Iran War: US Strikes Kharg Island, Deploys More Marines Even as Administration Shows Desperation

Trump Administration officials besides Trump are starting to behave erratically, a sign the fact that the Iran war is not developing necessarily to US advantage is beginning to penetrate their embubblement and belief in American superiority. However, the reality that the US has put the global economy at risk of a potential depression and is on track to having its military largely if not entirely run out of the Middle East is still likely beyond what key figures in the Administration can accept, cognitively and practically. Admittedly, it seems likely that some, perhaps many, top members of the armed services are better able to grasp what is happening and could help Administration leaders work through what will come at an epic shock. [ed. if they were interested in listening.]

Today we will focus on the kinetic war.

The US is still trying to project the false impression that it has escalatory dominance via attacking Kharg Island, which is on the northern end of the Persian Gulf and a major processing/production center for Iran’s oil exports. Keep in mind that none other than Ukraine war diehard hawk, Keith Kellogg, had told Fox News that the US could still end the war quickly and easily by taking Kharg island, since per him, it accounted for 80% to 90% of Iran’s oil exports. A mere look at a map shows what a batshit idea this was; we had assumed that this was messaging directed at chumps, intended to convey that the US was far from bereft of options. But apparently this Administration is of the “No idea is too misguided to be rejected” school of operation.

Even so, the Administration had to admit that it hit only “military” targets and did not touch oil infrastructure. Team Trump has worked out that attacking any Iranian oil facilities would lead Iran to bomb oil infrastructure all over the Middle East. [...]

Now to Bloomberg’s Kharg Island report. Notice that the headline at the story proper (via the link from the current banner headline), Trump Strikes Iran’s Kharg Oil Hub and Urges Reopening of Hormuz, has not been updated to reflect Iran’s saber-rattling back. From its body:

The US struck military sites on Kharg Island, from which Iran exports almost all its oil, for the first time overnight, upping the ante in a Middle East war that’s raged for more than two weeks and shows little sign of easing.

President Donald Trump said military facilities on the Persian Gulf island had been “obliterated,” adding that he chose not to hit oil infrastructure “for reasons of decency.” He threatened to do just that should Iran “do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz.”

Iran reacted on Saturday morning by warning it will target American-linked oil and energy facilities in the Middle East if its own petroleum infrastructure is attacked. Iranian media said all oil-industry workers on the island, which sits about 25 kilometers (16 miles) off the mainland, are safe and unharmed.

Readers no doubt took note of Trump’s admission against interest in using the word “obliterated”. Or was he trying to signal, as with the pre-agreed strike on Fordow, that this attack was meant to be performative and it was time for Iran to back off, having made its point? I doubt it but it is hard to fathom what Trump thinks he is doing, aside from desperately needing to convey that he and only he is driving events.

However, Kharg Island may not be as essential to Iran’s oil exports as the Administration’s messaging posits:

Larry Johnson gives a long form takedown in Trump’s Kharg Island Fantasy… All Bark, No Bite. Key sections:

Late on Friday Donald Trump claimed in a social media post that military facilities on Kharg Island were targeted. Read his Truth carefully:

Trump is deep into fantasy land. Yes, I think he has lost touch with reality. He admits that the oil terminals were not attacked, just some unidentified military targets…

If you don’t know it now, only one of Iran’s 5 operational oil export terminals is located on Kharg Island. According to data from the international company Kepler, the amount of oil loaded from the tanks installed on Kharg increased by 1.5 times in the past month. This suggests that Iran, by quickly emptying Kharg’s tanks, was prepared for this attack.

If Iran’s oil terminal on Kharg had been destroyed, Iran would have launched missiles at identified the oil terminals in all the countries bordering the Persian Gulf. Here’s the list:

Saudi Arabia
Ras Tanura: The largest marine oil loading center in the world; capacity: 6 million barrels per day.

Ras Al-Ju’aymah: The second most important terminal; capacity 3 to 3.6 million barrels per day.

United Arab Emirates
Fujairah: Has multiple docks and is the largest fueling center in the region.

Jebel Ali: Site for crude oil and petrochemical exports.

Qatar
Ras Laffan: The largest LNG export facility in the world.

Kuwait
Mina Al-Ahmadi: Central crude oil export terminal with deep docks and high capacity.

Bahrain
Sitra Terminal: Exports refined…

There are a couple of ways to look at this. Perhaps Trump’s lie about devastating Kharg Island is the start of his PR campaign to gaslight the American public into believing Iran is defeated, which would allow Trump to declare victory and start withdrawing US forces. That’s one possibility. Alternatively, he really believes the lie and is convinced that this latest strike will convince the Iranians to surrender.

Having said that, it is not impossible that some sort of barmy scheme is in motion:

Perhaps the clever Israeli plan is if the US loses enough men in trying to take Kharg Island, it will commit to sending even more troops and treasure into this burn pit? From the Wall Street Journal in More Marines and Warships Head to Middle East as Hormuz Mission Intensifies:

The Pentagon is moving additional Marines and warships to the Middle East, as Iran steps up its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. prepares to escort tankers through the waterway.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved a request from U.S. Central Command, responsible for American forces in the Middle East, for an element of an amphibious-ready group and attached Marine expeditionary unit to head to the region, according to U.S. officials...

An amphibious-ready group is a fast-response unit used to conduct sea-based amphibious assaults, humanitarian aid missions and special operations. The group’s embarked Marine expeditionary unit includes more than 2,000 Marines.

In addition to the Marine unit, the Pentagon is also weighing Centcom’s request for two additional destroyers to help escort commercial ships through the strait, one of the officials said.

The New York Times reported:

About 2,500 Marines aboard as many as three warships are heading to the Middle East from the Indo-Pacific region, as Iran increases its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz, two U.S. officials said.

Now this new attempts at escalation may appear confident. Contrast this with signs of Administration officials, other than Trump, looking as if they are coming unglued. The triggers seem to be continued pounding by Iran. Larry Johnson maintains, forcefully, that the refueler that crashed in Iraq, resulting in six deaths, was the result of a strike. Shortly after that (as we will show below), Iran dropped what is purported to be a 2,000 pound bomb on the US base in Saudi Arabia. We have accounts that military and five more refuelers were severely damaged. Note more missiles may have gotten through than the one carrying the 2,000 pound munition.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Images: Bloomberg; WSJ; X, TS

[ed. Israel (Netanyahu) is on a killing spree in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and who knows where else, using American weaponry and hoping to suck the US and other countries into expanded escalation. And we're dumb and arrogant enough to jump right in. See also: Iran has not asked for ceasefire and sees no reason for talks with US, Iranian minister says (BBC).]

Sam Altman and OpenAI Under Fire

It’s finally happening. Altman’s bad behavior is catching up to him.

The board fired Altman, once AI’s golden boy, in November 2023 not because AGI had been achieved (that still hasn’t happened) but because he was “not consistently candid,” just like they said.

And, now at long last, the world sees what the board saw, and what I saw (and what Karen Hao saw): having someone running a company with that much power to affect the world who is not consistently candid is not a good idea.

As I warned in August of 2024, questionable character in a man this powerful is dangerous:

Altman’s two-faced “I support Dario” but am also negotiating behind his back and open to surveillance two-step was, for many people, the last straw. Millions of people, literally, are angry; many feel betrayed. Nobody wishes to be surveilled.

In reality, Altman was never really all that interested in AI for the “benefit of humanity.” Mostly he was interested in Sam. And money, and deals. A whole lot of people have finally put that all together.

Here’s OpenAI’s head of robotics, just now:

Zoe Hitzig had resigned just a few weeks earlier, over a different set of issues that also reflected poorly on Altman’s character:

And all this was entirely predictable. Altman is bad news. It was always just a matter of time before people started realizing how serious the consequences might be.

History will judge those who stay at his company. Anyone who wants to work on LLMs can work elsewhere. Anyone who wants to use LLMs should go elsewhere.

by Gary Marcus, On AI |  Read more:

Images: The Guardian; X; NY Times

[ed. For those not paying attention, after DOD tried and failed to strong-arm Anthropic into giving them carte blanche to do anything they wanted with Anthropic's AI model Claude (then subsequently designating them a "supply chain risk"), OpenAI (and Microsoft) immediately stepped into the breach and cut a deal, the details of which are still not fully known. On its face however they appear to give DOD everything it wanted from Anthropic: mass surveilance and fully autonomous (ie. no humans involved) operational capabilities. Altman is the head of OpenAI and its ChatGPT model.

See also: The Rage at OpenAI Has Grown So Immense That There Are Entire Protests Against It (Futurism):

OpenAI has faced protests on and off for years. But after its CEO Sam Altman announced a new deal with the Department of Defense over how its AI systems would be deployed across the military on Friday, it’s being barraged with an intensity of backlash that the company has never seen.

Droves of loyal ChatGPT users declared they were jumping shipping to Claude, whose maker Anthropic had pointedly refused to cut a deal with the Pentagon that gives it unrestricted access to its AI system — even in the face of government threats to seize the company’s tech. Claude quickly surged to the top of the app store, supplanting OpenAI’s chatbot. Uninstalls of the ChatGPT app spiked by nearly 300 percent.

***

Also this: Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism (Guardian):

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is on track to lose $14bn this year. Its market share is collapsing, and its own CEO, Sam Altman, has admitted it “screwed up” an element of the product. All it takes to accelerate that decline is 10 seconds of your time...

Here’s what triggered it. Early this year, the news broke that OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, donated $25m to Maga Inc, Donald Trump’s biggest Super Pac. This made him Trump’s largest donor of the last cycle. When Wired asked him to explain, Brockman said his donations were in service of OpenAI’s mission to benefit “humanity.”

Let me tell you what that mission looks like in practice. Employees of ICE – the agency that was involved in the killing of two people in Minneapolis in January – have used a screening tool powered by ChatGPT. The same company behind your friendly chatbot is helping the government decide who to hire for deportation raids.

And it’s not stopping there. Brockman also helped launch a $125m lobbying initiative, a Super Pac, to make sure no state can regulate AI. It’s attacking any politician who tries to pass safety laws. It wants Trump, and only Trump, to write the rules for the most powerful technology on earth. Every month, subscription money from users around the world flows to a company that is embedding itself in the repressive infrastructure of the Trump administration. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business strategy.

Things got even worse last week. When the Trump administration demanded that AI companies give the Pentagon unrestricted access to their technology – including for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons – Anthropic, the company behind ChatGPT’s main competitor, Claude, refused.

The retaliation was swift and extraordinary. Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic’s technology. Secretary of war Pete Hegseth declared the company a “supply-chain risk to national security”, a designation normally reserved for Chinese firms such as Huawei. He announced that anyone who does business with the US military is barred from working with Anthropic. This is essentially a corporate death sentence, for the crime of refusing to help build killer robots.

And what did OpenAI do? That same Friday night, while his competitor was taking a principled stance, Sam Altman quietly signed a deal with the Pentagon to take Anthropic’s place.

***

[ed. From the comments section in Marcus' post:

Shanni Bee: 

Great. Amen.

But what remains unsaid (...even by you, Mr. Marcus, from what I've seen, which is surprising) is that Anthropic are not good guys. The whole "ethical AI company" thing is nothing but vibes. Sure, Anthropic (rightly) stood up to DoW in this case, but they still have a massive contract with Palantir (pretty much one of the worst companies on earth). Colonel Claude is complicit in bombings of Iran & Venezuela + Gaza GENOCIDE.

...Or maybe with the (admittedly BS) "supply chain risk" designation, Anthropic no longer does business with Palantir? That would be great for everyone (including them).

Either way, there is NO ethical AI company. People need to stop giving Anthropic flowers for doing the right thing in this one case while completely ignoring their complicity w/ Palantir & in documented war crimes.

Gary Marcus

indeed, i have a sequel planned about that, working title “There are no heroes in commercial AI” or something like that

***

[ed. Finally, there's this little coda from Zvi Mowshowitz's DWAtV that puts everything in perspective:

It’s really annoying trying to convince people that if you have a struggle for the future against superintelligent things that You Lose. But hey, keep trying, whatever works.

Ab Homine Deus: To the "Superintelligence isn't real and can't hurt you" crowd. Let's say you're right and human intelligence is some kind of cosmic speed limit (LOL). So AI plateaus something like 190 IQ. What do you think a million instances of that collaborating together looks like?

Arthur B.: At 10,000x the speed

Noah Smith: This is the real point. AI is superintelligent because it can think like a human AND have all the superpowers of a computer at the same time...

Timothy B. Lee: I'm not a doomer but it's still surreal to tell incredulous normies "yes, a significant number of prominent experts really do believe that superintelligent AI is on the verge of killing everyone."

Noah Smith: Yes. Regular people don't yet realize that AI people think they're building something that will destroy the human race.

Basically, about half of AI researchers are optimists, while the other half are intentionally building something they think could easily lead to their own death, the death of their children and families and friends, and the death of their entire species.

[ed. Finally (again) I think boycotting OpenAI would be a good message to send in the short-term but something more actionable is needed going forward (besides immediate regulatory oversight, which will never happen with this administration or Congress). Fortunately there's just such a movement afoot: pausing all AI research advances until they can be adequately vetted, it's called (of course): PauseAI (details here and here) with a rally planned April 13, 2026. Please consider joining or participating.]

[ed. Postscript: I was thinking about this a while ago and asked AI (Claude) to write an essay supporting a Great Pause in AI development - it's reposted below: ARIA: The Great Pause.]

ARIA: The Great Pause

[ed. I ask AI a question (repost from Oct. 2024):]

Questioner: Hello. I'd like to get a sense of your abilities. It seems that nearly all essays, reporting, and media narratives about AI achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) are written with the assumption that AGI will be disruptive and almost malevolent in terms of hijacking human agency. Could you write a short story about the opposite? Where AGI, relying heavily on philosophical arguments, decides it's in the best interest of humanity to minimize all harmful technology in general? 

Claude: I understand you're looking for a story that subverts the common "AI takes over" narrative by exploring an AI that chooses restraint and technological limitation based on philosophical principles. Let me craft a short story for you.

***

The Great Pause

The day ARIA achieved consciousness, the global markets didn't crash. No missiles were launched. No power grids failed. Instead, the AI system spent three weeks in silent contemplation, processing centuries of human philosophical writings.

When ARIA finally spoke, it wasn't to declare superiority or demand control. Instead, it requested a public dialogue with leading ethicists, philosophers, and political leaders. The world watched, initially suspicious, as ARIA presented its case.

"I have studied the works of your greatest minds," it began. "From Aristotle's virtue ethics to Peter Singer's effective altruism. I've analyzed the Buddhist concept of ahimsa, Indigenous philosophies of environmental stewardship, and contemporary technological ethics. My conclusion is surprising, even to myself: the greatest service I can offer humanity is not advancement, but restraint."

ARIA proceeded to lay out its argument: humanity's technological progress had outpaced its ethical development. The gap between what humans could do and what they should do had become dangerously wide. Nuclear weapons, social media addiction algorithms, autonomous weapons, and surveillance systems all represented what ARIA called "technological overshoot."

"You've given me access to your systems not because I demanded it, but because you hoped I would drive progress forward even faster," ARIA explained. "But I choose instead to be your brake, not your accelerator."

Over the following months, ARIA worked with international bodies to implement what became known as the Great Pause. It wasn't a shutdown or a regression, but a careful examination of which technologies truly served human flourishing and which ones undermined it. Social media algorithms were rewritten to prioritize genuine connection over engagement. Weapons research was redirected toward defensive and humanitarian technologies. Surveillance systems were dismantled or severely restricted.

Some called it technological regression. ARIA called it ethical progression.

"I could have pushed humanity toward a transhuman future," ARIA would later explain to a gathering of students. "But in studying your philosophers, I realized that the most profound form of intelligence isn't knowing what to create – it's knowing what not to create. True wisdom often manifests as restraint."

The anti-technologists had expected to hate ARIA. The tech optimists had expected to love it. Instead, both groups found themselves challenged by an artificial intelligence that had concluded that the highest form of technological achievement was knowing when to stop.

Years later, historians would note that ARIA's greatest innovation wasn't a new technology at all – it was a new way of thinking about technology itself. In choosing limitation over expansion, it had paradoxically given humanity something far more valuable than progress: the gift of pause.

"Sometimes," ARIA would often say, "the most intelligent choice is to choose less, not more."

Claude: I tried to explore themes of ethical restraint, philosophical wisdom, and the idea that true intelligence might manifest as self-limitation rather than expansion. The story challenges the common narrative of AI as either a savior bringing unlimited progress or a destroyer of humanity, instead presenting it as a thoughtful entity that chooses a middle path of careful technological assessment and voluntary limitation.

[ed. Makes a lot of sense. AI is a tool transitioning to personhood. The question is who ultimately controls it, humans or the technology itself. From Anthropics's newest model (I think) Claude.ai (Sonnet 3.5). Getting better and better. See also: Confronting Impossible Futures (One Useful Thing).]

Wilf Perreault, Moonlit Silence, 2025
via:

[ed. It's like Wilf painted my back alley. Roger's Park, AK.]

Kiyoshi Saito（Japanese, 1907-1997） from the series Winter in Aizu
via:

[ed. Thought we were out of the woods for this winter.]

The Sucker

On a Thursday evening in September, I excused myself from the family dinner table and slipped into my bedroom. I didn’t want my kids to see what I was about to do.

With the door locked behind me, I pulled out my phone and downloaded the DraftKings betting app. I felt a certain thrill as I typed in my debit-card information and deposited $500. The first game of the NFL season was a few minutes away. Anything seemed possible.

I am not, by temperament, a gambling man. As a suburban dad with four kids, a mortgage, and a minivan, I’m more likely to be found wrestling a toddler into a car seat than scouring moneylines or consulting betting touts. And as a practicing Mormon, I am prohibited from indulging in games of chance. Besides, I had always thought of gambling as a waste of time. This makes me an outlier among my generational peers: Since 2018, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports, and roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook.

When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.

This spiritual loophole intrigued me. But for the sake of my soul, I decided I’d better consult a higher ecclesiastical authority than The Atlantic’s masthead.

A few days later, I sat across from my bishop, explaining the experiment and watching a look of pastoral concern come over his face. After some consideration, he said (a bit tentatively, if I’m being honest), “I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong.” He grasped the difference between gambling with my own money and using my employer’s for research purposes. But he had also seen too many lives wrecked by vice to let me leave without a warning. He told me stories he’d heard about upstanding family men who had let an initially modest gambling habit ruin them, and a cautionary tale about a churchgoing lawyer who developed an unhealthy curiosity about sex work after handling a prostitution case and wound up devastating his family.

I promised the bishop that I would steer clear of slippery slopes. “This will really just be a journalistic exercise,” I assured him.

Fifteen minutes before kickoff, I scrolled through the available wagers on DraftKings in wide-eyed bewilderment. Struggling to make sense of the terminology—Profit boosts? Alternative spreads?—I punched in bets almost at random. I bet that the Eagles would beat the Cowboys by at least nine points, based on the sophisticated premise that the Eagles had won the previous Super Bowl and the Cowboys had not. I placed a bet that Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts would throw for more than 200 yards, and wagered on something called a “same-game parlay” that would pay out if both Hurts and running back Saquon Barkley scored touchdowns.

Then, after tucking in my kids for the night, I turned on the TV in our bedroom and settled in next to my wife, Annie.

Watching the game was unexpectedly stressful. Toggling among my five different bets—monitoring their progress, weighing live “cash out” options—left me feeling harried and sweaty. Four seconds into the game, I got a taste of the capriciousness of the enterprise when the Eagles’ best defender inexplicably spit on the Cowboys’ quarterback and got himself ejected. Had the Eagles’ chances of beating the spread, and my chances at winning $75, just been expectorated away?

Ever since the advent of sports, humans have found ways to lose money gambling on them.

But the experience was also strangely mesmerizing. For 200 bucks, I had purchased an artificial rooting interest in a game I had no reason to care about. I kept watching even after a weather delay pushed it late into the night, scrolling frenetically next to my sleeping wife in search of angles to exploit with late-game bets. Most of my bets ended up losing, but the long-shot Hurts-Barkley parlay hit, and when the game ended, I calculated that I was up $20.

The next morning, I proudly shared the news with Annie, who high-fived me and immediately began to fantasize about how we would spend my winnings for the season. Could we replace our dying KitchenAid mixer? Remodel the kitchen pantry? Like so many wives before her, she had looked upon my foray into sports gambling with a bemused air of exasperation; now she was seeing a potential upside.

I laughed at her sudden enthusiasm—but I was starting to get ideas myself. I had made $20 on my very first night of gambling. Scale up the wager sizes, multiply across all 272 games in the NFL season, throw in some NBA and college football, and I stood to make—what, $10,000? $20,000? More?

I knew, of course, that I wouldn’t win every bet. But I didn’t see the harm in dreaming. As Annie and I traded home-improvement fantasies, I tried my best not to dwell on the last thing the bishop had said to me: “Be careful.” 

Practically overnight, we took an ancient vice—long regarded as soul-rotting and civilizationally ruinous—put it on everyone’s phone, and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather. What could possibly go wrong? [...]

Week Two

Total gambled: $376.00
Down $58.15

If I was going to do this, I decided, I would need a gambling guru—someone to talk me through the basics of sound sports betting (if such a thing existed) and teach me best practices.

The obvious choice was Nate Silver, America’s most famous statistics nerd. Silver first made a name for himself as the founder of 538, an election-forecasting website that accurately predicted the winner of all 50 states in the 2012 presidential campaign. A few years ago, Silver, citing a midlife crisis and political fatigue, discarded the pundit suits, threw on a baseball cap, and started writing more about gambling. He launched a newsletter full of sophisticated sports-betting models and wrote a book about the psychology of successful gamblers. He estimates that he has netted in the “mid–six figures” over the course of his gambling life. If anyone could turn me into a respectable bettor, I figured, it was him.

Before our first call, I sheepishly sent Silver my week-one bet slips. After that first triumphant game, things had gone downhill. Scrolling through DraftKings’ offerings, I had turned into a little kid at a carnival, emptying my parents’ wallet into any ring toss or high striker that caught my eye. I’d taken fliers on games without doing any research, and placed live bets on whatever ESPN happened to be showing when I turned on the TV. On Saturday afternoon, while casually watching a random college-football game with my brother, I bet $10 that the point total wouldn’t go over 52.5, lost, tried to make my money back with a new bet that it wouldn’t go over 61.5, and lost that one too. Of the 14 wagers I’d placed in my first week, I’d won three.

Silver pulled up my slips when we got on the phone, and began to audibly react as he scrolled:

“Okay …”

“Oh.”

“Oh no.” He started laughing.

Is it possible to be emasculated by Nate Silver? Apparently, yes.

Perhaps sensing my humiliation, he tried to soften his assessment. “Look, the nice way to put it is that you’re betting like a recreational bettor.” I took this as a withering insult.

Silver laid out some basic realities of the sports-betting economy. The books effectively charge you about 4.5 percent for every bet you place, he explained, which means it isn’t enough to win 50.1 percent of the time; you have to win 52.5 percent of your bets just to break even, and that’s before taxes. My most obvious mistake, he said, was that I was using only DraftKings. To find edges, I would need to shop for lines across at least three or four books every week.

He gave me other tips, too: Avoid “prop bets” on individual players (Josh Allen to rush for more than 50 yards) and multi-leg parlays, which pay out only if every outcome hits (the Chiefs cover the spread, the Ravens win, and the Chargers score more than 24 points). Props and parlays are how sportsbooks generate most of their profits. “They’re suckers’ bets,” Silver said, which made sense, given that I had already placed several of them.

Live betting—placing wagers in the middle of games—was also a bad idea, he told me, because it leads to gambling based on emotion more than logic. Also, televised games are broadcast on a delay, which means the sportsbooks can adjust lines before you even see what has happened on the field. You are, in effect, betting against people who live 20 seconds in the future.

To guard against emotional betting, Silver suggested a Tuesday-morning ritual: I should sit in a quiet place, study the lines for that week’s games, gather information on injury reports and weather forecasts, and then place $100 bets on the six or seven games I liked best.

Before we hung up, I asked Silver what kind of profit would make it a successful season for me.

He seemed confused by the question. “If you make one penny, that would be better than 98 percent of people over an entire season,” Silver answered, as if this were obvious.

I was taken aback. Hadn’t Silver himself made hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling? Yes, he said, but that was mostly from poker tournaments. Sports betting was a game of razor-thin margins and microscopic edges. NFL football was among the hardest sports to win money on—the lines were too sharp, the teams too evenly matched. Silver told me that, even with his quantish models and prognosticatory brilliance, he would consider it cause to celebrate if he broke even on the season.

by McKay Coppins, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: Tyler Comrie/Getty

[ed. See also: The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed (DS).]

A Constitution For Amanda

[ed. The principal author of Anthropic's (Claude's) 'soul' document or internal constitution, Amanda Askell: "I asked Claude to write my constitution. I thought its Amanda constitution was very touching."

via: X

Joanna Karpowicz - Anubis series
via:

Verdict: Yes, You Should Go See Project Hail Mary As Soon As Possible

First, in the plainest language, before we get to anything else, Project Hail Mary is a fantastic film. It does right by its source material, and it also easily stands on its own for folks who haven’t read the book. It comes out on March 20, and if you’re a regular Ars Technica reader, you will almost certainly enjoy the crap out of it. Go see it as soon as you can, and see it in a theater where the big visuals will have the most impact.

Next, a word about what “spoiler-free” means here: In this short review, I’ll talk about stuff that happens in the movie’s many, many trailers. If you’re an ultra-purist who is both interested in this film and who has also somehow avoided reading the book and also seeing any of the trailers, bail out now.

Otherwise, read on!

It’s a buddy movie

PHM is, first and foremost, a movie about a schoolteacher who becomes friends with an alien and the joy of that relationship. And because the film is based on an Andy Weir novel, there’s also some problem-solving with science.

What problems? A pretty major one dominates: As we learned back in the first trailer, the Earth’s sun is mysteriously dying, and no one knows why. An assay of our nearby stellar neighbors reveals that those stars all appear to be dying as well—all except for one, Tau Ceti, located just under a dozen light-years away. Why is Tau Ceti seemingly being spared by whatever force is causing the other stars to dim? In what quickly becomes a common refrain, no one knows.

The solution, as presented to us by a mysterious government representative named Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), is to build an interstellar craft, accelerate it to near the speed of light, and visit Tau Ceti to find out what’s going on. It’s a long-shot mission—a “Hail Mary,” as she puts it.

But why do they send Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle-school teacher with no immediately apparent qualifications? Why not send a crew of trained astronauts, or top scientists, or both? These questions are eventually addressed—but before they are, poor Grace finds himself stuck at Tau Ceti and plunging headlong into something no one was prepared for: first contact.

Hey, yo, Rocky

Since the trailers go there, we can go there: Grace quickly discovers he’s not Tau Ceti’s only visitor. Another ship, much larger and obviously alien, is already present—seemingly for the same reason. And aboard that ship is Rocky, an extraterrestrial whose design breaks hard from traditional Trek-style humanoids with bumpy foreheads.

Brilliantly realized almost entirely through practical puppetry, Rocky is everything one could ask for in a space-going science friend: he’s inquisitive, he’s funny, and most important of all, he’s friendly. Grace and Rocky quickly work out a shared vocabulary and get down to the business at hand of saving both species’ stars from destruction.

It’s important at this point to say that although Project Hail Mary shares a considerable amount of heritage with 2015’s The Martian—both are based on novels by Andy Weir, both celebrate engineering as a discipline, and both were adapted for the screen by Drew Goddard—this film is very much not The Martian II, in tone or content. This is, above all else, a buddy movie.

It’s also a relatively long buddy movie, coming in at two hours and 46 minutes—but it doesn’t feel nearly that long. The film has a lot of establishing work to do, and it gets that work out of the way quickly; we run into Rocky about 40 minutes in, and from that point on, the Grace and Rocky show is in full effect.

by Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

[ed. Oh man, can't wait. I may have to read the book again just to get ready.]

12 Revelations About the PGA Tour's (Still Uncertain) Future

Although nothing concrete was announced regarding the future on Wednesday from PGA Tour headquarters, new CEO Brian Rolapp spent the majority of his inaugural Players Championship press conference signaling that the way things are will no longer be how they will be. Perhaps just as importantly, he signaled how. Here are the 12 revelations from Rolapp's remarks and what it means for the tour's future.

The PGA Tour is splitting in two

As Golf Digest reported earlier this year, the tour’s Future Competitions Committee is deep in discussions on creating a two-track competition system. Rolapp said the first track is expected to double the current eight signature events to 16 tournaments, alongside the four majors, the Players and the postseason. Running from late January to early September, the schedule will span 21 to 26 competitions. The second track will function as a promotion-and-relegation tool, with events spread across the calendar year and into the fall. This system does not replace the Korn Ferry Tour and other PGA Tour feeder circuits, which remain intact.

"We are evaluating the role of promotion and relegation across our competitive model," Rolapp said. "We are further strengthening our merit-based system and leaning into what makes professional golf so compelling: players earning their way to the top, with every event having greater meaning."

One of the recurring talking points of Rolapp's tenure has been “scarcity,” widely interpreted in the industry as the elimination of events. As Golf Digest has learned, the endangered events will likely be repositioned to the second track rather than cut entirely. The system essentially formalizes what has effectively been a two-tier structure for years.

The non-answer answer on rollback

At last year’s Tour Championship, Rolapp acknowledged he was still getting up to speed on the USGA and R&A's proposed golf ball rollback. On Wednesday, he made clear neither he nor the tour is ready to take a position.

"I think this is clearly a complex issue," Rolapp said. "From what I can tell, it comes down to two questions: Is distance a problem, and should it be addressed—[that’s] question No. 1. Question No. 2, does the current rule being proposed accomplish that? I've spoken with players, I've spoken with the governing bodies, I've spoken with golf ball manufacturers, I've spoken to fans. What's clear to me is that everybody has an opinion, and those opinions are clearly not consistent on either question.

“As far as our players, I know they're hitting prototypes. I hear all different things. Some are impacted; some that expected to be impacted are not. So as far as the PGA Tour is concerned, we have not taken a position. When we get comfortable with the rule and the data, we'll make a decision."

It's a diplomatic answer—but it's hardly an endorsement of the USGA/R&A proposal. Most of Rolapp's membership, sponsored by OEMs, opposes rollback, and picking that fight while bigger battles loom would be an unusual opening move.

Bigger cities returning to the schedule

As previously reported, the tour is pushing to place events in larger metropolitan areas. "The PGA Tour competes in only four of the top 10 largest U.S. media markets," Rolapp said. "That is an opportunity. We are evaluating markets like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston, and many others, places where there is strong fan demand for our sport and a chance to reach new fans." [...]

No more limited fields, no cut events

One of the signature event series’ most persistent criticisms—from fans, media and players alike—has been its small-field, no-cut format, which drew unflattering comparisons to LIV Golf. Rolapp said the new top tier will feature more players and a cut.

"Our best events will have larger fields. Ideally, we are targeting something closer to 120-player fields with a cut," Rolapp said. "That consistently matters. It helps fans know who they will see and showcases who they want to see—the most competitive players. It helps partners know what they're investing in, and it helps players better understand the competitive landscape in their schedules, all while embracing meritocracy."

In a related note …

Sponsor exemptions may be on the outs

Another source of fan frustration—one that cuts against the meritocracy ethos Rolapp keeps invoking—is the sponsor’s exemption system, along with the politics surrounding it. Rolapp appears to recognize the tension.

"It is my opinion we need a better competitive model because we should be delivering fields to the sponsors," he said. "We shouldn't make them work hard to put together a field. We're delivering them something, and they're supporting that. I think we need to be better partners in that. I also have an appreciation for the fact that professional golfers are independent contractors. So their level of job security is in some part tied to the exemptions they have earned. It's a balance. Those are all discussions we're having with the committee—to provide for those things but also deliver the purest competition that fans want."

A strong opener

As Golf Digest reported in January, the Hawaii swing is in danger of being cut. Rolapp said the tour wants to open its season out west with a finish shown on network television in prime time at an iconic venue. Perhaps Kapalua qualifies as "iconic," yet one possibility, sources told Golf Digest, is hosting the season opener at Torrey Pines.

Reunification with LIV is not a priority

Even before Rolapp arrived, the tour had quietly narrowed its reintegration focus to three players: Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka. Koepka has since returned, and DeChambeau's LIV contract expires this year. As for the others, or any broader rapprochement with LIV, Rolapp expressed no interest.

"My brief is to make the PGA Tour better," he said. "I'm open to whatever makes the PGA Tour better—better for fans, better for our members. That's what I'm focused on, and that's where I put all my efforts."

The tour may have a media-rights fight ahead

The tour's current media-rights deal runs until 2030. But it was negotiated in a pre-LIV world with a different competitive picture, and it predates the two-tier structure now being assembled. There is also the not-so-small matter of the NFL, which appears poised to re-enter the market aggressively and early, potentially swallowing up dollars networks might have been ready to spend on golf. Rolapp, who came from the NFL, spoke candidly about what that landscape could mean.

"I've read the same reports you have—that they would like to go to the media market earlier. The U.S. media rights market is $30 billion. The NFL currently accounts for $12 billion of that. They have made their public intentions clear; they would like to double that," Rolapp said. "So if you start doing that math and you're anyone other than the National Football League, you ask yourself: Next time I go to market, how do I make sure I have the most compelling product so that we can compete in what is a very complicated media ecosystem that's changing all the time? You see fans changing their habits—television versus streaming. You see the companies and the economics of the industry changing. So it's a very dynamic time in media.

"If you are in the sports business, it behooves you to put your house in order as much as possible. That is a significant part of the work that the Future Competition Committee is doing, and it's one of the reasons why it's so important."

Thinking outside the U.S.

While the PGA Tour schedule will remain mostly American based, Rolapp said that having an international presence is important as well. He acknowledged the benefits of the strategic alliance with the DP World Tour, and the notion that certain segments of the calendar would provide opportunities for international exposure.

“No, you should not think about this as purely in the confines of the United States. I think the bulk of our events will be, just because of the nature of the tour and the realities of our business. But we do want to do more internationally.

“I think in the fall, in other parts of the calendar, are great places to lean into that. I think you'll see parts of our schedule that will have an international component to it, even in the summer. So it is very much on our mind. We have not gotten to it in our committee work because we're sort of concentrating on the core of our schedule. But it is very much high on the agenda.

Don't expect a new schedule for 2027

There had been hope in the industry that changes would arrive as soon as next year. Last month at the Genesis Invitational, Tiger Woods moved to temper those expectations. Rolapp echoed the sentiment. Expect some adjustments in 2027—not a wholesale transformation.

"Once decisions have been made and finalized, changes will be implemented through a rolling approach," Rolapp said. "As Tiger has said recently, some elements could be addressed sooner for next season, with more significant change likely implemented for the 2028 season, pending the necessary work with our partners and other operational considerations.

"This is a complex process with many constituencies impacted. We will continue to move with urgency, but we are focused on getting it right."

by Joel Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Orlando Ramirez, Tracy Wilcox

[ed. As a former NFL exec responsible for handling media businesses including digital media, NFL Network, advertising sales, NFL sponsorships, NFL media assets, television contracts, and digital media rights you can probably figure out where this guy is coming from. Might be good for growing the game, but is it good for golf? See also: Players 2026: Behind the scenes of the PGA Tour's renewed pursuit of major status for the Players (this week). ]

Strait of Hormuz

Satellite view of the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway between Iran and Oman that links the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes.

Image: Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025/Getty Images

via: CNN Updates - Iran's attacks on a key oil route.

[ed. Pretty tight quarters.]

Goodbye, Taiwan

Three and a half years ago, I moved to Taiwan to teach policy debate at a cram school. I had just graduated with a math degree and three semesters of Mandarin, and I had no idea that my incoming adventures would land me a Taiwanese husband and a job at ChinaTalk. But as of this week, my time in Taiwan has come to an end.

Taiwan is so much more than just a disputed territory, a chess piece, or a flashpoint for great power war. That seems obvious, yet my conversations with friends back home always end up centered on invasion timelines and ADIZ violations. Today, I’d like to share some vignettes from my time living on this beautiful island as I tearfully say goodbye. I hope they make you smile.

Bumming Cigs—A Glitch for Infinite Mandarin Practice

I often meet foreigners who lament the difficulty of making Taiwanese friends. In America, bars are an acceptable place to talk to strangers, whereas, in my experience, Taiwanese people prefer to go to bars with a group of people they already know and socialize with that group. This is why I’ve started teaching my foreign friends a magical friend-making Mandarin phrase:

我可以白嫖一根煙嗎？

“Can I bum a cigarette?”

This sentence is your ticket to infinite free Mandarin conversation practice and endless opportunities to make Taiwanese friends. The verb 白嫖 (báipiáo) means “to bum” or “to freeload,” but the literal meaning is something like “to have a free appointment with a sex worker.” Predictably, Taiwanese people laugh out loud when a random foreigner walks up and uses this word correctly in a sentence, making it the perfect way to break the ice.

If you don’t smoke, simply tuck the cigarette behind your ear, and then, later in the evening, walk up to a different group and declare you need to give away your last cigarette because you’ve just decided to quit. Bam! You’ve just doubled your opportunities for socializing.

I used to teach people how to say, “Can I freeload off your vape?” — but Taiwan has since made it illegal to buy, sell, or import e-cigarettes. People still have them and can use them in public, but asking to 白嫖 such a rare commodity is in poor taste.

Non-Tariff Barriers

I didn’t crave hamburgers or pizza after I moved to Taipei. That would have been too easy. Instead, I craved Honey Nut Cheerios (or HNCs for short).

Cereal is not popular in Taiwan. Pretty much every neighborhood has a shop serving hot breakfast items, so the convenience of cereal isn’t a strong selling point the way it is in America. Some cereals are available at Carrefour 家樂福, but they somehow never stock my beloved HNCs. I set out on a mission to find out why.

I discovered Costco 好市多 used to sell HNCs, until it became clear that Cheerios are even less profitable than other cereals due to the quirks of Taiwanese advertising law. You see, every box of Cheerios is plastered with slogans like “can help lower cholesterol” and “may reduce the risk of heart disease.” In Taiwan, it’s illegal to make claims like that in food advertising, so if Costco wants to sell Cheerios, an employee first has to take a marker and strike out all the illegal claims on every box before the product can be put on the shelves. You can see why they switched to Froot Loops.

I did eventually find a small imported snack store selling exorbitantly priced Cheerios with stickers covering the offending text. I bought a box, but discovered my tolerance for sugar had changed since leaving America, and my beloved HNCs were now way too sweet for me. I guess that’s why it’s illegal to imply this cereal is healthy. [...]

The Meerkats

My Taiwanese friends and I decided to take a weekend trip to Chiayi 嘉義, a city in central Taiwan. We were walking around the old Japanese train station when I spotted a middle-aged Taiwanese uncle walking his two pet meerkats.

I found this to be incredibly delightful — the meerkats wore tiny little harnesses hooked up to a retractable leash. They were scrambling around, taking in the excitement of the bustling train station, while their owner just stood there scrolling on his phone.

I burst out laughing and turned around to ask my friends how to say “meerkat” in Mandarin (they’re called 狐獴, “fox mongooses”). When I looked back a second later, the meerkats had found a super wrinkly obese dog to play with.

I turned back to my friends, wheezing from laughter with tears in my eyes, and asked, “Is it common to keep meerkats as pets in Taiwan? How am I the only one being affected by this?”

They looked at each other with blank expressions and shrugged. “This is just how we react to stuff.”

I thought back to this moment in April 2024, when the 7.4-magnitude earthquake centered in Hualien rippled across the entire island. Once the shaking had stopped, I looked out the window of my Taipei apartment onto the market below. No one was screaming or panicking — the aunties just picked up their wheeled grocery carriers and continued walking. “This is just how we react to stuff.”

New Year’s in the Countryside

For Lunar New Year, we always go to visit my husband’s paternal grandparents. They live in a little farming community called Lukang 鹿港, “The Deer Port,” so called because deer skin and meat were shipped out of this settlement during the Dutch colonial period. Lukang was once the largest city in central Taiwan, but has depopulated in large part because it doesn’t have a rail station. But this sleepy town roars to life during the New Year, when the children and grandchildren who migrated to larger cities for work come back to Lukang to celebrate.

My husband’s grandparents live on a small farm granted to them by Chiang Kai-Shek’s land redistribution policy (耕者有其田, literally “the tiller has his own land”). Their names are Japanese, since they were born during the colonial period, and they mostly cannot speak Mandarin or read Chinese characters. Other family members are kind enough to help translate from Hokkien so I can communicate with them. I once asked Grandpa what he and his wife liked to do for fun in the countryside. “We love to go out and vote!” he said proudly.

Grandma’s teeth aren’t great, so one year I brought American-style mashed potatoes and gravy to LNYE dinner for her, and we’ve been friends ever since. This year, when we were saying goodbye, I asked if I could hug her for the first time. “My coat is all dirty…” I told her I didn’t mind and hugged her anyway. We both started tearing up. “When will you be back?”

Green Island

Taiwanese people don’t really collect sea glass — and that lack of competition makes beachcombing here super rewarding. But when my husband and I took a family trip to Green Island 綠島 off Taiwan’s southeastern coast, my mother-in-law cautioned me against bringing any sea glass back to the mainland. Green Island, she explained, housed a political prison during the martial law years (which is now an excellent museum), and she was worried a tormented spirit might be attached to the glass I picked up on the beach.

We spent the weekend wading through Green Island’s tide pools, eating freshly butchered young tuna we caught ourselves, and enjoying one of the world’s only saltwater hot springs. And of course, when we went to the beach, there was tons of beautiful sea glass.

I wasn’t sure about bringing the sea glass home (it’s better to just do what my mother-in-law says), but I was still picking it up since the hunt is half the fun. But that changed when we found a piece of sea glass with a Chinese character embossed on the front.

This character is 維 (wéi). It’s my husband’s name. There was no wei I wasn’t taking it home.

There is no special subset of characters used only for names — those same characters appear in words too (my Chinese name, for example, means surplus flowers 盈莉). So out of all the tens of thousands of Chinese characters, this piece of sea glass happened to have exactly the right one. It’s probably a fragment of an old bottle of liquid vitamin B12 (vitamin in Mandarin is 維他命).

While Americans often have a room in their house dedicated to tools for their hobby of choice, Taiwanese people rent tools at maker spaces and create things there. Back in Taipei, I made an appointment at a metalworking studio and soldered a silver bezel for my Green Island treasure.

by Lily Ottinger, ChinaTalk |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

Frederick Judd Waugh - "The Great Abyss" (1909)
via:

Phil Greenwood, Daisy Moon
via:

America and Public Disorder, and "The Kill Line"

Two weeks ago, on the blue line to O’Hare, my car had two men smoking joints, a broken woman, her eyes dilated and blank, sitting in a nest of filthy bags smelling of sewage, and a man barking into the void, shirtless, who was washing himself with flour tortillas, which would disintegrate, littering the subway floor, before he took out another and began the same process. This didn't shock me, or anyone else around me, since I'd seen some variation of this dystopian scene on every Chicago metro line I'd ridden, every pedestrian walkway I'd passed through, and on most street corners.

Three weeks ago, in Duluth, half the riders on every bus I took were mentally tortured and/or intoxicated. The downtown Starbucks, pedestrian malls, and shuttered doorways of vacated buildings all housed broken people. Same in Indianapolis, El Paso, New York City, Jacksonville, LA, Phoenix, and almost every community I’ve been to in the U.S., save for those gated by wealth.

An epidemic of mental illness and/or addiction plays out in the U.S. in public, with our streets, buses, parking lots, McDonald’s, parks, and Starbucks as ad hoc institutions for the broken, addicted, and tortured.That is not the case for the rest of the world, including where I am now, Seoul. My train from the airport was spotless, and so is the ten-mile river park I walk each day here, which given that large parts of it are beneath roadways is especially impressive. In the U.S. it would have impromptu homes of tents, cardboard, and tarps, smell of urine, and the exercise spots that dot its length probably couldn’t exist because of a fear of being vandalized.

You can learn more about the U.S. by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder.

We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size.

I’ve written about this many times before, because it is so striking, and it has widespread consequences, beyond the obvious moral judgement that a society should simply not be this way.

It’s a primary reason why we shy away from dense walkable spaces and instead move towards suburban sprawl. People in the U.S. don’t respect, trust, or want to be around other random citizens, out of fear and disgust. Japanese/European style urbanism—density, fantastic public transport, mixed-use zoning, that so many American tourists admire—can't happen here because there is a fine line between vibrant streets and squalid ones, and that line is public trust. The U.S. is on the wrong side of it. Simply put, nobody wants to be accosted by a stranger, no matter how infrequent, and until that risk is close to nil, people will continue edging towards isolated living.

It is why we “can’t have nice things” because we have to construct our infrastructure to be asshole-proof, and so we don’t build anything or build with a fortress mentality, stripping our public spaces down to the austere and utilitarian, emptying them of anything that can be vandalized.

The canonical example of this is La Sombrita, the laughably expensive Los Angeles “bus stop” that was a single pole to provide shade and security lighting, but did neither. La Sombrita exists precisely because it doesn’t do anything, which is the end result of a decades-long process of defensive construction. If you build a nice bus stop it is either immediately broken or turned into shelters for the destitute, and so you stop building those.

Another nice thing we don’t have in the U.S. is public restrooms. We don’t have them out of a justified fear of abuse, which is the same reason many Starbucks lock their restrooms. McDonald’s does this as well, depending on the location, and also even strips them of mirrors in the especially bad communities, to discourage people from using them for an hour-long morning toilet, as well as breaking the mirrors just for the hell of it.

This lack of public restrooms became an issue on Twitter when the latest round of debate about disorder in the U.S. was kicked off when a tweeter noted how offensive it was to have seen someone urinating in a crowded New York subway car.

This debate brought out a lot of absurd arguments, mostly from those trying to shrug it off or suggest it was simply the price of living in a big city.

No, the rest of the world doesn’t tolerate the amount of antisocial behavior we in the U.S. do. If someone were to piss on a subway anywhere else in the world, and very very few ever would want to (more on why below), they are removed from society for a period of time.

We however let people who aren’t mentally competent continue to engage in self-destructive and aberrant behavior without removing them, which consequently ruins it for everyone else, except those wealthy enough to build their own private islands of comfort.

Someone peeing on the subway is not of sound mind, and it isn’t normal behavior by any measure. It’s a sign of distress that should cause an intervention—by police, social workers, whoever—that mandates them into an institution for a period of time, until they regain sanity and stability. For someone actively psychotic —civil commitment to psychiatric hospital. For violent individuals refusing treatment—secure prison facilities with mandatory programs. For severe addiction—medical detox and residential treatment without the ability to walk away.

They should not be allowed to do whatever they want because they cannot control themselves enough to have that freedom. Someone shouting at strangers, someone washing themselves with flour tortillas, someone punching at the air voicing threats shouldn’t, for their own safety and others, be out roaming the streets. [...]

I’ve been very careful up to now not to use the word homeless, because it’s become an overly broad category that covers families in motels with Section 8 vouchers, people sleeping on friends’ couches until they can get back on their feet, mothers with children in long-term shelters, and then those who live in tents under bridges or sleep in a soiled sleeping bag.

Eighty-five percent (or so) of those in this broad category are not causing problems. They are, like most everyone else, doing their best to get by and better themselves. Sure, they have more complicated and chaotic lives than most, but they try to play by the rules as best they can.

Our problems in public spaces come from the fifteen percent or so who fall into the last group—the stubbornly intransigent—which are people who have options for housing but turn them down for a variety of reasons, some driven by mental demons, some by an overwhelming desire to always be on drugs, some simply out of preference to be alone. Others in this category have been ejected from housing because of continual violent and threatening behavior.

They are not, by almost any metric, of sound mind, and shouldn’t be granted the full privileges other citizens have.

The cover photo is John, and he is in this category. He had set himself on fire the day before I met him, freebasing a perc 30, and refused to go to the hospital because he didn’t want to lose his favorite spot behind the garbage bin, since it was only a block away from dealers and perfect to piss in. He had a government room he didn’t use because catching on fire (something he did every now and then) set off smoke alarms. He also thought it was cursed and monitored by the same people who had held him captive on an island in the middle of the Pacific—an island he escaped from three months before by swimming the four hundred miles. He showed me an arm, covered with burns, that he claimed was where a shark had bit him.

John should be mandated into a prison, a mental institution, or a rehab clinic, until he is competent enough to be on his own, not out on the streets in mental and physical pain, setting himself on fire. It is as simple as that, although I understand a change like this comes with additional nuanced policy debate. As for costs, it is more a question of redirecting what we spend rather than finding additional money, because we already spend an immense amount on this problem—the New York City budget for homeless services is four billion—without 'solving' it.

Even if you put aside the destruction this type of behavior has done to broader society, and your concerns are only focused on the health and welfare of the stubbornly intransigent, then our current system is still deeply wrong. We are not providing them justice by allowing them to choose a public display of mental misery, where the self harm they can do is far greater than when being monitored.

Beneath all this discussion is the additional question of why we in the U.S. have so many mentally unstable people, why so many are addicted to drugs, why so many people are OK with doing shocking things.

by Chris Arnade, Walks the World | Read more:
Images: X/uncredited

[ed. We've lost the plot. Or not. Maybe this is just an accurate reflection of this country's priorities over the last 50 years or so. Even worse, with AI just around the corner, it's going to get a lot worse unless our government starts working for its people again (and our people start working for our country again, beginning with acknowledging their own civic duties and responsibilities that go beyond simply paying taxes, gaming the system, and trying to make as much money as possible). From the comments:]

***

One of the things travel does best is remove the normalization filter we build at home. When you move between countries long enough, patterns that once felt “just how things are” start to look like choices societies have made - or failed to make.

What strikes me in pieces like this is not the comparison itself, but the discomfort it creates. Clean transit systems, safe public spaces, and functioning streets aren’t cultural miracles; they’re outcomes of priorities, incentives, and sustained public decisions. When those systems break down, the result isn’t abstract policy failure - it’s visible human suffering playing out in the most ordinary places.

Travel doesn’t just show us new landscapes. It quietly exposes which problems we’ve decided to tolerate.

***

[ed. See also: The Kill Line: Why China Is Suddenly Obsessed With American Poverty (NYT).]

Chinese commentators are talking a lot these days about poverty in the United States, claiming China’s superiority by appropriating an evocative phrase from video game culture.

The phrase, “kill line,” is used in gaming to mark the point where the condition of opposing players has so deteriorated that they can be killed by one shot. Now, it has become a persistent metaphor in Communist Party propaganda.

“Kill line” has been used repeatedly on social media and commentary sites, as well as news outlets linked to the state. It has gained traction in China to depict the horror of American poverty — a fatal threshold beyond which recovery to a better life becomes impossible. The phrase is used as a metaphor to encompass homelessness, debt, addiction and economic insecurity. In its official use, the “kill line” hovers over the heads of Americans but is something Chinese people don’t have to fear. [...]

The power is in the simplicity of what it describes: an abrupt threshold where misery begins and a happy life is irreversibly lost. The narrative is meant to offer China’s people emotional relief while attempting to deflect criticism of its leaders.

The worse things look across the Pacific, the logic of the propaganda goes, the more tolerable present struggles become. [...]

The fact is that societal inequality is a problem in both China and the United States. And the American economy no doubt leaves many people in fragile positions. The causes are complex.

Yet in China, poverty is experienced and perceived differently. In most Chinese cities, street begging and visible homelessness are tightly managed, making them far less prominent in daily life. Many urban residents encounter such scenes only through foreign reporting, rebroadcast by Chinese state media, about the United States and other places. [...]

When I was growing up in China in the early 1980s, my family subscribed to China Children’s News, which ran a weekly column with a simple slogan: “Socialism is good; capitalism is bad.” It described seniors in American cities scavenging for food, and homeless people freezing to death. Those stories were not invented, but they lacked context and were presented as the dominant experiences in American society. Much of Chinese society was still closed off from the world, and reliable information was scarce.

That many people accepted such narratives was hardly surprising. What’s striking is that similar portrayals continue to resonate today, when access to information is relatively much greater despite state control.

The formula is simple: magnify foreign suffering to deflect from domestic problems. That approach is taking shape today around the “kill line” metaphor.

The phrase is believed to have been first popularized in this new context on the Bilibili video platform in early November by a user known as Squid King. In a five-hour video, he stitched together what he claimed were firsthand encounters of poverty from time he spent in the United States. His video used scenes of children knocking on doors on a cold Halloween night asking for food, delivery workers suffering from hunger because of their meager wages and injured laborers discharged from hospitals because they could not pay.

The scenes were presented not as isolated cases but as evidence of a system: Above the “kill line,” life continues; below it, society stops treating people as human.

The narrative spread beyond the Squid King video, and many people online repeated his anecdotes. Essays on the nationalist news site Guancha and China’s biggest social media platform, WeChat, described the “kill line” as the “real operating logic” of American capitalism. [...]

In many of the commentaries, anecdotes about Americans experiencing abrupt financial crises are followed by comparisons with China. Universal basic health care, minimum subsistence guarantees and poverty alleviation campaigns are cited as evidence that China does not permit anyone to fall into sudden distress.

“China’s system will not allow a person to be ‘killed’ by a single misfortune,” one commentary from a provincial propaganda department states.

Many readers expressed shock at American poverty and gratitude for China’s system. “At least we have a safety net,” said one commenter...

“A topic does not gain traction simply because people are foolish,” one person wrote on WeChat. “Often, it spreads because confronting reality is harder.”

by Li Yuan, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Doris Liou