AI Systems Are About to Start Building Themselves.

What does that mean?

I’m writing this post because when I look at all the publicly available information I reluctantly come to the view that there’s a likely chance (60%+) that no-human-involved AI R&D - an AI system powerful enough that it could plausibly autonomously build its own successor - happens by the end of 2028.

This is a big deal.

I don’t know how to wrap my head around it.

It’s a reluctant view because the implications are so large that I feel dwarfed by them, and I’m not sure society is ready for the kinds of changes implied by achieving automated AI R&D.

I now believe we are living in the time that AI research will be end-to-end automated. If that happens, we will cross a Rubicon into a nearly-impossible-to-forecast future. More on this later.

The purpose of this essay is to enumerate why I think the takeoff towards fully automated AI R&D is happening. I’ll discuss some of the consequences of this, but mostly I expect to spend the majority of this essay discussing the evidence for this belief, and will spend most of 2026 working through the implications.

In terms of timing, I don’t expect this to happen in 2026. But I think we could see an example of a “model end-to-end trains it successor” within a year or two - certainly a proof-of-concept at the non-frontier model stage, though frontier models may be harder (they’re a lot more expensive and are the product of a lot of humans working extremely hard).

My reasoning for this stems primarily from public information: papers on arXiv, bioRxiv, and NBER, as well as observing the products being deployed into the world by the frontier companies. From this data I arrive at the conclusion that all the pieces are in place for automating the production of today’s AI systems - the engineering components of AI development. And if scaling trends continue, we should prepare for models to get creative enough that they may be able to substitute for human researchers at having creative ideas for novel research paths, thus pushing forward the frontier themselves, as well as refining what is already known.

Upfront caveat

For much of this piece I’m going to try to assemble a mosaic view of AI progress out of things that have happened with many individual benchmarks. As anyone who studies benchmarks knows, all benchmarks have some idiosyncratic flaws. The important thing to me is the aggregate trend which emerges through looking at all of these datapoints together, and you should assume that I am aware of the drawbacks of each individual datapoint.

Now, let’s go through some of the evidence together.

by Jack Clark, Import AI |  Read more:

[ed. From what I can tell, most people in the AI field find this timeline entirely plausible (give or take a couple of years). As some have said, the next five years will be a time of great change and turbulence. See also:]

The seven deadly curses of superhuman AI:

Going For Broke

Not long ago, the national debt was a scandal. Economists said it would wreck the financial system. Voters stewed. A 1990 poll found that 76 percent of Americans regarded the deficit as “a very serious problem calling for immediate action.” Presidential candidates ran against it; the 1992 race was a referendum on different belt-tightening proposals. At the time, the debt was around $4 trillion.

Now it’s over $31 trillion, bigger than our entire economy. Here’s what that means: If the federal government were to demand, for an entire year, that all workers hand over 100 percent of their wages, that all landlords hand over 100 percent of their rents, that all investors hand over 100 percent of their capital returns and that all corporations hand over 100 percent of their profits, then at the end of that nightmarish year, the government would still be in debt.

That’s not healthy. The United States hasn’t held this much debt since World War II. And it’s still growing, fast.

Yet neither voters nor politicians seem worried, my colleague Tony Romm writes. Both parties keep cutting taxes, even as aging Americans receive more money from Medicare and Social Security. Lawmakers keep spending more on the military. And the Treasury must make debt interest payments so huge that they exceed the annual cost of Medicare.

Our views on the debt, clearly, have changed. Why?

by Evan Gorelick, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times

[ed. Probably a couple of reasons, 1) the attitude that "I'll be gone soon and it'll be somebody else's problem" (so why not get while the getting's good and insulate my family); and 2) most people not having a firm grasp on how the economy works (let alone basic math), and lacking the ability to assess long-term risks (climate change being another example). Maybe a third reason, too: that AI will fix everything. From the story by Tony Romm referenced above:]

***

The root of the problem is well-documented and widely known. U.S. debt has soared in recent years because of a mismatch between federal spending and tax revenue, one complicated by a rapidly aging population, which has driven up costs across government.

For economists, the fear is that these conditions are inching the United States toward a fiscal crisis, one in which its debt is so great that the country can’t easily afford to pay the rising interest on it. But their warnings have long gone unheeded in Washington, calcifying the strains on the government’s balance sheet in ways that President Trump’s agenda is expected to exacerbate.

Despite winning a congressional majority, Republicans have cut little in spending over the past year. With the few savings they did achieve, they put that money toward offsetting a fraction of the cost of Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, which are still expected to add more than $4 trillion to the debt in the coming years.

***

[ed. See also: Ray Dalio's interview with Ross Douthat posted here yesterday.]

Moonlight Jazz Blue

The Life and Times of an American Tween

Every Wednesday, at exactly 2:15 P.M., the electronic bell at San Francisco’s A. P. Giannini Middle School sounds with a dull, droning buzz, and hundreds of students stream from the building. They wear big pants and bucket hats, cropped tanks and cargo jeans, Athleta sets and Air Force 1s. They carry ergonomically unsound backpacks dripping with bag charms and key chains: athletic affiliations, memorabilia, miniature stuffies. They pull thick socks up over their leggings; fix hydrocolloid stickers, star-shaped and cutesy, atop angry, interloping zits. Their lip tint is red and thickly applied. Their water bottles are status symbols. Their press-ons are shellacked and combat-ready. There are boys, too, small and gangly. They move in packs, magnifying their bulk like synchronized minnows. They look dressed by their mothers. On early-dismissal days, the afternoon yawns with possibility. The students dash to the bus or wander the nearby commercial drag, which has little going for it save the hardware store, where there is candy. They exchange their allowance for matcha ice cream at Polly Ann; gobble Domino’s to no intestinal detriment. They buy boba and punt each other with tapioca bullets. They flock to Starbucks for magenta Cannon Ball Drinks, creamy Pink Drinks, sludgy Dubai Chocolate Mochas. They chug the unchuggable. Twelve blocks to the west, the Pacific Ocean glitters and threatens, waves dragging out in the wind.

On a Wednesday afternoon, I was joined outside A.P.G. by Mira, a sixth grader with an open, angelic face and an ebullient presence. It is often chilly and overcast in the Outer Sunset, but this was a warm and clear day, and Mira, who is interested in matters of fashion, wore low-slung cargo sweatpants and a white tube top. Her hair, which is long, dark, and curly, had recently been treated to a bathroom Manic Panic job, and the front strands were dyed a light peach. She smoothed a strand as one might the tail of a cat. Mira is good company: frank, funny, and self-deprecating in a way that suggests confidence rather than its lack. At four feet eight, she is small for her age, but manages to occupy space laterally. She moves with a noodle elasticity, and is prone to breaking into dance moves while going about her business: a full-body wave from wrist to wrist, an entire sequence from a Katseye music video. The first time we met, we were mid-conversation when she inexplicably dropped into a side split, grabbed her ankles, and rolled backward, placing her toes on the floor behind her head. “At the beginning of the year, I couldn’t do an aerial”—a hands-free cartwheel—“and I can kind of do one now,” she told me, harrowingly assuming the starting position.

Mira is twelve years old and lives in the Avenues, San Francisco’s foggy western neighborhoods, with her mother, Michalle, who is a nurse practitioner, her father, Patrick, who is a full-time parent, and her sibling, Dylan, who is nine. (Last year, Dylan requested to use they/them pronouns, which the family mostly remembers to honor.) Like most kids her age, Mira exists in the murky, thrilling bardo between childhood and maturity. She is a gracious host—quick to offer guests a Spindrift—who totes a lunchbox adorned with a sticker of a unicorn. She is learning to cook, mostly quesadillas, but if she could she would live on Cheetos, boba, Trü Früs, and Coke. She razzes her parents in a way that makes them laugh, but no longer tells them everything. Mira’s first middle-school dance was coming up, and there was discussion among her friends about dresses and hair styles. I was excited to see which of her dance moves would make an appearance.

For years, Mira has been agitating for more independence. Last August, she began commuting to and from school alone, hurtling around the edge of the continent on the public bus. Since fifth grade, she has worn a silver Apple Watch, a glorified tracking device, which she pushes to the outer limits of usability. She is a member of several large group chats, including one called “4th Period Baddies,” and regularly consults Siri, summoning facts and images from the ether. (“Photos of hazel eyes.” “What does A.S.M.R. stand for?”) Still, the watch is no phone. A phone would be much cooler; would be, perhaps, the coolest thing. An Apple Watch was a bridge from childhood to adulthood. A phone would be a portal.

That Wednesday, Mira went to Polly Ann with her friends Kaitlyn and Sloane. At the counter, the girls realized no one had brought money. They began plumbing their wallets—pink, pleather, flat—for stray coins. Sloane called her mother on her Apple Watch and, in a mix of English and Mandarin, requested a transfusion of Apple Cash. She hung up just as Mira and Kaitlyn discovered, miraculously, that if they pooled their assets they could afford to split something. “Never mind we found money exclamation point,” Sloane said into her watch.

“Sloane, no!” Mira said. “We were going to get money!” Giggling, the girls ordered a pint of watermelon ice cream, requested three spoons, and dropped their last dime into the tip jar. They headed to a playground, a regular hangout spot for their peers, and settled onto a boulder. Smaller children from a nearby elementary school were availing themselves of climbers, slides, and beams. But by the boulder the real action was social and discursive. Two sixth-grade boys appeared, one tall and floppy-haired, the other wiry and blond. “Mira, I have a question for you,” the floppy-haired boy said. “Are you straight?” Mira looked at him, her face grave and blank. “No, no, not for me, for one of my friends,” he said, putting his hands out in front of his body, as if to distance himself from any association with crushing. Mira wanted to know who had dispatched him, but the boy wandered off to a playground structure, singing Jimmy Eat World to himself. [...]

The literature on adolescence marks middle school as a turning point, a time when kids begin to pull away from their parents, discard childish pursuits, and pursue, full thrust, the exhausting project of individuation. It is a period of intense, hormonally driven emotional flux. Self-consciousness sets in. The adult world is studied and emulated in a manner that suggests praxis but no theory. There is an aspect of camp to it all: a kind of LARP or drag, as young people transition from play-acting adulthood to inhabiting it. Actual adults are ancillary. Tweens and teens look to each other for clarity and guidance on how to behave and how to feel, all the while gambling with each other’s social confidence and self-esteem. It is natural, and it is psychotic.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described the period between twelve and eighteen as one of essential identity formation: a time of trying on personas and roles. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Erikson was sensitive to the ways that society could shape personality, but no one could have anticipated the explosion of potential identities, interests, aesthetics, subcultures, and life styles that children would be exposed to by globalization and, later, the internet: now there are clean girls, tomato girls, vanilla girls, office sirens, femboys, e-boys, looksmaxxers; one can be avant basic, old money, new money, quiet luxury, cottagecore, goblincore, fairycore. Adolescent anxiety and depression have been on the rise for years, and there is abundant public debate about why: economic inequality, strained family ties, sleep deprivation, smartphones. Childhood has never been easy, but these days the on-ramp to adulthood seems somehow shorter and more perilous.

by Anna Wiener, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ok Causland

Hollow Body

I enrolled in MUS 253: Classical Guitar out of desperation. I’m an English professor, and since the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022, things have changed. I watched students, staff, colleagues, and administrators outsource their thinking to the machine, and the academy soon became a sham to me, a farce of its former self. I once taught students to spend time inside sentences, to wrestle with difficulty, to make productive use of their uncertainty by paying close attention to how language works on the page. We once sat inside paragraphs, dwelt inside language in its richness and complexity.

But the ease of AI has devalued language, difficulty, and the work and perseverance and focus necessary to make meaning out of words. Believing a writer should write her own sentences and a reader should read instead of relying on AI summaries, I have become Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill, the work of teaching and learning, reading and writing seemingly pointless in the face of the juggernaut offering to do my students’ work for them. After years of this, I descended into a severe depression marked by panic attacks, substance abuse, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. A complete loss of meaning in your life’s work will do that.

A therapist once told me that one way to manage the hollow of depression is to find an activity that creates pleasure but also demands mastery—something like baking, or the arts, or sports. Such pursuits engage both mind and body, reorienting your focus away from the myopic self-obsession of depression and toward, instead, something beyond the self, some palpable problem that can be worked through and, with enough time, eventually solved. There is peace in that, my therapist said; satisfaction too. And, he added, these activities tend to be much better for you than the many vices people often turn toward to fill that emptiness when stressed, anxious, and depressed.

So I signed up for guitar lessons. I wanted to do something with my hands, something real, tangible, and material. Pleasure and mastery. I also wanted to retreat into a familiar role, to become a student again, and to rediscover what it means to, and how one does, learn. I hoped that, in the long hours of practicing, I might somehow cast aside the cynicism and despair overtaking my teaching and so rekindle my love of the classroom—and of life.

by Peter Wayne Moe , Longreads | Read more:
Image: Mischa Willett

How To Be at Home in a Changing World

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.

                                                            —Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness

Having come to Taos, New Mexico, riding the light of long, nearly solstice days. The high desert has been spared fire so far this year. It offers a welcome respite from the already-thick humidity of Georgia in June. The trip’s impetus is to work with a writing collaborator—gloriously, for the first time, in person—but mostly I am here to shift the frame. I need a week to set down the burdens of home.

Two weeks before my arrival here, my father died, just shy of his seventy-fifth birthday. Alzheimer’s had taken him apart, block by block, over a decade. The disease sets up shop in the seahorse of the hippocampus; one of the first symptoms is losing your way. My dad lost his ability to follow well-grooved routes—Boo, I’m . . . I’m not sure which way to turn—and ultimately any amount of ambulation. He lost his stories, then later almost all of his words. Those losses were especially gutting for a man who built a vocation around them as a sports journalist.

Being with him at the threshold of life’s end, and walking with him as long as I could, has shifted something in me. The fathomlessness of this whole experience—to be a person, in a body, for some uncertain number of years on this Earth, then suddenly gone—it feels altogether infinite. I find myself wading through a raft of new wonderings about liminality and the journey on from here.

In the aftermath of loss, existential questions often sweep in. Questions about what makes a good life and matters most. Questions about impermanence and the twin truths of intrinsic possibility and inevitable ends. The probing, clarifying nature of loss can, I think, be one of its gifts. And the questions seem to have a way of tagging along, even as I cross the Mississippi River and the Great Plains to reach the Southern Rockies.

Of all the wonderings that I’ve brought with me to Taos, the ones that feel most weighty and most insistent are about home: Will the meaning of home shift as family roots that have held me loosen? Is this a moment to step back and think anew about where and how to live? Amid so much disruption in the world, how do we all find or feel at home?

Home, the dictionary warrants, is about where we reside. The word’s typical use suggests something fairly fixed, even permanent—a place we remain, or, if we leave, to which we return. Homecoming is ritual. Animals home, returning by instinct to their territory. To be at home is to be at ease, at peace.

But when flux comes to neighborhoods, ecosystems, and entire countries — how can we not lose our bearings? The scale of loss is different, but the sensation we know well. In the thick of the climate crisis and its abutting troubles, the places we call home today may become unrecognizable or be lost completely. Some—like Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, where climate justice leader Colette Pichon Battle lives—almost certainly will. Intellectually, I comprehend the acute wildfire risks in California, yet I was still stunned when cousins in Los Angeles lost their home to one. My father’s question, “which way to turn,” takes on another, awful, meaning.

Wayfinding, in very literal ways, will be part of climate futures ahead, and it will not always be a choice. At times, it will be the catapulting outcome of turmoil and displacement, which are all the more difficult in a world of borders and barriers, of battle lines around who belongs and who does not. How many hundreds of millions of people may need to migrate has everything to do with how hot it gets and how high the oceans climb—whether temperatures are survivable and land is still land.

Home is in the crosshairs. The need to re-home is sure to be common. The questions of where home is, what it means, how to make it—they feel weighty and urgent for many. I’m beginning to accept that these burdens cannot really be set down. Maybe the shifting sands, both underfoot and within, are calling us to embrace the interplay of rooting and roaming that is so core to humankind. To be an Earthling is to be a denizen of change.

In the loam of my psyche, a new question is sprouting: “How do I make of myself a home that is expansive enough to hold all of it—the rootedness and roaming, the devastation and defiance, the knowingness and mystery?”

by Kathrin K. Wilkinson, Orion |  Read more:

Image: via Amber Lotus/Andrews McMeel, 2026

2026 F-15E Rescue Operation

via:
[ed. Good point. You'd think he'd be doing the Hero Tour by now. The 110 miles figure doesn't sound plausible, but from Wikipedia:]

The pilot was rescued by U.S. forces seven hours after the crash. The operation involved hundreds of U.S. troops and dozens of aircraft. The weapon systems officer (WSO) escaped in the area of the Zagros Mountains, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), U.S. combat search and rescue personnel, and the local nomadic tribesmen worked to find him. The WSO was recovered by U.S. forces supported by 155 aircraft. A U.S. military official described it as "one of the most challenging and complex [missions] in the history of U.S. special operations."

Iran claimed multiple aircraft shootdowns during the rescue operation. The U.S. claimed there had been a shootdown of one of its A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft, and the intentional destruction of two of its Lockheed MC-130 transport aircraft and four helicopters to avoid capture. Iran later claimed the "operation may have been a deceptive plan to steal enriched uranium" of Iran's nuclear program, and compared the operation to the failed 1980 Operation Eagle Claw, the last publicly acknowledged U.S. military ground operation in Iran. [...]

Iranian and U.S. forces engaged in a race to find the second crew member. U.S. surveillance drones failed to find the airman, and he was "status unknown". The airman hiked a 7,000-foot (2,100 m) ridgeline in the Zagros Mountains foothills and hid in a mountain crevice and restricted the use of his emergency beacon signal so that it would not be picked up by Iran. [...]

Additionally during the search and rescue efforts:

• 2 UH-60 Black Hawks were hit and damaged. An undisclosed number of crew aboard the helicopters were injured.
• 1 A-10 Thunderbolt II shot down.
• 2 MC-130J Hercules intentionally destroyed by U.S. forces after they became stuck to avoid falling into enemy hands.
• 4 MH-6 or AH-6 special operations helicopters destroyed from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne). A U.S. official claimed that these too were intentionally destroyed.

The U.S. reported that no service members were killed during the operation.

Charlotte Baxter (Welsh), Tan y Bwlch 

via:

Hantavirus Update

A working timeline: 

• Mid-March: Dutch couple possibly contract virus on bird watching landfill excursion.
• April 1: MV Hondius departs southern Argentina.
• April 6: Dutch man falls ill.
• April 11: He dies.
• April 24: St. Helena. Man’s body is taken off ship and wife flies with it to South Africa. The Dutch woman is already sick before boarding flight to South Africa.
• April 26: The Dutch woman dies in SA at a hospital.
• April 27: A British man who is sick is flown from Ascension Island to South Africa.
• May 2: A German woman dies on the MV Hondius.

Meanwhile, we have people leaving the ship and flying all over the world:

Some Hantavirus Cruise Passengers Are Back in the U.S. MedPage Today

Two British people self isolating at home after leaving cruise ship in St Helena BBC. “The UKHSA also said British people currently on the ship would be flown home on a charter flight, probably from the Canary Islands, as long as they didn’t have symptoms.”

Patient with a hantavirus infection being treated in hospital Switzerland Federal Office of Public Health (press release)

Passenger with hantavirus was briefly on board a KLM aircraft in Johannesburg KLM (press release)

Spanish passenger on the ‘Hondius’: ‘There are 23 people who got off on Saint Helena and have been wandering around’ El Pais

by Conor Gallagher, Naked Capitalism | Read more:

[ed. Time to pull that old "definition of insanity" cliche' out again. Even if this does eventually burn out, it appears we've learned very little in the last few years.]

Interview: Interesting Times

A Legendary Investor on How to Prevent America’s Coming ‘Heart Attack’

I feel that lately we’ve been having an “end of the American empire” moment.

In part, I think it’s the stalemated war in Iran. In part, it’s the strain that Donald Trump is putting on American alliances. And in part, I think, it’s a sense that our biggest rival, China, is sitting back, biding its time, and waiting for the collapse.

My guest this week has been on this beat for a while now, and he has a grand theory of history that predicts that America is headed for a fall. He’s kind of an unlikely Cassandra.

Ray Dalio built one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Bridgewater Associates, from the ground up. But these days, he mostly wants to talk about our imperial decadence, and whether there’s anything we can do to pull the American empire back from the brink. [...]

Douthat: So people say. So you’re someone who spent your career making bets, and a substantial number of them have paid off over the last few decades. Lately, you have been arguing that the United States of America is maybe not such a good bet at the moment.

So if someone is looking at America right now, trying to decide, let’s say, whether to bet on the American empire as a dominant force in the 21st century, what are the big forces or factors that they should be looking at?

Dalio: I’d correct that. I’m not saying that America is a bad bet or a good bet. I’m just describing what’s going on. And what I learned through my roughly 50 years of investing is that many things that are important that happened to me didn’t happen in my lifetime before, but happened many times in history.

So I learned to study the last 500 years of history to find what caused the rises and declines of reserve currencies, their empires, and so on. And you see a pattern over and over again. There is such a thing as a big cycle, and the big cycle starts when there are new orders.

There are three types of orders. There’s a monetary order, a domestic political order, and an international world order. These are three big forces that evolve.

So on the first force, as we look at that monetary order, there’s a debt cycle. When debts rise relative to incomes, and debt service payments rise relative to incomes. For countries, for individuals —— That squeezes out spending. That’s a problem.

For example, the United States now spends about $7 trillion. It takes in about $5 trillion, so it spends about 40 percent more than it takes in. It’s been running those deficits for a while, so it has a debt that’s about six times its income, the amount that it takes in.
And you can see throughout history that that produces problems. It’s a very simple thing: The debts for a country work the same as the debts for an individual or a company — except the government can print money. [...]

But what that does is it also devalues money. So that’s the mechanics. That’s why there’s a long-term debt cycle, as well as short-term debt cycles and money cycles and economic cycles that take us from one recession to an overheating to another recession.

Related to that is the domestic political and social cycle that relates to the money part. And when you have very large wealth and values differences, big gaps in those ——

Douthat: Meaning, between rich and poor?

Dalio: Between rich and poor, and those with different values. And you get to the point where there are irreconcilable differences. Then you have political conflicts that are such that the system is at risk.

OK. I think we have the first cycle going on. I think we have the second cycle going on — the political left and right and their irreconcilable differences. We can get into those.

Douthat: How does the international aspect factor in?

Dalio: And then international is the same thing. Following a war, there is a dominant power, and the dominant power creates the new world order. The order means the system.

So that began in 1945.

Douthat: For us. The United States was the dominant power establishing that system.

Dalio: That’s right. And it established a system, which was largely modeled after the United States system in that it was meant to be representative. The United Nations, for example, was a multilateral world order. And so all different countries would operate and there was supposed to be a rule-based system.

But the problem with that is, without enforcement, it’s not going to be an effective system. It was an idealistic system and it was a beautiful system while it lasted, but we no longer have a multilateral rule-based system.

We have what existed prior to 1945 through most of history, and now you’re going to have geopolitical disagreements, such as even what is existing with Iran.

How are those disagreements resolved? You don’t take it to the World Court and get a verdict and get it enforced. It’s power that rules. [...]

Douthat: And again, just to emphasize what is distinctive about this moment relative to the past few decades, it’s the strength of the alignment on the other side?

Dalio: It’s the relative strength, and the breakdown of that order. In addition, there are big debtor-creditor relationships that enter into it. For example, when the United States runs large deficits, it has to borrow money. And that is very risky during periods of conflict. So are interdependencies.

In other words, in this world of greater risk, then you have to have self-sufficiency. Because history has taught us that you can be cut off. Either side can be cut off. [...]

Douthat: As an investor myself, I do want the investment advice. But as a pundit, a columnist — whatever I am — who’s trying to describe or anticipate reality, even accepting that we can’t know for sure, if there are these lessons from history, if there are these cycles that repeat, and we’re headed for a kind of bottoming out or reset, that maybe we bounce back from it, but I’m just trying to get a sense of what you think life looks like at the bottom of the cycle and whether it is a stagnation and a persistent unhappiness, or is it more like crisis and clashes in the streets kind of thing? Because the ’70s versus the ’30s seem like different examples. That’s all.

Dalio: I’ll give you my concerns. I think we have these big issues — the money issue, the political social issue domestically, and the international geopolitical issues. As I look at the clock, we’re going to come into the midterm elections and I think that the Republicans will probably lose the House. I think from that point on, you’re going to see an intensification of political and social conflict that’ll take place in that period, particularly between that election and the presidential election in 2028.

I worry that those can be irreconcilable differences. I don’t know how they will go down. I don’t know how the respect for rules and law and order and whatever will keep law and order.

I am concerned about, but I’m not predicting, broader-based violence. You could have broader-based violence. There are more guns in the United States than people [...]

Douthat: Tell me how you think the debt picture and the political and social picture interact, because it seems like if you ask people what they’re divided about right now, they don’t say interest payments on the national debt. They have a much longer list of things they’re divided about.

I’m just curious: Interest payments go up, they crowd out other forms of investment. What is the economic force that interacts with social disarray here?

Dalio: They’re divided about who has what money and who gets it, which is very much related to the deficit.

I wrote my most recent book to explain how it works with 35 examples. It was called “How Countries Go Broke.” And I’ve been speaking to top levels of both the Democratic and the Republican Parties, and everybody agrees on those mechanics.

When I go down and I say to them, you’ve got to get to 3 percent of G.D.P. deficit through some mix of raising taxes, cutting spending and controlling interest rates — because that’s how you have to do it mechanically.

Then they say, Ray, you don’t understand, in order to be elected, I have to make at least one of two promises: “I will not raise your taxes” and “I will not cut your benefits.”

What the country’s divided on is, let’s say, the multibillionaire class and those who are struggling financially, the left and the right and populism, and so on — and that has a money component. So the deficits and the money part is a very big part of the social conflict part.

Douthat: So you’re talking to politicians about this, and they give you this spiel about how we can’t raise taxes and we can’t cut spending, I think the follow-up that they would say is that people experience those things as threats to opportunity or equality. That people who rely on Medicare and Social Security think this is the guarantee of equality, and people who rely on low taxes to build a business think this is the guarantee of opportunity.

If you are trying to sell those people on cutting deficits to 3 percent of G.D.P., what do you tell them you’re saving them from?

Dalio: You’re saving them from a financial crisis.

Douthat: And what happens in a financial crisis in the U.S.? What does that look like?

Dalio: The financial crisis will mean that the capacity to spend will be very limited. In other words, you can’t afford military expenses and social expenses, and so on. You’ll be very constrained. And because the demand won’t meet up with the supply, you’ll have interest rates going up, which will curtail borrowing, will hurt markets, and so on. And that will lead to the central banks trying to balance that by printing money, which will also devalue the money and create a stagflation kind of environment. [...]

It is like the plaque building up. It’s like you saying, “I haven’t had a heart attack yet.”

Douthat: “I feel OK.”

Dalio: And I can say: OK, I understand you haven’t had a heart attack yet. Can I show you the M.R.I. of this plaque building up in your system? And can you understand what I’m saying about that plaque, that you will have a heart attack if that plaque then starts to get there? Can you understand that? Can you understand where the numbers are, and where you are? Look, it’s your life. It’s your choices. Ask yourself, “Is that right or is that wrong?” That’s what you need to do for your own well-being.

Douthat: In your story, it sounds like if you combine that diagnosis with your sense — and my sense — of how the American political system currently works, that you’re going to get at least a mild version of the heart attack before you get change.

You said at the outset, you weren’t really betting against America, in spite of my podcaster’s framing. Are you optimistic that we could have, I guess you could call it, a minor heart attack and recover?

Dalio: I think we’re going to come into a period of greater disorder as there’s a confluence between the monetary part; the domestic, social and political part, where there’s irreconcilable differences; and the international world order part.

I would say then, I should bring in two other factors. One of them is acts of nature through history ——

Douthat: Pandemics.

Dalio: Droughts, floods and pandemics. And if you take what most people think about what’s happening to climate, it’s not a movement toward improvement, it’s a movement toward worsening. And then technology and A.I. [...]

We have to talk about technology and A.I. as it enters into this picture because it plays a role. And it does so in three ways. It can be a tremendous productivity enhancing result that can help to mitigate maybe a number of the debt problems — perhaps. We can get into this. I don’t think it’s going to come across at that speed. [...]

The second effect of that A.I. is it is now creating enormous wealth gaps. Those who are the beneficiaries of it are approaching “Who will be the first trillionaire?” The wealth gap thing has increased at great amounts, and it will replace a lot of jobs. So that’s No. 2 as a factor. Those gaps are an issue however we deal with them. They will have to be dealt with, and that’s going to become probably a political question, but that’s an issue.

And then No. 3 is that the technologies themselves can be used for harm — a lot of power. It could be used by other countries. It can be used by those who want to inflict harm. It could be used by those who want to steal money. It can be used for harm. [...]

For all these forces, these five forces, over the next five years it’ll be like going through a time warp. There will be huge changes over the next five years, with all of these forces coming together. And on the other side of that, it’ll be almost unrecognizable. It’ll be very different, and it’ll be a period of great change and great turbulence. [...]

Douthat: ... I guess what I’m interested in is, in your account of the rise and fall of empires — Spanish Empire, British Empire, the Dutch mini empire, and so on — you don’t have these case studies of a great power going through this cycle, hitting what you think of as the bottom, and then bouncing back and having another run. Or do you?

Because, look, as Americans, that’s our goal. If someone buys into your narrative, they would say: OK, but history isn’t determinist. We can make choices and we can have ourselves another cycle. Right?

Dalio: Yes. I think that’s possible, but here’s what has to happen — and history would suggest it: Plato talked about this cycle ——

Douthat: Yes.

Dalio: In “The Republic.” And he talked about the democracy and the problems with the democracy because the people don’t vote for what is good for them and the strength. About 60 percent of the American people have below a sixth-grade reading level, and there’s a problem with productivity, and so on. And they vote and they determine a lot.

The question is: How in a democracy can that happen? His view is that’s when you have, ideally, the benevolent despot — somebody who is going to take control, be strong and give for the country. In a sense, bring people together.

However that happens, what you need is a strong leader of the middle who recognizes essentially that the partisanship and the conflict is going to be a problem, but has the strength to get people and everything working in a way that it needs to work so that there can be a debt restructuring of some form, there can be an improvement in our education system, there can be the structural changes in efficiency.

by Ross Douthat and Ray Dalio, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: New York Times
[ed. If there's one benefit to having Trump in office (and only one that I can think of) it's that he's shown how fragile and ricketty our democratic system has become over the last fifty years. I'm beginning to think it might be time for a new approach. Not on board with Plato's "benevolent despot" idea, but some form of modified socialism, or maybe a Professional Managerial Board (grounded in the Constitution, and composed of experts in every field making scientific, economic, social, and other decisions), or something else altogether, idk. Because whatever we have now is not working.]

via:

Iran: The Second Amendment Solution

[ed. Not the Onion.]

US President Donald Trump should send large amounts of weapons to Iranian civilians in order to spark a civil war in the country, Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the biggest cheerleaders of the US-Israeli war on Iran, has suggested.

Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday, the South Carolina war hawk Republican framed the proposal as a “Second Amendment solution” for the Islamic Republic and an alternative to deploying American ground troops.

 

“If I were President Trump and I were Israel, I would load the Iranian people up with weapons so they can go to the streets armed and turn the tide of battle inside Iran,” Graham said.

Hannity noted in the interview that Washington had already tried this approach in the past. Last month, Trump confirmed that the US had sent “a lot” of firearms to Iranian protesters during the nationwide unrest that erupted in late 2025. However, the guns were supposedly stolen, according to Trump, and Washington’s efforts to spark regime change in the country have consistently failed, even after assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February.

“Do it again,” Graham demanded, adding that “I love the idea of empowering the Iranian people with weapons.” He further fantasized that the plan would make life “hell” for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and that “it’s one thing to be bombed by America. It’s another thing to have your neighbor shoot back at you.”

The South Carolina senator’s latest call to orchestrate mass social unrest within the Islamic Republic comes after years of him advocating the destruction of Iran’s government, demanding that the US military “destroy the air force, sink their navy,” urging not to “underrate killing them all,” and calling for the country to be blown “off the map.”

by RT Media |  Read more:

Image: Fox "News"

[ed. Wow, that's some awesome "outside the box" thinking: arm your enemies to win! America's number one war-mongering, chickenhawk (close race with you know who) is giving that one last brain cell a workout. Here's the full text (via RCP):]

***

SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: I love the idea of a Second Amendment solution for the Iranian people. To those who want to eliminate the Second Amendment in our country — no way. What did the Founding Fathers do? When they got to America, free from the King, they made sure the people would be able to be armed.

The first thing a king does is take guns away from his subjects. The first thing a religious theocracy does is make sure nobody can have a gun to threaten the regime.

If I were President Trump and Israel, I would load the Iranian people up with weapons so they can go to the streets armed and turn the tide of battle inside Iran. We don't need American boots on the ground. We've got millions of boots on the ground in Iran — they just don't have any weapons. Give them the weapons so they can rise up like we did and destroy this regime. A Second Amendment solution, I think, would go a long way to ending this war. If we can take control of the Strait, checkmate.

SEAN HANNITY: Okay. My understanding is there have been attempts to do so and they tried to funnel it through groups. My understanding is, for example, the Kurds were stealing 90% of the weapons.

SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Don't work with the Kurds. Work with somebody else. If you can prove to me the Kurds were stealing the weapons, the Kurds will regret that. I love the idea of empowering the Iranian people with weapons — a Second Amendment solution to make the Revolutionary Guard's life hell. It's one thing to be bombed by America. It's another thing to have your neighbor shoot back at you because they're tired of being slaughtered.

Number two, the Strait of Hormuz is the only thing left. This has been a brilliant campaign by President Trump and our military. The nuclear program of Iran has been destroyed. Their ability to spread terrorism has been destroyed because they're on their knees economically. If we can take back control of the Strait of Hormuz, it is checkmate. This thing is over.

For the American people — I know gas prices are high and I know we're suffering right now. But you pay now or you pay later against thugs like Iran. They tried to get a nuclear weapon. If you don't believe that, you shouldn't be allowed to drive in your hometown. Donald Trump stopped Iran from having eight to ten nuclear weapons by bombing their enrichment facilities. God bless you, President Trump. We were weeks away from a nuclear-armed Iran. No more. Everything has been obliterated. Their economy is in tatters. Their military has been decimated. There's more to do. If we can control the Strait — checkmate against Iran. Blockade plus. Arm the people. And to our allies throughout the world who depend on the Strait of Hormuz more than we do: get off your ass and help us.

via:

Ted Turner, Cable TV Visionary Dies at 87

Ted Turner, a mercurial tycoon and gadfly visionary whose “superstation” TBS was a cornerstone of cable TV’s early success, whose 24-hour news channel CNN revolutionized TV journalism, and whose sprawling legacy encompassed conservation, philanthropy and professional sports, died Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by Phillip Evans, a spokesman for Turner Enterprises. Mr. Turner revealed in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.

A serial entrepreneur known as “the Mouth of the South” for his bellicosity and bravado, Mr. Turner took over his family’s Georgia-based billboard company at 24, after his father’s suicide, and transformed the business into a media juggernaut that would forever alter broadcasting.

“CNN really heralds the world of Twitter and social networks and interactivity,” said Ken Auletta, a Turner biographer and media writer for the New Yorker. “During the Persian Gulf War, you had a live war for the first time, without commercial breaks. You’d see bombs dropping and people screaming and fire engines roaring. Everything is immediate. It’s the world we live in today. He’s the father of that world.”

Mr. Turner’s achievements transcended journalism and business, and his much-publicized personality — charming, vulgar, daring, impulsive, idealistic, titanically self-regarding — made him one of the most captivating public figures of his generation.

He presented himself as a Southern gentleman. But he also boasted of being a Ferrari in the bedroom, and with his incessant philandering, he burned through three marriages, including his last, to actress Jane Fonda.

The billionaire Mr. Turner championed a world free of conflict but was on friendly terms with dictators and despots, including Saddam Hussein and Vladi­mir Putin. A Goldwater Republican turned unabashed liberal, he had friends running the political gamut — from former President Jimmy Carter to Sen. Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina), from televangelist Jerry Falwell to communist Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who became a duck-hunting companion.

On his cable channels TBS and TNT, Mr. Turner delivered wholesome family fare, including sports and black-and-white reruns. But in his prime, he was a self-confessed absentee husband and father, with family below business and sailing on his list of priorities.

As skipper of the yacht Courageous in 1977, Mr. Turner won the America’s Cup, sailing’s most prestigious trophy. He also brought his competitive drive to ownership of the Atlanta Braves, the long-hapless baseball team he bought in 1976. The team rewarded his vigorous support and patience with a World Series victory in 1995 over the Cleveland Indians.

His interests and ambitions seemingly boundless, Mr. Turner became one of the largest private landowners in the Western Hemisphere, and he used his more than 2 million acres, from Montana to Argentina, to preserve endangered flora and fauna. He underwrote foundations that campaigned against nuclear arms proliferation and for such causes as population control, solar energy and debt forgiveness for developing countries.

In 1986, he created the Goodwill Games to foster brotherhood among athletes after the two world superpowers — the United States and Soviet Union — traded boycotts of the Summer Olympics in Moscow (1980) and Los Angeles (1984) during a surge in Cold War tensions. He lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on the venture before it was shuttered in 2001 because of low television ratings.

Years before Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates rose to the top of world philanthropy, Mr. Turner donated $1 billion to start a foundation to support United Nations projects in developing countries.

In business, as in all his undertakings, Mr. Turner cultivated a renegade persona. The bad boy yachtsman, who galled the elite gatekeepers of sailing in New York and Newport, Rhode Island, was also the Atlanta David battling the media Goliaths of New York. “I was cable,” he once quipped, “when cable wasn’t cool.”

Mr. Turner thrived on the role of buccaneer, and he looked the part with his rugged 6-foot-3 frame, square jaw, cleft chin and tidy mustache. A cigar, a beer can and a quip were ever at the ready. “If I only had a little humility,” he once joked in his booming Southern drawl, “I’d be perfect.” [...]

“Ted is a complicated guy, but he is part genius,” Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner, told The New York Times in 2001. “Ted doesn’t mean the harm he causes; he just cannot shut up.”

by Adam Bernstein, Washington Post/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Images:Michael Williamson/Craig Herndon/Washington Post

[ed. What a life. And he married Jane Fonda, too.]

Dr. Bobby

Bobby Wagner, former Seahawks star, earns honorary doctorate from Utah State.

Former Seahawk Bobby Wagner … oops. Former Seahawk Dr. Bobby Wagner had to crack a few jokes when he took the stage at Utah State University’s graduation last week.

Wagner, who played for the Seahawks from 2012 to 2021 and again in 2023, returned to his alma mater on April 29 as the commencement speaker. During the ceremony, Wagner received an honorary doctoral degree from Utah State.

“If you didn’t know, my name is now Dr. Bobby Wagner,” Wagner said. “And to any family members here, you need to update my name in your phone. It’s ‘Dr.’ now. I will no longer respond to ‘Bobby.’ It’s Dr. only.”

The honorary doctorate adds to a long list of accolades that Wagner has collected throughout his career. In addition to his Super Bowl win with the Seahawks, he is a 10-time Pro Bowler and six-time All-Pro. Wagner also was named the 2025 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year.

Wagner’s jokes were on display when he accepted that award, too.

“I really didn’t think I was going to win this award,” Wagner said on stage after learning he won the Walter Payton award. “I almost didn’t even come to be honest. I’m glad I did.”

While accepting that honor back in February, Wagner delivered a speech that balanced humor with thoughtful reflection and gratitude for his mother who died of stroke complications when Wagner was a student athlete at Utah State.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 6,000 graduates in late April, Wagner joked about how lucky the graduating class was to have a Target in town, a luxury that wasn’t around during his time, before telling the story of how he ended up at Utah state.

He recalled a winter visit he made to the university with his mother. On the trip, he was offered a scholarship and despite having no other scholarship offers, Wagner told his mother he wanted to take his chances.

“She told me I either accept the scholarship, or I wasn’t coming back home,” Wagner said standing at the podium. “Back then there was no Ubers. There was no NIL. I wasn’t getting paid. So, I accepted the scholarship.”

“One of the things that taught me was the place you least expect to be is the place you’re exactly supposed to be,” Wagner said.

Wagner went on to be a four-year starter at Utah State, leading the program to their first bowl game in 14 years. He tied the school record with 446 career tackles and earned various other individual honors.

After graduating, Wagner was selected by the Seahawks in the second round of the 2012 draft.

The linebacker’s speech continued on, talking about the importance of building connections and going after personal goals. In addition to his NFL career, Wagner has various off-field pursuits including the Phenia Mae Fund and FAST54 that promote stroke education in honor of his mother. Wagner also recently earned his MBA from the Howard University School of Business.

Wagner’s 15-minute speech was threaded with jokes, including some well received trash talk.

“It’s fun to be able to talk trash to every other school, like I tell them, ‘I don’t know, Stanford’s cool, but it’s not Utah State,’ you know what I mean?” Wagner said.

by Sofia Schwarzwalder, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Dean Rutz/Seattle Times
[ed. Dr. Bobby. Blessed with class and talent. Seattle's been lucky. We've had Ichiro, too.]

Doomers in Love

Last February, a group of young conservatives in Washington hosted an open-invitation Valentine’s Day debate party. There, a month after the inauguration, dozens of young men in or around Trump’s new administration gathered to discuss not the great man in the White House, not political revolution, but love.

This is an era of good feelings for these young men, and the theme would seem to reflect the mood. It is also promisingly uncontroversial, and thus more welcoming: more women have come to this event than most conservative mixers, raising their average attendance from the single digits to tentative double digits. For a generation of young men increasingly politically divorced from women their age, who make up the most anti-GOP and anti-Trump demographic, the idea that love could overcome any obstacle is a hopeful premise.

But in the debate that ensues, nearly every speech is against romance. The arguments detail the dangers of infatuation, and amid the laudations of reason over passion, logic over love, are explicit and implicit warnings against being a “simp” or a “sucker.” Some wonder aloud whether one should ask out women at all, who, in the age of dating apps, receive far too much male attention, and as a result have become too picky, exacting and fickle. Eventually, a quip about women’s suffrage comes from the audience, prompting a jocular back-and-forth. I ask a friend why they are suddenly discussing whether women should vote. He looks at me and sighs. “Women’s suffrage always comes up.” By night’s end, almost nobody has asked out any of the women present in the room; the only man who ventures to do so is summarily rejected.

Afterwards, at a nearby bar, I find again a lot of single young men talking about women, rather than to women. One tells me that his friend, who is not here tonight, recently found a girlfriend: “I’m really happy for him. But now he texts our group chat advice, acting like he’s got the key to life, like he’s got it all figured out. And sometimes I’m not sure what to talk about with him anymore. We used to bond over not having a girl.” I think of my own “girlfriends,” who’ve told me to break up with previous boyfriends over their greater or lesser faults, imploring me to think of “how fun it would be to be single together.”

In another corner of the bar, I encounter a group of three twentysomething young men. The young, right-leaning women who had shown up hopeful have gone home. These men are now here alone on a Saturday night, in hour one of a five-hour debate about the nature of love. They are lonely experts, armed with elaborate theories of the female mind. The discussants go around in circles for hours, discussing what men truly want, what women truly want. Theses abound: “Men want respect; women want to be desired”; “Men are easily satisfied, but women are always afraid of making the wrong choice and not maximizing their options”; “Men are the only true romantics.” And questions remain: How many past sexual partners is too many? How many is too few? Does she need to share your interests, or is femininity more important than intellectual compatibility? Is it a red flag if she’s unmarried after 25? Is it a red flag if she’s single? What if we just assigned girlfriends and boyfriends randomly, wouldn’t they be happier than if we let them choose?

These single men talk amongst themselves about how many kids they want, out of an earnest aspiration but also, at times, as if in competition to prove their traditional virility. It is easier to talk about wanting ten kids while unattached and 24 than to raise ten kids with one’s wife, but tonight the effect is the same: here, you are based. One asks me how many I want. “I don’t know yet; I have to find someone first. Three, four?” He gives me a look. “Those are liberal numbers.”

A few weeks later I attend another party in similar circles. It is almost midnight, ten minutes until my 27th birthday. I want to go home. As I walk out I encounter two young men, staffers in Trump’s administration, talking on the sidewalk in their suits and loosened ties, smoking cigarettes. Hesitantly, I say hello. I am exhausted by the theories I’ve heard over the last few weeks about women’s virtues and faults and nearly wince, expecting more to come. Behind me, I recognize two college-aged guys from recent media exposés; they work for DOGE and are evaluating some absent girl’s Instagram page.

I exchange a few pleasantries and introductions with the two men in front of me instead. Midway through the conversation, I mention that I ought to go home soon, but a friend walks past and wishes me a happy birthday. One of my new acquaintances walks abruptly toward a flowering dogwood tree, picks a flower from a branch, and comes back to present it to me without a word. I hold it in my hand, shy and elated. The DOGE boys call him a simp.

One thing I and other young women in D.C. have observed since the election is a shift in how young men speak to and appraise us. Passing through conservative mixers, parties and young-professional networks in Trump’s Washington, we’ve increasingly felt like we’re working against an assumption that women are tainted and guilty until proven otherwise. “Among all the young men I’ve met on the right, especially on the far right, I would guess that 10 to 20 percent of them hate all women,” my acquaintance Oliver, someone familiar with these circles, tells me somewhat sarcastically. I share Oliver’s estimate with a twentysomething right-wing influencer. He widens his eyes and laughs, but concedes there’s truth to it. “Look, lots of these guys, they just consider you less reliable if you talk to women. You’re compromised, in a real way.”

I later tell Jake,* the Trump staffer who picked me the flower, about the statistic. He is a former fraternity president and hardly uses X. He looks bewildered. “Where do you find these guys?” He shakes his head. “Whoever they are, they don’t talk to me.” Jake seems to be as-yet uncontaminated by the culture on the right that views women as saboteurs of right-wing ideological purity and hen-pecking nuisances to be avoided. He suggests to me that, as a 27-year-old, he’s already older than the demographic that received their intellectual and social formation online. His romantic imagination was shaped more by fraternity mixers and reading physical books. Jake quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins and Goethe’s Faust, revealing a talent I suspect will bode better for his own fertility than that of the young men studying tweets about female fertility.

The three of us meet again for drinks, and the other young staffer I met on my birthday, James,* offers his own explanation for his peers: “My working thesis is that all of these stupid, these ridiculous rules—they come from a sense of anxiety. People feel very anxious that the normal rules have broken down.” He references not just the disappearance of in-person dating scripts, or our confusion about gender roles, but the widespread anxiety around expressing desire toward women, even verbally approaching women without clear permission, in the wake of #MeToo. “They [young men] think, ‘I have to make my own new rules.’ But people’s new rules are worse. Much worse. Real life has been so eroded” by social media, COVID lockdowns and dating apps “that people are forced to retreat into this kind of categorical thinking. Because opportunities to casually meet people as they actually come, as entire people and not checklists, are no longer available to most people. It’s all first principles. Yeah, right. Like, what’s the ‘first principles’ wife? ‘Doesn’t have too many tattoos.’ ‘I just want a woman who dresses modestly.’ Where are we, fucking Qatar?”

“For most young men, their lives are consumed by thinking about these categories,” he continues, “because real life is degraded for most people, and they can’t exit out of these imagined categories and just meet human beings. Real life is not degraded for me, because I’m relatively good-looking and charming and rich.” He pauses and gives me a smile. “But I can understand it. We’ve outsourced opportunities for normal connection. You go to bars today and it’s literally groups of guys in three and groups of women in three, and none of them talk to each other. That was not how it was fifty years ago. If you’re just a well-meaning young person who is not extraordinary in any way, what are you supposed to do?”

I think of his peers, the young right-wing men at parties around the city, surrounded by young women who share their values. Amid a post-election renaissance of right-wing social life in D.C., they’ve had all summer to pursue opportunities in real life, but the forms of gender-specific discourse that had given them consolation were more gratifying, or familiar, than the opportunity to encounter real and receptive women. Instead, they talked about the abstract women, archetypes they’d read about online, who would always hurt them.

by Mana Afsari, The Point | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. Maybe it's because these guys don't have fully formed personalities and rely too heavily on being told what to think, be, expect by dumb macho podcasters.]

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Why Airlines Are Always Going Bankrupt

How aviation companies (fail to) make a profit

It might not be the most important story in the world right now, as our species takes its first halting steps into a brave new world of technological power whose contours are still to us mysterious and weighted with fearful portent, but lately I’ve been spending a good bit of time reading about the death of Spirit Airlines. Spirit, for those lucky enough to have never flown on one of its planes—I have a few memories of terrible Spirit flights from New York to Miami in my teenage years—is, or rather was, one of the ten or so largest airlines in the United States, and, after its more popular rival Southwest, the most prominent of the budget airlines. (JetBlue is somewhat larger, but can’t be considered a “true” budget airline.) And, for the last few years, Spirit had been hurtling toward insolvency.

Spirit had last turned a profit in 2019; things turned disastrously bad with the COVID pandemic in 2020—as was the case for every other airline—but whereas larger flyers generally recovered, things went from bad to worse for Spirit. Corporate leadership pursued a merger with JetBlue, but this was blocked by a federal judge. And so in November 2024, Spirit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; then it filed again, less than a year later, in August 2025. But these filings did little to save Spirit. There was talk of liquidating the company. The Trump administration raised the prospect of a capital injection that would leave the federal government with a 90 percent stake in the airline (the first time in American history that the federal government has owned a passenger airline outright), but the talks collapsed, and so in early May 2026 Spirit announced that it was shutting down for good.

The collapse of Spirit was unique in that in its death throes it managed to solicit a bailout offer from the U.S. government; but it was not unique among its fellow airlines in going broke. Airlines are a bad business: a really, really bad business. The International Air Transport Association, the trade body of the global airline industry, has documented for years that airlines as a sector destroy investor value in the aggregate. The IATA’s 2026 outlook, looking forward to a quite strong year—this was before the Iran war broke out and oil prices surged—projected an average return on invested capital of 6.8 percent, against a weighted average cost of capital of 8.2 percent. As the IATA’s report said, “the airline industry collectively does not generate earnings that cover its cost of capital.” This has been the case for a long time. From its deregulation in 1978 to the end of 2025, the airline industry has cumulatively lost money: its net profit over those 47 years sits at negative $37 billion.

Given these grim economics, you won’t be surprised to hear that airlines have a bad habit of going insolvent. This includes many of the most famous names in the history of aviation. Pan Am, long the unofficial flag carrier of the United States, ceased operations in 1991; Eastern Air Lines liquidated the same year; TWA, the carrier of Howard Hughes, was absorbed into American Airlines after a third bankruptcy filing in 2001; Braniff died in 1982. And those are only the most famous names; countless aviation startups have come and gone. (Have you ever heard of Trump Shuttle?) Even airlines with the backing of a national government go bankrupt all the time: Alitalia, Italy’s flag carrier, reported only a single year of profit since its founding in 1946 and was saved countless times by the Italian government before ultimately ceasing operations in 2021. Even those airlines that survive for long periods of time are perpetually in financial distress. Between 1978 and 2005, more than 160 airlines filed for bankruptcy; virtually every major U.S. carrier other than Southwest has been to bankruptcy court at least once. In September 2005, every one of the four largest American airlines—United, Delta, Northwest, and US Airways—was operating simultaneously under Chapter 11 protection.

This is very strange. There’s not really a conventional economic explanation for an industry whose long-term equilibrium is losing money: an industry that, on a purely economic level, should not exist. Warren Buffett once called the airline industry a “bottomless pit” for investor capital. “Indeed,” he wrote, “if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.”

So why is the airline business so remarkably bad?

One answer is that airlines are particularly vulnerable to shocks. There are so many potential risks with air travel that practically anything going wrong will have some effect. The September 11th attacks, for example, had a huge effect on air travel; so did the surging oil prices of the 2000s, the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting recession, the 2020 pandemic, and now the volatility in oil prices surrounding the Iran war. Whenever a major shock occurs you tend to see a huge wave of airline bankruptcies.

But airlines obviously aren’t the only type of business in the world that’s vulnerable to shocks. Hotels, for instance, are heavily exposed to recessions, terrorism, and pandemics; their costs are heavily front-loaded into the property, just as an airline’s costs are loaded into the plane; and yet the hotel industry doesn’t go through synchronized waves of bankruptcy each time a shock hits. Shocks might explain why airlines tip over the edge into restructuring or liquidation; but they don’t really explain why they’re so vulnerable in the first place, or why the airline sector—uniquely among all major industries—is unable to generate profit in the aggregate.

And we don’t see the same structural unprofitability in any of the other companies of the aviation ecosystem: engine and avionics manufacturers, for example, do totally fine; so do the service suppliers that sell into airlines.

Maybe, then, the answer is that airlines specifically are just poorly managed. This was the dominant view in the 2000s and 2010s: legacy full-service carriers were chronic money-losers; budget airlines, like Southwest and Ryanair, were much more profitable; and so in the future air travel would bifurcate into budget aviation for the masses and Emirates-style luxury travel for the few. But the budget airlines don’t look so good anymore. Spirit was a flagship budget airline and has now been liquidated; JetBlue and Frontier, two budget or semi-budget competitors, are also at risk of bankruptcy; even Southwest, the most durable and iconic of the low-cost carriers, has been unable to make a profit since the pandemic and is now fending off an activist challenge from the hedge fund Elliott Management. So the budget strategy clearly wasn’t a solution to the airline industry’s problems.

So explanations that cite shocks or bad management either explain too much or too little. If it’s just vulnerability to shocks, why don’t other industries have such huge bankruptcy waves? And if it’s bad management, why has no airline in the long history of aviation figured out a replicable solution to running the business profitably?

I’d like to suggest that the problem with the airline industry is much deeper than people seem to think. Losing money in the aggregate is a feature, not a bug, of a competitive airline industry. The airline sector, for reasons that go into the essential nature of the industry, cannot reach a profitable competitive equilibrium. This is not because airlines are vulnerable to shocks or because they’re poorly managed. The airline industry itself can either be profitable, or it can be competitive: but it can’t really be both.

To understand why, we have to learn a little bit about game theory.

by David Oks, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Mike Kelley from “Life Cycles” series
[ed. Interesting thesis. I'd never have imagined the industry as being systemically unprofitable given ticket prices and all the add-on charges. Or, at least wildly profitable during certain periods to compensate for the occasional downdrafts.]

Ronnie Earl & The Broadcasters

[ed. From Just For Today (full album). Bonus: Song for a Sun:]

Banter

I run into a lot of people who don’t seem to understand what banter is. In my experience, it has exactly two ingredients:

• You call someone out for a transgression that is, in fact, a transgression—something where they are in fact cringe, have in fact lost some points.

• You do so in a context and in a manner where it’s clear that this doesn’t matter, overall—that they are safe, and still “in.” That the loss is small and absorbable and forgettable.

That’s it.

If you (metaphorically or literally) fart while everyone is eating, and nobody mentions it, this can be a certain kind of anxiety-inducing. It’s not clear whether the faux pas was noticed, and by whom; it’s not clear whether it’s being left unmentioned because it’s a really big deal, actually; it’s not clear whether maybe people are going to talk about it later, behind your back, or whether the loss of status is so great that actually this is the last time you’ll be invited, or whether they think that you are so fragile and thin-skinned that they don’t dare to just … acknowledge plain reality.

But if you fart, and everybody groans and calls you the Field-Marshal of Flatulence, and there’s good-natured laughter, and then the conversation moves on to the next target…

What’s happened is that a cap has been put, on how bad it could possibly be. That the group feels safe acknowledging plain reality. They feel like it’s fine. They’re showing, viscerally, that it’s fine. They’re defusing the potential of social land mines by loudly stomping around, laughing and unafraid. They’re not so concerned over the loss of a few points that they’re making A Big Deal Out Of It.

This can go south, in a number of ways. It’s not always easy to distinguish loving banter from contempt; they sort of necessarily use the same words and the same channels.

And if you yourself are not secure in your position within the group—if you’re either genuinely afraid that you don’t have very many points, or if you just kind of happen to be eternally socially anxious, such that you feel threatened by the pointing-out—this can cause you to react loudly to the attempted gentle slug-on-the-shoulder, in a way that demonstrates back to the group that it’s not safe to josh you, actually, and that whole thing can start a spiral away from a starting point that was actually safe (if only you’d known).

But overall, friendships that have had a few fights and then recovered feel more secure than friendships that have only ever been Good Vibes Only. People who’ve made a couple of mistakes and come out of it fine are less terrified of misstepping than people who’ve never gotten anything wrong, in a given context, and don’t know what will happen if they do. One feels less scared of small downturns in the market if one has been investing for a while, and seen the squiggles go up and down, and trusts that they mostly go up in the end.

Banter is your friends’ expression of the sentiment “We see you. We actually see you. We see your flaws, your foibles. We accept you, warts and all. We’re not going to only conspicuously be accepting of your carefully curated best face.” [...]

Banter is your friends telling you “look, yeah, you lost some points, but whatever, you had 9567 and now you have 9548, big deal, nobody cares.”

And that’s a lot more safety-inducing, for most people, than “Whoa, whoa, whoa—you just lost 19 points!? Jesus, you’d better get your shit together, you can’t afford to do that very many times.”...

And it’s a lot more safety-inducing, for most people, than [embarrassing moment] → [radio silence]. Radio silence could mean anything.

by Duncan Sabien, Homo Sabiens |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via