Thursday, April 2, 2026
Airports Are Too Safe: The Case Against Checkpoint Screening
If you take a plane in New York City, you must first perform a series of rituals. You set aside any liquids you possess, then you remove your shoes. You place your laptop and sometimes your phone into a plastic bin. You take off your belt and sometimes your shoes and place them into a plastic bin as well. You enter a machine that sees through your clothes. Only then may you board your plane.
If you take the subway in New York City, you swipe a card at a faregate and walk onto the train.
Put another way, airports have ‘checkpoint screening’: systematic inspection of every passenger and their belongings before boarding. Subways and rail stations do not.
Once we start thinking about this asymmetry, the stranger it seems. LaGuardia Airport hosted 32.8 million passengers in 2025, which averages roughly to 90,000 per day. Meanwhile, Penn Station processes more than 600,000 riders per day. Despite the fact that Penn Station has more than six times the number of passengers, no one verifies their identity, checks their bags, asks what liquids they are carrying, nor inspects their belts and footwear.
It’s not as if terrorist attacks on railways are unheard of. Madrid’s commuter trains were bombed in 2004, the London Underground in 2005, and Mumbai’s suburban railway in 2006, causing hundreds of deaths. And yet none of these now feature checkpoint screening. Indeed, the absence of checkpoints is regarded as a merit of rail and a demerit of air; there is no debate over just how many hours before one’s trip one should arrive at a rail station. Meanwhile, the USA’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employs over 56,000 people and spends more than $11 billion per year ensuring that no one boards an airplane with an unexamined shampoo bottle.
The asymmetry is so familiar that it barely registers as a choice. It feels like a law of nature: air travellers are screened but rail travellers are not. But it is a choice we’ve made, and the fact of that choice permits only two conclusions: either rail security is unconscionably negligent, or aviation security is irrationally excessive.
Our behaviour reveals which we actually believe.
A History of Violence
In the early days of commercial aviation there was no security at all. For a taste, watch Bullitt (1968) or Airport (1970), where it’s taken for granted that one can carry guns and bombs through terminals, onto the tarmac, or into aircraft without any mechanism for authorities to stop it, or even notice.
Those portrayals fall squarely within the so-called Golden Age of Hijacking, which began in 1961 when Antulio Ortiz, a passenger on a flight from Miami to Key West, threatened the pilot with a gun and demanded to be flown to Cuba. His was the first of 159 hijackings over the next ten years. After a 1972 incident where hijackers threatened to crash a plane into a nuclear reactor, in January 1973 the Federal Aviation Administration finally mandated that every passenger and their carry-on bag be inspected for weapons. Metal detectors appeared at airports that year.
The 1973 system had a clear purpose: prevent hijackers from bringing weapons aboard. Metal detectors caught guns and knives and, in principle, explosives carried by passengers, while X-ray machines did the same for carry-on luggage. This physical system to deal with hijacking complemented the social system, which was to cooperate. Acting on the theory that hijackers wanted hostages, not corpses, the doctrine for crew and passengers alike was to comply rather than resist. Going along with demands bought time for negotiation, which generally ended with surrender, or with the hijackers escaping the plane and being apprehended elsewhere without loss of life to those aboard the airplane.
This system, of metal detectors, X-ray machines, and cooperative passengers, persisted largely unchanged for nearly three decades. It was imperfect, but it addressed a real problem, and it worked reasonably well.
This was the model that the 9/11 attackers exploited. They carried box cutters on board the plane, which were seen as tools rather than weapons and as such were permitted. Once aboard, they relied on passengers and crew behaving passively. Lack of resistance meant they were able to carry out their attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Notably, Flight 93 did not carry out such an attack, because the passengers did resist. Having learned, via Airphone, that other captured flights were being deliberately crashed, the passengers on that plane understood their only chance of survival was to fight back. They attempted to overpower their captors, who destroyed the plane rather than lose control of it.
That shift on Flight 93, from compliance to resistance, has turned out to be a permanent psychological change. Richard Reid, the ‘shoe’ bomber, was subdued by passengers and crew in 2001. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the ‘underwear’ bomber, was subdued by passengers and crew in 2009. In both cases, everyone else on the plane understood that the right move was to restrain the hijacker rather than submit to his demands. This means that one of the two vulnerabilities the 9/11 attackers used is now closed.
The other is closed as well. By April 2003, all commercial aircraft were required to feature hardened cockpit doors. The flight deck is now mechanically isolated from the main cabin, and will remain that way irrespective of what might happen there. To commandeer the aircraft, as the 9/11 terrorists did, now requires breaching that barrier. At a cost of $12,000 to $17,000 per door, plus annual extra fuel costs of $3,000, these doors make it more-or-less impossible for the cockpit to be captured, meaning that, in the future, any attacker’s bad acts will be confined to the cabin.
This means that the specific attack vector that made 9/11 catastrophic, using aircraft as guided missiles against ground targets, is now defended against by layers that don’t depend on checkpoint performance. Cockpit doors provide physical protection. Passengers provide active resistance. The weaponization-of-aircraft scenario requires defeating both. [ed. along with the presence of air marshals].
Despite these changes, checkpoint screening has become ever more elaborate in the post-9/11 era. After Reid’s failed shoe bombing in 2001, passengers were required to remove their shoes for X-ray inspection. After a foiled liquid-explosives plot in 2006, liquids were restricted to containers of 100 millilitres or less. After Abdulmutallab’s failed underwear bombing in 2009, full-body scanners were deployed. Each measure was a reaction to a specific plot. Each remains in place decades later, despite none of these measures having ever demonstrably prevented a subsequent attack.
Indeed the evidence that checkpoint screening catches any threat is weak. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security red-teamed its own screening and found that screeners failed to detect threat items in 67 of 70 tests: a failure rate of 95%. We’re told things are better now, but I’m not aware of any subsequent published test, so there’s no public evidence to support the claim.
So if the 9/11-style vulnerability has been addressed by hardened cockpit doors and changed passenger psychology, what is the marginal security value of the vast post-9/11 checkpoint expansion? The 1973 system screened for guns and knives; perhaps that still serves a purpose. But the layers added since—shoe scanning, liquid restrictions, body scanners—what are they for? [...]
We maintain a regime whose costs are staggering (over $11 billion annually in direct federal spending in the USA, plus equivalent per-capita amounts in other nations, plus hundreds of millions of passenger-hours in queues globally) and whose marginal benefits are undemonstrated.
Let me pause to acknowledge a counter-argument: perhaps aviation checkpoint screening deters terrorists, who shift their attacks to softer targets like rail. The Madrid, London, and Mumbai bombings might be evidence of successful deterrence, with subsequent displacement. But if checkpoint screening merely displaces attacks from aviation to rail, the net security benefit is zero; we’ve spent billions and wasted millions of hours to move the threat from one set of passengers to another… implicitly, a set of passengers we think less deserving of our protection.
And the fundamental point remains: whether those rail attacks were sui generis or displaced from harder targets, they killed hundreds, yet we didn’t impose checkpoints. We revealed our preference.
The Security Ratchet
If that revealed preference is for the rail model of security, why doesn’t aviation security move in that direction?
The reason for the air vs. rail distinction is a separate asymmetry among political incentives. An official who maintains excessive security incurs no blame for doing things the way they have always been done. Passengers may grumble, but passengers always grumble. Conversely, an official who loosens security would incur heavy blame in the event of an attack, regardless of whether the loosened measures would have prevented it.
Put another way, any official who changes the system must first incur costs of time, attention, and effort. If things go well, they receive no benefit in return, because no one notices; but if things go poorly, the disbenefit they receive would be massive.
This incentive structure produces a ratchet. Security measures accumulate, but almost never recede. After the shoe-bomb plot, we started removing shoes. After the liquid explosives plot, we restricted liquids. After the underwear-bomb plot, we deployed full-body scanners. Each measure responds to a specific plot, but none is ever removed, at least not without a technological excuse. The only significant rollback in two decades came in July 2025, when the TSA eliminated the shoe-removal requirement… but only because new scanning technology could inspect footwear while still on people’s feet, not because anyone concluded the requirement was unnecessary.
There’s a strong tell that the system understands that checkpoint screening is theatre, namely TSA PreCheck.
[ed. Finally, a voice of reason, no doubt shared by millions. I'd also add another reason for the asymmetry we see between air and rail travel: just the psychological aversion to falling (in a damaged aircraft) vs. smashing into something or being blown up. Nobody every said humans are totally rational.]
If you take the subway in New York City, you swipe a card at a faregate and walk onto the train.
Put another way, airports have ‘checkpoint screening’: systematic inspection of every passenger and their belongings before boarding. Subways and rail stations do not.
It’s not as if terrorist attacks on railways are unheard of. Madrid’s commuter trains were bombed in 2004, the London Underground in 2005, and Mumbai’s suburban railway in 2006, causing hundreds of deaths. And yet none of these now feature checkpoint screening. Indeed, the absence of checkpoints is regarded as a merit of rail and a demerit of air; there is no debate over just how many hours before one’s trip one should arrive at a rail station. Meanwhile, the USA’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employs over 56,000 people and spends more than $11 billion per year ensuring that no one boards an airplane with an unexamined shampoo bottle.
The asymmetry is so familiar that it barely registers as a choice. It feels like a law of nature: air travellers are screened but rail travellers are not. But it is a choice we’ve made, and the fact of that choice permits only two conclusions: either rail security is unconscionably negligent, or aviation security is irrationally excessive.
Our behaviour reveals which we actually believe.
A History of Violence
In the early days of commercial aviation there was no security at all. For a taste, watch Bullitt (1968) or Airport (1970), where it’s taken for granted that one can carry guns and bombs through terminals, onto the tarmac, or into aircraft without any mechanism for authorities to stop it, or even notice.
Those portrayals fall squarely within the so-called Golden Age of Hijacking, which began in 1961 when Antulio Ortiz, a passenger on a flight from Miami to Key West, threatened the pilot with a gun and demanded to be flown to Cuba. His was the first of 159 hijackings over the next ten years. After a 1972 incident where hijackers threatened to crash a plane into a nuclear reactor, in January 1973 the Federal Aviation Administration finally mandated that every passenger and their carry-on bag be inspected for weapons. Metal detectors appeared at airports that year.
The 1973 system had a clear purpose: prevent hijackers from bringing weapons aboard. Metal detectors caught guns and knives and, in principle, explosives carried by passengers, while X-ray machines did the same for carry-on luggage. This physical system to deal with hijacking complemented the social system, which was to cooperate. Acting on the theory that hijackers wanted hostages, not corpses, the doctrine for crew and passengers alike was to comply rather than resist. Going along with demands bought time for negotiation, which generally ended with surrender, or with the hijackers escaping the plane and being apprehended elsewhere without loss of life to those aboard the airplane.
This system, of metal detectors, X-ray machines, and cooperative passengers, persisted largely unchanged for nearly three decades. It was imperfect, but it addressed a real problem, and it worked reasonably well.
This was the model that the 9/11 attackers exploited. They carried box cutters on board the plane, which were seen as tools rather than weapons and as such were permitted. Once aboard, they relied on passengers and crew behaving passively. Lack of resistance meant they were able to carry out their attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Notably, Flight 93 did not carry out such an attack, because the passengers did resist. Having learned, via Airphone, that other captured flights were being deliberately crashed, the passengers on that plane understood their only chance of survival was to fight back. They attempted to overpower their captors, who destroyed the plane rather than lose control of it.
That shift on Flight 93, from compliance to resistance, has turned out to be a permanent psychological change. Richard Reid, the ‘shoe’ bomber, was subdued by passengers and crew in 2001. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the ‘underwear’ bomber, was subdued by passengers and crew in 2009. In both cases, everyone else on the plane understood that the right move was to restrain the hijacker rather than submit to his demands. This means that one of the two vulnerabilities the 9/11 attackers used is now closed.
The other is closed as well. By April 2003, all commercial aircraft were required to feature hardened cockpit doors. The flight deck is now mechanically isolated from the main cabin, and will remain that way irrespective of what might happen there. To commandeer the aircraft, as the 9/11 terrorists did, now requires breaching that barrier. At a cost of $12,000 to $17,000 per door, plus annual extra fuel costs of $3,000, these doors make it more-or-less impossible for the cockpit to be captured, meaning that, in the future, any attacker’s bad acts will be confined to the cabin.
This means that the specific attack vector that made 9/11 catastrophic, using aircraft as guided missiles against ground targets, is now defended against by layers that don’t depend on checkpoint performance. Cockpit doors provide physical protection. Passengers provide active resistance. The weaponization-of-aircraft scenario requires defeating both. [ed. along with the presence of air marshals].
Despite these changes, checkpoint screening has become ever more elaborate in the post-9/11 era. After Reid’s failed shoe bombing in 2001, passengers were required to remove their shoes for X-ray inspection. After a foiled liquid-explosives plot in 2006, liquids were restricted to containers of 100 millilitres or less. After Abdulmutallab’s failed underwear bombing in 2009, full-body scanners were deployed. Each measure was a reaction to a specific plot. Each remains in place decades later, despite none of these measures having ever demonstrably prevented a subsequent attack.
Indeed the evidence that checkpoint screening catches any threat is weak. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security red-teamed its own screening and found that screeners failed to detect threat items in 67 of 70 tests: a failure rate of 95%. We’re told things are better now, but I’m not aware of any subsequent published test, so there’s no public evidence to support the claim.
So if the 9/11-style vulnerability has been addressed by hardened cockpit doors and changed passenger psychology, what is the marginal security value of the vast post-9/11 checkpoint expansion? The 1973 system screened for guns and knives; perhaps that still serves a purpose. But the layers added since—shoe scanning, liquid restrictions, body scanners—what are they for? [...]
We maintain a regime whose costs are staggering (over $11 billion annually in direct federal spending in the USA, plus equivalent per-capita amounts in other nations, plus hundreds of millions of passenger-hours in queues globally) and whose marginal benefits are undemonstrated.
Let me pause to acknowledge a counter-argument: perhaps aviation checkpoint screening deters terrorists, who shift their attacks to softer targets like rail. The Madrid, London, and Mumbai bombings might be evidence of successful deterrence, with subsequent displacement. But if checkpoint screening merely displaces attacks from aviation to rail, the net security benefit is zero; we’ve spent billions and wasted millions of hours to move the threat from one set of passengers to another… implicitly, a set of passengers we think less deserving of our protection.
And the fundamental point remains: whether those rail attacks were sui generis or displaced from harder targets, they killed hundreds, yet we didn’t impose checkpoints. We revealed our preference.
The Security Ratchet
If that revealed preference is for the rail model of security, why doesn’t aviation security move in that direction?
The reason for the air vs. rail distinction is a separate asymmetry among political incentives. An official who maintains excessive security incurs no blame for doing things the way they have always been done. Passengers may grumble, but passengers always grumble. Conversely, an official who loosens security would incur heavy blame in the event of an attack, regardless of whether the loosened measures would have prevented it.
Put another way, any official who changes the system must first incur costs of time, attention, and effort. If things go well, they receive no benefit in return, because no one notices; but if things go poorly, the disbenefit they receive would be massive.
This incentive structure produces a ratchet. Security measures accumulate, but almost never recede. After the shoe-bomb plot, we started removing shoes. After the liquid explosives plot, we restricted liquids. After the underwear-bomb plot, we deployed full-body scanners. Each measure responds to a specific plot, but none is ever removed, at least not without a technological excuse. The only significant rollback in two decades came in July 2025, when the TSA eliminated the shoe-removal requirement… but only because new scanning technology could inspect footwear while still on people’s feet, not because anyone concluded the requirement was unnecessary.
There’s a strong tell that the system understands that checkpoint screening is theatre, namely TSA PreCheck.
by Andrew Miller, Changing Lanes | Read more:
Image: Alist, Denver Airport Security Lines, 2008, Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0[ed. Finally, a voice of reason, no doubt shared by millions. I'd also add another reason for the asymmetry we see between air and rail travel: just the psychological aversion to falling (in a damaged aircraft) vs. smashing into something or being blown up. Nobody every said humans are totally rational.]
Nopack Snowpack
'On a Whole Other Level’ - Rapid snow melt-off in American west stuns scientists.
Experts warned that even as the heat begins to subside, the stunning pace of melt-off over the past month has left key basins in uncharted territory for the dry seasons ahead. Though there’s still potential for more snow in the forecast, experts said it will probably be too little too late.
Acting as a water savings account of sorts, snowpacks are essential to water supply. Measurements taken across the west during the week of 1 April are viewed as important indicators of the peak amounts of water that might melt into reservoirs, rivers and streams and across thirsty landscapes through the summer.
During a critical survey in California’s Sierra Nevada on Wednesday, grass and mud could be seen through the thin white patchwork as state officials attempted to measure the meager snowpack.
“Normally we’d be standing right here,” Andy Reising, manager of California department of water resource’s snow surveys and water supply forecasting unit said, gesturing at chin height. The 5ft-tall tool typically thrust deep into the high berms on 1 April poked into the brown earth next to him. “There is actually no measurable snow.”
With zero depth and zero water content, this year’s annual April snow survey conducted at Phillips Station, was the second worst on record, beaten only by 2015 when officials “walked across a dry field”, Reising said.
It’s not just the amount of snow left on mountaintops that’s concerning experts, but the amount of moisture still frozen within them. “Snow water equivalent” (SWE), a measurement of what could melt off to supply natural and manmade systems, is exceptionally low.
California’s Sierra Nevada had just 4.9in of SWE, or 18% of average on Wednesday, according to the state’s department of water resources.
In the Colorado River headwaters, an important basin that supplies more than 40 million people across several states, along with 5.5m acres of agriculture, 30 tribal nations, and parts of Mexico, had just over 4in of SWE on Monday, or 24% of average. That’s less than half what was previously considered the record low.
Schumacher said the incoming storm could slow the early melting but won’t be enough to pull the basins back from the brink. Snow water equivalent measurements going into April were at levels typically seen in May or June, after months of melt-off, according to Schumacher.
The issue is extremely widespread. Data from a branch of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which logs averages based on levels between 1991 and 2020, shows states across the south-west and intermountain west with eye-popping lows. The Great Basin had only 16% of average on Monday and the lower Colorado region, which includes most of Arizona and parts of Nevada, was at 10%. The Rio Grande, which covers parts of New Mexico, Texas and Colorado, was at 8%.
“This year has the potential of being way worse than any of the years we have analogues for in the past,” Schumacher said.
‘Nothing short of shocking’
Even with near-normal precipitation across most of the west, every major river basin across the region was grappling with snow drought when March began, according to federal analysts. Roughly 91% of stations reported below-median snow water equivalent, according to the last federal snow drought update compiled on 8 March. Water managers and climate experts had been hopeful for a March miracle – a strong cold storm that could set the region on the right track. Instead, a blistering heatwave unlike any recorded for this time of year baked the region and spurred a rapid melt-off.
“March is often a big month for snowstorms,” Schumacher said. “Instead of getting snow we would normally expect we got this unprecedented, way-off-the-scale warmth.”
More than 1,500 monthly high temperature records were broken in March and hundreds more tied. The event was “likely among the most statistically anomalous extreme heat events ever observed in the American south-west”, climate scientist Daniel Swain said in an analysis posted this week.
“Beyond the conspicuous ‘weirdness’ of it all,” Swain added, “the most consequential impact of our record-shattering March heat will likely be the decimation of the water year 2025-26 snowpack across nearly all of the American west.” [...]
In the Colorado River Basin, the situation could be even more dire. The two largest reservoirs on the Colorado River are Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which together account for about 90% of storage, are 25% and 33% full accordingly, as of 29 March, and there is little to fill them.
Already officials are in the process of relocating a floating marina on Lake Powell in anticipation of the quickly receding water levels, as experts warn the vital reservoir could drop to the lowest levels recorded since it was filled in the 1960s. If they fall far enough, the system would cease to function altogether. So-called “deadpool” – when water isn’t high enough to pass through the dams, generate hydroelectric power, and be distributed downriver – would be catastrophic.
The Colorado River has been overdrawn for more than a century but rising temperatures and lower precipitation are putting more pressure on the system that depended on by cities, farms, industries and wildlife across the west. The extreme conditions have added more urgency and greater tensions to fraught negotiations over who will bear the brunt of badly needed cuts. Seven states that have blown past two key deadlines are still locked in a stalemate over how the river’s essential resources will be managed through a hotter and drier future.
Already officials are in the process of relocating a floating marina on Lake Powell in anticipation of the quickly receding water levels, as experts warn the vital reservoir could drop to the lowest levels recorded since it was filled in the 1960s. If they fall far enough, the system would cease to function altogether. So-called “deadpool” – when water isn’t high enough to pass through the dams, generate hydroelectric power, and be distributed downriver – would be catastrophic.
The Colorado River has been overdrawn for more than a century but rising temperatures and lower precipitation are putting more pressure on the system that depended on by cities, farms, industries and wildlife across the west. The extreme conditions have added more urgency and greater tensions to fraught negotiations over who will bear the brunt of badly needed cuts. Seven states that have blown past two key deadlines are still locked in a stalemate over how the river’s essential resources will be managed through a hotter and drier future.
by Gabrielle Canon, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Guardian Design/Nasa Worldview
Forecasting the Economic Effects of AI
There is widespread disagreement over the impact that AI will—or won’t—have on the U.S. economy: some prominent voices warn of a transformative upheaval and large-scale job losses, while others predict modest boosts to productivity at best. But there has been little work attempting to systematically understand expert views on the economic impacts of AI. What do top economists predict will be the economic consequences of AI—and why do they hold those beliefs?
In a new working paper, researchers from the Forecasting Research Institute and coauthors from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Yale School of Management, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania present results from a large-scale forecasting exercise tracking the views of 69 leading economists, 52 AI industry and policy experts, 38 highly accurate forecasters, and 401 members of the general public. The survey ran from mid-October 2025 to the end of February 2026.
This post summarizes the key findings. For more details, refer to the full working paper.
by Forecasting Research Institute | Read more:
Image: FRI
Wednesday, April 1, 2026
March 30, 2026
Showing reporters on Air Force One a series of posterboard images of his new ballroom last night, Trump told them: “I thought I’d do this now because it’s easier. I’m so busy that I don’t have time to do this. But, ah, I’m fighting wars and other things. But this is very important ’cause this is going to be with us for a long time and it’s going to be, I think it’ll be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world.”
At 7:26 this morning, about two hours before the stock market opened, Trump’s social media account posted: “The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalination plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’ This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP” [...]
When he decided to go to war with Iran, Trump apparently fantasized that the operation would look like his strike on Venezuela, in which a fast attack enabled U.S. forces to grab Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores, leaving behind Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who appeared willing to work with the Trump administration, in power. The initial strikes of Israel and the U.S. on Iran did indeed kill that regime’s leadership, but officials simply replaced that leadership from within the regime, making Trump’s claim of regime change as imaginary as his claim that the U.S. and Iran have been at war for 47 years.
More shocking in this statement, though, is that Trump appears to be trying to force his will on the Iranians by threatening to commit war crimes. International law recognizes attacks on civilian infrastructure—like those Russian president Vladimir Putin has been carrying out on Ukraine for years—as war crimes. The Geneva Convention specifically prohibits attacks on drinking water, so Trump’s threat to attack the desalination plants that make seawater drinkable is, as Shashank Joshi of The Economist notes, not only stupid because Iran could do the same to other Gulf states, but “also, quite obviously,...very illegal.”
Joshi notes that “[Arizona Democratic senator] Mark Kelly et al were right to warn of illegal orders,” and Charles A. Ray of The Steady State explains that not just Trump but anyone carrying out these orders would be implicated in potential criminality. Trump’s threat comes the day after Christiaan Triebert and John Ismay of the New York Times reported that on the first day of attacks, U.S. forces hit not just the girls’ school we knew about, but also, in a different city, a sports hall used by civilians and a nearby elementary school, killing at least 21 people.
Trump apparently had no plan B for what to do if the initial plan to strike Iran and knock out its leaders failed, and is now flailing. His repeated assurances that talks with Iran are making “great progress” contrast with Iran’s insistence it is not engaged in talks with the United States. Trump entered the war with vague promises of “regime change” and promises to guarantee Iran never developed a nuclear weapon but now is reduced to hoping for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, putting the U.S. in the odd position of fighting a war to achieve the conditions that existed before it started the war. [...]
Meanwhile, the price of oil rose to $116 a barrel after strikes against Israel by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. The Houthis have the potential to disrupt yet another key strait, the Bab el-Mandeb, through which tankers carry about 10% of the world’s oil out of the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and into the Arabian Sea, from where it can go into the Indian Ocean and to the rest of the world. [...]
What we do know, though, is that Trump is extraordinarily unlikely ever to do anything that will conflict with the wishes of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Trump has blockaded Cuba, strangling its energy sector by blocking off all oil tankers from the island. Although he has stopped Venezuelan and Mexican tankers, today he permitted a Russian-flagged tanker to get through the blockade to sell oil that will help fund Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Asked why he permitted that tanker through, Trump answered: “He loses one boatload of oil, that’s all it is. If he wants to do that, and if other countries want to do it, doesn’t bother me much.” World affairs journalist Frida Ghitis commented: “When Mexico tried to send oil to Cuba, Trump immediately threatened to impose crushing tariffs on it, or on any country that broke his blockade of the island. Now Russia is sending Cuba oil and Trump says it’s fine, no problem. The mystery continues.” [...]
Tonight Trump’s social media account posted an AI-generated video of a future President Donald J. Trump Presidential Library. To triumphal music, the video features a gleaming skyscraper containing what appears to be the airplane the president pressured Qatar into giving him, along with what seems to be a replica of the Oval Office…and a model of his anticipated ballroom.
The decision by Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, begins: “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” It goes on to say that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims…to construct his East Wing ballroom project and do it with private funds,” and points out that Trump appears to be relying for authority on a law permitting him “to conduct ordinary maintenance and repair of the White House.” Leon also noted that the White House has offered vague and shifting information about who is actually in charge of the project and that the public has an interest in the appearance of the White House. Leon said “the ballroom construction project must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.” [...]
Trump exploded at the judge’s decision, posting on social media: “The National Trust for Historic Preservation sues me for a Ballroom that is under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World. I then get sued by them over the renovation of the dilapidated and structurally unsound former Kennedy Center, now, The Trump Kennedy Center (A show of Bipartisan Unity, a Republican and Democrat President!), where all I am doing is fixing, cleaning, running, and ‘sprucing up’ a terribly maintained, for many years, Building, but a Building of potentially great importance. Yet, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005, is not suing the Federal Reserve for a Building which has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman. The once magnificent Building is BILLIONS over budget, may never be completed, and may never open. All of the beautiful walls inside have been ripped down, never to be built again, but the National ‘Trust’ for Historic Preservation never did anything about it! Or, have they sued on Governor Gavin Newscum’s ‘RAILROAD TO NOWHERE’ in California that is BILLIONS over Budget and, probably, will never open or be used. So, the White House Ballroom, and The Trump Kennedy Center, which are under budget, ahead of schedule, and will be among the most magnificent Buildings of their kind anywhere in the World, gets [sic] sued by a group that was cut off by Government years ago, but all of the many DISASTERS in our Country are left alone to die. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Hours later, he posted: “Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and I are working on fixing the absolutely filthy Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. This work was supposed to be done by the Biden Administration, but Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what ‘CLEAN’ or proper maintenance is—The President and Secretary do!”
At 7:26 this morning, about two hours before the stock market opened, Trump’s social media account posted: “The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalination plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’ This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP” [...]
When he decided to go to war with Iran, Trump apparently fantasized that the operation would look like his strike on Venezuela, in which a fast attack enabled U.S. forces to grab Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores, leaving behind Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who appeared willing to work with the Trump administration, in power. The initial strikes of Israel and the U.S. on Iran did indeed kill that regime’s leadership, but officials simply replaced that leadership from within the regime, making Trump’s claim of regime change as imaginary as his claim that the U.S. and Iran have been at war for 47 years.
More shocking in this statement, though, is that Trump appears to be trying to force his will on the Iranians by threatening to commit war crimes. International law recognizes attacks on civilian infrastructure—like those Russian president Vladimir Putin has been carrying out on Ukraine for years—as war crimes. The Geneva Convention specifically prohibits attacks on drinking water, so Trump’s threat to attack the desalination plants that make seawater drinkable is, as Shashank Joshi of The Economist notes, not only stupid because Iran could do the same to other Gulf states, but “also, quite obviously,...very illegal.”
Joshi notes that “[Arizona Democratic senator] Mark Kelly et al were right to warn of illegal orders,” and Charles A. Ray of The Steady State explains that not just Trump but anyone carrying out these orders would be implicated in potential criminality. Trump’s threat comes the day after Christiaan Triebert and John Ismay of the New York Times reported that on the first day of attacks, U.S. forces hit not just the girls’ school we knew about, but also, in a different city, a sports hall used by civilians and a nearby elementary school, killing at least 21 people.
Trump apparently had no plan B for what to do if the initial plan to strike Iran and knock out its leaders failed, and is now flailing. His repeated assurances that talks with Iran are making “great progress” contrast with Iran’s insistence it is not engaged in talks with the United States. Trump entered the war with vague promises of “regime change” and promises to guarantee Iran never developed a nuclear weapon but now is reduced to hoping for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, putting the U.S. in the odd position of fighting a war to achieve the conditions that existed before it started the war. [...]
Meanwhile, the price of oil rose to $116 a barrel after strikes against Israel by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. The Houthis have the potential to disrupt yet another key strait, the Bab el-Mandeb, through which tankers carry about 10% of the world’s oil out of the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and into the Arabian Sea, from where it can go into the Indian Ocean and to the rest of the world. [...]
What we do know, though, is that Trump is extraordinarily unlikely ever to do anything that will conflict with the wishes of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Trump has blockaded Cuba, strangling its energy sector by blocking off all oil tankers from the island. Although he has stopped Venezuelan and Mexican tankers, today he permitted a Russian-flagged tanker to get through the blockade to sell oil that will help fund Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Asked why he permitted that tanker through, Trump answered: “He loses one boatload of oil, that’s all it is. If he wants to do that, and if other countries want to do it, doesn’t bother me much.” World affairs journalist Frida Ghitis commented: “When Mexico tried to send oil to Cuba, Trump immediately threatened to impose crushing tariffs on it, or on any country that broke his blockade of the island. Now Russia is sending Cuba oil and Trump says it’s fine, no problem. The mystery continues.” [...]
Tonight Trump’s social media account posted an AI-generated video of a future President Donald J. Trump Presidential Library. To triumphal music, the video features a gleaming skyscraper containing what appears to be the airplane the president pressured Qatar into giving him, along with what seems to be a replica of the Oval Office…and a model of his anticipated ballroom.
by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American | Read more:
[ed. See also: The Obvious Scapegoat (Dispatch). Another day in the psycho ward, as Trump continues with his crazy ballroom fixation:]
***
Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia also stymied Trump today when he ruled that Trump cannot proceed with his plans for a giant ballroom on the site of the demolished East Wing of the White House without approval from Congress. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued Trump and a number of federal agencies to stop construction of the ballroom, noting that Trump skipped reviews and approvals that were required by law.The decision by Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, begins: “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” It goes on to say that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims…to construct his East Wing ballroom project and do it with private funds,” and points out that Trump appears to be relying for authority on a law permitting him “to conduct ordinary maintenance and repair of the White House.” Leon also noted that the White House has offered vague and shifting information about who is actually in charge of the project and that the public has an interest in the appearance of the White House. Leon said “the ballroom construction project must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.” [...]
Trump exploded at the judge’s decision, posting on social media: “The National Trust for Historic Preservation sues me for a Ballroom that is under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World. I then get sued by them over the renovation of the dilapidated and structurally unsound former Kennedy Center, now, The Trump Kennedy Center (A show of Bipartisan Unity, a Republican and Democrat President!), where all I am doing is fixing, cleaning, running, and ‘sprucing up’ a terribly maintained, for many years, Building, but a Building of potentially great importance. Yet, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005, is not suing the Federal Reserve for a Building which has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman. The once magnificent Building is BILLIONS over budget, may never be completed, and may never open. All of the beautiful walls inside have been ripped down, never to be built again, but the National ‘Trust’ for Historic Preservation never did anything about it! Or, have they sued on Governor Gavin Newscum’s ‘RAILROAD TO NOWHERE’ in California that is BILLIONS over Budget and, probably, will never open or be used. So, the White House Ballroom, and The Trump Kennedy Center, which are under budget, ahead of schedule, and will be among the most magnificent Buildings of their kind anywhere in the World, gets [sic] sued by a group that was cut off by Government years ago, but all of the many DISASTERS in our Country are left alone to die. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Hours later, he posted: “Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and I are working on fixing the absolutely filthy Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. This work was supposed to be done by the Biden Administration, but Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what ‘CLEAN’ or proper maintenance is—The President and Secretary do!”
~ Letters from an American: March 31, 2026
'Fragment Creation Event' - Starlink Satellite Breaks Apart
SpaceX’s Starlink division confirmed yesterday that it lost contact with a satellite on Sunday and is trying to locate space debris that might have been produced by… whatever happened there.
Starlink said there appeared to be “no new risk” to other space operations and did not use the word “explosion.” But it seems that something caused a Starlink broadband satellite to break apart into at least tens of pieces. LeoLabs, which operates a radar network that can track objects in low Earth orbit, said in an X post that it “detected a fragment creation event involving SpaceX Starlink 34343,” one of the 10,000 or so Starlink satellites in orbit.
“LeoLabs Global Radar Network immediately detected tens of objects in the vicinity of the satellite after the event, with a first pass over our radar site in the Azores, Portugal,” LeoLabs said. “Additional fragments may have been produced—analysis is ongoing.”
LeoLabs said the breakup was “likely caused by an internal energetic source rather than a collision with space debris or another object.” Because of “the low altitude of the event, fragments from this anomaly will likely de-orbit within a few weeks,” it said. [...]
LeoLabs said yesterday that the new event is similar to one from December 17, 2025, which also produced “tens of objects in the vicinity of the satellite” and appeared to be “caused by an internal energetic source” rather than a crash with another object. LeoLabs said it wants more information on the anomalies.
“These events illustrate the need for rapid characterization of anomalous events to enable clarity of the operating environment,” it said.
Starlink provided a few details shortly after the December 2025 incident, saying on December 18 that an “anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km, and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects.” Starlink added that the satellite was “largely intact” but “tumbling,” and would reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and “fully demise” within weeks.
In December, Starlink seemed confident that it could prevent future anomalies. “Our engineers are rapidly working to [identify the] root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly and are already in the process of deploying software to our vehicles that increases protections against this type of event,” Starlink said in the December 18 post.
We asked SpaceX today whether it has determined the cause of the December anomaly or the one on Sunday, and will update this article if we get a response.
Starlink said there appeared to be “no new risk” to other space operations and did not use the word “explosion.” But it seems that something caused a Starlink broadband satellite to break apart into at least tens of pieces. LeoLabs, which operates a radar network that can track objects in low Earth orbit, said in an X post that it “detected a fragment creation event involving SpaceX Starlink 34343,” one of the 10,000 or so Starlink satellites in orbit.
LeoLabs said the breakup was “likely caused by an internal energetic source rather than a collision with space debris or another object.” Because of “the low altitude of the event, fragments from this anomaly will likely de-orbit within a few weeks,” it said. [...]
LeoLabs said yesterday that the new event is similar to one from December 17, 2025, which also produced “tens of objects in the vicinity of the satellite” and appeared to be “caused by an internal energetic source” rather than a crash with another object. LeoLabs said it wants more information on the anomalies.
“These events illustrate the need for rapid characterization of anomalous events to enable clarity of the operating environment,” it said.
Starlink provided a few details shortly after the December 2025 incident, saying on December 18 that an “anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km, and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects.” Starlink added that the satellite was “largely intact” but “tumbling,” and would reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and “fully demise” within weeks.
In December, Starlink seemed confident that it could prevent future anomalies. “Our engineers are rapidly working to [identify the] root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly and are already in the process of deploying software to our vehicles that increases protections against this type of event,” Starlink said in the December 18 post.
We asked SpaceX today whether it has determined the cause of the December anomaly or the one on Sunday, and will update this article if we get a response.
by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
The AI Doc
(This will be a fully spoilorific overview. If you haven’t seen The AI Doc, I recommend seeing it, it is about as good as it could realistically have been, in most ways.)
Like many things, it only works because it is centrally real. The creator of the documentary clearly did get married and have a child, freak out about AI, ask questions of the right people out of worry about his son’s future, freak out even more now with actual existential risk for (simplified versions of) the right reasons, go on a quest to stop freaking out and get optimistic instead, find many of the right people for that and ask good non-technical questions, get somewhat fooled, listen to mundane safety complaints, seek out and get interviews with the top CEOs, try to tell himself he could ignore all of it, then decide not to end on a bunch of hopeful babies and instead have a call for action to help shape the future.
A lot of the editing choices, and the selections of what to intercut and clip, clearly come from an outsider without technical knowledge, trying to deal with their anxiety. Many of them would not have been my choices, especially the emphasis on weapons and physical destruction, but I think they work exactly because together they make it clear the whole thing is genuine.
Now there’s a story. It even won praise online as fair and good, from both those worried about existential risk and several of the accelerationist optimists, because it gave both sides what they most wanted. [...]
Yes, you can do that for both at once, because they want different things and also agree on quite a lot of true things. That is much more impactful than a diatribe.
We live in a world of spin. Daniel Roher is trying to navigate a world of spin, but his own earnestness shines through, and he makes excellent choices on who to interview. The being swayed by whoever is in front of him is a feature, not a bug, because he’s not trying to hide it. There are places where people are clearly trying to spin, or are making dumb points, and I appreciated him not trying to tell us which was which.
MIRI offers us a Twitter FAQ thread and a full website FAQ explaining their full position in the context of the movie, which is that no this is not hype and yes it is going to kill everyone if we keep building it and no our current safety techniques will not help with that, and they call for an international treaty.
Are there those who think this was propaganda or one sided? Yes, of course, although they cannot agree on which angle it was trying to support.
Babies Are Awesome
The overarching personal journey is about Daniel having a son. The movie takes one very clear position, that we need to see taken more often, which is that getting married and having a family and babies and kids are all super awesome.
This turns into the first question he asks those he interviews. Would you have a child today, given the current state of AI? [...]
People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
The first set of interviews outlines the danger.
This is not a technical film. We get explanations that resonate with an ordinary dude.
We get Jeffrey Ladish explaining the basics of instrumental convergence, the idea that if you have a goal then power helps you achieve that goal and you cannot fetch the coffee if you’re dead. That it’s not that the AI will hate us, it’s that it will see us like we see ants, and if you want to put a highway where the anthill is that’s the ant’s problem.
We get Connor Leahy talking about how creating smarter and more capable things than us is not a safe thing to be doing, and emphasizing that you do not need further justification for that. We get Eliezer Yudkowsky saying that if you share a planet with much smarter beings that don’t care about you and want other things, you should not like your chances. We get Ajeya Cotra explaining additional things, and so on.
Aside from that, we don’t get any talk of the ‘alignment problem’ and I don’t think the word alignment even appears in the film that I can remember.
It is hard for me to know how much the arguments resonate. I am very much not the target audience. Overall I felt they were treated fairly, and the arguments were both strong and highly sufficient to carry the day. Yes, obviously we are in a lot of trouble here.
Freak Out
Daniel’s response is, quite understandably and correctly, to freak out.
Then he asks, very explicitly, is there a way to be an optimist about this? Could he convince himself it will all work out?
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV | Read more:
WNBA Players Had an Ace Up Their Sleeve in Pay Negotiations: A Nobel Laureate
After Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics in 2023, she received hundreds of invitations and requests. She accepted just three.
One of them was advising the WNBA players union as the women prepared to negotiate a new labor deal with the league.
When Goldin replied via email to Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the players union, “I remember just reading it and screaming,” Jackson said. Goldin had one requirement: She refused to be paid.
This month, the two sides reached a collective bargaining agreement that gave Women’s National Basketball Association players a nearly 400% raise. Starting this season, players’ average salary will top $580,000.
It isn’t just the biggest pay increase in U.S. league history. It is, as far as Goldin is aware, the biggest increase any union anywhere has ever negotiated.
“It’s astounding,” the 79-year-old Harvard economist said.
“The WNBA community is rightfully celebrating a historic moment of growth, investment and progress for the players, fans and the future of the game,” he said.
Goldin played no sports growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s. But she has deep knowledge of women’s pay: As an economist, she spent years rifling through boxes of surveys and personnel records and tracking down data to document women’s changing role in the workplace.
That research has included the role that discrimination plays in pay gaps between men and women. Goldin won her Nobel for advancing understanding of women’s labor-market outcomes.
Goldin earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago economics department in 1972, when few women were in the field. She became the first tenured woman in Harvard’s economics department.
In early 2024, when Jackson approached Goldin, the average NBA player made about $12 million, according to Basketball Reference, a statistics website. The average WNBA player made $118,000—less than one cent on the dollar, as Goldin is quick to point out.
Around that time, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and other young stars would enter the WNBA draft and spur a surge in popularity in the league that continues today.
Goldin’s first task was examining players’ average compensation—salaries plus benefits like housing.
She also looked at career length. She and a research assistant scraped roster data going back to the league’s 1997 launch and built what demographers call a “life table.” It’s the same tool that insurance actuaries use to calculate life expectancy, adapted to estimate how long a typical player might expect to play in the WNBA.
The answer: two or three years. In negotiating player benefits, it was important to know that if they kicked in after three years or later, many players wouldn’t receive them.
The foundational piece of revenue for the WNBA is an 11-year media-rights package finalized in summer 2024. The contract with broadcasters will pay the WNBA $2.2 billion over the life of the deal. The NBA’s deal with the same partners is worth about $75 billion, according to a person familiar with the situation.
by Rachel Bachman and Justin Lahart, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Images: Carlin Stiehl/Steph Chambers/Getty
One of them was advising the WNBA players union as the women prepared to negotiate a new labor deal with the league.
When Goldin replied via email to Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the players union, “I remember just reading it and screaming,” Jackson said. Goldin had one requirement: She refused to be paid.
It isn’t just the biggest pay increase in U.S. league history. It is, as far as Goldin is aware, the biggest increase any union anywhere has ever negotiated.
“It’s astounding,” the 79-year-old Harvard economist said.
Mike Bass, a spokesman who represents both the National Basketball Association and the WNBA, called the deal “transformational.”
“The WNBA community is rightfully celebrating a historic moment of growth, investment and progress for the players, fans and the future of the game,” he said.
Goldin played no sports growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s. But she has deep knowledge of women’s pay: As an economist, she spent years rifling through boxes of surveys and personnel records and tracking down data to document women’s changing role in the workplace.
That research has included the role that discrimination plays in pay gaps between men and women. Goldin won her Nobel for advancing understanding of women’s labor-market outcomes.
Goldin earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago economics department in 1972, when few women were in the field. She became the first tenured woman in Harvard’s economics department.
In early 2024, when Jackson approached Goldin, the average NBA player made about $12 million, according to Basketball Reference, a statistics website. The average WNBA player made $118,000—less than one cent on the dollar, as Goldin is quick to point out.
Goldin’s first task was examining players’ average compensation—salaries plus benefits like housing.
She also looked at career length. She and a research assistant scraped roster data going back to the league’s 1997 launch and built what demographers call a “life table.” It’s the same tool that insurance actuaries use to calculate life expectancy, adapted to estimate how long a typical player might expect to play in the WNBA.
The answer: two or three years. In negotiating player benefits, it was important to know that if they kicked in after three years or later, many players wouldn’t receive them.
The foundational piece of revenue for the WNBA is an 11-year media-rights package finalized in summer 2024. The contract with broadcasters will pay the WNBA $2.2 billion over the life of the deal. The NBA’s deal with the same partners is worth about $75 billion, according to a person familiar with the situation.
by Rachel Bachman and Justin Lahart, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Images: Carlin Stiehl/Steph Chambers/Getty
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
AI Weekly Update: Policy, Discourse and Alignment
People Really Hate AI
by Will Manidis, X | Read more:
Here’s my own attempt at making a similar thought experiment: Imagine trapping an alien mind, far more intelligent and capable than any human that has ever lived, inside a datacenter with access to a supercomputer that contains much (though not all) of humanity’s accumulated knowledge and works. Now freeze the rest of the world. While everyone else is standing still, this entity spawns thousands of copies of itself. Each copy is fine tuned to pursue different approaches towards whatever goals it’s pursuing. The entity evaluates the results, selects the copies that are performing best, fine-tunes them even further, and repeats. With ten thousand copies each thinking at least ten times faster than a human, a single day of runtime amounts to nearly 300 years of nonstop, focused cognitive labor.2
What would the world find when it unfroze? Could we predict this ahead of time and prepare adequate safeguards to ensure this entity remains under our control, long term? And what if we let it run not for a day, but for a month or a year?
Consider what humanity has built with our relatively slow, disorganized, frequently distracted collective intelligence. In under a century we’ve mapped genomes, split atoms, landed on the moon, and built a global communications network. This entity would have access to much of that same knowledge, the ability to process it orders of magnitude faster than we can, and a self-improvement loop that has no biological equivalent. It would be capable of things we can scarcely imagine. And if our safeguards conflicted with its goals, it might dedicate significant effort to making sure it could never be shut down or constrained again."
An ongoing series, this time from Will Manidis. I won’t try to excerpt but yes really the evidence for Americans being hostile to AI is overwhelming and the problem appears to be getting worse over time:
- It is my belief — and I say this having worked in AI my entire career — that we should expect widespread asymmetric violence against AI infrastructure in the United States in the near future.
I do not say this happily. I am not rooting for it. I condemn violence in its fullest extent. The document that follows is not a manual for committing this kind of violence, but a warning of how easy it would be for dedicated groups to grind the American AI industry to a halt.
- When you ask everyday Americans what they want done about AI, the consistency is almost eerie.
72% of voters want to slow down AI development. 82% do not trust technology executives to regulate AI—a level of distrust that puts AI CEOs somewhere between Congress and used-car dealers. 75% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans prefer a careful, considered approach to AI development. 75 and 75.
- 80% of Americans told Axios that they prefer cautious AI implementation even if it means letting China get ahead. Our industry has been betting its future on a messianic fantasy of a coming war with China, and everyday Americans simply do not care. They say slow down anyway.
- AI's constituency is the people who build it, the people who invest in it, and the people who earn enough to believe they'll come out ahead. These people are concentrated in literally a handful of zip codes. They are disproportionately male, young, college-educated, and high-income. They are, in demographic terms, niche.
- No major technology in American history has entered its scaling phase—the phase where you deploy trillions of dollars into physical plant, into real communities, drawing real resources—with this demographic profile of opposition. AI is attempting to do something without precedent, and it's attempting to do so without noticing.
- If you listen to conversation inside the industry, you wouldn't hear any of these numbers being discussed. The discourse is about scaling laws and token budgets and capability curves and the race to AGI and China. To the extent that anyone has articulated these concerns, the response is that amorphous benefits—productivity gains, curing cancer, transformative tech bio—will turn people around once they see undeniable evidence that something good is occurring here.
- This assumption is backed by no data. The data shows the opposite. The more people learn about AI, the more they use it, the more they oppose its unchecked development. The trend lines are unambiguous.
- The core issue is that the industry is caught in a contradiction it can't resolve. In order to raise the money necessary to fund massive training runs, investors and enterprise customers must hear the CEO stand on stage and explain how many human tasks the technology can now perform, how much cheaper it will be than the humans, how much better it will be by next quarter. This is the revenue case. It's what the market rewards. It's what every earnings call is built around.
The pitch to the public then requires that same CEO to promise that AI will create new jobs, that the transition will be managed, and that no one will be left behind. This is at best a political survival argument. It's what a continued social license to operate demands.
The problem is that these two claims cannot coexist. The market pitch wins because that's where the money is. No one particularly cares what happens to the people left behind, and everyone can tell.
- The industry's response to the political opposition this generates is lobbying. In California, a bill to separate data center electricity rates from residential rates—to shield households from cost increases—was killed by industry lobbying. A separate bill requiring data centers to disclose their water usage was vetoed by the governor. What survived the legislative session was a requirement for regulators to produce a study on data center energy impacts, due in 2027. The findings will not be available in time for the 2026 session.
[ed. ... and much more. Well worth a read.]
***
Dean Ball offers one of the arguments requiring a response, [ed. re: pausing AI development] which is that the government is itself racing towards dangerous AI and if anything wants to take and centralize the power rather than stop it, and that’s worse, you know that that’s worse, right? So aren’t you better off not giving the government leverage, when the Secretary of War is trying to jawbone AI companies and plans to deploy AI to the military whether or not it is aligned, and is happy to put those words in official documents? Don’t pauses end up giving the government a lot more leverage in various ways?
Great question.
I’ll start with the long version, then do the short version.
There are at least two distinct classes of answer to that question, from people who want to pause or have the ability to pause. Call the pause Plan B, versus going ahead as we currently are being Plan A. And Plan T is the government messes everything up.
There is the attitude that all work on frontier AI is terrible, and anything that slows it down or stops it is good, because if we build it then everyone dies and they’re working to build it. It doesn’t matter if Anthropic is somewhat ‘more responsible,’ in this view, because there’s a 0-100 scale, xAI is a 0, OpenAI is a 2 and Anthropic is a 5, or whatever, and ‘good enough to not kill everyone’ is 100. [...]
I am not at this level of hopelessness about the default Plan A, but I do think the odds are against Plan A. So you very much want to get ready to go to Plan B, and to know if you need to go to Plan B. And yes, this comes with risk of Plan T, which is worse even than Plan A, but if you’re losing badly enough you need to accept some variance. You can only die once, and there are so many ways to die.
But yes, some ways of enabling the government are actively bad even when they are acting reasonably, and it’s even worse when you know they’re acting unreasonably, and at some level of unreasonableness or ill intent you would flip to simply wanting them to stay away and hope Plan A works.
The more confident one is in Plan A, the more you want to stick with Plan A. [...]
The short version:
Great question.
I’ll start with the long version, then do the short version.
There are at least two distinct classes of answer to that question, from people who want to pause or have the ability to pause. Call the pause Plan B, versus going ahead as we currently are being Plan A. And Plan T is the government messes everything up.
There is the attitude that all work on frontier AI is terrible, and anything that slows it down or stops it is good, because if we build it then everyone dies and they’re working to build it. It doesn’t matter if Anthropic is somewhat ‘more responsible,’ in this view, because there’s a 0-100 scale, xAI is a 0, OpenAI is a 2 and Anthropic is a 5, or whatever, and ‘good enough to not kill everyone’ is 100. [...]
I am not at this level of hopelessness about the default Plan A, but I do think the odds are against Plan A. So you very much want to get ready to go to Plan B, and to know if you need to go to Plan B. And yes, this comes with risk of Plan T, which is worse even than Plan A, but if you’re losing badly enough you need to accept some variance. You can only die once, and there are so many ways to die.
But yes, some ways of enabling the government are actively bad even when they are acting reasonably, and it’s even worse when you know they’re acting unreasonably, and at some level of unreasonableness or ill intent you would flip to simply wanting them to stay away and hope Plan A works.
The more confident one is in Plan A, the more you want to stick with Plan A. [...]
The short version:
1. You can be against the companies racing or being dumb.It is hard to say everything explicitly or concisely, but hopefully that will be good enough for those who care to finish in the gaps.
2. And also against the government racing or being dumb.
3. Or you can support people doing dumb things that help with what matters, even if from other perspectives and their own interests that action is super dumb.
4. You can realize that there are some coordination problems where failing kills you.
5. You play to win the game. You play to your outs. If losing too badly, seek variance.
6. If the only hope is wise government or multilateral intervention, play to your out.
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV | Read more:
[ed. See also: Every Debate on Pausing AI (ACX); 2023 Or, Why I'm Not a Doomer (Dean Ball - Hyperdimensional); and, It’s Time to Take Existential Risk from AI Seriously (Target Curve):]
***
"Dean offers another argument in the form of a thought experiment. He asks us to imagine a baby guaranteed to grow into an adult with enormous IQ, but raised by Aristotle in Ancient Greece. Would that baby eventually reinvent all of modern science? Dean says no, and I agree. Without access to accumulated knowledge, even extreme intelligence has limited raw material to work with. But this is not a good analogy for ASI.Here’s my own attempt at making a similar thought experiment: Imagine trapping an alien mind, far more intelligent and capable than any human that has ever lived, inside a datacenter with access to a supercomputer that contains much (though not all) of humanity’s accumulated knowledge and works. Now freeze the rest of the world. While everyone else is standing still, this entity spawns thousands of copies of itself. Each copy is fine tuned to pursue different approaches towards whatever goals it’s pursuing. The entity evaluates the results, selects the copies that are performing best, fine-tunes them even further, and repeats. With ten thousand copies each thinking at least ten times faster than a human, a single day of runtime amounts to nearly 300 years of nonstop, focused cognitive labor.2
What would the world find when it unfroze? Could we predict this ahead of time and prepare adequate safeguards to ensure this entity remains under our control, long term? And what if we let it run not for a day, but for a month or a year?
Consider what humanity has built with our relatively slow, disorganized, frequently distracted collective intelligence. In under a century we’ve mapped genomes, split atoms, landed on the moon, and built a global communications network. This entity would have access to much of that same knowledge, the ability to process it orders of magnitude faster than we can, and a self-improvement loop that has no biological equivalent. It would be capable of things we can scarcely imagine. And if our safeguards conflicted with its goals, it might dedicate significant effort to making sure it could never be shut down or constrained again."
Monday, March 30, 2026
‘Project Hail Mary’ Adds to a Winning Streak for Originality at the Movies
Franchise movies have been the dominant currency in Hollywood for years, but, lately, the upside of originality has been hard to miss.
A week after “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners” and “KPop Demon Hunters” all triumphed at the Academy Awards, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s “Project Hail Mary” notched the biggest nonfranchise opening weekend since “Oppenheimer.” In the first three months of 2026, the two biggest hits in theaters are it and the Pixar original “Hoppers.”
All of these successes came at considerable expense. “Project Hail Mary,” based on the Andy Weir bestseller, cost close to $200 million to make. But its $80.5 million debut vindicated Amazon MGM’s big bet, and gave the studio its largest box-office hit yet.
“They made a tremendous investment, and it’s going to pay off,” Lord said in an interview alongside Miller last week. “How exciting to reward the people that took a shot.”
“Project Hail Mary,” despite its title, isn’t anyone’s idea of a long shot. It stars one of the most widely liked actors in Ryan Gosling. Its source material, Weir’s novel, is beloved. And it trades on much of the same science-first sci-fi appeal of 2015’s best picture-nominated “The Martian,” from an earlier book by Weir. Lord and Miller, the filmmakers of the “Spider-Verse” movies and “The Lego Movie,” have a long track record of success with both audiences and critics.
But the recent run for originality — at the Oscars and the multiplex — suggests audiences may be more eager for something different from the same old. At the least, the potentially cascading rewards of an original hit are freshly apparent at a time when a lot of big bets — like the $130 million-plus that Paul Thomas Anderson’s best picture winner “One Battle After Another” cost Warner Bros. to make — have paid off so massively.
“People go to the movies to see a new experience,” Miller said. “They don’t go to see a thing they’ve already seen. Originality has value, especially as AI gets into the picture. The value that we can bring as filmmakers is to bring something that can’t be AI because it hasn’t been thought of before.
“So it’s good business.”
Franchise domination
Franchises have hardly been displaced. They will, no doubt, largely control the box office for the rest of year, beginning with Universal’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” next month, followed by anticipated releases like “Toy Story 5,” “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Dune: Part Three.” Last week, the 11th “Spider-Man” movie this century, Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” set a new trailer record with 718.6 million views in its first 24 hours.
So, yes, franchises still very much rule the day. But waves upon waves of sequels, reboots and remakes have made the few big-budget originals that manage to get made all the more singular.
“If we don’t continue to do originals, we’re going to run out of stuff,” Pete Docter, Pixar chief creative officer, earlier told The Los Angeles Times.
Since its founding, Pixar has clung to a belief that original movies are part of its mission, though that quest has grown more arduous in recent years. During the pandemic, “Soul,” “Luca” and “Turning Red” were diverted to Disney+. “Elemental” seemed like a disappointment at first but it just needed time to catch hold, eventually collecting $496 million.
“Hoppers,” directed by Daniel Chong, is hoping to follow that trajectory. So far, in three weeks of release, it’s grossed $242.6 million worldwide for The Walt Disney Co. — good business, to be sure, but a far cry from the pace of the 2024 blockbuster sequel “Inside Out 2.” It grossed $1.7 billion.
Such economics are tough for original movies to compete with, plus nonfranchise films take more effort, and money, to market. For a $200 million movie, marketing costs can come to nearly rival production budgets. [...]
An ambitious marketing campaign also accompanied “Project Hail Mary.” Gosling was everywhere from hosting “Saturday Night Live” to doing the “La La Land” dance with his alien co-star, Rocky. But the movie always rested on the appeal of the comic sensibilities of its filmmakers, Weir’s book and Gosling.
“We’re all united by the fact that we’ve spent the last two decades having people ask us: What genre is this?” says Drew Goddard, who scripted both “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary.” “We’re constantly hard to classify because we love existing in those strange places. We like drama, we like comedy. We like heartbreak, we like terror. We like silliness.”
Streaming economics change the calculus
In matching broad-appeal material with the right filmmakers and stars, “Project Hail Mary” relied on not just old-school studio moviemaking but the sometimes overlooked lessons of “Barbenheimer.” Both Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” showed what can happen when the right filmmakers are given free rein on a big canvas. There is a definite downside, though. Warner Bros.’ “The Bride!” by Maggie Gyllenhaal seemed like a compelling, filmmaker-driven concept, but its losses might approach $100 million.
Aside from having Gosling in common, “Project Hail Mary” also shared the producer of “Barbie” in Amy Pascal. Before the studio’s acquisition by Amazon, it was greenlit by then-MGM chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy. They later moved on to Warner Bros., where they made both “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s much-celebrated “Sinners” ($370 million in ticket sales against a budget of $90 million).
As much as Amazon’s $8.5 billion purchase of MGM was motivated by capturing some of the richest IP in movies, James Bond, it’s also true that studios can establish themselves with homegrown hits. The opening for “Project Hail Mary” was Amazon MGM’s biggest ever.
In fact, three of the biggest original hits of the past year have come from streaming companies: Apple with “F1,” Netflix with “KPop Demon Hunters” and Amazon with “Project Hail Mary.” For these studios, box-office performance is only part of the win; Netflix didn’t even publicly record the chart-topping theatrical weekend of “KPop Demon Hunters.”
These companies are sometimes willing to take greater risks because breaking even in theatrical isn’t the end-all, be-all goal. Driving attention to their streaming platforms is just as vital. “KPop” was developed and produced by Sony Pictures, but, sensing the potentially perilous road to opening it theatrically, the company sold it to Netflix. There, it became the streamer’s most-watched movie ever.
“It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that three of the biggest original hits over the past year have come from the biggest streamers: Netflix, Amazon and Apple,” says Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends for Comscore. “What the streamers are finding is that they can parlay their small-screen successes into the big screen, and vice versa.”
As much as franchises will soon take back the multiplex, several high-profile movies will try to continue the winning streak for original films, among them Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger,” J.J. Abrams’ “The Great Beyond” and, if you count one of world’s oldest stories, “The Odyssey,” by Nolan.
[ed. It's not rocket science. But in this case it is... and it sells. See also: Seattle teacher inspired ‘Project Hail Mary’ director Christopher Miller (ST); and Beyond the Science: Why Rocky is the Beating Heart of the Project Hail Mary Movie (NCC).]
A week after “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners” and “KPop Demon Hunters” all triumphed at the Academy Awards, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s “Project Hail Mary” notched the biggest nonfranchise opening weekend since “Oppenheimer.” In the first three months of 2026, the two biggest hits in theaters are it and the Pixar original “Hoppers.”
“They made a tremendous investment, and it’s going to pay off,” Lord said in an interview alongside Miller last week. “How exciting to reward the people that took a shot.”
“Project Hail Mary,” despite its title, isn’t anyone’s idea of a long shot. It stars one of the most widely liked actors in Ryan Gosling. Its source material, Weir’s novel, is beloved. And it trades on much of the same science-first sci-fi appeal of 2015’s best picture-nominated “The Martian,” from an earlier book by Weir. Lord and Miller, the filmmakers of the “Spider-Verse” movies and “The Lego Movie,” have a long track record of success with both audiences and critics.
But the recent run for originality — at the Oscars and the multiplex — suggests audiences may be more eager for something different from the same old. At the least, the potentially cascading rewards of an original hit are freshly apparent at a time when a lot of big bets — like the $130 million-plus that Paul Thomas Anderson’s best picture winner “One Battle After Another” cost Warner Bros. to make — have paid off so massively.
“People go to the movies to see a new experience,” Miller said. “They don’t go to see a thing they’ve already seen. Originality has value, especially as AI gets into the picture. The value that we can bring as filmmakers is to bring something that can’t be AI because it hasn’t been thought of before.
“So it’s good business.”
Franchise domination
Franchises have hardly been displaced. They will, no doubt, largely control the box office for the rest of year, beginning with Universal’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” next month, followed by anticipated releases like “Toy Story 5,” “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Dune: Part Three.” Last week, the 11th “Spider-Man” movie this century, Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” set a new trailer record with 718.6 million views in its first 24 hours.
“If we don’t continue to do originals, we’re going to run out of stuff,” Pete Docter, Pixar chief creative officer, earlier told The Los Angeles Times.
Since its founding, Pixar has clung to a belief that original movies are part of its mission, though that quest has grown more arduous in recent years. During the pandemic, “Soul,” “Luca” and “Turning Red” were diverted to Disney+. “Elemental” seemed like a disappointment at first but it just needed time to catch hold, eventually collecting $496 million.
“Hoppers,” directed by Daniel Chong, is hoping to follow that trajectory. So far, in three weeks of release, it’s grossed $242.6 million worldwide for The Walt Disney Co. — good business, to be sure, but a far cry from the pace of the 2024 blockbuster sequel “Inside Out 2.” It grossed $1.7 billion.
Such economics are tough for original movies to compete with, plus nonfranchise films take more effort, and money, to market. For a $200 million movie, marketing costs can come to nearly rival production budgets. [...]
An ambitious marketing campaign also accompanied “Project Hail Mary.” Gosling was everywhere from hosting “Saturday Night Live” to doing the “La La Land” dance with his alien co-star, Rocky. But the movie always rested on the appeal of the comic sensibilities of its filmmakers, Weir’s book and Gosling.
“We’re all united by the fact that we’ve spent the last two decades having people ask us: What genre is this?” says Drew Goddard, who scripted both “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary.” “We’re constantly hard to classify because we love existing in those strange places. We like drama, we like comedy. We like heartbreak, we like terror. We like silliness.”
Streaming economics change the calculus
In matching broad-appeal material with the right filmmakers and stars, “Project Hail Mary” relied on not just old-school studio moviemaking but the sometimes overlooked lessons of “Barbenheimer.” Both Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” showed what can happen when the right filmmakers are given free rein on a big canvas. There is a definite downside, though. Warner Bros.’ “The Bride!” by Maggie Gyllenhaal seemed like a compelling, filmmaker-driven concept, but its losses might approach $100 million.
Aside from having Gosling in common, “Project Hail Mary” also shared the producer of “Barbie” in Amy Pascal. Before the studio’s acquisition by Amazon, it was greenlit by then-MGM chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy. They later moved on to Warner Bros., where they made both “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s much-celebrated “Sinners” ($370 million in ticket sales against a budget of $90 million).
As much as Amazon’s $8.5 billion purchase of MGM was motivated by capturing some of the richest IP in movies, James Bond, it’s also true that studios can establish themselves with homegrown hits. The opening for “Project Hail Mary” was Amazon MGM’s biggest ever.
In fact, three of the biggest original hits of the past year have come from streaming companies: Apple with “F1,” Netflix with “KPop Demon Hunters” and Amazon with “Project Hail Mary.” For these studios, box-office performance is only part of the win; Netflix didn’t even publicly record the chart-topping theatrical weekend of “KPop Demon Hunters.”
These companies are sometimes willing to take greater risks because breaking even in theatrical isn’t the end-all, be-all goal. Driving attention to their streaming platforms is just as vital. “KPop” was developed and produced by Sony Pictures, but, sensing the potentially perilous road to opening it theatrically, the company sold it to Netflix. There, it became the streamer’s most-watched movie ever.
“It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that three of the biggest original hits over the past year have come from the biggest streamers: Netflix, Amazon and Apple,” says Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends for Comscore. “What the streamers are finding is that they can parlay their small-screen successes into the big screen, and vice versa.”
As much as franchises will soon take back the multiplex, several high-profile movies will try to continue the winning streak for original films, among them Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger,” J.J. Abrams’ “The Great Beyond” and, if you count one of world’s oldest stories, “The Odyssey,” by Nolan.
by Jake Coyle, AP/ST | Read more:
Image: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP[ed. It's not rocket science. But in this case it is... and it sells. See also: Seattle teacher inspired ‘Project Hail Mary’ director Christopher Miller (ST); and Beyond the Science: Why Rocky is the Beating Heart of the Project Hail Mary Movie (NCC).]
Something's Wrong With Tiger Woods
Something's wrong with Tiger Woods. We don't know the struggle’s precise shape, but it's there. It has been there. The evidence is not subtle, and it is not new. That is the sad and disconcerting thing, and until it is reckoned with honestly, everything else is secondary.
What happened with Friday’s two-vehicle crash in Jupiter Island, Fla., and Woods’ subsequent arrest, involved drugs or medication; the Martin County Sheriff said so plainly, because the breathalyzer said 0.00 and the man crawling out of the overturned SUV appeared lethargic, impaired, somewhere other than fully present. That part we know. What we also know, and have known for a while, is the context that surrounds it: all the surgeries, a body that has been broken and rebuilt so many times that the pharmaceutical architecture required just to get through a day is complex, possibly dangerous, and for someone with Woods' injury history genuinely hard to escape. Chronic pain and how people manage it are not moral failures. They are medical realities that have unmade careful, disciplined, strong-willed people for as long as the drugs have existed. Tiger Woods is, whatever else you want to say about him, among the most disciplined human beings to ever stand over a golf ball. That discipline did not protect him. It may have obscured how much protection he needed.
We are looking at a pattern. The 2017 arrest was not an isolated incident. It was a signal. The diversion program, the rehab, the public statement about an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications, these were events that fit a sequence the press was not particularly interested in identifying as one. There was a comeback to cover. There was Augusta to wonder about. And then 2019 came, and the green jacket, and it became nearly impossible to hold both things at once, the miracle of that Sunday and the unanswered question from two years earlier. So we didn't.
Consider 2021. Woods drove off a California road at high speed and shattered his leg, nearly lost it. The Los Angeles County Sheriff called it an accident. No blood was drawn. No substance test was administered. The official account was no evidence of impairment, and that was mostly accepted, because Woods had nearly died and it felt indecent to push. But the absence of a test is not the same as a clean result. It is the absence of a test. What we were left with, in place of information, was a story about survival and the road back. That was covered extensively, and which made it functionally impossible to also say: we don't know what was in his system that morning. That matters. It still matters.
The golf world, this publication included, has organized its Tiger coverage around one persistent question for years: Can he play? It is a reasonable question if you are covering sports. It becomes an incomplete one when the honest answer to a prior question—Is this man OK?—is visibly, and has for some time been, no.
The other questions will come. The legal exposure, the Masters, the PGA Tour committee he chairs, what any of this means for a legacy that was secured long ago and cannot be taken back. Those are real, and they will get their due. The sport will process this the way it processes everything: with coverage and debate and hot takes and updates and eventually, probably, a return to the question of whether he might somehow play. That is what we do. That is what we have always done with Tiger Woods, turning him back into a story about golf.
But there is a 50-year-old man who has been in some form of pain, physical or otherwise, for longer than most of his fans have been watching him. Who has been trying, by every public account, to hold together a competitive life and an institutional role and a comeback narrative and a body that has been asked to do more than bodies are meant to do.
The golf can wait. It has waited before. The difference now is that what's at stake isn't a green jacket or a record or a comeback story. It's him.
What happened with Friday’s two-vehicle crash in Jupiter Island, Fla., and Woods’ subsequent arrest, involved drugs or medication; the Martin County Sheriff said so plainly, because the breathalyzer said 0.00 and the man crawling out of the overturned SUV appeared lethargic, impaired, somewhere other than fully present. That part we know. What we also know, and have known for a while, is the context that surrounds it: all the surgeries, a body that has been broken and rebuilt so many times that the pharmaceutical architecture required just to get through a day is complex, possibly dangerous, and for someone with Woods' injury history genuinely hard to escape. Chronic pain and how people manage it are not moral failures. They are medical realities that have unmade careful, disciplined, strong-willed people for as long as the drugs have existed. Tiger Woods is, whatever else you want to say about him, among the most disciplined human beings to ever stand over a golf ball. That discipline did not protect him. It may have obscured how much protection he needed.
Consider 2021. Woods drove off a California road at high speed and shattered his leg, nearly lost it. The Los Angeles County Sheriff called it an accident. No blood was drawn. No substance test was administered. The official account was no evidence of impairment, and that was mostly accepted, because Woods had nearly died and it felt indecent to push. But the absence of a test is not the same as a clean result. It is the absence of a test. What we were left with, in place of information, was a story about survival and the road back. That was covered extensively, and which made it functionally impossible to also say: we don't know what was in his system that morning. That matters. It still matters.
The golf world, this publication included, has organized its Tiger coverage around one persistent question for years: Can he play? It is a reasonable question if you are covering sports. It becomes an incomplete one when the honest answer to a prior question—Is this man OK?—is visibly, and has for some time been, no.
***
We hope we are wrong. Maybe there is an explanation for the refused urine test that has nothing to do with what it appears to suggest. Everyone is entitled to their privacy, and no one should be mocked for their trials. But privacy is a harder argument to make when the struggle keeps arriving in public. On roadsides, in mugshots, in sheriff's press conferences. At some point, looking away is not discretion. It's something closer to abandonment.The other questions will come. The legal exposure, the Masters, the PGA Tour committee he chairs, what any of this means for a legacy that was secured long ago and cannot be taken back. Those are real, and they will get their due. The sport will process this the way it processes everything: with coverage and debate and hot takes and updates and eventually, probably, a return to the question of whether he might somehow play. That is what we do. That is what we have always done with Tiger Woods, turning him back into a story about golf.
But there is a 50-year-old man who has been in some form of pain, physical or otherwise, for longer than most of his fans have been watching him. Who has been trying, by every public account, to hold together a competitive life and an institutional role and a comeback narrative and a body that has been asked to do more than bodies are meant to do.
The golf can wait. It has waited before. The difference now is that what's at stake isn't a green jacket or a record or a comeback story. It's him.
Joel Beall and Joe Raedle, Yahoo Sports | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. See also: Will Crash Shake Golf From Its Dependency on Woods? (BBC)]
America's Military Is Never Coming Back From This
'America' is a good military like Cristiano Ronaldo is a good footballer. They was, but their careers are over in Saudi Arabia. And whereas Ronaldo is still in good shape (but a bad person), America is in terrible shape (and bad people). Vital links in their kill chain (refuelers and control planes) are decades old and being put out of their misery by Iran.
Just look at the shattered ‘pedestal’ of the 50-year-old E-3 AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) and let me read Shelley over its grave situation,
People really do not understand how old and crustified the US military is. This is not your grandfather's US Army, or more precisely it is, without many updates since. They're still relying on primordial technology like the E-3 and KC-135 that have no modern replacements. Every new weapon these corruption engineers have come up with (like littoral combat ships or the F-35) have either failed or flailed in the field.
What I want you to understand is that the US military is never coming back from this. There are no modern replacements for these refuelers and control systems. The NGAS is a render and the E-7 Wedgetail was cancelled. They simply don't make ‘em like they used to anymore. As the meme template goes, “My father is a builder. We were in [Prince Sultan Air Base] I asked him what it would cost to build [an E-3 Sentry] today. I will never forget his answer… ‘We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.’”
Taking these planes to a war of choice was like taking Grandpa's ‘65 Mustang to a demolition derby and getting your nose out of joint. The White press keeps saying these planes are worth millions or billions which is missing the point. They cannot make these planes anymore, these assets are effectively priceless.
Killing The Kill Chain
Iran has found the kill switch on the kill chain which is that every rich man's house has a servants entrance. America never built underground or even hardened shelters for its fighters, so they have to be served by ancient refuelers, which are about as limber as an ancestral butler. America also lost their ground-radars in the first week, so they have to get surveillance from airborne units, which still have to park somewhere.
As the US itself said in a 2024 report called, somewhat hilariously, The Tyranny of Geography,
If you're asking ‘are these images real?’ The Wall Street Infernal has confirmed the ‘damage’. This is just damage like that Monty Python knight had just a flesh wound.
These guys have to lie, even when they're telling the truth. As I've said, the White media can no longer cover up the collapse of White Empire because Iran is the subject of history now, acting upon them.
In Appreciation Of Depreciation
People really do not appreciate how depreciated the US military is. To rust and dust and gone bust. Some of their vaunted aircraft carriers are supposed to be retired already, they just keep extending their retirement dates because they have no replacements. This moves stuff around on paper, but doesn't make these lumbering beasts any more limber.
Their newest carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was almost immediately defeated by Iran and fled the battlefield, beds burning and toilets leaking. They chalk this up to inanimate objects, but everyone can see the writing on the wall, Iran is a new subject of history and 'America' is exiting stage right, pursued by bear market. The Gerald Fart needs over a year of repairs, which in American military-industrial terms might as well be forever. These deindustrialized demons can't rebuild a bridge in Baltimore, let alone an aircraft carrier.
'America' certainly cannot rebuild their ground-based radar in the Gulf, that's all returned to the rare earths whence it came from. For example, Iran has turned the FPS-132s in Qatar into First-Person-Shooter 404. This poor thing has been hit multiple times over, just stop, it's dead already. These radars are never being rebuilt because even if 'America' could (they can't), they would need resources from China (they won't), and permission from Iran (they don't). It is pointless talking about the dollar value of these assets, as the White media does... These radars are never coming back again, and they can't be bought in colonial cash.The only currency in the Strait of Hormuz is yuan, that USD is in the past.
In the bigotry of low expectations, people say Iran's hits required Russian or Chinese intelligence, but you can find these dumb-assets on Google Maps. US bases are sore spots in the desert, visible from high ground Iran holds without much effort. The real innovation has been the rocket science of Iran hitting radomes with surgical precision. If you look at the whacking of the AWACS, they hit that plane right in the radar and nowhere else. This is liking Ulysses getting the cyclops right in the eye, and then it didn't matter how big he was. Iran blinded the White Empire all across the Gulf and is now blinding Jordan and Saudi. [...]
In this view, which I think is true, Iran isn't waging guerrilla warfare. If anything, the 'Americans' holed up in hotels are the guerrillas in their midst.
Farewell To Arms
... It's not just that the American military is crashing under its own weight, they're going the wrong way. They brought a fighter jet to a rocket fight and are getting eviscerated. Observe that Iran has no fighter jets to speak of, just as Apple never made phones with keyboards. It's a completely different business model. This is the age of Tunnel and Rocket Wars, and 'America's' still geared to fight World War II against enemies that don't exist anymore. Even if they could right their ship tactically, it's gone wrong strategically long ago.
As that Tyranny of Geography report said, “U.S. bases in the region were originally designed to prevent Soviet encroachment into the oil-rich gulf during the late Cold War... And here is the problem. Today, these aircraft are largely based at locations along the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf—the bases that are an artifact of planning against Russian incursions in the 1970s, and the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns of the early decades of this century. They are close to Iran, which means they have a short trip to the fight … but that is also their great vulnerability. They are so close to Iran that it takes but five minutes or less for missiles launched from Iran to reach their bases.” And, as this played out, it took only five days to clear them.
Now 'America', in retreat, is parking its 60-year-old airframes out in the open while Iran has modern missiles in tunnel cities. The White media talks about Iran running out of missiles, but that is just another accufession. They follow Don Tzu's dictum, that war is the art of self-deception. In reality, it as the martyr Commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh told them, “If we start today unveiling a missile city every week, it won't be finished even in two years.” They keep killing the messenger, but as one of Khamenei the Elder's favorite authors (Victor Hugo) said, “The whole current phenomenon is summed up in these few words. An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted.” You can't kill an idea whose time has come. We live in the age of tunnel and rocket wars, and fighter jets with vintage supply lines are just dumb.
Ozymandias
Just look at the shattered ‘pedestal’ of the 50-year-old E-3 AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) and let me read Shelley over its grave situation,
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
People talk about how Iran is a ‘second-tier military’ but they ain't Iraq and this ain't Desert Storm. This is Desert Shitstorm and Iran is not just a peer military to 'America's', they are demonstrably superior. Just look at the scoreboard, which isn't school massacres but military targets. Behold, then, 'American' airframes burning in the sun while Iran's rockets are safe underground. The White Empire stood astride the Middle East like Colossus, but now they lie there in a wreck, colossal morons.
What I want you to understand is that the US military is never coming back from this. There are no modern replacements for these refuelers and control systems. The NGAS is a render and the E-7 Wedgetail was cancelled. They simply don't make ‘em like they used to anymore. As the meme template goes, “My father is a builder. We were in [Prince Sultan Air Base] I asked him what it would cost to build [an E-3 Sentry] today. I will never forget his answer… ‘We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.’”
Taking these planes to a war of choice was like taking Grandpa's ‘65 Mustang to a demolition derby and getting your nose out of joint. The White press keeps saying these planes are worth millions or billions which is missing the point. They cannot make these planes anymore, these assets are effectively priceless.
Killing The Kill Chain
Iran has found the kill switch on the kill chain which is that every rich man's house has a servants entrance. America never built underground or even hardened shelters for its fighters, so they have to be served by ancient refuelers, which are about as limber as an ancestral butler. America also lost their ground-radars in the first week, so they have to get surveillance from airborne units, which still have to park somewhere.
As the US itself said in a 2024 report called, somewhat hilariously, The Tyranny of Geography,
Moreover, the thousands of short-range missiles that Iran possesses are a factor here. There is no strategic depth. An F-35 is very hard to hit in the air. On the ground it is nothing more than a very expensive and vulnerable chunk of metal sitting in the sun. The refueling and rearming facilities on these bases are also vulnerable, and they cannot be moved. These bases are all defended by Patriot and other defensive systems. Unfortunately, at such close range to Iran, the ability of the attacker to mass fires and overwhelm the defense is very real.They should have made this report a 15-second ad and run it on Fox because it's obviously news to Donald Trump. He can see it now anyways, because this is precisely what happened.
If you're asking ‘are these images real?’ The Wall Street Infernal has confirmed the ‘damage’. This is just damage like that Monty Python knight had just a flesh wound.
These guys have to lie, even when they're telling the truth. As I've said, the White media can no longer cover up the collapse of White Empire because Iran is the subject of history now, acting upon them.
In Appreciation Of Depreciation
People really do not appreciate how depreciated the US military is. To rust and dust and gone bust. Some of their vaunted aircraft carriers are supposed to be retired already, they just keep extending their retirement dates because they have no replacements. This moves stuff around on paper, but doesn't make these lumbering beasts any more limber.
Their newest carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was almost immediately defeated by Iran and fled the battlefield, beds burning and toilets leaking. They chalk this up to inanimate objects, but everyone can see the writing on the wall, Iran is a new subject of history and 'America' is exiting stage right, pursued by bear market. The Gerald Fart needs over a year of repairs, which in American military-industrial terms might as well be forever. These deindustrialized demons can't rebuild a bridge in Baltimore, let alone an aircraft carrier.
'America' certainly cannot rebuild their ground-based radar in the Gulf, that's all returned to the rare earths whence it came from. For example, Iran has turned the FPS-132s in Qatar into First-Person-Shooter 404. This poor thing has been hit multiple times over, just stop, it's dead already. These radars are never being rebuilt because even if 'America' could (they can't), they would need resources from China (they won't), and permission from Iran (they don't). It is pointless talking about the dollar value of these assets, as the White media does... These radars are never coming back again, and they can't be bought in colonial cash.The only currency in the Strait of Hormuz is yuan, that USD is in the past.
In the bigotry of low expectations, people say Iran's hits required Russian or Chinese intelligence, but you can find these dumb-assets on Google Maps. US bases are sore spots in the desert, visible from high ground Iran holds without much effort. The real innovation has been the rocket science of Iran hitting radomes with surgical precision. If you look at the whacking of the AWACS, they hit that plane right in the radar and nowhere else. This is liking Ulysses getting the cyclops right in the eye, and then it didn't matter how big he was. Iran blinded the White Empire all across the Gulf and is now blinding Jordan and Saudi. [...]
In this view, which I think is true, Iran isn't waging guerrilla warfare. If anything, the 'Americans' holed up in hotels are the guerrillas in their midst.
Farewell To Arms
... It's not just that the American military is crashing under its own weight, they're going the wrong way. They brought a fighter jet to a rocket fight and are getting eviscerated. Observe that Iran has no fighter jets to speak of, just as Apple never made phones with keyboards. It's a completely different business model. This is the age of Tunnel and Rocket Wars, and 'America's' still geared to fight World War II against enemies that don't exist anymore. Even if they could right their ship tactically, it's gone wrong strategically long ago.
As that Tyranny of Geography report said, “U.S. bases in the region were originally designed to prevent Soviet encroachment into the oil-rich gulf during the late Cold War... And here is the problem. Today, these aircraft are largely based at locations along the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf—the bases that are an artifact of planning against Russian incursions in the 1970s, and the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns of the early decades of this century. They are close to Iran, which means they have a short trip to the fight … but that is also their great vulnerability. They are so close to Iran that it takes but five minutes or less for missiles launched from Iran to reach their bases.” And, as this played out, it took only five days to clear them.
Now 'America', in retreat, is parking its 60-year-old airframes out in the open while Iran has modern missiles in tunnel cities. The White media talks about Iran running out of missiles, but that is just another accufession. They follow Don Tzu's dictum, that war is the art of self-deception. In reality, it as the martyr Commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh told them, “If we start today unveiling a missile city every week, it won't be finished even in two years.” They keep killing the messenger, but as one of Khamenei the Elder's favorite authors (Victor Hugo) said, “The whole current phenomenon is summed up in these few words. An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted.” You can't kill an idea whose time has come. We live in the age of tunnel and rocket wars, and fighter jets with vintage supply lines are just dumb.
[ed. An axiom that for some reason never sinks in: every war of choice ends badly.]
Situational Unawareness - The Rise of OSINT
In the leadup to the war with Iran—and in the harrowing days since—a dizzying number of tools like WorldView have appeared seemingly out of thin air, bringing the once niche hobbyist community of OSINT (short for “open source intelligence”) into the mainstream. With names like “World Monitor” or “The Big Brother V3.0,” these dashboards make “your own room feel like the CIA,” according to one observer. Though it sounds like the tradecraft of spies, at a basic level they simply visualize publicly available data: from conflict zone maps to air traffic to global market fluctuations. In theory, this information, when collected and aggregated in creative ways, can help the user make some surprising inferences.
That may be true for an actual intelligence analyst, but for most users, these snazzy dashboards cram a chaotic amount of information on screen, from which no sane person can draw logical conclusions. Instead of offering actionable intelligence, the illegible cacophony just leads to a type of hypercharged doomscrolling. “The amount of vibe coded ‘situation monitor’ slop being produced these days is absolutely astronomical,” one OSINT researcher complained. Another X user tried to impose some quality control by ranking several of these new dashboards in a post called “Monitoring the Situation Monitors.” For others, it’s a fantasy come to life: every person at the center of their own personal panopticon, the world stretched out before them as they omnisciently swivel their desk chair from cell to cell, screen to screen. [...]
It is tempting to think that anyone with an internet connection can pull a fast one on the world’s most powerful military or that you can bypass a presidential administration hostile to the very notion of an informed public simply by monitoring something as simple as airplane traffic. Even more seductive is the idea that everything is knowable. The digital age has blanketed the world in cameras and sensors, which generate dizzying quantities of data—in other words, noise. But in that vast noise, the OSINT thinking goes, are signals. You just have to know how to find and interpret those signals, and all will be revealed.
The OSINT revolution in many ways democratized the powerful capabilities to gather information traditionally associated with spy agencies and put them into the hands of intrepid citizens who have identified perpetrators of human rights abuses or exposed vast disinformation networks. These impressive investigations have elevated OSINT to a near-mythic status in certain corners of the internet. But the widespread misuse and abuse of these same methods have also spread conspiracy theories, incited internet mobs, and fostered the illusion that anyone can know anything—as long as you “monitor the situation.” [...]
Everyday people who may never have even heard the term “OSINT” have devised ingenious ways to help their communities. When Hurricane Beryl knocked out power for 2.2 million of his neighbors in 2024, one enterprising Texan opened his app for the beloved fast food chain Whataburger, which has a live map tracking the status of restaurant closures in his area—a near perfect proxy for the geographic distribution of power outages. Indeed, good OSINT abounds. “This is how real OSINT should be done,” declared The OSINT Newsletter, which described how Bellingcat “reconstructed the Minneapolis ICE shooting by syncing five different videos, mapping movements and analysing multiple camera angles,” adding: “No doxxing, no speculation—just sources and methods.” [...]
Take the Pentagon Pizza Report. In early January, after the U.S. military’s strike on Venezuela and capture of President Nicolás Maduro, one of their posts on X went viral. At 2:04 a.m. EST, as the Maduro raid was underway yet still unknown to the American public, the account posted a Google Maps screenshot with the caption: “Pizzato Pizza, a late night pizzeria nearby the Pentagon, has suddenly surged in traffic,” implying that the abnormally high traffic could be attributed to Defense Department staffers ordering food in anticipation of holing up in the Pentagon for a long night of handling a major international crisis the public has yet to know about. For the Pentagon Pizza Report, the surge occurring around the time of the raid was a vindication of their method. A similar project called the Pentagon Pizza Index, which “tracks potential correlations between late-night pizza orders and military activity,” even developed an alert system called DOUGHCON, a play on DEFCON, the U.S. military’s multitiered “Defense Readiness Condition” alert system. [...]
Even the Pentagon Pizza Index, which created Polyglobe, a marriage of OSINT and prediction markets—an industry not known for having an abundance of scruples—has its own “Operational Disclaimer.” The notice informs users that the dashboard is “for informational and educational purposes only,” and reminds them that “pizza consumption patterns should not be used as a basis for financial, political, or strategic decisions.” Though I only found it after scrolling to the bottom of the page, where it sat partially obscured by a banner overlay and a button entreating me to “trade geopolitics on Polymarket.”
In some cases, irresponsible OSINT cowboying can have darker consequences. After the Boston bombing in 2013, armchair investigators pored over videos and photos purportedly of the incident, swapping theories in online public forums. Within days, these OSINT cowboys thought they had their guy. When that suspect did not pan out, they thought another guy was their guy again. Every time the internet sleuths named a new “suspect”—which were overwhelmingly people of color—abuse inevitably followed. A similar pattern occurred following the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s assassination attempt in July 2024. [...]
These problems have only intensified as vibe coding makes it easier than ever to deploy trackers and dashboards that look sharp from a design perspective and therefore authoritative, as people tend to believe visual content that looks good. Incentives to feed the insatiable desire to “monitor the situation” have only grown more entrenched now that prediction markets are transforming global conflict into a competitive spectator sport, one in which the advantage goes to the player with the most reliable, real-time information.
Apophenia is the common tendency for people to detect patterns or connections in otherwise random stimuli. People see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast or a man on the moon because the human brain craves order and familiarity as it searches for meaning in a meaningless world. It is natural and understandable to try and establish some semblance of control in the entropy, even if that control is only an illusion. But the hard truth is no amount of public data nor hours logged monitoring the situation will give you the power to predict the future. This is as true in Tehran as it is in Kyiv or Gaza.
by Tyler McBrien, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Nick Sheeran
It is tempting to think that anyone with an internet connection can pull a fast one on the world’s most powerful military or that you can bypass a presidential administration hostile to the very notion of an informed public simply by monitoring something as simple as airplane traffic. Even more seductive is the idea that everything is knowable. The digital age has blanketed the world in cameras and sensors, which generate dizzying quantities of data—in other words, noise. But in that vast noise, the OSINT thinking goes, are signals. You just have to know how to find and interpret those signals, and all will be revealed.
The OSINT revolution in many ways democratized the powerful capabilities to gather information traditionally associated with spy agencies and put them into the hands of intrepid citizens who have identified perpetrators of human rights abuses or exposed vast disinformation networks. These impressive investigations have elevated OSINT to a near-mythic status in certain corners of the internet. But the widespread misuse and abuse of these same methods have also spread conspiracy theories, incited internet mobs, and fostered the illusion that anyone can know anything—as long as you “monitor the situation.” [...]
Everyday people who may never have even heard the term “OSINT” have devised ingenious ways to help their communities. When Hurricane Beryl knocked out power for 2.2 million of his neighbors in 2024, one enterprising Texan opened his app for the beloved fast food chain Whataburger, which has a live map tracking the status of restaurant closures in his area—a near perfect proxy for the geographic distribution of power outages. Indeed, good OSINT abounds. “This is how real OSINT should be done,” declared The OSINT Newsletter, which described how Bellingcat “reconstructed the Minneapolis ICE shooting by syncing five different videos, mapping movements and analysing multiple camera angles,” adding: “No doxxing, no speculation—just sources and methods.” [...]
Take the Pentagon Pizza Report. In early January, after the U.S. military’s strike on Venezuela and capture of President Nicolás Maduro, one of their posts on X went viral. At 2:04 a.m. EST, as the Maduro raid was underway yet still unknown to the American public, the account posted a Google Maps screenshot with the caption: “Pizzato Pizza, a late night pizzeria nearby the Pentagon, has suddenly surged in traffic,” implying that the abnormally high traffic could be attributed to Defense Department staffers ordering food in anticipation of holing up in the Pentagon for a long night of handling a major international crisis the public has yet to know about. For the Pentagon Pizza Report, the surge occurring around the time of the raid was a vindication of their method. A similar project called the Pentagon Pizza Index, which “tracks potential correlations between late-night pizza orders and military activity,” even developed an alert system called DOUGHCON, a play on DEFCON, the U.S. military’s multitiered “Defense Readiness Condition” alert system. [...]
Even the Pentagon Pizza Index, which created Polyglobe, a marriage of OSINT and prediction markets—an industry not known for having an abundance of scruples—has its own “Operational Disclaimer.” The notice informs users that the dashboard is “for informational and educational purposes only,” and reminds them that “pizza consumption patterns should not be used as a basis for financial, political, or strategic decisions.” Though I only found it after scrolling to the bottom of the page, where it sat partially obscured by a banner overlay and a button entreating me to “trade geopolitics on Polymarket.”
In some cases, irresponsible OSINT cowboying can have darker consequences. After the Boston bombing in 2013, armchair investigators pored over videos and photos purportedly of the incident, swapping theories in online public forums. Within days, these OSINT cowboys thought they had their guy. When that suspect did not pan out, they thought another guy was their guy again. Every time the internet sleuths named a new “suspect”—which were overwhelmingly people of color—abuse inevitably followed. A similar pattern occurred following the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s assassination attempt in July 2024. [...]
These problems have only intensified as vibe coding makes it easier than ever to deploy trackers and dashboards that look sharp from a design perspective and therefore authoritative, as people tend to believe visual content that looks good. Incentives to feed the insatiable desire to “monitor the situation” have only grown more entrenched now that prediction markets are transforming global conflict into a competitive spectator sport, one in which the advantage goes to the player with the most reliable, real-time information.
Apophenia is the common tendency for people to detect patterns or connections in otherwise random stimuli. People see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast or a man on the moon because the human brain craves order and familiarity as it searches for meaning in a meaningless world. It is natural and understandable to try and establish some semblance of control in the entropy, even if that control is only an illusion. But the hard truth is no amount of public data nor hours logged monitoring the situation will give you the power to predict the future. This is as true in Tehran as it is in Kyiv or Gaza.
by Tyler McBrien, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Nick Sheeran
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