Monday, August 3, 2026
What is It Like to Live in a World You Believe is About to End?
I opened my interviews for this article with a simple question: “How long do we have?”
Five years, or five to 10, or five to 20. One person said eight, then corrected herself to six; one said eight and stuck to it.
“I think that in most timelines, humans will simply be irrelevant and extinct,” one interviewee said.
I heard that a lot. A few interviewees — mostly employed by frontier AI labs — expected the world to become unimaginably strange in a good way. One put a 30% chance on utopia, a 30% chance on dystopia, a 30% chance on extinction, and a 10% chance on something too weird to imagine. Several refused to make any prediction; several more said only that they still had hope. About half echoed one of my most blunt respondents: “I don’t think humanity is going to make it.”
What is it like to live in a world you believe is about to end?
Death was already inevitable
“I was born with a terminal condition,” said Matthew Gray, a board member at the existential risk community-building nonprofit Lightcone Infrastructure. “We call it aging. I’ve since picked up another. We call it multiple sclerosis. And AI is a third one on top. I’m not very worried about degenerating from multiple sclerosis because I’m pretty sure the robots will kill me first, just like I wasn’t that worried about aging-related deterioration because multiple sclerosis will get me first.”
From this perspective, AI doomers don’t face a new problem; they face the oldest problem humanity has ever faced.
I pushed back. If I look at an actuarial table, I can expect another 47 years of life. I’d be pretty upset to discover I had only five.
This, my interviewees thought, was naive. Even without AI risk, I could have been hit by a car; I could have gotten cancer; I could have been nuked in a hot war between Russia and the United States. It’s not that the difference in probability doesn’t matter. It’s worse to be certain that I’ll die in five years than to have a 50% chance of not hitting my allotted 47. But because my death has always been an inevitability, I have been coping all along with the precarity of my existence. From this perspective, AI risk isn’t shocking and unfamiliar; it’s a significantly worse version of a problem I already know I have to deal with.
“I was never guaranteed that I was going to get a long life and a long future and a chance to meet my grandchildren,” said Gretta Duleba, an independent technical AI safety researcher and former communications manager at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. “Those were never my right. Across human history, no one has ever been entitled to the future.”
Throughout the entire scope of human experience, many of my respondents said, apocalypse has been more the rule than the exception: the Holocaust, the Black Death, the An Lushan Rebellion, the Thirty Years’ War. AI doom, as many people pointed out, is the latest and the last iteration of a societal universal. AGI might be the end of the actual entire world, but it is far from the first time people have faced the end of their own individual worlds.
And AI doom is a remarkably cozy catastrophe. If you suffered through a historical apocalypse, you’d expect to starve, be raped, watch your children die in front of you, die a slow and lingering death of smallpox or plague or wound infection. The AI apocalypse — at least for those with the slack to be worried about it — takes place in a world of wealth and relative peace and technological marvels.
“Enjoy the fact that you get to have hot showers,” said Duleba. “Enjoy the fact that you get to eat delicious food. Enjoy the fact that you get to do escape rooms, which is one of my favorite things. This is great. Have you noticed how great this is?”
“There’s at least some hope that AI might become good,” said Robert Herr, a former senior political staffer who is transitioning into AI policy work, “and that is a lot more than many, many billions of people in history had.”
For some people with short AI timelines, the enormity of the AI apocalypse is its own perverse source of comfort. Once, they had to worry about many things: climate change, malaria, factory farming, democratic backsliding, the fertility crisis. Now, instead of many big problems, they have one enormous problem. Worry about AI frees them from having to worry about anything else.
“When you’re diagnosed with prostate cancer,” said Adam Grey, who isn’t involved in AI research but who follows AI news, “a lot of the time doctors say not to bother treating it because you’ll die of something else. This is the thing that’s going to kill us first — us as a civilization and also personally me. It clarifies what the most important issues are.”
Ambiguous loss
Although short AI timelines can be a source of clarity, some people also struggle with the uncertainty of humanity’s fate. Duleba, who was a therapist before she switched to working on AI, told me about the concept of “ambiguous loss,” originally developed by Pauline Boss in the 1970s.
In normal grief, your loved one is dead. While it’s painful, you know that it will never change. Ambiguous grief, however, occurs when a loved one is kidnapped, or is a soldier missing in action, or has slowly worsening dementia with occasional good days farther and farther apart. Your loved one’s death is never really over, so you can never really grieve. You are trapped in a cycle of mourning that never resolves.
AI doom can be a situation of ambiguous loss. You can’t know for sure when it will happen or whether it will happen at all — but the more you understand what’s going on, many people find, the easier it is to grieve and move forward.
“The more I know about something, the less I’m freaked out always,” said Tao Lin, a member of technical staff at a frontier AI lab (and a close personal friend). “The less I know about something, the less I will be rational about it. The rational part of your brain needs information to operate, and just having more information will make you be more premeditated and system 2 about everything.”
When he felt doomy, he did AI forecasting to put concrete numbers on his uncertainty. (He believes there is about a 20% chance of human extinction, a 40% chance of ”a great outcome,” and a 40% chance that “people survive and have a great time, but stuff is broadly bad.”) [...]
Most interviewees emphasized that the most important thing to understand about AI risk was how little control you had over it.
“There’s not much use worrying about a thing if the outcome is determined,” said Alyssa Riceman, a software engineer. “You’re just going to burn a whole bunch of emotional energy not making any changes out in the world. It’s only worth worrying about things if you’re in a position of control over them. So go out and check if you’re in a position of control, and if you are, control them.”
But what if you have partial control over a situation?
“Then you have to game out all the branches,” Riceman said. “Say ‘I can do this. If I do this, what happens then?,’ until everything bottoms out at either a situation you can completely control or a situation that’s out of your control.”
Duncan Sabien, who is the current communications manager for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, agreed. “I actually have no control over whether we succeed or fail,” he said. “All I can control is my own actions. And so if I am doing the best I can with what I know and what I have available to me, then that is the best I can do. I go home feeling like I’m a good person, and I get to go to sleep at night feeling like if the AI does kill us all, I did as much as I could, realistically and sustainably, to prevent it. And everything else is out of my hands. Everything else is always out of my hands.”
Living well in the apocalypse
What, then, do people decide to do?
Five years, or five to 10, or five to 20. One person said eight, then corrected herself to six; one said eight and stuck to it.
In this, they aren’t that far off from many estimates made by experts. The bluntly titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies has hit bestseller lists by warning of the imminent risks of artificial general intelligence (AGI). The scenario AI 2027, written by a former OpenAI employee, predicts AGI within the next few years. The AI company Anthropic consistently predicts AGI by early 2027.
I heard that a lot. A few interviewees — mostly employed by frontier AI labs — expected the world to become unimaginably strange in a good way. One put a 30% chance on utopia, a 30% chance on dystopia, a 30% chance on extinction, and a 10% chance on something too weird to imagine. Several refused to make any prediction; several more said only that they still had hope. About half echoed one of my most blunt respondents: “I don’t think humanity is going to make it.”
What is it like to live in a world you believe is about to end?
Death was already inevitable
“I was born with a terminal condition,” said Matthew Gray, a board member at the existential risk community-building nonprofit Lightcone Infrastructure. “We call it aging. I’ve since picked up another. We call it multiple sclerosis. And AI is a third one on top. I’m not very worried about degenerating from multiple sclerosis because I’m pretty sure the robots will kill me first, just like I wasn’t that worried about aging-related deterioration because multiple sclerosis will get me first.”
From this perspective, AI doomers don’t face a new problem; they face the oldest problem humanity has ever faced.
I pushed back. If I look at an actuarial table, I can expect another 47 years of life. I’d be pretty upset to discover I had only five.
This, my interviewees thought, was naive. Even without AI risk, I could have been hit by a car; I could have gotten cancer; I could have been nuked in a hot war between Russia and the United States. It’s not that the difference in probability doesn’t matter. It’s worse to be certain that I’ll die in five years than to have a 50% chance of not hitting my allotted 47. But because my death has always been an inevitability, I have been coping all along with the precarity of my existence. From this perspective, AI risk isn’t shocking and unfamiliar; it’s a significantly worse version of a problem I already know I have to deal with.
“I was never guaranteed that I was going to get a long life and a long future and a chance to meet my grandchildren,” said Gretta Duleba, an independent technical AI safety researcher and former communications manager at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. “Those were never my right. Across human history, no one has ever been entitled to the future.”
Throughout the entire scope of human experience, many of my respondents said, apocalypse has been more the rule than the exception: the Holocaust, the Black Death, the An Lushan Rebellion, the Thirty Years’ War. AI doom, as many people pointed out, is the latest and the last iteration of a societal universal. AGI might be the end of the actual entire world, but it is far from the first time people have faced the end of their own individual worlds.
And AI doom is a remarkably cozy catastrophe. If you suffered through a historical apocalypse, you’d expect to starve, be raped, watch your children die in front of you, die a slow and lingering death of smallpox or plague or wound infection. The AI apocalypse — at least for those with the slack to be worried about it — takes place in a world of wealth and relative peace and technological marvels.
“Enjoy the fact that you get to have hot showers,” said Duleba. “Enjoy the fact that you get to eat delicious food. Enjoy the fact that you get to do escape rooms, which is one of my favorite things. This is great. Have you noticed how great this is?”
“There’s at least some hope that AI might become good,” said Robert Herr, a former senior political staffer who is transitioning into AI policy work, “and that is a lot more than many, many billions of people in history had.”
For some people with short AI timelines, the enormity of the AI apocalypse is its own perverse source of comfort. Once, they had to worry about many things: climate change, malaria, factory farming, democratic backsliding, the fertility crisis. Now, instead of many big problems, they have one enormous problem. Worry about AI frees them from having to worry about anything else.
“When you’re diagnosed with prostate cancer,” said Adam Grey, who isn’t involved in AI research but who follows AI news, “a lot of the time doctors say not to bother treating it because you’ll die of something else. This is the thing that’s going to kill us first — us as a civilization and also personally me. It clarifies what the most important issues are.”
Ambiguous loss
Although short AI timelines can be a source of clarity, some people also struggle with the uncertainty of humanity’s fate. Duleba, who was a therapist before she switched to working on AI, told me about the concept of “ambiguous loss,” originally developed by Pauline Boss in the 1970s.
In normal grief, your loved one is dead. While it’s painful, you know that it will never change. Ambiguous grief, however, occurs when a loved one is kidnapped, or is a soldier missing in action, or has slowly worsening dementia with occasional good days farther and farther apart. Your loved one’s death is never really over, so you can never really grieve. You are trapped in a cycle of mourning that never resolves.
AI doom can be a situation of ambiguous loss. You can’t know for sure when it will happen or whether it will happen at all — but the more you understand what’s going on, many people find, the easier it is to grieve and move forward.
“The more I know about something, the less I’m freaked out always,” said Tao Lin, a member of technical staff at a frontier AI lab (and a close personal friend). “The less I know about something, the less I will be rational about it. The rational part of your brain needs information to operate, and just having more information will make you be more premeditated and system 2 about everything.”
When he felt doomy, he did AI forecasting to put concrete numbers on his uncertainty. (He believes there is about a 20% chance of human extinction, a 40% chance of ”a great outcome,” and a 40% chance that “people survive and have a great time, but stuff is broadly bad.”) [...]
Most interviewees emphasized that the most important thing to understand about AI risk was how little control you had over it.
“There’s not much use worrying about a thing if the outcome is determined,” said Alyssa Riceman, a software engineer. “You’re just going to burn a whole bunch of emotional energy not making any changes out in the world. It’s only worth worrying about things if you’re in a position of control over them. So go out and check if you’re in a position of control, and if you are, control them.”
But what if you have partial control over a situation?
“Then you have to game out all the branches,” Riceman said. “Say ‘I can do this. If I do this, what happens then?,’ until everything bottoms out at either a situation you can completely control or a situation that’s out of your control.”
Duncan Sabien, who is the current communications manager for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, agreed. “I actually have no control over whether we succeed or fail,” he said. “All I can control is my own actions. And so if I am doing the best I can with what I know and what I have available to me, then that is the best I can do. I go home feeling like I’m a good person, and I get to go to sleep at night feeling like if the AI does kill us all, I did as much as I could, realistically and sustainably, to prevent it. And everything else is out of my hands. Everything else is always out of my hands.”
Living well in the apocalypse
What, then, do people decide to do?
by Ozy Brennan, Asterisk | Read more:
Image: Karol Banach
What Do Consultants Get Paid For?
A consultant I had lunch with recently is redesigning the loyalty program of a large airline. His team finished the analysis in two weeks. Months later the program still does not exist. This is because the purpose of the assignment is not to solve an analytical case study, but to figure out which redesign the parties will accept, and to get the people with authority to commit to implementing it.
I was not surprised to hear the story. In our just-published book Messy Jobs: The Work That AI Cannot Reach, Jin Li, Yanhui Wu, and I argue that a job is not a collection of independent tasks but a bundle of tasks and a position inside an organization. While many of the constituent tasks are clean, the job is messy because they must be combined under incomplete knowledge, conflicting objectives among the different parties and binding constraints on who has the authority to make decisions.
Hence we argue that automating the clean parts does not necessarily eliminate the job, because the remaining activities, tightly bundled with the rest, can remain the constraint. We argue that the bundle is strongest where separating the analytical/cognitive parts that can be automated would destroy local knowledge, trust, accountability or continuity.
Two objections
Critics of our argument raise two concerns. The first one has to do with advances in AI capabilities: models do some tasks extremely well and others badly. As they gain memory, use tools and acquire multimodal perception, critics would say, AI will get better at many other tasks like persuading, anticipating the objections raised in a meeting and adapting the tone. Hence even the interpersonal part by itself may not be a sanctuary for long. Just wait a bit for AI to get better, say the critics: Messy Jobs (in their view) describes the transition rather than the long run.
The second objection to our thesis is more radical. Maybe as long as we have humans in the loop, we need organizations. But if organizations really are a mess, slow, political, resistant to change, with a large role for humans precisely because someone has to hold meetings, build coalitions and learn the internal politics, why not get rid of the entire organization? What is the point of preserving the existing obsolete structures?
We believe that both objections fail, because some of the mess is substantive and necessary.
Where the “implementation” months go
To an outsider, my friend’s consulting project looks purely analytical. The team receives all the data, including all passenger records, redemption rates, customer-retention data, and so on. The team works out the key economic and financial trade-offs of the possible redesigns to figure out which redesign maximizes profits.
If doing this, given all the available data and the current AI tools, took two weeks, why has the project taken many months?
First, inside the airline, different parts of the business worry about different things. For instance, the salespeople have relationships with the hotel chains and do not want to disturb them, while the operations team worries about the staff at the airport counters who will have to deal with angry passengers who have grown used to certain privileges.
Second, there are the outside parties, from hotel chains to credit-card companies to the retailers that accept miles. Anything that improves the airline’s economics may reduce the value of the program to the hotels or to the card issuers. Each has a view on how card spending should count relative to flying, or how hotel nights should count relative to flying. There are winners and losers everywhere, and a reform that benefits the airline as a whole can hurt a particular business unit or a particular partner.
So the consultants spend weeks doing an enormous amount of work that looks peripheral to the problem. They repeatedly meet the head of the loyalty program, then the CFO, then the CEO. They also meet the commercial partners, and that means meeting the head of loyalty, then the finance team, then the chief executive. They revise the proposal. They redo the presentation.
And all of these people speak different languages. Organizations have different internal codes because they care about different things and deal with different problems. What the consultants are doing is a mix of analysis, translation and intermediation. The assignment of the consultants is to design a program that is an agreement that the relevant parties will authorize and implement.
Once the analysis is cheap, what remains is to learn what each party will actually accept, and to obtain commitments from those who are authorized to make them.
The real knowledge problem
An advocate of highly capable AI systems (“AGI-pilled”) would probably say this is a problem ready for AI. Have an agent redesign the program, have it meet the other constituencies, have it come back with a solution.
But what happens in those meetings deserves a closer look. There are four frictions in the room that make the meetings necessary.
by Luis Garicano, Silicon Continent | Read more:
Image: via
Hence we argue that automating the clean parts does not necessarily eliminate the job, because the remaining activities, tightly bundled with the rest, can remain the constraint. We argue that the bundle is strongest where separating the analytical/cognitive parts that can be automated would destroy local knowledge, trust, accountability or continuity.
Two objections
Critics of our argument raise two concerns. The first one has to do with advances in AI capabilities: models do some tasks extremely well and others badly. As they gain memory, use tools and acquire multimodal perception, critics would say, AI will get better at many other tasks like persuading, anticipating the objections raised in a meeting and adapting the tone. Hence even the interpersonal part by itself may not be a sanctuary for long. Just wait a bit for AI to get better, say the critics: Messy Jobs (in their view) describes the transition rather than the long run.
The second objection to our thesis is more radical. Maybe as long as we have humans in the loop, we need organizations. But if organizations really are a mess, slow, political, resistant to change, with a large role for humans precisely because someone has to hold meetings, build coalitions and learn the internal politics, why not get rid of the entire organization? What is the point of preserving the existing obsolete structures?
We believe that both objections fail, because some of the mess is substantive and necessary.
Where the “implementation” months go
To an outsider, my friend’s consulting project looks purely analytical. The team receives all the data, including all passenger records, redemption rates, customer-retention data, and so on. The team works out the key economic and financial trade-offs of the possible redesigns to figure out which redesign maximizes profits.
If doing this, given all the available data and the current AI tools, took two weeks, why has the project taken many months?
First, inside the airline, different parts of the business worry about different things. For instance, the salespeople have relationships with the hotel chains and do not want to disturb them, while the operations team worries about the staff at the airport counters who will have to deal with angry passengers who have grown used to certain privileges.
Second, there are the outside parties, from hotel chains to credit-card companies to the retailers that accept miles. Anything that improves the airline’s economics may reduce the value of the program to the hotels or to the card issuers. Each has a view on how card spending should count relative to flying, or how hotel nights should count relative to flying. There are winners and losers everywhere, and a reform that benefits the airline as a whole can hurt a particular business unit or a particular partner.
So the consultants spend weeks doing an enormous amount of work that looks peripheral to the problem. They repeatedly meet the head of the loyalty program, then the CFO, then the CEO. They also meet the commercial partners, and that means meeting the head of loyalty, then the finance team, then the chief executive. They revise the proposal. They redo the presentation.
And all of these people speak different languages. Organizations have different internal codes because they care about different things and deal with different problems. What the consultants are doing is a mix of analysis, translation and intermediation. The assignment of the consultants is to design a program that is an agreement that the relevant parties will authorize and implement.
Once the analysis is cheap, what remains is to learn what each party will actually accept, and to obtain commitments from those who are authorized to make them.
The real knowledge problem
An advocate of highly capable AI systems (“AGI-pilled”) would probably say this is a problem ready for AI. Have an agent redesign the program, have it meet the other constituencies, have it come back with a solution.
But what happens in those meetings deserves a closer look. There are four frictions in the room that make the meetings necessary.
by Luis Garicano, Silicon Continent | Read more:
Image: via
Shingles Vaccine and Dementia
Image: X
See here: Dementia Risk After Recombinant Herpes Zoster Vaccination in Older Adults With a Recent Skilled-Nursing Facility Stay: A Target Trial Emulation (Annals of Internal Medicine).
Inconvenient Standards
This week the Blue Angels have been over Seattle for Seafair — they practiced Thursday, then have show days above Lake Washington. Hundreds of thousands will look up. So will every naval aviator. The crowd will be watching the jets. The fleet will be watching something else: what became of Pensacola.
Earlier this month, a Blue Angels F/A-18 crossed Pensacola Beach low enough to blast sand over families and send umbrellas tumbling down the shoreline. The team’s instinct was right: It acknowledged the aircraft had flown below standard profiles and promised a safety review against Navy and Federal Aviation Administration rules — rules meant to keep 500 feet between those jets and the people watching them.
Then the review died in public, at the top. Within about a day, the acting secretary of the Navy announced the outcome before there was a process: “No reprimands. No firings. No problem.” The Secretary of Defense turned it into a punchline; the Pentagon’s spokesman posted encouragement. In one news cycle, a safety process became a test of enthusiasm — and every junior officer, plane captain and lance corporal watched it happen.
I gave the Marine Corps 29 years and retired as a sergeant major, which means I spent most of my adult life enforcing standards that somebody, somewhere, found inconvenient. Here is what every noncommissioned officer knows and no news release can replace: A standard is not what the manual says. A standard is what happens the first time it is violated, in front of the formation. Hold the line and the line is real. Shrug, and the shrug becomes the new regulation. This time the formation was the whole internet, and the shrug came with emojis.
And Pensacola was not the first shrug — the third in five months. Eight National Guard aviators, grounded by their own command for buzzing South Carolina beaches, were flying again the morning after the secretary of defense posted about it. Apache crews suspended for hovering over Kid Rock’s Nashville mansion were absolved within a day. Each pardon lowers the real floor — not the one in the manual, the one in the cockpit. Aviators are competitive people. Unpunished showboating is an invitation.
The Navy knows the other road, because this same team once took it. In 2011, a Blue Angels commander flew a maneuver he judged unacceptably low. No one was hurt. Nothing was touched. He grounded the team and gave up command on his own. In 2021, after a training mishap, the Navy tightened the profiles — slower, wider, safer. Those profiles carry weight because this team has buried pilots — Beaufort in 2007, Smyrna in 2016 — and swore each time to learn.
What remains, now that the political layer has walked past the standard: A federal investigation has been reported; it should be completed and published, whatever news cycle it interrupts. Congress funds these teams and owns their oversight; it should ask for the review the Navy was not permitted to finish. Between that cockpit and that social-media account are admirals and captains who know what those profiles are for. The fleet is reading their silence. It could yet read their spine.
Nobody needs the Blue Angels grounded. We need them governed — because precision is the point. Six aircraft holding formation within inches of one another, exactly where they are supposed to be: that is discipline, made visible at 400 knots. An elite team held to its own rules is magnificent. An elite team excused from them is a stunt act with government paint.
Earlier this month, a Blue Angels F/A-18 crossed Pensacola Beach low enough to blast sand over families and send umbrellas tumbling down the shoreline. The team’s instinct was right: It acknowledged the aircraft had flown below standard profiles and promised a safety review against Navy and Federal Aviation Administration rules — rules meant to keep 500 feet between those jets and the people watching them.
I gave the Marine Corps 29 years and retired as a sergeant major, which means I spent most of my adult life enforcing standards that somebody, somewhere, found inconvenient. Here is what every noncommissioned officer knows and no news release can replace: A standard is not what the manual says. A standard is what happens the first time it is violated, in front of the formation. Hold the line and the line is real. Shrug, and the shrug becomes the new regulation. This time the formation was the whole internet, and the shrug came with emojis.
And Pensacola was not the first shrug — the third in five months. Eight National Guard aviators, grounded by their own command for buzzing South Carolina beaches, were flying again the morning after the secretary of defense posted about it. Apache crews suspended for hovering over Kid Rock’s Nashville mansion were absolved within a day. Each pardon lowers the real floor — not the one in the manual, the one in the cockpit. Aviators are competitive people. Unpunished showboating is an invitation.
The Navy knows the other road, because this same team once took it. In 2011, a Blue Angels commander flew a maneuver he judged unacceptably low. No one was hurt. Nothing was touched. He grounded the team and gave up command on his own. In 2021, after a training mishap, the Navy tightened the profiles — slower, wider, safer. Those profiles carry weight because this team has buried pilots — Beaufort in 2007, Smyrna in 2016 — and swore each time to learn.
What remains, now that the political layer has walked past the standard: A federal investigation has been reported; it should be completed and published, whatever news cycle it interrupts. Congress funds these teams and owns their oversight; it should ask for the review the Navy was not permitted to finish. Between that cockpit and that social-media account are admirals and captains who know what those profiles are for. The fleet is reading their silence. It could yet read their spine.
Nobody needs the Blue Angels grounded. We need them governed — because precision is the point. Six aircraft holding formation within inches of one another, exactly where they are supposed to be: that is discipline, made visible at 400 knots. An elite team held to its own rules is magnificent. An elite team excused from them is a stunt act with government paint.
by William R. McDonald, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Kevin Clark / The Seattle Times
Sunday, August 2, 2026
Frank Zappa: The MTV Interview
[ed. Man, I still miss the guy. I wish we had politicians this intelligent, direct and honest. Actually, not just politicians, everybody. Had a good laugh around 12:20, after he got done talking about John and Yoko stealing one of his songs.]
Salmon Sushi: Not a Japanese Tradition
Somewhere in Tokyo in the mid-1980s, a Norwegian marketing strategist stood in front of a room of Japanese seafood executives, served them raw salmon, and watched the room politely fall apart. The colour was wrong, they told him. Its smell, they said, had a river-like quality. Someone objected to the shape of the fish’s head.
I think about that meeting every time I sit at a conveyor belt and watch the orange slabs go past. Salmon nigiri has the settled look of something that was always there, parked next to the tuna and looking as venerable as a prawn tempura. It has been on Japanese menus for about thirty years.
What Japan actually ate before
Japanese cooks have used salmon for centuries. They grilled it, salted it, flaked it into rice balls and packed it into lunchboxes. Nippon.com describes grilled salmon and salmon flakes as fixtures of home cooking, with a hard line drawn between that cooked fare and anything sliced raw. The domestic workhorse was chum salmon: lean, firm, nobody’s idea of sashimi.
So the fish was there. The appetite for raw fish was very obviously there. Those two facts never met.
The parasite question, answered properly
There was a real reason for the line, and fussiness was not it.
Wild Pacific salmon carry Anisakis simplex, a nematode larva that causes a thoroughly miserable illness called anisakiasis if you swallow it alive. Heat kills it. Deep freezing kills it. Slicing the fish fresh and eating it does not, which is why generations of Japanese cooks treated raw salmon as a hazard to be cooked out.
Farmed Atlantic salmon raised on heat-treated pellets is a different animal. The Norwegian Food Safety Authority exempts farmed salmon and rainbow trout from the freezing rule that otherwise applies to fish destined to be eaten raw, on the grounds that the fish eat nothing but dry feed containing no viable parasites and barely graze on wild organisms in the pen. That exemption tracks a 2010 European Food Safety Authority opinion and its 2024 re-evaluation.
A survey published in the Italian Journal of Food Safety put numbers on it: 270 slices of smoked farmed Atlantic salmon examined, zero anisakids found, against ten positives out of thirteen slices of wild sockeye. One paper on one processed product, not a settled literature, but it points the same way the regulators do.
Norway had too much fish
Norway started farming salmon commercially in the 1970s, then watched its own population drift towards chicken and red meat.
Freezers filled up.
The Norwegian Seafood Council, which has every commercial reason to tell this story well, dates the campaign to 1985, when a delegation led by former fisheries minister Thor Listau flew to Tokyo. Their figures: two tonnes of Norwegian salmon went to Japan in 1980, and twenty years later the annual number was above 45,000 tonnes.
Underneath all of it sat one piece of arithmetic. Fish sold for the grill competes on price with every other cheap protein, while fish accepted for sashimi could fetch up to ten times more, as Bjørn Eirik Olsen, who ran market research for the project, later told The Japan Times.
A name change, then a decade of nothing
“We couldn’t just say that our fish doesn’t have parasites,” Olsen said in that interview. Walking into a foreign industry and announcing that its national fish is wormy tends to close doors rather than open them.
So he went after the word instead. The Japanese for salmon is sake, and sake carried every association he was trying to escape: grilled, salted, cheap, the thing in the lunchbox. Olsen borrowed the English word and pushed the katakana sāmon, the term still stamped on essentially every sushi menu in the country. Same animal, different shelf.
Then came the advertising, all clean fjords and clear arctic water, and it achieved almost nothing for years. Olsen told NPR that pressure from home to abandon the sushi idea and dump the stock into the grill market was relentless.
The deal that broke it open
In 1992, Olsen offered the frozen food giant Nichirei 5,000 tonnes of salmon at close to giveaway prices, with one condition written into it: the fish could only be sold as sushi. Nichirei said yes.
That was the crack in the wall. Through the 1990s, Iron Chef and celebrity chefs including Yutaka Ishinabe put Norwegian salmon onto national television, and appetite did the rest. Olsen has said he knew the campaign had landed when he started noticing plastic salmon nigiri in restaurant window displays.
Where salmon sits now
Salmon has topped Japan’s biggest conveyor-belt sushi survey for fifteen consecutive years. In the 2026 round, run by Umios (the company known as Maruha Nichiro until March), 47.7 per cent of respondents named it as the topping they eat most often, more than eleven points clear of lean tuna in second place. The split runs along age lines: older diners tend to open with lean white fish and work up to tuna, while younger ones go straight for the orange.
I think about that meeting every time I sit at a conveyor belt and watch the orange slabs go past. Salmon nigiri has the settled look of something that was always there, parked next to the tuna and looking as venerable as a prawn tempura. It has been on Japanese menus for about thirty years.
What Japan actually ate before
So the fish was there. The appetite for raw fish was very obviously there. Those two facts never met.
The parasite question, answered properly
There was a real reason for the line, and fussiness was not it.
Wild Pacific salmon carry Anisakis simplex, a nematode larva that causes a thoroughly miserable illness called anisakiasis if you swallow it alive. Heat kills it. Deep freezing kills it. Slicing the fish fresh and eating it does not, which is why generations of Japanese cooks treated raw salmon as a hazard to be cooked out.
Farmed Atlantic salmon raised on heat-treated pellets is a different animal. The Norwegian Food Safety Authority exempts farmed salmon and rainbow trout from the freezing rule that otherwise applies to fish destined to be eaten raw, on the grounds that the fish eat nothing but dry feed containing no viable parasites and barely graze on wild organisms in the pen. That exemption tracks a 2010 European Food Safety Authority opinion and its 2024 re-evaluation.
A survey published in the Italian Journal of Food Safety put numbers on it: 270 slices of smoked farmed Atlantic salmon examined, zero anisakids found, against ten positives out of thirteen slices of wild sockeye. One paper on one processed product, not a settled literature, but it points the same way the regulators do.
Norway had too much fish
Norway started farming salmon commercially in the 1970s, then watched its own population drift towards chicken and red meat.
Freezers filled up.
The Norwegian Seafood Council, which has every commercial reason to tell this story well, dates the campaign to 1985, when a delegation led by former fisheries minister Thor Listau flew to Tokyo. Their figures: two tonnes of Norwegian salmon went to Japan in 1980, and twenty years later the annual number was above 45,000 tonnes.
Underneath all of it sat one piece of arithmetic. Fish sold for the grill competes on price with every other cheap protein, while fish accepted for sashimi could fetch up to ten times more, as Bjørn Eirik Olsen, who ran market research for the project, later told The Japan Times.
A name change, then a decade of nothing
“We couldn’t just say that our fish doesn’t have parasites,” Olsen said in that interview. Walking into a foreign industry and announcing that its national fish is wormy tends to close doors rather than open them.
So he went after the word instead. The Japanese for salmon is sake, and sake carried every association he was trying to escape: grilled, salted, cheap, the thing in the lunchbox. Olsen borrowed the English word and pushed the katakana sāmon, the term still stamped on essentially every sushi menu in the country. Same animal, different shelf.
Then came the advertising, all clean fjords and clear arctic water, and it achieved almost nothing for years. Olsen told NPR that pressure from home to abandon the sushi idea and dump the stock into the grill market was relentless.
The deal that broke it open
In 1992, Olsen offered the frozen food giant Nichirei 5,000 tonnes of salmon at close to giveaway prices, with one condition written into it: the fish could only be sold as sushi. Nichirei said yes.
That was the crack in the wall. Through the 1990s, Iron Chef and celebrity chefs including Yutaka Ishinabe put Norwegian salmon onto national television, and appetite did the rest. Olsen has said he knew the campaign had landed when he started noticing plastic salmon nigiri in restaurant window displays.
Where salmon sits now
Salmon has topped Japan’s biggest conveyor-belt sushi survey for fifteen consecutive years. In the 2026 round, run by Umios (the company known as Maruha Nichiro until March), 47.7 per cent of respondents named it as the topping they eat most often, more than eleven points clear of lean tuna in second place. The split runs along age lines: older diners tend to open with lean white fish and work up to tuna, while younger ones go straight for the orange.
by Daniel Moran, Space Daily | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Not many people know this but there are actually six species of Pacific salmon (not five), including the cherry salmon (Oncorhynchus masou) in Japan.]
Feds Implement Temporary Water Sharing Agreement in Western States
Arizona, California and Nevada will be required to curb their use of the water from the Colorado River by about 20 percent over the next two years — and could ultimately face even larger cuts — according to three officials familiar with negotiations over a long-awaited federal plan to rescue the depleted river.
The plan, part of which the Bureau of Reclamation is expected to describe in an Environmental Impact Statement on Friday, comes at a time of escalating crisis for the Colorado, a crucial water source for seven states, 30 Native tribes and a swath of northwestern Mexico. But experts say it will not be sufficient to resolve a political standoff among the river’s many users or prevent the beleaguered waterway from teetering toward collapse.
The cuts proposed for the next two years resemble what the three states offered in a proposal this spring, and represent the first phase of a broader 10-year framework for operating the river’s dams and reservoirs, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations.
That framework is expected to call for operating plans to be developed every two years and outline a wide range of possible measures those plans could include — including reducing the amount of water released to the Lower Basin by as much as 40 percent.
The framework is not expected to consider mandatory cuts to water use from the four states in the upper part of the basin: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Arizona, California and Nevada make up the Lower Basin. [...]
The current operating rules, which expire at the end of September, have not prevented chronic overuse of the river amid a decades-long drought worsened by climate change.
After a historically meager winter snowfall and a scorching spring, the amount of water flowing into the river this year is less than a quarter of average annual demand, and levels in its major reservoirs have dropped to record lows. Scientists warn that one or two more dry years could crash the entire system, disrupting hydropower production, drinking water supplies and irrigation for some 5 million acres of farmland. [...]
The likely operating plan for 2027 and 2028, based on a May proposal from the Lower Basin states, is projected to save about 3.2 million acre feet of water — enough to fill roughly 1.5 million Olympic swimming pools. The plan will require significant “belt tightening,” particularly in Arizona, according to Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, but states have indicated they can tolerate the reductions.
Yet those measures are only half of what studies suggest is needed to bring water demand in line with the dwindling supply, Porter cautioned, increasing the likelihood of even steeper cuts down the road. [...]
The 330-mile system of canals and aqueducts, which supplies water to the most populated parts of Arizona, is poised to see the biggest cut in its history under the bureau’s operating plan for the next two years. If the agency chooses to implement some of the deeper reductions considered in the 10-year framework, CAP’s entire water allocation could be wiped out. [...]
Experts say the rising tensions on the river result from a chaotic combination of bad weather, poor planning, intransigent state officials and federal missteps under the Trump and Biden administrations.
At the heart of the conflict is an impasse between the Upper and Lower Basin states over who should shoulder the burden of necessary cuts.
In the Upper Basin, home to the snowcapped mountains and winding tributaries that feed the river, there are few reservoirs to provide long-term water storage, leaving users reliant on natural flows. That means the Upper Basin takes an automatic cut during dry years, officials argue. They say responsibility for restoring water to Lakes Powell and Mead should fall on the Lower Basin states that use them.
Yet about three-quarters of the people who depend on the Colorado live in the Lower Basin. The region is also home to major cities and sprawling farms that provide most of the nation’s winter vegetable supply. Officials from these states say they have already curbed their water consumption by millions of acre feet in recent years. Overuse of the river is universal, they argue, and so too is responsibility for saving it.
The situation is complicated by the arcane legal framework governing the river, which prioritizes users chronologically. Without agreements among the states, major cuts would fall entirely on junior users, including huge cities such as Phoenix and Tucson, before more senior rights-holders such as the farmers in California’s Imperial Valley see any reductions.
Last summer, it looked like states might agree on a new method of apportioning the river based on actual flow, rather than historical averages and legal agreements. But those negotiations broke down over familiar disagreements about who should be subjected to mandatory cuts. [...]
Brad Udall, a climate scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center, describes the tensions over the river as a “big collision of 19th-century water law, 20th-century infrastructure and 21st-century climate change and population growth.”
The Colorado has almost never contained enough water to satisfy everyone who has legal rights to it, Udall said, and human-caused warming has made the situation even worse. Since 2000, high temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns linked to climate change have diminished the amount of water flowing through the river by about 20 percent, compared to the 20th-century average.
The deficits have forced repeated negotiations over how to manage shortages. Past deals have helped curb consumption somewhat, but they were never stringent enough to reverse the inexorable decline of reservoirs that are intended to provide a buffer during bad years.
Lake Mead, the site of the Hoover Dam, is mere inches from its lowest level on record. A few hundred miles upstream, Lake Powell is approaching the point at which water can no longer flow through the turbines of the Glen Canyon Dam. That raises the risk of a phenomenon called cavitation, in which air bubbles form then implode in fast-moving water, releasing energy that can damage the dam itself.
“The reservoirs are depleted so low they’re really at the end of their capability,” Castle said. “We’re in such a precarious situation.”
[ed. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Friday unveiled the framework that will guide operations on the Colorado River through 2036. See also: Lake Powell's Dying Days (CCG):]
The Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — will get $100 million in conservation funding. But unlike their downstream neighbors, they won’t face mandatory water cuts. However much water they end up saving, that will be good enough. [...]
If Powell’s water levels sink much lower, water won’t be able to pass through the dam’s hydropower turbines, which generate cheap electricity for communities across the West. That wouldn’t be a “dead pool” situation; water could still flow downstream to the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead through bypass tubes lower in the dam. But the bypass tubes are surprisingly frail and could break with sustained use.
Translation: We are frighteningly close to “de facto dead pool.” That’s why the Trump administration is ordering everyone to use less water.
Well, not everyone. California, Arizona and Nevada are willing to cut back dramatically, and federal officials seem happy to make them do it. The Upper Basin states — the ones upstream of Lake Powell — say they shouldn’t have to commit to mandatory reductions, in part because they already consume a lot less.
In a New York Times opinion piece earlier this year, I argued that the Upper Basin states need to do more. Podmore agreed.
“It’s a tricky situation, because the Lower Basin has always used more water, and that’s a convenient argument for the Upper Basin,” he said. “But also, there’s more people in the Lower Basin. And the most productive agricultural land that’s irrigated with Colorado River water is located in the Lower Basin.”
“Even with the cuts that the Lower Basin has offered, we still have a long way to go to balance the water budget,” he added. “Everyone needs to pitch in.”
[ed. But not everyone is agreeing to pitch in: California’s Biggest AI Data Center Is Suing for Colorado River Water (Yahoo News):]
The Farm-to-Cloud Gambit
IVCM's legal strategy treats 160 acres of fallowed farmland as a water entitlement for a nearly million-square-foot AI campus.
The developer's playbook relies on a tactic called "buy and dry" — purchasing irrigated farmland, retiring it from production, then claiming its water allocation for industrial use.
The plan, part of which the Bureau of Reclamation is expected to describe in an Environmental Impact Statement on Friday, comes at a time of escalating crisis for the Colorado, a crucial water source for seven states, 30 Native tribes and a swath of northwestern Mexico. But experts say it will not be sufficient to resolve a political standoff among the river’s many users or prevent the beleaguered waterway from teetering toward collapse.
That framework is expected to call for operating plans to be developed every two years and outline a wide range of possible measures those plans could include — including reducing the amount of water released to the Lower Basin by as much as 40 percent.
The framework is not expected to consider mandatory cuts to water use from the four states in the upper part of the basin: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Arizona, California and Nevada make up the Lower Basin. [...]
The current operating rules, which expire at the end of September, have not prevented chronic overuse of the river amid a decades-long drought worsened by climate change.
After a historically meager winter snowfall and a scorching spring, the amount of water flowing into the river this year is less than a quarter of average annual demand, and levels in its major reservoirs have dropped to record lows. Scientists warn that one or two more dry years could crash the entire system, disrupting hydropower production, drinking water supplies and irrigation for some 5 million acres of farmland. [...]
The likely operating plan for 2027 and 2028, based on a May proposal from the Lower Basin states, is projected to save about 3.2 million acre feet of water — enough to fill roughly 1.5 million Olympic swimming pools. The plan will require significant “belt tightening,” particularly in Arizona, according to Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, but states have indicated they can tolerate the reductions.
Yet those measures are only half of what studies suggest is needed to bring water demand in line with the dwindling supply, Porter cautioned, increasing the likelihood of even steeper cuts down the road. [...]
The 330-mile system of canals and aqueducts, which supplies water to the most populated parts of Arizona, is poised to see the biggest cut in its history under the bureau’s operating plan for the next two years. If the agency chooses to implement some of the deeper reductions considered in the 10-year framework, CAP’s entire water allocation could be wiped out. [...]
Fraught negotiations
Experts say the rising tensions on the river result from a chaotic combination of bad weather, poor planning, intransigent state officials and federal missteps under the Trump and Biden administrations.
At the heart of the conflict is an impasse between the Upper and Lower Basin states over who should shoulder the burden of necessary cuts.
In the Upper Basin, home to the snowcapped mountains and winding tributaries that feed the river, there are few reservoirs to provide long-term water storage, leaving users reliant on natural flows. That means the Upper Basin takes an automatic cut during dry years, officials argue. They say responsibility for restoring water to Lakes Powell and Mead should fall on the Lower Basin states that use them.
Yet about three-quarters of the people who depend on the Colorado live in the Lower Basin. The region is also home to major cities and sprawling farms that provide most of the nation’s winter vegetable supply. Officials from these states say they have already curbed their water consumption by millions of acre feet in recent years. Overuse of the river is universal, they argue, and so too is responsibility for saving it.
The situation is complicated by the arcane legal framework governing the river, which prioritizes users chronologically. Without agreements among the states, major cuts would fall entirely on junior users, including huge cities such as Phoenix and Tucson, before more senior rights-holders such as the farmers in California’s Imperial Valley see any reductions.
Last summer, it looked like states might agree on a new method of apportioning the river based on actual flow, rather than historical averages and legal agreements. But those negotiations broke down over familiar disagreements about who should be subjected to mandatory cuts. [...]
A vanishing river
Brad Udall, a climate scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center, describes the tensions over the river as a “big collision of 19th-century water law, 20th-century infrastructure and 21st-century climate change and population growth.”
The Colorado has almost never contained enough water to satisfy everyone who has legal rights to it, Udall said, and human-caused warming has made the situation even worse. Since 2000, high temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns linked to climate change have diminished the amount of water flowing through the river by about 20 percent, compared to the 20th-century average.
The deficits have forced repeated negotiations over how to manage shortages. Past deals have helped curb consumption somewhat, but they were never stringent enough to reverse the inexorable decline of reservoirs that are intended to provide a buffer during bad years.
Lake Mead, the site of the Hoover Dam, is mere inches from its lowest level on record. A few hundred miles upstream, Lake Powell is approaching the point at which water can no longer flow through the turbines of the Glen Canyon Dam. That raises the risk of a phenomenon called cavitation, in which air bubbles form then implode in fast-moving water, releasing energy that can damage the dam itself.
“The reservoirs are depleted so low they’re really at the end of their capability,” Castle said. “We’re in such a precarious situation.”
by Sarah Caplan, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Caroline Brehman/Reuters[ed. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Friday unveiled the framework that will guide operations on the Colorado River through 2036. See also: Lake Powell's Dying Days (CCG):]
***
The L.A. Times’ Ian James reported that Trump’s Interior Department would accept a proposal submitted by California, Arizona and Nevada — the Lower Basin states — to slash their water use by 12%, 31% and 28%, respectively, through 2028. They’ll receive $350 million from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to support water conservation.The Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — will get $100 million in conservation funding. But unlike their downstream neighbors, they won’t face mandatory water cuts. However much water they end up saving, that will be good enough. [...]
If Powell’s water levels sink much lower, water won’t be able to pass through the dam’s hydropower turbines, which generate cheap electricity for communities across the West. That wouldn’t be a “dead pool” situation; water could still flow downstream to the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead through bypass tubes lower in the dam. But the bypass tubes are surprisingly frail and could break with sustained use.
Translation: We are frighteningly close to “de facto dead pool.” That’s why the Trump administration is ordering everyone to use less water.
Well, not everyone. California, Arizona and Nevada are willing to cut back dramatically, and federal officials seem happy to make them do it. The Upper Basin states — the ones upstream of Lake Powell — say they shouldn’t have to commit to mandatory reductions, in part because they already consume a lot less.
In a New York Times opinion piece earlier this year, I argued that the Upper Basin states need to do more. Podmore agreed.
“It’s a tricky situation, because the Lower Basin has always used more water, and that’s a convenient argument for the Upper Basin,” he said. “But also, there’s more people in the Lower Basin. And the most productive agricultural land that’s irrigated with Colorado River water is located in the Lower Basin.”
“Even with the cuts that the Lower Basin has offered, we still have a long way to go to balance the water budget,” he added. “Everyone needs to pitch in.”
***
The developer behind California's biggest planned AI data center publicly swore it would never touch Colorado River water. It would run on recycled wastewater — clean, virtuous, zero environmental impact. That pledge held right up until the cities of Imperial and El Centro said no thanks. Now Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing (IVCM) has sued the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) for access to the very river it promised to leave alone. The facility would sit in a desert valley where 180,000 people share exactly one freshwater source.The Farm-to-Cloud Gambit
IVCM's legal strategy treats 160 acres of fallowed farmland as a water entitlement for a nearly million-square-foot AI campus.
The developer's playbook relies on a tactic called "buy and dry" — purchasing irrigated farmland, retiring it from production, then claiming its water allocation for industrial use.
China Now Uses 80% Artificial Sand
The world is running out of sand.
About 50 billion tons of sand and gravel are extracted annually, most of which is used for construction activities. This is a problem for two reasons. First of all, it’s not sustainable. Secondly, if we continue to extract sand at this rate, it will end up causing irreversible damage to the environment.
For instance, loss of sand from oceans, rivers, and beaches can lead to excessive flooding and degradation of marine ecosystems. It threatens coastal communities, and infrastructure. Plus, sand mining near aquifers can lower water tables, affecting water availability for humans, land animals, and agriculture.
And no, you can’t just use sand from the desert. Desert sands are typically rounded and smooth, which makes them less effective for construction purposes. For concrete, the rougher texture of river or beach sand is essential as it helps bind the materials together. Desert sand, with its finer and more uniform grains, lacks the necessary angularity to bond effectively with cement.
The study authors developed a monitoring system that allowed them to examine the sand use pattern in China from 1995 to 2020. Their analysis revealed many surprising facts. For example, the Chinese have been producing artificial sand since the early 2000s, but it became popular in 2010.
2010 was also the year when the supply of natural sand in China reached its highest level. However, the next year’s supply of manufactured sand overtook that of natural sand, becoming the primary sand type used for construction activities.
In the following years, production of artificial sand continued to increase by 13 percent annually. In 2020, the use of natural sand reduced to the extent that it accounted for only 21 percent of the total sand supply, witnessing an 80 percent decline compared to 2010.
About 50 billion tons of sand and gravel are extracted annually, most of which is used for construction activities. This is a problem for two reasons. First of all, it’s not sustainable. Secondly, if we continue to extract sand at this rate, it will end up causing irreversible damage to the environment.
And no, you can’t just use sand from the desert. Desert sands are typically rounded and smooth, which makes them less effective for construction purposes. For concrete, the rougher texture of river or beach sand is essential as it helps bind the materials together. Desert sand, with its finer and more uniform grains, lacks the necessary angularity to bond effectively with cement.
“The issue of sand comes as a surprise to many, but it shouldn’t. We cannot extract 50 billion tonnes per year of any material without leading to massive impacts on the planet and thus on people’s lives.” Pascal Peduzzi, a researcher at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), told BBC.A 2024 study suggests China may have found a solution to the sand mining problem. The Chinese have been using artificial sand made by crushing rocks and leftover materials from mining for many of their construction projects. This simple technique has allowed them to drastically reduce their dependence on natural sand without slowing down their massive construction projects. [...]
The study authors developed a monitoring system that allowed them to examine the sand use pattern in China from 1995 to 2020. Their analysis revealed many surprising facts. For example, the Chinese have been producing artificial sand since the early 2000s, but it became popular in 2010.
2010 was also the year when the supply of natural sand in China reached its highest level. However, the next year’s supply of manufactured sand overtook that of natural sand, becoming the primary sand type used for construction activities.
In the following years, production of artificial sand continued to increase by 13 percent annually. In 2020, the use of natural sand reduced to the extent that it accounted for only 21 percent of the total sand supply, witnessing an 80 percent decline compared to 2010.
“China’s overall sand supply surged by approximately 400% over the study period, yet the proportion of natural sand dropped from ≈80% to ≈21% due to the increasing use of manufactured sand,” the study authors note.by Rupendra Brahambhatt, ZME Science | Read more:
“The percentage of manufactured sand in the Chinese market could now be close to 90 percent. The shift from natural sand to manufactured sand is a miracle for a country that has completed such massive infrastructure construction,” Song Shaomin, a professor at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, told SCMP.
Image: Nathan Cowley/Pexels
Surfing the Bore Tide
Image: Kerry Tasker
[ed. Not new but apparently increasing in popularity.]
Will Larry Ellison Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?
[ed. Don't miss this one. It's got everything (and could easily be a Pulitzer contender).]
For Ellison, it was the capstone of a mad two-year scramble to transform Oracle into an A.I. juggernaut. The effort began in late 2022 when the launch of ChatGPT stunned the world and set in motion a race to master and control the most transformative new technology since the birth of the internet. Ellison, a founding father of Silicon Valley and the last of his generation still in the game, was desperate to avoid getting left behind. He’d moved quickly and aggressively — some might even say recklessly — to turn Oracle into a “hyperscaler,” one of the handful of companies providing the critical infrastructure that would power the A.I. boom. [...]
ChatGPT landed very differently in Washington than it did in Silicon Valley, setting off a scramble of its own inside the Biden administration to regulate the development of A.I. To oversee his A.I. policy, Biden turned to a veteran Democratic policy adviser, Bruce Reed, who believed that the administration needed to be proactive. A year after ChatGPT’s debut, in late 2023, Biden signed a comprehensive executive order on A.I., seeking to define the government’s role in the future of this new technology.
For the Biden administration, artificial intelligence was by no means just a domestic economic issue. Countries around the world were all racing to develop their own A.I. infrastructure and technology, and global power and influence would flow to whoever got there first. From this perspective, A.I. data centers were less businesses than geopolitical assets.
The administration was especially concerned about the A.I. ambitions of China and the Persian Gulf, given the powerful role artificial intelligence was likely to play in reshaping the information ecosystem. [...]
The administration’s concerns and Ellison’s ambitions were on a collision course. China and the Gulf were both critical to Ellison’s A.I. plans. Oracle already had a lot of contracts around the Gulf, and it also had a strong business relationship with one of China’s most important A.I. companies, ByteDance. Oracle was the U.S. cloud provider for the U.S. division of ByteDance’s TikTok, storing and securing the data of the app’s 100 million American users. But with ByteDance itself now pivoting into generative A.I., they had the opportunity to do more business together. In the summer of 2024, Oracle started working on a $6.5 billion deal to build a large data center complex in Malaysia, from which it could convey computing power to ByteDance and other foreign companies through opaque leasing deals.
In early 2024, the administration started working with Congress on a bipartisan bill — the Protecting Americans’ Data From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — that would force ByteDance to divest its U.S. TikTok operations. Biden signed the bill into law in April 2024, setting a deadline of Jan. 19, 2025, for a sale. If ByteDance failed to meet the deadline, the app would be shut down in the United States.
At the same time, the administration was preparing to shore up its efforts to restrict China’s access to American computing power and to exert more control over the Gulf’s. In late 2024, it circulated the draft of a plan to require hyperscalers to go through a licensing process to operate overseas and to keep 50 percent of their computing power in America.
All of the hyperscalers were looking to build overseas, but Oracle had the most to lose: Its global plans were the most ambitious, at least relative to its size. The company publicly and aggressively opposed the Biden plan. Its top policy executive in Washington, Ken Glueck, called it “one of the most destructive” moves ever taken against the tech industry, arguing that the best way to solidify America’s lead in the artificial intelligence race was for U.S. companies to build and control as much of the world’s A.I. infrastructure as possible.
Biden signed off on the new policy in the final days of his presidency. It was scheduled to go into effect in May 2025. If enacted, it could force Oracle to scale back its ambitions in Malaysia and the Gulf. Ellison’s plan to transform Oracle was in trouble. But a new president was on his way to Washington.
‘The Tsunami’
Relief came almost immediately. Hours after his inauguration in January 2025, Trump sat down at the Resolute Desk and began signing executive orders aimed at dismantling Biden’s A.I. policies. He also signed an order directing his attorney general to hold off on enforcing the congressionally mandated TikTok ban for 75 days. And then, of course, came the Project Stargate announcement with Ellison and Altman.
Trump turned to a very different group of people to shape his new administration’s approach to artificial intelligence. He named as his A.I. and cryptocurrency czar David Sacks, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who had raised many millions for the Trump campaign and, according to a New York Times investigation, was personally invested in at least 449 companies with ties to artificial intelligence. Sacks, who has denied any conflict of interest, believed that when it came to A.I., the government’s job was to get out of the way.
The National Security Council’s technology and national security division had played a key role in shaping America’s A.I. policy in the Biden years. Trump initially appointed David Feith — who had serious concerns about China’s ability to remotely access computing power through Malaysia and other Southeast Asian nations — to run it. But in April, he fired Feith and a few other China hawks and then eliminated the entire directorate. [...]
Trump saw another benefit to withdrawing the Biden plan: The Gulf states were adamantly opposed to it. They needed U.S. computing power to build out their own A.I. infrastructures and had something to offer in return. Their sovereign wealth funds were sitting on trillions of dollars that they were ready to invest in all sorts of American companies, including some connected to the Trump family.
Two weeks before the Biden policy was scheduled to go into effect, Zach Witkoff — son of the Trump adviser Steven Witkoff and chief executive of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm World Liberty Financial — made an announcement at a conference in Dubai: The Emiratis would use $2 billion of the firm’s brand-new stablecoin for an investment in Binance, a crypto exchange. Less than two weeks later — 48 hours before the Biden restrictions would kick in — Trump rescinded the policy.
That same day, Trump landed in Saudi Arabia, the first stop on a three-day tour of the Gulf. He was joined in the United Arab Emirates by Altman to announce Stargate U.A.E., a multibillion-dollar initiative to build one of the world’s largest data centers outside Abu Dhabi. Oracle would be a partner, too.
With the Biden plan dead, Oracle was free to operate its data center complex in Malaysia as it saw fit. By the end of June, the facility was on track to become the second-biggest in the world. Oracle doesn’t release the names of its customers there, but by studying its output, an independent A.I. research firm, SemiAnalysis, determined that the facility was feeding most of its computing power to ByteDance. An analyst at the tech-focused think tank ChinaTalk, Aqib F. Zakaria, ran his own numbers and arrived at a startling conclusion: Oracle was providing a staggering 22.6 percent of China’s known A.I. computing power.
by Jonathan Mahler, Jim Rutenberg and Kirsten Grind, NY Times | Read more:
[ed. Not to be redundant but this came out shortly after I'd posted about Oracle (and Larry Ellison) below in The Hater's Guide to Oracle (Part 2). It contains a treasure trove of new information and a road map to how business and politics intersect in Washington and around the world these days. Well worth a read.]
Saturday, August 1, 2026
Astronauts Returning From Six-Month Missions Describe a Persistent 'Observer' Sensation
Astronauts coming home from long stays on the International Space Station have, for years, described a strange perceptual aftertaste: a sense of watching their own lives from a half-step outside the frame. They sit at dinner with family and feel like a guest. They drive on a familiar street and feel like they’re piloting it. The room is loud and they are in it, but a part of them is hovering near the ceiling, taking notes.
The descriptions are remarkably consistent across agencies. Crew members talk about feeling slightly delayed in conversations. They report a doubled awareness — being present while also watching themselves be present. Some say it feels like the first week of a new job that never quite ends. Others compare it to jet lag of the self.
NASA’s own post-flight reflections from station crews describe the sensation in plainer language: home feels staged. Smells are too sharp. Gravity feels theatrical. The brain, which spent half a year recalibrating for a world without down, treats the familiar as something to be studied rather than inhabited.
Returning astronauts describe walking into their own homes and feeling like they are visiting them. Some talk about being unable to put a glass down without watching their hands do it. The pattern shows up in oral histories, in memoirs, in flight surgeon notes. It is one of the quieter costs of long-duration spaceflight.
It is not a clinical diagnosis. It does not appear in a DSM. But flight surgeons and crew psychologists who debrief astronauts after six-month rotations describe it often enough that it has become a recognizable readjustment pattern — an observer sensation that lingers for weeks, sometimes months, after splashdown.
What returning crews actually describe
What returning crews actually describe
NASA’s own post-flight reflections from station crews describe the sensation in plainer language: home feels staged. Smells are too sharp. Gravity feels theatrical. The brain, which spent half a year recalibrating for a world without down, treats the familiar as something to be studied rather than inhabited.
Returning astronauts describe walking into their own homes and feeling like they are visiting them. Some talk about being unable to put a glass down without watching their hands do it. The pattern shows up in oral histories, in memoirs, in flight surgeon notes. It is one of the quieter costs of long-duration spaceflight.
by Space Daily, Editorial Team | Read more:
Image: T Leish on Pexels
Live From Camp David, It's Friday Night!
[ed. Comedy gold.]
President Donald Trump on Friday held what the administration said was the first televised Cabinet meeting at Camp David, assembling his deputies at the secure wooded retreat to tout the administration’s accomplishments.
But the rural Maryland setting, long used by presidents for sensitive private meetings or as a tranquil escape, swiftly became the latest stage for Trump’s frustrations over a series of stalled domestic and foreign policy initiatives.
Trump railed against Republican senators blocking his nominee for attorney general, lamented the collapse of his proposed $1.8 billion Justice Department payout fund, questioned whether Iran was negotiating a potential ceasefire in good faith and warned that Democrats would open U.S. borders if they won the midterm elections.
He again lashed out at Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), one of several GOP lawmakers to resist Trump’s policies as his popularity drops and the midterms approach. Cornyn — who lost his primary bid this year after Trump endorsed his opponent — has joined with other lame-duck senators to hold up acting attorney general Todd Blanche’s nomination for the full-time position.
Cornyn has “become a very angry person,” Trump said, also praising Blanche, his former personal attorney. “Todd Blanche is a very, very good man, and he shouldn’t be in the middle of this.”
The president’s remarks Friday, which echoed similar complaints he has made in person and on social media, were most striking because of the unusual backdrop. The media has historically not been allowed to visit Camp David, and reporters who covered Friday’s Cabinet meeting were told to leave their cellphones outside the room, because it was a secure information facility. However, the White House allowed several live video streams of the meeting, and photographers were permitted to take pictures.
The president and White House officials said it was the first televised Cabinet meeting from the rustic compound. Trump in May had planned a Cabinet meeting at the site but canceled it, citing the risk of bad weather. [...]
Trump spent time at Camp David in his first term but has preferred visiting his own properties recently and is set to spend this weekend at his resort in Bedminster, New Jersey [ed. golf course]. He touted his decision Friday to trade the increasingly gold-festooned White House for the wood-paneled walls of the presidential retreat, located in Catoctin Mountain Park.
“This room is a very, very special room,” Trump said, as the meeting began. “I don’t believe the press has ever come anywhere near it, but we are the party of transparency.” [...]
Trump’s Cabinet members, as they have at past meetings, also took the opportunity to lavish praise on the president. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth credited Trump for policies that he said had boosted morale in the military, including the president’s effort to rebrand the department as the “Department of War” and putting military vehicles on parade and in flyovers to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary.
“Parades, 250 [anniversary] flyovers, the American people seeing and feeling their military in ways they have not in the past,” Hegseth said. “That’s spirit.”
“Parades, 250 [anniversary] flyovers, the American people seeing and feeling their military in ways they have not in the past,” Hegseth said. “That’s spirit.”
by Dan Diamond, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Daniel Heuer/Reuters[ed. Sorry, worthless news but couldn't resist. Yes, we're all "seeing and feeling" our military in new ways. But "spirit" is not the word I'd use. Who even owns a babyshit blue jacket like that? (well, one person anyway : ). Here's another attendee, sweating an upcoming confirmation vote:
I know the feeling... everyone would like to be somewhere else
The Hater’s Guide To Oracle (Part 2)
Oracle has one of the strongest mythologies in the tech industry. Ask a regular person and they’ll tell you that it’s “incredibly profitable” and “growing fast,” that it’s “unstoppable,” and that Larry Ellison has the mandate of heaven with regard to the continual sales of software and hardware related to databases and AI.
And those people are completely and utterly wrong.
The original title of this article was “Is Oracle Dying?” because I assume, when I took a deeper look, that there’d be some sort of debate, some sort of bull case for a decades-old quasi-hyperscaler run by one of the more nakedly-evil CEOs in the history of tech. I assumed — incorrectly, I might add — that Oracle as a business was doing fine other than the ridiculous commitments it made to support the whims of Sam Altman and OpenAI via deals that I believed (and still believe) will kill Oracle.
Except it turns out that Oracle has already been on a death spiral for the best part of a decade (if not longer) and has only survived this long by screwing its customers, taking on masses of debt, and — most importantly — more than $85 billion in acquisitions over the last 23 years. Pretty much every major product line outside of databases is a hodge-podge of other people’s innovation stapled together with a legendary contempt for the customer. These acquisitions (and continual price increases) are the only thing keeping the reaper from Oracle’s door other than margin-destroying GPUs. [...]
After April 2009’s $5.7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle’s revenues barely kept pace with inflation until December 2021’s $28.3 billion acquisition of Cerner allowed it to create Oracle Health, adding about $6 billion in annual revenue that had 40% lower margins (about 21.7%) than Oracle’s other businesses, though Oracle immediately started closing offices and brutal layoffs to try and bring them up.
And as I mentioned above, Oracle’s other plan was to sink a little over $99 billion in capital expenditures since the middle of calendar year 2020 into AI GPUs. [...]
Oracle is a decades-long mission to keep reapplying lipstick to a pig. Billions of dollars of acquisitions have, for the most part, only succeeded in keeping the company’s revenue growth from going negative, and as noted by forensic accountant Howard M. Schilit, this is one of the most well-documented cases of accounting shenanigans being used to cover up that a business is in decline.
Today’s newsletter is a sequel to the Hater’s Guide To Oracle, where I told the sordid tale of how Larry Ellison grew a massive, lucrative business out of a database business that one reporter once told me was a “law firm with a database company attached,” an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) product that competes with SAP to create the most-annoying way to run a large company, and a business built around licensing Java that exists mostly to email people and say “you need to pay us for Java or we’ll sue you.”
Then, as I’ve mentioned, there’s Oracle’s cloud infrastructure business, a decade-old also-ran that was meant to compete with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, but only managed to catch up following the advent of AI GPUs and a movement where all it took to party was buying billions of GPUs and saying “gosh darn, we love AI.”
I originally started drafting this as a much tamer piece where I’d ask whether Oracle was dying, but as my editor and I started digging into the research, it became obvious that not only is Oracle dying, it’s been dying for years, kept alive through decades of acquisitions and a desperate and dangerous commitment to generative AI.
And AI, I believe, will be what eventually kills Oracle dead. [...]
With revenue plateauing and customers in revolt, Oracle’s future already looked murky, but with the power of AI — and $95 billion in FY2027 capex — it’s becoming increasingly clear that this may be Larry Ellison’s last dance with Silicon Valley.
Which means that Warner Brothers, you know, the big conglomerate that owns CNN and HBO, is potentially getting folded into another conglomerate Paramount Pictures, which is the company that owns CBS, MTV, Showtime, and Nickelodeon. And the shareholder vote is April 23rd, this up coming Thursday.
And last Thursday afternoon, which is one week before the vote, Warner Brothers Discovery filed a 14 page correction to the document that shareholders are voting o n.
Now, this is kind of a big deal because this is a 14page addendum to the biggest media merger in American history. And this was filed on Thursday of last week, 4 days ago at this point.
And those people are completely and utterly wrong.
Except it turns out that Oracle has already been on a death spiral for the best part of a decade (if not longer) and has only survived this long by screwing its customers, taking on masses of debt, and — most importantly — more than $85 billion in acquisitions over the last 23 years. Pretty much every major product line outside of databases is a hodge-podge of other people’s innovation stapled together with a legendary contempt for the customer. These acquisitions (and continual price increases) are the only thing keeping the reaper from Oracle’s door other than margin-destroying GPUs. [...]
After April 2009’s $5.7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle’s revenues barely kept pace with inflation until December 2021’s $28.3 billion acquisition of Cerner allowed it to create Oracle Health, adding about $6 billion in annual revenue that had 40% lower margins (about 21.7%) than Oracle’s other businesses, though Oracle immediately started closing offices and brutal layoffs to try and bring them up.
And as I mentioned above, Oracle’s other plan was to sink a little over $99 billion in capital expenditures since the middle of calendar year 2020 into AI GPUs. [...]
Oracle is a decades-long mission to keep reapplying lipstick to a pig. Billions of dollars of acquisitions have, for the most part, only succeeded in keeping the company’s revenue growth from going negative, and as noted by forensic accountant Howard M. Schilit, this is one of the most well-documented cases of accounting shenanigans being used to cover up that a business is in decline.
Today’s newsletter is a sequel to the Hater’s Guide To Oracle, where I told the sordid tale of how Larry Ellison grew a massive, lucrative business out of a database business that one reporter once told me was a “law firm with a database company attached,” an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) product that competes with SAP to create the most-annoying way to run a large company, and a business built around licensing Java that exists mostly to email people and say “you need to pay us for Java or we’ll sue you.”
Then, as I’ve mentioned, there’s Oracle’s cloud infrastructure business, a decade-old also-ran that was meant to compete with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, but only managed to catch up following the advent of AI GPUs and a movement where all it took to party was buying billions of GPUs and saying “gosh darn, we love AI.”
I originally started drafting this as a much tamer piece where I’d ask whether Oracle was dying, but as my editor and I started digging into the research, it became obvious that not only is Oracle dying, it’s been dying for years, kept alive through decades of acquisitions and a desperate and dangerous commitment to generative AI.
And AI, I believe, will be what eventually kills Oracle dead. [...]
With revenue plateauing and customers in revolt, Oracle’s future already looked murky, but with the power of AI — and $95 billion in FY2027 capex — it’s becoming increasingly clear that this may be Larry Ellison’s last dance with Silicon Valley.
by Ed Zitron, Where's Your Ed At | Read more:
Image: Larry Ellison, Bloomberg/Getty
[ed. Larry Ellison. One of the most hated personalities in tech (and unfortunately, owner of my beloved island of Lanai, in Hawaii). Update: What a coincidence. There's quite a story in the NY Times that just came out about Ellison being the face of the AI bubble. See also: The Hater's Guide to Oracle (Zitron); Ellison Empire Beseiged On All Fronts (NC); and, this excellent series The Oracle Files by Drey Dossier on YouTube. (For example, this one: How Larry Ellison and Gulf Money Just Bought Your News):]
***
Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders are getting screwed on this new Paramount deal. Okay. And I would like to get into exactly how before they vote on Thursday, the largest media merger in American history is going to a shareholder vote. A merger worth in the ballpark of $111 billion in case you were wondering.Which means that Warner Brothers, you know, the big conglomerate that owns CNN and HBO, is potentially getting folded into another conglomerate Paramount Pictures, which is the company that owns CBS, MTV, Showtime, and Nickelodeon. And the shareholder vote is April 23rd, this up coming Thursday.
And last Thursday afternoon, which is one week before the vote, Warner Brothers Discovery filed a 14 page correction to the document that shareholders are voting o n.
Now, this is kind of a big deal because this is a 14page addendum to the biggest media merger in American history. And this was filed on Thursday of last week, 4 days ago at this point.
Now, public companies don't usually rewrite their own proxy statements a week before a shareholder vote, unless of course someone is forcing them to, which usually means that someone being one of their shareholders is suing them in order to do so. So, I checked to see if there were any lawsuits floating around out there, and what do you know? There is one. A shareholder named Donna Nikosia, apologies if I butchered that last name, filed a lawsuit on April 2nd saying that the original document left out a lot of information that shareholders needed in order to make an informed vote.
And following Donna's lawsuit were 15 other shareholders who had sent letters more or less saying the same thing. And can we all just take a moment here and say thank you to Donna for filing what we all probably knew to be true in the back seconds of our heads that there is information being left out that you need in order to make an informed decision this upcoming Thursday. Now up top I just want to say that I am not a Warner Brothers Discovery shareholder. I have never owned a share of Warner Brothers Discovery or Paramount Pictures. I am just thanking Donna as a media consumer.
All right, and somebody who works within the media ecosystem because I like to keep my media independent and this deserves a lot more scrutiny than it's getting. So WBD, Warner Brothers Discovery, told the court that this lawsuit had no merit and then two weeks later slightly added the information.
Anyways, so this move in business, I've learned, is how you smother out a lawsuit without ever having to say that we are wrong. Now, we're going to get into what was in this correction in a second here because oh boy, were they leaving information out? [...]
Anyways, so this move in business, I've learned, is how you smother out a lawsuit without ever having to say that we are wrong. Now, we're going to get into what was in this correction in a second here because oh boy, were they leaving information out? [...]
You know, I read that 14 page new filing this weekend and there are two companies in it that WBD is still trying very hard not to have to say out loud and is trying even harder, it seems, to smother this from any of the news outlets taking this to the other shareholders. And I think I figured out which ones they're talking about.
[ed. And this: Why Iran's Blockade is an Oracle Story:]
Most people know Larry Ellison as the Oracle billionaire, which true, you also probably know that he is the largest private donor to the Israeli military in American history.
[ed. And this: Why Iran's Blockade is an Oracle Story:]
Most people know Larry Ellison as the Oracle billionaire, which true, you also probably know that he is the largest private donor to the Israeli military in American history.
He's given over $26 million to the friends of the IDF since 2014, including a single $16.5 million donation in 2017. That is the largest gift in the organization's history. And that is the part we have discussed at length. But here is the part that a lot of people don't know. Ellison is not just the largest funer of the Israeli military.
His company is the operational backbone of it. According to Open Intel, Oracle holds a 26-year contract to build and operate the IT infrastructure for the IDF's intelligence campus in Negv. For clarity, that is the facility that houses unit 8200, Israel's signals intelligence and cyber warfare division and one of the largest listening bases in the world. That is a 26-year relationship extending into the 2040s between a private American company and the intelligence apparatus of a foreign military.
And that's just the intelligence side because Oracle also runs the Israeli Air Force entire logistics system, the supply chain that tracks his spare parts for F-35s and F-16s, aviation fuel and mutations inventory. Oracle hosts an AI battlefield management system called Fireweaver that coordinates sensors and weapons on the battlefield in real time, which means that Oracle software is making targeting decisions in the kill chain for Israeli Defense Forces.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)