even won another Super Bowl as Mr. Taylor Swift. Imagine that thrill. For a man who once longed to be as famous as the Rock, this was the zenith. He must have been sure he was headed to celebrity’s very upper limits.
Kelce and his brother have a popular podcast called New Heights. They banter about football and interview athletes. When Kelce began dating Swift, the podcast attracted many more listeners. Earlier this year, the Kelce brothers signed a $100 million deal with Amazon’s podcast studio, Wondery. For a podcast that only launched a few years ago—and was hosted by brothers who, before the year 2023, weren’t especially famous—this was the greatest of coups. It was a confirmation of the ascension of the Kelces and a credit to Swift’s own halo of fame, which has made even an ex-Eagles center into a household name.
Money is money, though, and the zeitgeist is something else. Recently, I noticed that many videos of the New Heights podcast on YouTube were failing to rack up 1 million views. For a pair of podcasters who have enjoyed so much conventional fame, these numbers struck me as rather anemic. My suspicions were confirmed when I checked in on comedian Theo Von’s YouTube channel. Von, something of a mini-Joe Rogan, is not nearly as well-known as Kelce. Yet his full videos—interviews with various comedians, cultural figures, and politicians—routinely exceed 1 million views. His total subscriber count on YouTube beats New Heights by nearly 1 million. I cite YouTube because I truly think the platform, despite its obvious dominance, still manages to be underrated by the mainstream. YouTube is the future of television and audio alike. If its parent company, Google/Alphabet, cared more about winning the streaming wars, YouTube Premium could probably put Spotify out of business. For less than $20 a month, a premium account allows a user to skip all advertisements and listen to what amounts to virtually the entire music catalog on Earth—one, in terms of human-made quality songs, even larger than Spotify’s.
It is on YouTube where the Kelces not only trail Von but get lapped by computer scientist Lex Fridman. It’s probably not worth bringing up Rogan, who is nearing 19 million YouTube subscribers, nine times as many as the New Heights podcast. This is how relevancy is measured in 2024. And since the Kelces, on aesthetics and substance, aren’t exceeding any of these other men—if anything, the NFL brothers are far less interesting—it is the fairest, and perhaps only way, to judge them.
It can be argued Travis Kelce will never be the Rock because he lacks the Rock’s charisma and gravitas. He’s too straining, too preening, nakedly thirsty for the attention he’s mostly receiving because he was able to date his generation’s Madonna. But it’s the crumbling superstructure of fame that will truly hold Kelce back. It was Old Hollywood and Old Television that made the Rock who he was; it was the world before social media had metastasized and culture had fractured. Millions of boys watched the Rock wrestle on linear television in the 1990s and bought DVDs of his action movies in the 2000s. There was a monoculture for the Rock to seize. Kecle won’t be so lucky.
What’s become clear, with the passage of a year, is just how thoroughly they once dominated the culture and how such a phenomenon is unlikely to repeat itself. Neither individual, barring an unforeseen twist, will approach the heights of 2023, when Swift embarked on her Eras Tour and entered into a relationship with the Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs tight end. They each enjoyed fame, for a wedge of time at the end of last year, that rivaled any twentieth century celebrity’s at the apogee of the old analog culture. It was, in retrospect, the last gasp of what can be called Empire. We are not going back to Elvis and Marilyn, the Beatles and Michael Jackson. Swift and Kelce, for a fleeting number of months, almost brought us there, with Swift donning red in her luxury suite during prime time to cheer on a future Hall of Famer playing America’s most popular sport. Kelce even won another Super Bowl as Mr. Taylor Swift. Imagine that thrill. For a man who once longed to be as famous as the Rock, this was the zenith. He must have been sure he was headed to celebrity’s very upper limits.
Money is money, though, and the zeitgeist is something else. Recently, I noticed that many videos of the New Heights podcast on YouTube were failing to rack up 1 million views. For a pair of podcasters who have enjoyed so much conventional fame, these numbers struck me as rather anemic. My suspicions were confirmed when I checked in on comedian Theo Von’s YouTube channel. Von, something of a mini-Joe Rogan, is not nearly as well-known as Kelce. Yet his full videos—interviews with various comedians, cultural figures, and politicians—routinely exceed 1 million views. His total subscriber count on YouTube beats New Heights by nearly 1 million. I cite YouTube because I truly think the platform, despite its obvious dominance, still manages to be underrated by the mainstream. YouTube is the future of television and audio alike. If its parent company, Google/Alphabet, cared more about winning the streaming wars, YouTube Premium could probably put Spotify out of business. For less than $20 a month, a premium account allows a user to skip all advertisements and listen to what amounts to virtually the entire music catalog on Earth—one, in terms of human-made quality songs, even larger than Spotify’s.
It is on YouTube where the Kelces not only trail Von but get lapped by computer scientist Lex Fridman. It’s probably not worth bringing up Rogan, who is nearing 19 million YouTube subscribers, nine times as many as the New Heights podcast. This is how relevancy is measured in 2024. And since the Kelces, on aesthetics and substance, aren’t exceeding any of these other men—if anything, the NFL brothers are far less interesting—it is the fairest, and perhaps only way, to judge them.
It can be argued Travis Kelce will never be the Rock because he lacks the Rock’s charisma and gravitas. He’s too straining, too preening, nakedly thirsty for the attention he’s mostly receiving because he was able to date his generation’s Madonna. But it’s the crumbling superstructure of fame that will truly hold Kelce back. It was Old Hollywood and Old Television that made the Rock who he was; it was the world before social media had metastasized and culture had fractured. Millions of boys watched the Rock wrestle on linear television in the 1990s and bought DVDs of his action movies in the 2000s. There was a monoculture for the Rock to seize. Kecle won’t be so lucky.
by Ross Barkan, Political Currents | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Truncated post for subscribers, but a good short take nonetheless. You can kind of get a feeling of where this is heading.]
A Theory about Dishes
“Washing dishes” (1914) photograph by Harry Whittier Frees
It seems so unreasonable when you put it that way: My wife left me because sometimes I leave dishes by the sink.The author then goes on to talk about why his wife cared about the dishes he left and how it reflected her broader concerns about not feeling respected and wanting her partner to share the mental load of managing a house. Toward the end, he summarizes the real problem his wife and other women in her situation have.
It makes her seem ridiculous; and makes me seem like a victim of unfair expectations.
The wife doesn’t want to divorce her husband because he leaves used drinking glasses by the sink.In the end, it was not about the dishes but about a broader pattern of behavior that left the wife feeling unsupported in their marriage. The dishes are a symbol, an artistic flourish to represent one piece of the frustration many couples, especially straight ones, have when it comes to dividing household labor. But what if this is not the whole story? What if dishes have a unique ability to create resentment and domestic misery?
She wants to divorce him because she feels like he doesn’t respect or appreciate her, which suggests he doesn’t love her, and she can’t count on him to be her lifelong partner.
There was a group of friends I knew who decided to all live together after high school. When their lease was up, they did not renew and there were some bitter feelings. At least one person claims that the reason their setup did not work out was because of conflict over the dishes. Maybe the dishes were a symptom of a bigger problem related to communication or willingness of everyone to share in household labor. But what if we take this reason seriously? What if that household did fall apart because of the dishes?
Conflict over dishes is so common that I am willing to bet every person reading this has argued about dishes at some point in their life whether that be with their parents, their own children, their partners or their roommates. There are always dishes to wash and most people find washing them to be unpleasant. Over time after hearing about other people’s conflicts and dealing with my own, I have come to think much more seriously about dishwashing than any sane person should. I have read empirical research on the division of dishwashing labor and its effects on relationships (most of which, oddly enough, focus on sexual satisfaction). I have read multiple takes by Christians who argue that dishwashing is part of God’s punishment for Eve eating the apple. Then I explored the many articles whose title is a play on “everyone wants a community/village/commune but no one wants to do the dishes.”
My radical conclusion after reading the dishwashing literature is that who does the dishes is not a petty concern and the fact that people see it as petty is the main reason it can prove to be such a destructive force in households whether those houses consists of married couples, roommates, or income sharing commune dwellers.
Evidence for the Surprising Importance of Dishwashing
Out of the few scientific studies on the division of dishwashing labor, the most relevant is Carlson, Miller and Sassler’s (2018) study that compared how the division of labor of different household tasks affects relationship satisfaction (including its effects on sex). Out of all the tasks they included (preparing/cooking meals, house cleaning, shopping, laundry, home maintenance, and paying bills), the “most consequential to relationship quality” was washing the dishes. When women were doing much more of the dishwashing, there was lower relationships satisfaction, more reports of relationship troubles, higher likelihood of having talked about separating, and a higher likelihood of physical arguments. Dishwashing was unique in its ability to cause discord and unhappiness.
Unfortunately, most research on division of household labor does not separate out dishwashing from other tasks so the rest of my evidence is anecdotal. After Mathew Fray wrote the above mentioned article about his wife leaving him over the dishes, he became a relationship coach and wrote a book about how men can save their marriages. His article about dishes resonated so much that he spun it into an entire career. [...]
My Guesses as to Why Dishwashing is so Important
Compared to other household tasks, dishwashing is more constant and has less potential to be fulfilling. There are other tasks that are gross, such as cleaning the toilet or gutters, but those aren’t daily tasks. Other tasks that are daily, such as cooking, are ones that many people enjoy and even do as a hobby. No one washes dishes as a hobby. The closest task in terms of regularity and unpleasantness might be laundry. In households where one person does everyone’s laundry then it does become a daily task of often unnoticed drudgery. But in most households laundry is not a daily issue in the way dishes are.
My main theory is that the perception of dishwashing as a petty concern is the problem. Most of the comments under Mathew Fray’s article are in the vein of “in a healthy marriage people do not care so much about dishes.” The whole reason the article went viral is the ridiculousness of the idea that dishes could be so important. When an issue is considered petty then the onus is on the resentful person to let it go rather than force a solution that everyone is satisfied with but it’s hard to let go when the dishwasher is reminded of their resentment everyday, multiple times a day. Washing the dishes does not take long but those short bursts of annoyances adds up.
by Mia Milne, Solar Thoughts | Read more:
Image: “Washing dishes” (1914) photograph by Harry Whittier Frees
Thursday, March 26, 2026
NASA's 'Lunar Viceroy' on Moon Base Plans
Image: Rendering of a Moon base that will be built over the next decade. Credit: NASA
[ed. In the next 10 years.]
Seeing Like a Sedan
Waymos and Cybercabs see the world through very different sensors. Which technology wins out will determine the future of self-driving vehicles.
Picture a fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. The city is experiencing a sudden rainstorm, common there in October. Along a wet and darkened city street drive two robotaxis. Each has passengers. Neither has a driver.
Both cars drive themselves, but they perceive the world very differently.
One robotaxi is a Waymo. From its roof, a mounted lidar rig spins continuously, sending out laser pulses that bounce back from the road, the storefronts, and other vehicles, while radar signals emanate from its bumpers and side panels. The Waymo uses these sensors to generate a detailed 3D model of its surroundings, detecting pedestrians and cars that human drivers might struggle to see.
In the next lane is a Tesla Cybercab, operating in unsupervised full self-driving mode. It has no lidar and no radar, just eight cameras housed in pockets of glass. The car processes these video feeds through a neural network, identifying objects, estimating their dimensions, and planning its path accordingly.
This scenario is only partially imaginary. Waymo already operates, in limited fashion, in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Phoenix, with announced plans to operate in many more cities. Tesla Motors launched an Austin pilot of its robotaxi business in June 2025, albeit using Model Y vehicles with safety monitors rather than the still-in-development Cybercab. The outcome of their competition will tell us much about the future of urban transportation.
The engineers who built the earliest automated driving systems would find the Waymo unsurprising. For nearly two decades after the first automated vehicles emerged, a consensus prevailed: To operate safely, an AV required redundant sensing modalities. Cameras, lidar, and radar each had weaknesses, but they could compensate for each other. That consensus is why those engineers would find the Cybercab so remarkable. In 2016, Tesla broke with orthodoxy by embracing the idea that autonomy could ultimately be solved with vision and compute and without lidar — a philosophical stance it later embodied in its full vision-only system. What humans can do with their eyeballs and a brain, the firm reasoned, a car must also be able to do with sufficient cameras and compute. If a human can drive without lidar, so, too, can an AV… or so Tesla asserts.
This philosophical disagreement will shortly play out before our eyes in the form of a massive contest between AVs that rely on multiple sensing modalities — lidar, radar, cameras — and AVs that rely on cameras and compute alone.
The stakes of this contest are enormous. The global taxi and ride-hailing market was valued at approximately $243 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $640 billion by 2032. In the United States alone, people take over 3.6 billion ride-hailing trips annually. Converting even a fraction of this market to AVs represents a multibillion-dollar opportunity. Serving just the American market, at maturity, will require millions of vehicles.
Given the scale involved, the cost of each vehicle matters. The figures are commercially sensitive, but it is certainly true that cameras are cheaper than lidar. If Tesla’s bet pays off, building a Cybercab will cost a fraction of what it will take to build a Waymo. Which vision wins out has profound implications for how quickly each company will be able to put vehicles into service, as well as for how quickly robotaxi service can scale to bring its benefits to ordinary consumers across the United States and beyond.
For example, here’s another thing he just said this week, in a trick he’s pulled several times without delivering, where the prediction market is at 12% but that seems rather high to me:
Announce periodically you are going to the moon and stars, and if one time you end up with SpaceX, it’s still a win. It’s worked for him quite well, so far.
Picture a fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. The city is experiencing a sudden rainstorm, common there in October. Along a wet and darkened city street drive two robotaxis. Each has passengers. Neither has a driver.
Both cars drive themselves, but they perceive the world very differently.
In the next lane is a Tesla Cybercab, operating in unsupervised full self-driving mode. It has no lidar and no radar, just eight cameras housed in pockets of glass. The car processes these video feeds through a neural network, identifying objects, estimating their dimensions, and planning its path accordingly.
This scenario is only partially imaginary. Waymo already operates, in limited fashion, in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Phoenix, with announced plans to operate in many more cities. Tesla Motors launched an Austin pilot of its robotaxi business in June 2025, albeit using Model Y vehicles with safety monitors rather than the still-in-development Cybercab. The outcome of their competition will tell us much about the future of urban transportation.
The engineers who built the earliest automated driving systems would find the Waymo unsurprising. For nearly two decades after the first automated vehicles emerged, a consensus prevailed: To operate safely, an AV required redundant sensing modalities. Cameras, lidar, and radar each had weaknesses, but they could compensate for each other. That consensus is why those engineers would find the Cybercab so remarkable. In 2016, Tesla broke with orthodoxy by embracing the idea that autonomy could ultimately be solved with vision and compute and without lidar — a philosophical stance it later embodied in its full vision-only system. What humans can do with their eyeballs and a brain, the firm reasoned, a car must also be able to do with sufficient cameras and compute. If a human can drive without lidar, so, too, can an AV… or so Tesla asserts.
This philosophical disagreement will shortly play out before our eyes in the form of a massive contest between AVs that rely on multiple sensing modalities — lidar, radar, cameras — and AVs that rely on cameras and compute alone.
The stakes of this contest are enormous. The global taxi and ride-hailing market was valued at approximately $243 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $640 billion by 2032. In the United States alone, people take over 3.6 billion ride-hailing trips annually. Converting even a fraction of this market to AVs represents a multibillion-dollar opportunity. Serving just the American market, at maturity, will require millions of vehicles.
Given the scale involved, the cost of each vehicle matters. The figures are commercially sensitive, but it is certainly true that cameras are cheaper than lidar. If Tesla’s bet pays off, building a Cybercab will cost a fraction of what it will take to build a Waymo. Which vision wins out has profound implications for how quickly each company will be able to put vehicles into service, as well as for how quickly robotaxi service can scale to bring its benefits to ordinary consumers across the United States and beyond.
by Andrew Miller, Asterisk | Read more:
Image: Jared Nangle
[ed. via DWAtV:]
***
A relevant thing about Elon Musk is that, while he has a lot of technical expertise and can accomplish a lot of seemingly impossible tasks, he also just says things.For example, here’s another thing he just said this week, in a trick he’s pulled several times without delivering, where the prediction market is at 12% but that seems rather high to me:
NewsWire: Elon Musk offers to pay TSA workers' salaries amid government shutdown.Just saying things, and announcing with confidence he will do things he probably cannot do, is central to his strategy of then yelling at people to sleep on floors until they manage to do it, which occasionally works to at least some extent. Elon Musk may plausibly start such a project, but the chances he achieves the goals he is stating are very low.
Announce periodically you are going to the moon and stars, and if one time you end up with SpaceX, it’s still a win. It’s worked for him quite well, so far.
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