via:
Sunday, November 8, 2026
On Constructive Visions of the Future
Ada Palmer is a science fiction writer and historian. She teaches early modern European history at the University of Chicago, and her Terra Ignota quartet, beginning with Too Like the Lightning, imagines the world of the 25th century. Ken Liu is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer, the author of the Dandelion Dynasty series and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, and most recently the author of All That We See or Seem, the first novel in his new series.
I direct the Existential Hope program at Foresight Institute, where we work on circulating more constructive visions of the future. I wanted to know what two people who build worlds for a living think human flourishing would actually look like, and why our imaginations keep sliding toward empire and catastrophe instead. They ended up talking about work far more than I had expected, and about the assumptions underneath it, some of them 2000 years old. I also left with a new term I plan to spread: the Etsy economy.
Permanent crisis
Beatrice Erkers: There’s a trend right now in Silicon Valley of reaching for historical analogies, especially the Renaissance and the age of empires. Why those periods, and why now?
Ada Palmer: Right now, everybody feels like the world is in a state of crisis, and when the world is in a state of crisis, we tend to look at other time periods, both past ones and imagined future ones. You see enormous interest in both past and future during and after the French Revolution, when everyone is suddenly wearing clothing that’s a reproduction of what they imagine ancient Rome looked like. You see the same in the Renaissance, which is also a period of crisis, in the aftermath of the Black Death. History is a wide palette of alternatives that people reach for as a tool to help them understand our world in times of crisis.
The narrower answer is that the periods tech people keep invoking are the ones we associate with disruptive technology. When we talk about the Renaissance, we usually attribute its growth to technology. Tech people love to compare what’s happening now to a Gutenberg revolution. They love to think that a new technology they’re creating is going to accelerate historical change. Just as the Middle Ages were supposedly stagnant and then we suddenly had a period of acceleration toward modernity, they imagine we’re in a period of acceleration toward an exciting science fictional future that’s just around the corner. And the 19th century, another age of empire, is the other age we strongly associate with technology, via the Industrial Revolution.
There’s also the fiction problem. We have an awful lot of science fiction and fantasy about empire, because empire is easy to write about. The power is in the hands of a few characters. It’s very big, but it’s also very dramatic. It’s much harder to write fiction about a complicated plural republic with 52 interlaced political offices and everybody coming from complicated, slightly middle-class backgrounds. Just try writing fiction about the European Union and you will figure this out. So when people look back to history dominated by technology, and forward to futures dominated by technology, they’re seeing a lot of models of empire.
Ken Liu: I agree with all that, and I’d add that there’s an element of justification going on. When history is invoked, it’s often a way to explain and legitimate exercises of power. When Venice was trying to become a great city, it went to Alexandria to steal the body of St. Mark, so that it could prove itself a great Christian city. When people think they’re making great transformations, it can seem a little scary, and one way to legitimate it is to say: Historically, things happen because they’re inevitable. You can complain about what I’m doing all you want, but I’m just an agent of history.
Ada: We’re all aware of the type of history we call Great Man theory of history, which centers all agency in a couple of heroized figures, and which we’ve been trying to move away from. But one of the biggest types of history people turn to instead is Great Forces history, in which everything is giant gears grinding, and as soon as there’s a certain amount of torque in the system, the machine tips. That’s an important analytical tool. But just as much as Great Man history, Great Forces history erases agency for everyone, except perhaps economists, who get to believe they’re wielding the great forces.
Ken: That’s my favorite version: Economics as storytelling with numbers.
Ada: And if you don’t have a choice in the thing you’re doing, if it’s an inevitability, that’s one of many ways to accept it and justify it, both to others and to yourself.
Beatrice: How much of this is really about AI, though? That’s the revolution Silicon Valley believes it’s living through.
Ada: I think we’re wrong to separate generative AI and call it a completely new revolution. I often talk to Silicon Valley people who want to ask, are we so special that we’ve had six Gutenberg revolutions in a row, 10 years apart? And I say no, we’re having one Gutenberg revolution: the computer.
The personal computer, the internet, the cell phone, social media, and generative AI are all iterations of the same one fundamental technological change, the same way Gutenberg’s press kept having new impacts for decades through news networks, pamphlets, and eventually the newspaper. A little too much of our analysis of Silicon Valley right now is of the past five years instead of the past 20.
The guy behind the refrigerator
Beatrice: Ada, when I interviewed you before, you mentioned that Petrarch could imagine political change but not the end of disease. And what happened instead is that we ended a lot of diseases. What’s our version of that blind spot?
Ada: He thought it would be easier to defeat the Dire Horseman War than the Dire Horseman Plague. And we’ve found that in fact we’ve made more progress against the Dire Horseman Plague than against the Dire Horseman War. Some of the STEM problems have proved easier than some of the social science problems.
We’re not entirely missing this, but you constantly hear people encouraging STEM, STEM, STEM while diminishing the humanities and the social sciences as partners, whereas people who are really deep in it, who are scientists, understand there’s a symbiosis: We don’t make progress by funding just one of the three. There’s a perception that wealth flows toward technological innovation, rather than recognizing that wealth flows toward lots of kinds of innovation, only some of which is technological.
Ken: I don’t want to focus so much on Silicon Valley, though. The problems we have today don’t stem from a few people or a few inventions. They have their roots much further back, in what I’d call the gradual mechanization of humans.
Take AI displacing jobs. This is not something that happened in the last five years. We’ve been creating the conditions for it for a century or more. If you worked in customer service 40 years ago, you were a respected professional. Over time we turned those into scripted jobs. Once you’ve gotten things to that point, it’s not very difficult to throw the human out and put in a language model. It’s not the model that caused this. It’s that we’ve been making humans behave more and more like machines, up and down the chain: devaluing work, taking the meaning out of it, turning it into a mechanistic process where you’re a cog performing what your role demands. The pushback Silicon Valley is getting now is the tip of the iceberg. What’s really being expressed is a much deeper loss of meaning, dignity, and participation.
by Beatrice Erkers, with Ada Palmer and Ken Liu, Asterisk Magazine | Read more:
Image: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Permanent crisis
Beatrice Erkers: There’s a trend right now in Silicon Valley of reaching for historical analogies, especially the Renaissance and the age of empires. Why those periods, and why now?
Ada Palmer: Right now, everybody feels like the world is in a state of crisis, and when the world is in a state of crisis, we tend to look at other time periods, both past ones and imagined future ones. You see enormous interest in both past and future during and after the French Revolution, when everyone is suddenly wearing clothing that’s a reproduction of what they imagine ancient Rome looked like. You see the same in the Renaissance, which is also a period of crisis, in the aftermath of the Black Death. History is a wide palette of alternatives that people reach for as a tool to help them understand our world in times of crisis.
The narrower answer is that the periods tech people keep invoking are the ones we associate with disruptive technology. When we talk about the Renaissance, we usually attribute its growth to technology. Tech people love to compare what’s happening now to a Gutenberg revolution. They love to think that a new technology they’re creating is going to accelerate historical change. Just as the Middle Ages were supposedly stagnant and then we suddenly had a period of acceleration toward modernity, they imagine we’re in a period of acceleration toward an exciting science fictional future that’s just around the corner. And the 19th century, another age of empire, is the other age we strongly associate with technology, via the Industrial Revolution.
There’s also the fiction problem. We have an awful lot of science fiction and fantasy about empire, because empire is easy to write about. The power is in the hands of a few characters. It’s very big, but it’s also very dramatic. It’s much harder to write fiction about a complicated plural republic with 52 interlaced political offices and everybody coming from complicated, slightly middle-class backgrounds. Just try writing fiction about the European Union and you will figure this out. So when people look back to history dominated by technology, and forward to futures dominated by technology, they’re seeing a lot of models of empire.
Ken Liu: I agree with all that, and I’d add that there’s an element of justification going on. When history is invoked, it’s often a way to explain and legitimate exercises of power. When Venice was trying to become a great city, it went to Alexandria to steal the body of St. Mark, so that it could prove itself a great Christian city. When people think they’re making great transformations, it can seem a little scary, and one way to legitimate it is to say: Historically, things happen because they’re inevitable. You can complain about what I’m doing all you want, but I’m just an agent of history.
Ada: We’re all aware of the type of history we call Great Man theory of history, which centers all agency in a couple of heroized figures, and which we’ve been trying to move away from. But one of the biggest types of history people turn to instead is Great Forces history, in which everything is giant gears grinding, and as soon as there’s a certain amount of torque in the system, the machine tips. That’s an important analytical tool. But just as much as Great Man history, Great Forces history erases agency for everyone, except perhaps economists, who get to believe they’re wielding the great forces.
Ken: That’s my favorite version: Economics as storytelling with numbers.
Ada: And if you don’t have a choice in the thing you’re doing, if it’s an inevitability, that’s one of many ways to accept it and justify it, both to others and to yourself.
Beatrice: How much of this is really about AI, though? That’s the revolution Silicon Valley believes it’s living through.
Ada: I think we’re wrong to separate generative AI and call it a completely new revolution. I often talk to Silicon Valley people who want to ask, are we so special that we’ve had six Gutenberg revolutions in a row, 10 years apart? And I say no, we’re having one Gutenberg revolution: the computer.
The personal computer, the internet, the cell phone, social media, and generative AI are all iterations of the same one fundamental technological change, the same way Gutenberg’s press kept having new impacts for decades through news networks, pamphlets, and eventually the newspaper. A little too much of our analysis of Silicon Valley right now is of the past five years instead of the past 20.
The guy behind the refrigerator
Beatrice: Ada, when I interviewed you before, you mentioned that Petrarch could imagine political change but not the end of disease. And what happened instead is that we ended a lot of diseases. What’s our version of that blind spot?
Ada: He thought it would be easier to defeat the Dire Horseman War than the Dire Horseman Plague. And we’ve found that in fact we’ve made more progress against the Dire Horseman Plague than against the Dire Horseman War. Some of the STEM problems have proved easier than some of the social science problems.
We’re not entirely missing this, but you constantly hear people encouraging STEM, STEM, STEM while diminishing the humanities and the social sciences as partners, whereas people who are really deep in it, who are scientists, understand there’s a symbiosis: We don’t make progress by funding just one of the three. There’s a perception that wealth flows toward technological innovation, rather than recognizing that wealth flows toward lots of kinds of innovation, only some of which is technological.
Ken: I don’t want to focus so much on Silicon Valley, though. The problems we have today don’t stem from a few people or a few inventions. They have their roots much further back, in what I’d call the gradual mechanization of humans.
Take AI displacing jobs. This is not something that happened in the last five years. We’ve been creating the conditions for it for a century or more. If you worked in customer service 40 years ago, you were a respected professional. Over time we turned those into scripted jobs. Once you’ve gotten things to that point, it’s not very difficult to throw the human out and put in a language model. It’s not the model that caused this. It’s that we’ve been making humans behave more and more like machines, up and down the chain: devaluing work, taking the meaning out of it, turning it into a mechanistic process where you’re a cog performing what your role demands. The pushback Silicon Valley is getting now is the tip of the iceberg. What’s really being expressed is a much deeper loss of meaning, dignity, and participation.
by Beatrice Erkers, with Ada Palmer and Ken Liu, Asterisk Magazine | Read more:
Image: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Why Don’t We Live In An Art Nouveau World?
via: Baikonur/Wikipedia
Why don’t we live in an Art Nouveau world? (Asterisk)
[ed. Not a big fan of Gaudi's work (which I associate mostly with the term gaudy). But do love Art Deco. See also: Art Deco vs Nouveau: What’s the Difference? (Design Confidential).]
Underwater Data Centers May Be Coming Soon
Whales are “skittish animals,” says Arial Brewer, a beluga researcher at the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “A massive-scale project like this could really stress them out in a lot of different ways.”
Data centers, with their thousands of servers, generate considerable heat that can damage equipment if not offset in some way. Land-based facilities use massive amounts of fresh water to cool down. By putting a data center underwater, the ocean can easily dispel that heat. “Cooling is a large part of what a data center costs to run, and seawater is a free sink,” says Vishal Misra, a computer scientist and professor at Columbia University.
Microsoft showed that the concept could work with a pilot project off California in 2015 and another off Scotland a few years later. Currently, there are only two operational underwater data centers in the world, one off the Chinese island of Hainan and another off the coast of Shanghai, and they’re a fraction of the size of the proposed centers at the two U.S. sites.
In the Maine project, a cluster of what official documents call “subsea-compute hives” or “data center pods” would rest on the seabed, powered by up to 50 tidal turbines across 27 acres. In Cook Inlet, the data center would be made up of 66 pods and more than 300 tidal turbines. Its footprint would span 1,650 acres—more than 1,000 football fields.
The locations were chosen by DeepGreen Holdings LLC—a U.S.-based developer—because of their potential for tidal power, which works by harnessing the movement of water.
But each spot is also home to beleaguered groups of whales. A distinct population of around 300 critically endangered beluga whales lives in Cook Inlet. And the Gulf of Maine hosts feeding grounds for the North Atlantic right whale, a species whose numbers have dropped below 400 individuals.
by Ryan Green and Andrea Thompson, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Hollis Europe & Jacob Barbaro/NOAA Fisheries
[ed. See also: The Trump administration wants underwater datacenters. One Great Lakes non-profit is already preparing (Guardian).]
Saturday, November 7, 2026
The Biggest Flirting Mistake
It’s time to examine one of the most common dating sins.
Just the other day, a family member revealed to me that a longtime friend of hers confessed his multi-year love for her. Without hearing any other details, I immediately knew that wasn’t going to go well for him. It didn’t.
Similarly, a woman I know recently asked a friend out with zero build-up and never got a real answer. To be fair to her, a guy making the same move would've gotten the same result. Her problem wasn’t her desire or desirability. She just tried to harvest a crop that hadn't sprouted yet.
I see this ALL the time. You know the trope. Escalating too quickly. Coming on too strong. This is a skill issue, and I want to talk about why it’s such a vibe killer and thwarts what might otherwise be successful pursuits, both for men and for women.
Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe
Escalating too quickly is a bad tactic for two reasons. First, if there is romantic potential, it overwhelms the connection before it’s mature enough to support that kind of load. Second, if there is no mutual connection, it nukes existing dynamics and causes people to see you differently. It creates consequences. Sometimes benign, but frequently bad! Lost friendships, disrupted social groups, etc.
For all our collective obsession with rom com meet cutes, attraction isn’t something that strikes two people like a lightning bolt at the same time. Instead, it grows inside each individual at its own pace.
Even among established friendships, it’s very easy to push too suddenly. You might’ve developed feelings over years, but that was happening in your head. If your interest isn’t signaled externally and mutually reciprocated, they might still be on day one.
This is Why Flirting Exists, Actually
This is the whole purpose of flirting! Flirting is tossing someone a consequence-free softball. They can hit it back, or they can let it go by, guilt-free.
That second part is super important. Skillful flirting gives the other person an out. It needs to be “plausibly deniable.” Immediately asking someone out forces everyone to put their cards on the table right away. But most people hate that. It requires them to be vulnerable and take a risk. There is no ambiguity nor graceful retreat.
What works much better is a genuine compliment. If you find something that you sincerely like or appreciate about someone, that sends the ambiguous signal that you a) romantically admire them from afar and are open to growing your relationship deeper or b) you authentically value your present relationship with them and need nothing more. The value lies in the ambiguity. You give the person the opportunity to choose their own adventure.
The key is being tactful while giving the other person a consequence-free out.
Ambiguity is only the starting point, though. Each time they hit the softball back, you get to throw the next one a little harder and with clearer intention. By the time anyone actually asks the other person out, the answer should basically be known. The ask should almost be a formality.
by Connor Daly, The Friendship Engineer | Read more:
Just the other day, a family member revealed to me that a longtime friend of hers confessed his multi-year love for her. Without hearing any other details, I immediately knew that wasn’t going to go well for him. It didn’t.
I see this ALL the time. You know the trope. Escalating too quickly. Coming on too strong. This is a skill issue, and I want to talk about why it’s such a vibe killer and thwarts what might otherwise be successful pursuits, both for men and for women.
Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe
Escalating too quickly is a bad tactic for two reasons. First, if there is romantic potential, it overwhelms the connection before it’s mature enough to support that kind of load. Second, if there is no mutual connection, it nukes existing dynamics and causes people to see you differently. It creates consequences. Sometimes benign, but frequently bad! Lost friendships, disrupted social groups, etc.
For all our collective obsession with rom com meet cutes, attraction isn’t something that strikes two people like a lightning bolt at the same time. Instead, it grows inside each individual at its own pace.
Even among established friendships, it’s very easy to push too suddenly. You might’ve developed feelings over years, but that was happening in your head. If your interest isn’t signaled externally and mutually reciprocated, they might still be on day one.
This is Why Flirting Exists, Actually
This is the whole purpose of flirting! Flirting is tossing someone a consequence-free softball. They can hit it back, or they can let it go by, guilt-free.
That second part is super important. Skillful flirting gives the other person an out. It needs to be “plausibly deniable.” Immediately asking someone out forces everyone to put their cards on the table right away. But most people hate that. It requires them to be vulnerable and take a risk. There is no ambiguity nor graceful retreat.
What works much better is a genuine compliment. If you find something that you sincerely like or appreciate about someone, that sends the ambiguous signal that you a) romantically admire them from afar and are open to growing your relationship deeper or b) you authentically value your present relationship with them and need nothing more. The value lies in the ambiguity. You give the person the opportunity to choose their own adventure.
The key is being tactful while giving the other person a consequence-free out.
Ambiguity is only the starting point, though. Each time they hit the softball back, you get to throw the next one a little harder and with clearer intention. By the time anyone actually asks the other person out, the answer should basically be known. The ask should almost be a formality.
by Connor Daly, The Friendship Engineer | Read more:
Image: uncredited
A World Of Pain
Dr. M.R. Rajagopal is haunted by the memory of his cousin’s nightly cries echoing through his village. His cousin had no pain relief for flare-ups from a rare skin cancer on his scalp, which caused him immense pain. And his cousin was not the only person he was unable to help; his memoir details other occasions he was unable to do more for people in his care. In his early career, he was too cautious in administering morphine — an opioid — to a man who had burns on 70% of his body; he was afraid of creating an addict. For months, his patient was kept in agony with only a few hours of daily pain relief. Years later, the man bumped into Rajagopal and told him the ordeal almost destroyed him. Rajagopal was shattered — but the experience changed his approach to pain forever. Dr. Rajagopal went on to become a pioneer in modern Indian palliative medicine.
These anecdotes are from more than 40 years ago, but the patterns are hardly a thing of the past. Across rich and poor countries alike, people are still routinely failed through a lack of access to proper pain relief.
Having no access to pain relief can be agonizing. Cancer patients in Vietnam describe waiting for others to die so that they could get the leftover morphine. Kenyan patients speak of their wish to hasten their deaths due to their inability to find peace from pain. I experienced uncontrolled and agonizing pain myself when, as a child in Uruguay, I had second-degree burns on both legs. Without appropriate pain relief, my pain was more than just physical. As I counted down the hours to the next dressing change, the anxiety I experienced was just as distressing and memorable as the deep burn of the gauze coming unstuck from my raw flesh.
Some form of suffering is a core experience for most of us around the world. Depending on the country and survey, between 5% and 10% of people from the UK, US and Middle East report having pain that impedes their daily functioning. More than two-thirds of advanced cancer patients have serious pain, and recent estimates suggest over 70 million people endure at least one day of serious health-related suffering a year.
As populations grow older and we make gains against communicable disease, the burden of disease is shifting to chronic diseases like cancers and other diseases of old age, which can be painful and long-lasting. In much of the world, where people still can’t access good-quality healthcare, many conditions that are easily treatable remain serious causes of pain. We need better systems to help people deal with pain and death in a dignified way. [...]
In many countries, the bureaucratic procedures one must follow to prescribe opioids remain difficult to navigate, too few clinicians are allowed to prescribe and updates in regulation take too long to trickle down to clinical practice.
Instead, clinicians lean heavily on ibuprofen and paracetamol. However, these medications are only suitable for fairly mild pain; for postsurgical pain and cancer pain, they barely make a dent. [...]
These anecdotes are from more than 40 years ago, but the patterns are hardly a thing of the past. Across rich and poor countries alike, people are still routinely failed through a lack of access to proper pain relief.
Having no access to pain relief can be agonizing. Cancer patients in Vietnam describe waiting for others to die so that they could get the leftover morphine. Kenyan patients speak of their wish to hasten their deaths due to their inability to find peace from pain. I experienced uncontrolled and agonizing pain myself when, as a child in Uruguay, I had second-degree burns on both legs. Without appropriate pain relief, my pain was more than just physical. As I counted down the hours to the next dressing change, the anxiety I experienced was just as distressing and memorable as the deep burn of the gauze coming unstuck from my raw flesh.
Some form of suffering is a core experience for most of us around the world. Depending on the country and survey, between 5% and 10% of people from the UK, US and Middle East report having pain that impedes their daily functioning. More than two-thirds of advanced cancer patients have serious pain, and recent estimates suggest over 70 million people endure at least one day of serious health-related suffering a year.
As populations grow older and we make gains against communicable disease, the burden of disease is shifting to chronic diseases like cancers and other diseases of old age, which can be painful and long-lasting. In much of the world, where people still can’t access good-quality healthcare, many conditions that are easily treatable remain serious causes of pain. We need better systems to help people deal with pain and death in a dignified way. [...]
For the Few, Not the Many
In some settings, suffering from a painful medical condition can be like a sentence to ongoing torture. This torture is far more common in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) than in rich ones. 99% of children with serious health-related suffering are in LMICs. The lack of treatment for pain is especially common for the most severe types of pain, such as postsurgical and cancer pain. In Haiti, for instance, 99% of severe pain relief needs are unmet.
Worldwide, the top 10% of countries by opioid consumption consume as much as 90% of all distributed opioids (converted into doses with the potency of morphine).
To put this into perspective, one paper estimates that the average yearly controlled opioid consumption is 32 mg per person worldwide, but Germans consume around 480 mg per person. Note that this is not due to Germans overconsuming opioids; it is simply that pain elsewhere is not treated.
In some settings, suffering from a painful medical condition can be like a sentence to ongoing torture. This torture is far more common in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) than in rich ones. 99% of children with serious health-related suffering are in LMICs. The lack of treatment for pain is especially common for the most severe types of pain, such as postsurgical and cancer pain. In Haiti, for instance, 99% of severe pain relief needs are unmet.
Worldwide, the top 10% of countries by opioid consumption consume as much as 90% of all distributed opioids (converted into doses with the potency of morphine).
To put this into perspective, one paper estimates that the average yearly controlled opioid consumption is 32 mg per person worldwide, but Germans consume around 480 mg per person. Note that this is not due to Germans overconsuming opioids; it is simply that pain elsewhere is not treated.
Many issues in global health and development can be boiled down to lack of money, but the lack of pain control is not one of them. Morphine is among the cheapest essential medicines out there; oral morphine for 10 days costs about the same as a loaf of bread. Instead, lack of pain management is driven by a fear of opioids’ side effects, accentuated by the opioid epidemic in the United States and the closely related War on Drugs.
Traditionally, clinicians have avoided using opioids as much as possible, as they can cause central nervous system depression. This reduces the rate of breathing and in doing so could potentially hasten death. As recently as 2012, a third of medical ethics educators in the United States believed this to be the case. However, while it is true that morphine and other opioids have a narrow therapeutic index, meaning that the safety margin for their use is fairly small, it is not true that they hasten death when correctly administered.
Doctors’ fears of overusing opioids have only increased with time. Opioids are addictive, and overuse is dangerous. The United States has experienced significant public health harm from the overprescription of opioids, with the opioid crisis peaking at perhaps 80,000 opioid-caused deaths per year. The start of the crisis was caused by the unscrupulous drug pushing of pharmaceutical companies for types of pain where opioids are not very helpful. In response, doctors became much more hesitant to prescribe. Indeed, doctors could even be prosecuted for overprescription.
But while this first wave of the opioid crisis in the U.S. was driven by the prescribing dynamics of doctors, this was not the lasting mechanism for increased opioid deaths into the 2020s. Between 2011 and 2021, opioid deaths tripled, even as opioid prescriptions decreased by nearly 40% during the same period. Pain medication might have kicked off the epidemic, but it was not the lasting driver. [...]
It is true that prescribing opioid pain medications comes with risks. Estimates of the true rate of opioid use disorder as a consequence of prescribing are very heterogeneous. One study has estimated the prevalence of problematic pharmaceutical opioid use at 9.3% in patients with non-cancer pain, while other studies estimated the risk as 0.2% for individuals with no preexisting addiction issues. Even a 0.2% risk of addiction is not trivial, but it must be weighed against the harm of leaving patients in debilitating pain.
Crucially, opioid pain medication must be treated like all other possibly addictive pain medications — worth the risk in some circumstances, but not in others. Different cases require different approaches. And when opioids are used in end-of-life settings, there are fewer concerns about addiction — if a patient is dying, even addiction might be a reasonable choice to make the last few months of their life more bearable.
But despite these nuances, over time, regulation has tended to tighten restrictions on pain relief, further constraining who can access relief.
Restrictions begin at the international level. Countries must report their need for opiates to the International Narcotics Control Board before importing them. Unfortunately, countries often underestimate their own needs for opioids and fear being seen as lax on drug control. Thus, they rarely choose to deviate from their current level of imports — even if it is far too low. Furthermore, since pain medication is not seen as “lifesaving,” it is an easy place for governments to cut corners. [...]
Traditionally, clinicians have avoided using opioids as much as possible, as they can cause central nervous system depression. This reduces the rate of breathing and in doing so could potentially hasten death. As recently as 2012, a third of medical ethics educators in the United States believed this to be the case. However, while it is true that morphine and other opioids have a narrow therapeutic index, meaning that the safety margin for their use is fairly small, it is not true that they hasten death when correctly administered.
Doctors’ fears of overusing opioids have only increased with time. Opioids are addictive, and overuse is dangerous. The United States has experienced significant public health harm from the overprescription of opioids, with the opioid crisis peaking at perhaps 80,000 opioid-caused deaths per year. The start of the crisis was caused by the unscrupulous drug pushing of pharmaceutical companies for types of pain where opioids are not very helpful. In response, doctors became much more hesitant to prescribe. Indeed, doctors could even be prosecuted for overprescription.
But while this first wave of the opioid crisis in the U.S. was driven by the prescribing dynamics of doctors, this was not the lasting mechanism for increased opioid deaths into the 2020s. Between 2011 and 2021, opioid deaths tripled, even as opioid prescriptions decreased by nearly 40% during the same period. Pain medication might have kicked off the epidemic, but it was not the lasting driver. [...]
It is true that prescribing opioid pain medications comes with risks. Estimates of the true rate of opioid use disorder as a consequence of prescribing are very heterogeneous. One study has estimated the prevalence of problematic pharmaceutical opioid use at 9.3% in patients with non-cancer pain, while other studies estimated the risk as 0.2% for individuals with no preexisting addiction issues. Even a 0.2% risk of addiction is not trivial, but it must be weighed against the harm of leaving patients in debilitating pain.
Crucially, opioid pain medication must be treated like all other possibly addictive pain medications — worth the risk in some circumstances, but not in others. Different cases require different approaches. And when opioids are used in end-of-life settings, there are fewer concerns about addiction — if a patient is dying, even addiction might be a reasonable choice to make the last few months of their life more bearable.
But despite these nuances, over time, regulation has tended to tighten restrictions on pain relief, further constraining who can access relief.
Restrictions begin at the international level. Countries must report their need for opiates to the International Narcotics Control Board before importing them. Unfortunately, countries often underestimate their own needs for opioids and fear being seen as lax on drug control. Thus, they rarely choose to deviate from their current level of imports — even if it is far too low. Furthermore, since pain medication is not seen as “lifesaving,” it is an easy place for governments to cut corners. [...]
In many countries, the bureaucratic procedures one must follow to prescribe opioids remain difficult to navigate, too few clinicians are allowed to prescribe and updates in regulation take too long to trickle down to clinical practice.
Instead, clinicians lean heavily on ibuprofen and paracetamol. However, these medications are only suitable for fairly mild pain; for postsurgical pain and cancer pain, they barely make a dent. [...]
What Would It Take to Prioritize Pain?
Even in countries with excellent medication availability, progress in palliative care is often stuck for deeply human reasons: misconceptions, regulation, governance and lack of training. The barrier to good care is not medicine innovation but rather the lack of prioritization of pain control as a key part of treatment. Moreover, we need to change how people conceptualize palliative care. It is viewed as reserved for frail and dying people, which is perhaps why in the United States fewer than one in five young adults with advanced cancer get appropriate palliative care as part of their treatment.
Worldwide, most clinicians are still not properly trained in pain management and pain management specialists are very rare. Mozambique, a country of 35 million people, has just two physicians specializing in pain management. Zimbabwe, a country of 17 million people, has just two pain specialists. Pain management is often viewed as unimportant.
Even in countries with excellent medication availability, progress in palliative care is often stuck for deeply human reasons: misconceptions, regulation, governance and lack of training. The barrier to good care is not medicine innovation but rather the lack of prioritization of pain control as a key part of treatment. Moreover, we need to change how people conceptualize palliative care. It is viewed as reserved for frail and dying people, which is perhaps why in the United States fewer than one in five young adults with advanced cancer get appropriate palliative care as part of their treatment.
Worldwide, most clinicians are still not properly trained in pain management and pain management specialists are very rare. Mozambique, a country of 35 million people, has just two physicians specializing in pain management. Zimbabwe, a country of 17 million people, has just two pain specialists. Pain management is often viewed as unimportant.
by Morgan Fairless, In Development | Read more:
Image: By reference
[ed. Contrast this with the article below about the UK voting down assisted suicide. It's almost impossible to get opioid prescriptions these days, and millions of people are suffering.]
Some Thoughts on the Mid-Term Election
The Trump Decade Is Over. And a new chapter in American politics begins.
1. This was a generational wipeout for Republicans.
The Democratic Party’s margin of victory in the overall national vote for House seats is expected to be about 13 percentage points. That would be the largest Democratic rout in at least half a century, according to the New York Times. Two years after several news outlets announced that Trump had created a vibe shift in American history, we’re looking at a Watergate-level swing back to the left. [chart]
The Democratic Party’s margin of victory in the overall national vote for House seats is expected to be about 13 percentage points. That would be the largest Democratic rout in at least half a century, according to the New York Times. Two years after several news outlets announced that Trump had created a vibe shift in American history, we’re looking at a Watergate-level swing back to the left. [chart]
2. It was also a ‘generational’ moment for Democrats.
James Talarico is 37. Jon Ossoff is 39. Abdul El-Sayed is 42. Iowa Governor-elect Rob Sand is 44. The political order that has governed America for most of my adult life has been overwhelmingly dominated by Baby Boomers. But the candidate class is changing. The “Mr. Brightside caucus” of Millennial libs has an opportunity to write a new chapter in American politics.
3. Donald Trump is very good at running for president, but he is very bad at being president.
The problem with Donald Trump is not simple. It’s not just that he’s a bad president whose final pitch to voters involved talking endlessly about the shape of men’s butts and the ins and outs of White House renovations. It’s not just that he’s devoted himself to corrupt self-enrichment, spending his afternoons coating the White House ballroom in gold leaf while Americans struggle to afford gas. It’s not just that Americans increasingly oppose every single policy priority of the administration. It’s not just that he responded to frustrations about border control by dialing up a brutal immigration enforcement policy that destroyed 100 percent of his gains among Hispanic voters. It’s not just that he won a cost of living election in 2024 and then moved immediately to raise import prices with a historic tariff regime and then followed that up by sending gas and diesel prices higher by invading Iran in a military action that at once violated two campaign promises—to do something about high prices and to do nothing regarding military involvement in the Middle East. No, the deeper problem is that, on top of all of this, the man just plain sucks at candidate selection. Trump pushed out popular conservative senators in Texas and North Carolina for insufficient loyalty and backed horrendous wannabes that gave Democrats a chance to win in parts of the country where not even the most hopium-addled lib would have dreamed of winning in January 2025.
That Donald Trump is a unique political talent cannot be denied. But what kind of political talent is he, really? The president is now 2-0 running as an outsider trying to wrest the presidency from Democratic hands (2016 and 2024) but 0-3 in elections where he is already the president (2018, 2020, 2026). In an age of anti-incumbency, Trump is the epitome of the incumbent curse, a generational genius of charismatic negativity who has no idea what to do with the reins of power once he seizes them—other than marshal the machinery of the federal government to drive public opinion against him. [ed. See also: this (Nov. 6, 2026).]
James Talarico is 37. Jon Ossoff is 39. Abdul El-Sayed is 42. Iowa Governor-elect Rob Sand is 44. The political order that has governed America for most of my adult life has been overwhelmingly dominated by Baby Boomers. But the candidate class is changing. The “Mr. Brightside caucus” of Millennial libs has an opportunity to write a new chapter in American politics.
3. Donald Trump is very good at running for president, but he is very bad at being president.
The problem with Donald Trump is not simple. It’s not just that he’s a bad president whose final pitch to voters involved talking endlessly about the shape of men’s butts and the ins and outs of White House renovations. It’s not just that he’s devoted himself to corrupt self-enrichment, spending his afternoons coating the White House ballroom in gold leaf while Americans struggle to afford gas. It’s not just that Americans increasingly oppose every single policy priority of the administration. It’s not just that he responded to frustrations about border control by dialing up a brutal immigration enforcement policy that destroyed 100 percent of his gains among Hispanic voters. It’s not just that he won a cost of living election in 2024 and then moved immediately to raise import prices with a historic tariff regime and then followed that up by sending gas and diesel prices higher by invading Iran in a military action that at once violated two campaign promises—to do something about high prices and to do nothing regarding military involvement in the Middle East. No, the deeper problem is that, on top of all of this, the man just plain sucks at candidate selection. Trump pushed out popular conservative senators in Texas and North Carolina for insufficient loyalty and backed horrendous wannabes that gave Democrats a chance to win in parts of the country where not even the most hopium-addled lib would have dreamed of winning in January 2025.
That Donald Trump is a unique political talent cannot be denied. But what kind of political talent is he, really? The president is now 2-0 running as an outsider trying to wrest the presidency from Democratic hands (2016 and 2024) but 0-3 in elections where he is already the president (2018, 2020, 2026). In an age of anti-incumbency, Trump is the epitome of the incumbent curse, a generational genius of charismatic negativity who has no idea what to do with the reins of power once he seizes them—other than marshal the machinery of the federal government to drive public opinion against him. [ed. See also: this (Nov. 6, 2026).]
4. Democrats, don’t lie to yourselves: This is not a permanent realignment. The middle is molten.
Two years after almost every demographic shifted right, literally every demographic shifted toward Democrats, according to the New York Times. The biggest shifts were among voters under 30 (+32%), men under 45 (+31%), and Hispanics (+28%). Two years ago, some commentators—like me!—speculated that Trump had captured young voters and made serious inroads among Hispanics. But on Tuesday, those groups moved toward Democrats more dramatically than any other. [chart]
Is it a permanent realignment? I doubt it. I think it’s more likely that, in the 2020s—an era of high inflation, high interest rates, low institutional trust, global crises, and existential fears about climate change and AI—there are a lot of loosely attached independent voters who can toggle from party to party. Young voters and nonwhite voters (who are, themselves, disproportionately younger than whites) are not so much punching tickets to join a party as they are leasing one-year terms to vote for one group, only to punish them in the next election if things don’t improve.
Two years after almost every demographic shifted right, literally every demographic shifted toward Democrats, according to the New York Times. The biggest shifts were among voters under 30 (+32%), men under 45 (+31%), and Hispanics (+28%). Two years ago, some commentators—like me!—speculated that Trump had captured young voters and made serious inroads among Hispanics. But on Tuesday, those groups moved toward Democrats more dramatically than any other. [chart]
Is it a permanent realignment? I doubt it. I think it’s more likely that, in the 2020s—an era of high inflation, high interest rates, low institutional trust, global crises, and existential fears about climate change and AI—there are a lot of loosely attached independent voters who can toggle from party to party. Young voters and nonwhite voters (who are, themselves, disproportionately younger than whites) are not so much punching tickets to join a party as they are leasing one-year terms to vote for one group, only to punish them in the next election if things don’t improve.
by Derek Thompson, Substack | Read more:
Image: Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa
[ed. See also: Seventeen thoughts on an epic repudiation of Donald Trump (Slow Boring).]
Friday, November 6, 2026
Go Fish
I don’t know why I came to Alaska. I wanted to see the world. I needed to do something with my life besides scroll on my phone past photos of the genocide in Palestine. The vibes are dire in American democracy, the ice sheets keep weeping, my Saturn is returning. Plus I got dumped. I couldn’t stop weeping, like an ice sheet. Everyone kept saying there were so many fish in the sea.
I also heard there was money in Alaska. Two Aprils ago, hurtling down some highway toward the solar eclipse, Eliza told me about salmon season: six grueling weeks of work, rising and sleeping with the tides, the never-setting sun, netting $25,000. The next year they worked even harder for even longer, but prices were down and then there was an oil spill, so they washed ashore eventually with $6,000, a dozen frozen fish, and a sunburn. Monocrop soybeans blurred the Great Plains; I felt alive, unalienated, swashbuckling just to glimpse this volatility. If being on a boat seemed intimidating, Eliza said, they’d heard of this other job where you spend all summer counting fish.
I imagined wearing waders, standing in the river with a clicker, like one fish two fish red fish blue fish five six seven million fish this year. I imagined the vastness of the tundra, and gazed about the drabness of my cubicle, and decided or resigned to escape from the gray indoors. Aren’t most fish factory farmed these days? I wondered into a puddle of soy sauce, staring at my reflection in a single-use plastic tray of gas station sushi. Who am I, anyway, if you are what you eat? I found the listing on governmentjobs.com: Fish and Wildlife Technician II.
Now somehow it’s a cloud-coddled Monday morning in Ketchikan in June 2025, and I am drinking a cup of Mr. Coffee in a Department of Fish and Game onboarding meeting, and Jack — no longer a square on my screen but enfleshed, in hiking pants and a hoodie with a day or two of beard, white, about my age and height, and instantly chill — is pointing at my name and position on a State of Alaska PowerPoint. I and these two young women with our packets of stapled paperwork are the FWT IIs — “but we just say port samplers,” says Jack, whom the screen labels Port Sampling Supervisor. The conference room is ringed by wall-tall topographic/bathymetric maps of the Alexander Archipelago. A taxidermied snowy owl is mounted above the TV.
Port sampling, Jack explains, means collecting real-time data on the commercial salmon season. We are the State of Alaska’s eyes and hands on-site when the fishermen arrive at the processor. Our data makes it possible for the Department to monitor the commercial salmon catches, model the migrations of the fish, and micromanage the permissions of the fishermen. Day by day and cove by cove, all summer long, the “management biologists” decide and decree when and where fishing is allowed and forbidden, and to what kinds of boats.
The PowerPoint speedruns the three commercial fishing fleets the Department independently licenses and regulates: troll, gillnet, and seine. The difference is in the equipment: Trollers drag dozens of hooks behind their boats; gillnetters and seiners, respectively, lower large and gargantuan nets. When the fishing vessels deliver the salmon to the processors all summer long, my co-port-samplers-in-training and I will be waiting at the dock to intercept, identify, and measure them. Processors? Once upon a time these were called canneries, but they mostly no longer can. There are three private processors in Ketchikan, selling a wide variety of seafood products: flash frozen, vac-packed, headed and gutted, preportioned into fillets. Jack says we will each be stationed at a different processor every day. He says the three processors will combine with the three commercial fishing vessel types to determine which of the four methods of port sampling I will perform this summer — on the five species of Pacific salmon. I take frantic notes as he flips through pictures of indistinguishable fish.
Jack points to Ketchikan on a colorful map, the very bottom dot of the Southeast Alaska panhandle, and I feel ridiculously distant from my Arctic dreams. We are one of about a dozen small teams distributed across Alaska’s coastline, he continues, each contributing hundreds of numbers a day to the Department’s vast and subtle datasets, which allow the management biologists to optimize (?) the fisheries simultaneously for profit and sustainability. Jack explains in detail and at length all day. I sense an undertow pulling me far out of my depth.
This is our cubicle. This is where I will come to collect the ruggedized tablets in the morning and return in the afternoon to synchronize data and charge them overnight. This is my yellow plastic metal-detecting wand. I can keep it in my port sampling backpack, which is black and heavy-duty and waterproof and Grundéns brand — as are the forest-green overcoat and the orange polyurethane overalls Jack calls my fishing bibs. Everyone in the office is white. I meet two Annas, an Anne, and an Annie. I am provisioned a pair of Xtratuf boots and offered my choice of hat. This has an Alaska Department of Fish and Game logo and will be my uniform this summer.
Reeling, I jumble along the island’s shoreline, down Tongass Avenue, Ketchikan’s spine, past flightseeing jetties, a dental office complex, the postcard-precious steeple of the Lutheran church. At the cruise ship pier, I turn up a steep street curving up a treey cliff and quickly off it onto the sunny slope of houses where my Facebook landlords live. Crunchy the cat is dozing on the long straight stairs cutting up the cliff face. Where Warren meets G meets Harding Streets, I climb the wooden zigzag to the patio of my studio and pause for a giddy instant to behold the blue view. The grand Gravina Island unfolds across the calm and shallow channel, so wide it looks less like an island than a riverbank in the distance. A literal bald eagle soars magnificently over the vista. So this is Alaska. I work for the biology bureaucracy! Maybe I will finally figure out what life is.
On Tuesday morning we pile into a recommissioned sheriff’s department SUV and drive across town to my first fish processor. Jack leads us between two hangars, up a steel staircase, across a tread-plate catwalk, through a door, and into a large bright space striated with Formica lunch tables: the break room. I sit where Jack does, down at a table with two more white women wearing ADF&G-branded baseball caps. These are the FWT IIIs, who onboarded last week and have been out port sampling already.
Cannily, Jack disappears behind the lockers to the bathroom, leaving us free to chat among ourselves, pleasant and professional and soon blazing past formalities. I ask a lot of questions and begin to discern the existence of a small class of twentysomethings, preprofessional biologists job-hopping around the Pacific Rim. They teach tourists to snorkel in Costa Rica or Cozumel in the fall, skip the American winter to study stingrays or sharks in Australia, and fly up to Alaska in June to work salmon season. Trump defunded the US Forest Service in January, so some of us State of Alaska seasonal workers get to live in the USFS bunkhouse this summer.
Three of us are fresh out of college. Two of us grew up in Ketchikan. Four of us have, or almost have, marine biology degrees. The least like the others of us is Ana, who is, at 55, the oldest of us by far. Ana is a credentialed science teacher, but after a career in Washington state and three years all the way up in Utqiaġvik, she now teaches welding at Ketchikan High School. Ana met Kurt Cobain in a bar once in college, and now is a terminology stickler, insisting for instance that fish means more than one conspecific organism and fishes means more than one species. I like her immediately.
Processor workers amble into the break room. They fill the back of the room before the front, seemingly self-segregated into language blocs. I hear Spanish, Tagalog, West African French, and — is that Russian? “Probably Serbian,” says Ana. “Last year there were some Ukrainians.” Two of them begin a game of Jenga. The blocks clatter amid the mounting din. One of us conjures a deck of ADF&G-branded playing cards, and I am organizing my hand and relaxing into this easy scene when eight tall skinny beautiful white women walk in.
“Who’s that?” I ask quietly.
“That’s Sarah.”
“Who?”
“Sarah.”
“Which one’s Sarah?”
“They’re all Sarah.”
“?”
“It’s an acronym. Southern Southeast — um — Regional — ”
“ — Aquaculture Association,” finishes Jack, returning. “S-S-R-A-A. They run the hatcheries. In Southeast, anyway.” Hatcheries? I wonder, suddenly conscious of how the chunky baseball cap sits on my ponytail. Jack waves, and the SSRAAs wave back like waves, when a voice cuts through the noise to get our attention.
Reluctantly I turn to face the front of the room, where a portly man in a purple T-shirt is beginning . . . another PowerPoint. A long list of rules forbids things like jewelry and pens and AirPods in the processor, anything that might disassemble into fiddly metal parts or fall into the food. But if you wear only one AirPod, he insinuates unsubtly, and keep it under your hairnet, and keep the volume low, and as long as I don’t see it. He thanks us all for modeling proper behavior. If all goes according to plan, he says, in a tone that somehow sounds both like a joke and a threat, the machines won’t turn off until September.
[ed. I started out as a Tech II, but not doing this stuff. So much opportunity back then. Within five years I was doing department-wide coordination and state policy on federal oil and gas projects throughout Alaska.]
I also heard there was money in Alaska. Two Aprils ago, hurtling down some highway toward the solar eclipse, Eliza told me about salmon season: six grueling weeks of work, rising and sleeping with the tides, the never-setting sun, netting $25,000. The next year they worked even harder for even longer, but prices were down and then there was an oil spill, so they washed ashore eventually with $6,000, a dozen frozen fish, and a sunburn. Monocrop soybeans blurred the Great Plains; I felt alive, unalienated, swashbuckling just to glimpse this volatility. If being on a boat seemed intimidating, Eliza said, they’d heard of this other job where you spend all summer counting fish.
Now somehow it’s a cloud-coddled Monday morning in Ketchikan in June 2025, and I am drinking a cup of Mr. Coffee in a Department of Fish and Game onboarding meeting, and Jack — no longer a square on my screen but enfleshed, in hiking pants and a hoodie with a day or two of beard, white, about my age and height, and instantly chill — is pointing at my name and position on a State of Alaska PowerPoint. I and these two young women with our packets of stapled paperwork are the FWT IIs — “but we just say port samplers,” says Jack, whom the screen labels Port Sampling Supervisor. The conference room is ringed by wall-tall topographic/bathymetric maps of the Alexander Archipelago. A taxidermied snowy owl is mounted above the TV.
Port sampling, Jack explains, means collecting real-time data on the commercial salmon season. We are the State of Alaska’s eyes and hands on-site when the fishermen arrive at the processor. Our data makes it possible for the Department to monitor the commercial salmon catches, model the migrations of the fish, and micromanage the permissions of the fishermen. Day by day and cove by cove, all summer long, the “management biologists” decide and decree when and where fishing is allowed and forbidden, and to what kinds of boats.
The PowerPoint speedruns the three commercial fishing fleets the Department independently licenses and regulates: troll, gillnet, and seine. The difference is in the equipment: Trollers drag dozens of hooks behind their boats; gillnetters and seiners, respectively, lower large and gargantuan nets. When the fishing vessels deliver the salmon to the processors all summer long, my co-port-samplers-in-training and I will be waiting at the dock to intercept, identify, and measure them. Processors? Once upon a time these were called canneries, but they mostly no longer can. There are three private processors in Ketchikan, selling a wide variety of seafood products: flash frozen, vac-packed, headed and gutted, preportioned into fillets. Jack says we will each be stationed at a different processor every day. He says the three processors will combine with the three commercial fishing vessel types to determine which of the four methods of port sampling I will perform this summer — on the five species of Pacific salmon. I take frantic notes as he flips through pictures of indistinguishable fish.
Jack points to Ketchikan on a colorful map, the very bottom dot of the Southeast Alaska panhandle, and I feel ridiculously distant from my Arctic dreams. We are one of about a dozen small teams distributed across Alaska’s coastline, he continues, each contributing hundreds of numbers a day to the Department’s vast and subtle datasets, which allow the management biologists to optimize (?) the fisheries simultaneously for profit and sustainability. Jack explains in detail and at length all day. I sense an undertow pulling me far out of my depth.
This is our cubicle. This is where I will come to collect the ruggedized tablets in the morning and return in the afternoon to synchronize data and charge them overnight. This is my yellow plastic metal-detecting wand. I can keep it in my port sampling backpack, which is black and heavy-duty and waterproof and Grundéns brand — as are the forest-green overcoat and the orange polyurethane overalls Jack calls my fishing bibs. Everyone in the office is white. I meet two Annas, an Anne, and an Annie. I am provisioned a pair of Xtratuf boots and offered my choice of hat. This has an Alaska Department of Fish and Game logo and will be my uniform this summer.
Reeling, I jumble along the island’s shoreline, down Tongass Avenue, Ketchikan’s spine, past flightseeing jetties, a dental office complex, the postcard-precious steeple of the Lutheran church. At the cruise ship pier, I turn up a steep street curving up a treey cliff and quickly off it onto the sunny slope of houses where my Facebook landlords live. Crunchy the cat is dozing on the long straight stairs cutting up the cliff face. Where Warren meets G meets Harding Streets, I climb the wooden zigzag to the patio of my studio and pause for a giddy instant to behold the blue view. The grand Gravina Island unfolds across the calm and shallow channel, so wide it looks less like an island than a riverbank in the distance. A literal bald eagle soars magnificently over the vista. So this is Alaska. I work for the biology bureaucracy! Maybe I will finally figure out what life is.
On Tuesday morning we pile into a recommissioned sheriff’s department SUV and drive across town to my first fish processor. Jack leads us between two hangars, up a steel staircase, across a tread-plate catwalk, through a door, and into a large bright space striated with Formica lunch tables: the break room. I sit where Jack does, down at a table with two more white women wearing ADF&G-branded baseball caps. These are the FWT IIIs, who onboarded last week and have been out port sampling already.
Cannily, Jack disappears behind the lockers to the bathroom, leaving us free to chat among ourselves, pleasant and professional and soon blazing past formalities. I ask a lot of questions and begin to discern the existence of a small class of twentysomethings, preprofessional biologists job-hopping around the Pacific Rim. They teach tourists to snorkel in Costa Rica or Cozumel in the fall, skip the American winter to study stingrays or sharks in Australia, and fly up to Alaska in June to work salmon season. Trump defunded the US Forest Service in January, so some of us State of Alaska seasonal workers get to live in the USFS bunkhouse this summer.
Three of us are fresh out of college. Two of us grew up in Ketchikan. Four of us have, or almost have, marine biology degrees. The least like the others of us is Ana, who is, at 55, the oldest of us by far. Ana is a credentialed science teacher, but after a career in Washington state and three years all the way up in Utqiaġvik, she now teaches welding at Ketchikan High School. Ana met Kurt Cobain in a bar once in college, and now is a terminology stickler, insisting for instance that fish means more than one conspecific organism and fishes means more than one species. I like her immediately.
Processor workers amble into the break room. They fill the back of the room before the front, seemingly self-segregated into language blocs. I hear Spanish, Tagalog, West African French, and — is that Russian? “Probably Serbian,” says Ana. “Last year there were some Ukrainians.” Two of them begin a game of Jenga. The blocks clatter amid the mounting din. One of us conjures a deck of ADF&G-branded playing cards, and I am organizing my hand and relaxing into this easy scene when eight tall skinny beautiful white women walk in.
“Who’s that?” I ask quietly.
“That’s Sarah.”
“Who?”
“Sarah.”
“Which one’s Sarah?”
“They’re all Sarah.”
“?”
“It’s an acronym. Southern Southeast — um — Regional — ”
“ — Aquaculture Association,” finishes Jack, returning. “S-S-R-A-A. They run the hatcheries. In Southeast, anyway.” Hatcheries? I wonder, suddenly conscious of how the chunky baseball cap sits on my ponytail. Jack waves, and the SSRAAs wave back like waves, when a voice cuts through the noise to get our attention.
Reluctantly I turn to face the front of the room, where a portly man in a purple T-shirt is beginning . . . another PowerPoint. A long list of rules forbids things like jewelry and pens and AirPods in the processor, anything that might disassemble into fiddly metal parts or fall into the food. But if you wear only one AirPod, he insinuates unsubtly, and keep it under your hairnet, and keep the volume low, and as long as I don’t see it. He thanks us all for modeling proper behavior. If all goes according to plan, he says, in a tone that somehow sounds both like a joke and a threat, the machines won’t turn off until September.
by Grace Glass, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Sasha Fishman, Plastic Trapped Love (Interpretive Hexagon), detail. 2025[ed. I started out as a Tech II, but not doing this stuff. So much opportunity back then. Within five years I was doing department-wide coordination and state policy on federal oil and gas projects throughout Alaska.]
Thursday, November 5, 2026
Can Using a Dumber Phone Cure ‘Brain Rot’?
Dear readers, I have a confession: I am suffering from an ailment that the younger ones call “brain rot,” the inability to think deeply after too much scrolling on my phone. These days, it’s tough to even finish a book.
Plenty of people have this problem. So many, it has birthed a category of minimalist tech products striving to rid us of distractions, from the Ai Pin, the now defunct artificially intelligent lapel pin that took notes, to phones with only basic features.
The latest example, the $600 Light Phone III, from a Brooklyn start-up, is a stripped-down phone that does barely anything. The newest version, which began shipping in March and is set for a broader release in July, can place calls, send texts, take photos, show map directions, play music and podcasts and not do much else.
There is no web browser. There is also no app store, meaning there’s no Uber to hail a ride, no Slack and no social media. There isn’t even email.
“You use it when you need to, and when you put it back it disappears in your life,” said Kaiwei Tang, the chief executive of Light, the start-up that has developed multiple iterations of the Light Phone over the last nine years. “We get a lot of customers telling us they feel less stressed out, they become more productive, they become creative.”
I was curious to see if the Light Phone could cure me of brain rot, so I used it as my primary phone for a week. There were moments I enjoyed it. While waiting for a train, resting at the gym or eating alone, I was not tempted to stare at the phone screen, and I felt more mindful of my surroundings. Phone calls sounded nice and clear. The maps app did a fine job navigating me around town.
It reminded me of simpler times when we used phones primarily to converse before putting them away to focus on other tasks.
But over the week, the downsides of a dumber phone chipped away at my enjoyment, and over all I felt more stressed and less capable. I suddenly found myself unable to get into a train station, look up the name of a new restaurant or control my garage door.
Some of that has less to do with the Light Phone itself, which is a so-so product, and more to do with how society as a whole has become dependent on advanced smartphone features.
Here’s how my week went running errands, commuting and going out with a lower-tech phone.
[ed. This review could be completely turned around by asking kids who are smartphone restricted how they might feel (even if they can't control garage doors).]
Plenty of people have this problem. So many, it has birthed a category of minimalist tech products striving to rid us of distractions, from the Ai Pin, the now defunct artificially intelligent lapel pin that took notes, to phones with only basic features.
There is no web browser. There is also no app store, meaning there’s no Uber to hail a ride, no Slack and no social media. There isn’t even email.
“You use it when you need to, and when you put it back it disappears in your life,” said Kaiwei Tang, the chief executive of Light, the start-up that has developed multiple iterations of the Light Phone over the last nine years. “We get a lot of customers telling us they feel less stressed out, they become more productive, they become creative.”
I was curious to see if the Light Phone could cure me of brain rot, so I used it as my primary phone for a week. There were moments I enjoyed it. While waiting for a train, resting at the gym or eating alone, I was not tempted to stare at the phone screen, and I felt more mindful of my surroundings. Phone calls sounded nice and clear. The maps app did a fine job navigating me around town.
It reminded me of simpler times when we used phones primarily to converse before putting them away to focus on other tasks.
But over the week, the downsides of a dumber phone chipped away at my enjoyment, and over all I felt more stressed and less capable. I suddenly found myself unable to get into a train station, look up the name of a new restaurant or control my garage door.
Some of that has less to do with the Light Phone itself, which is a so-so product, and more to do with how society as a whole has become dependent on advanced smartphone features.
Here’s how my week went running errands, commuting and going out with a lower-tech phone.
by Brian X. Chen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andria Lo For The New York Times[ed. This review could be completely turned around by asking kids who are smartphone restricted how they might feel (even if they can't control garage doors).]
Laser Mosquito Air Defense System
A Powerful Mosquito-Hunting Laser Uses A.I. to Zap Winged Pests
For anyone kept awake by the infernal whine of mosquitoes, artificial intelligence may be coming to the rescue — armed with a laser.
A Chinese company has started marketing a $1,000 A.I.-enabled device that tracks mosquitoes in flight and burns their wings off. It uses technology found in self-driving cars to pinpoint its targets, while relying on A.I. to decide when it is safe to fire.
During a recent demonstration at the offices of Photon Matrix, the company behind the device, it appeared remarkably effective. The white, nearly brick-size machine quickly zapped mosquito after mosquito, each bursting into a green or blue flame with a tiny pop.
For anyone who has ever wished mosquitoes a horrible death, this is a strikingly high-tech way to make that wish a reality. The laser delivers a gruesome end, though not a quick one. Mosquitoes whose wings have burned off can take hours or even days to die, lying on the ground and twitching slightly, said Wang Chuan, chief executive and founder of Photon Matrix, based in Changzhou, about 100 miles northwest of Shanghai.
After the demonstration, I examined the fallen mosquitoes. The wings appeared to be gone, but their legs and bodies looked intact. None could fly, even when I waved my hand directly over them.
But there is a potentially dangerous catch. A laser powerful enough to disable a mosquito can also damage the human eye.
While the United States leads in developing the most advanced A.I. models, the device shows how quickly China is embedding powerful computing in consumer products. The technology also has military potential. It’s not hard to imagine how a system that tracks and shoots down mosquitoes today could be adapted to target drones tomorrow.
In the United States, manufacturers can begin selling new laser devices after submitting paperwork to the Food and Drug Administration, which does not test the products, said Ken Barat, a former laser safety officer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who oversaw the drafting of the world’s technical standards for research lasers.
Mr. Barat said Photon Matrix’s multiple safeguards could make the device safe. But he cautioned that a Class 4 laser designed to focus on something as tiny as a mosquito could pack “a lot of energy” into a small space.
Photon Matrix initially tested less powerful Class 3 lasers but found they could not reliably disable mosquitoes, Mr. Wang said. The company chose a Class 4 laser, limiting each burst to one-hundredth of a second — long enough, he said, to burn off the wings while reducing, but not eliminating, the risk of eye damage. The wings, which have little ability to absorb heat, burn off before the mosquito’s body is heavily affected.
To protect people and pets, an A.I.-enabled camera recognizes them and prevents the laser from firing. The system also identifies reflective surfaces that could send beams bouncing in unpredictable directions. An infrared system provides illumination so the camera can operate at night. A separate radar system detects movement by people or pets in the laser’s path, even in total darkness.
by Keith Bradsher, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Qilai Shen for The New York Times
A Chinese company has started marketing a $1,000 A.I.-enabled device that tracks mosquitoes in flight and burns their wings off. It uses technology found in self-driving cars to pinpoint its targets, while relying on A.I. to decide when it is safe to fire.
For anyone who has ever wished mosquitoes a horrible death, this is a strikingly high-tech way to make that wish a reality. The laser delivers a gruesome end, though not a quick one. Mosquitoes whose wings have burned off can take hours or even days to die, lying on the ground and twitching slightly, said Wang Chuan, chief executive and founder of Photon Matrix, based in Changzhou, about 100 miles northwest of Shanghai.
After the demonstration, I examined the fallen mosquitoes. The wings appeared to be gone, but their legs and bodies looked intact. None could fly, even when I waved my hand directly over them.
But there is a potentially dangerous catch. A laser powerful enough to disable a mosquito can also damage the human eye.
The device, the Laser Mosquito Air Defense System, uses a Class 4 laser, the most powerful classification, typically reserved for industrial applications. Such lasers can cause retinal injuries in less than a second, and their sale and use are tightly regulated.
Mr. Wang said that the company was seeking regulatory approval in China, Europe and the United States and that he believed Chinese approval was close.
In the United States, manufacturers can begin selling new laser devices after submitting paperwork to the Food and Drug Administration, which does not test the products, said Ken Barat, a former laser safety officer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who oversaw the drafting of the world’s technical standards for research lasers.
Mr. Barat said Photon Matrix’s multiple safeguards could make the device safe. But he cautioned that a Class 4 laser designed to focus on something as tiny as a mosquito could pack “a lot of energy” into a small space.
Photon Matrix initially tested less powerful Class 3 lasers but found they could not reliably disable mosquitoes, Mr. Wang said. The company chose a Class 4 laser, limiting each burst to one-hundredth of a second — long enough, he said, to burn off the wings while reducing, but not eliminating, the risk of eye damage. The wings, which have little ability to absorb heat, burn off before the mosquito’s body is heavily affected.
To protect people and pets, an A.I.-enabled camera recognizes them and prevents the laser from firing. The system also identifies reflective surfaces that could send beams bouncing in unpredictable directions. An infrared system provides illumination so the camera can operate at night. A separate radar system detects movement by people or pets in the laser’s path, even in total darkness.
Image: Qilai Shen for The New York Times
[ed. It's AI, what could go wrong? Actually, this almost makes me feel sorry for the little guys. Almost.]
Wednesday, November 4, 2026
U.K. Parliament Votes Down Assisted Suicide Bill
U.K. lawmakers... voted down a bill to legalize assisted suicide for terminally ill adults in England and Wales.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was narrowly rejected, with 286 members of the House of Commons voting against the bill and 270 members voting in favor.
The bill passed the Commons last year but unelected lawmakers in the House of Lords effectively filibustered the legislation by introducing more than 1,200 amendments. Friday’s vote ends a push by proponents of assisted suicide to revive the bill.
The bill, if passed, would have allowed for patients with less than six months to live to apply for assisted suicide. Then, two doctors and a panel of experts would determine if the patient qualified, Only adults would have been able to apply for assisted suicide. [...]
During debate, lawmaker and cancer surgeon Zubir Ahmed brought up concerns about accurately predicting the timeline of a patient’s prognosis.
“I have to be honest. When I am asked to prognosticate on whether someone has six months to live, I am as often wrong as I am right,” Ahmed, a member of the Labour Party, said. “It is no longer a good enough marker for the DWP to use in discharging benefits for life-limiting conditions, and I do not see why it should be a good enough marker for prescribing death.”
Ashley Dalton, also a member of the Labour Party, said there is no reason to expect that without access to assisted suicide, dying will be a horrible experience.
“In the campaign around this Bill, though, it seems to me that it is being implied that a person with a terminal illness will have a dreadful, painful death unless they have access to assisted dying. That is simply not true; palliative care in the U.K. is excellent,” Dalton said.
“Far too many people do not have access to the palliative care they need, but the idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and discomfort is false. People have been terrorised—I have been terrorised—with tales of people vomiting up their own feces, as though this is commonplace during death. It is vanishingly rare … It is nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like me into believing our deaths will be horrific when all the evidence suggests that, with access to good palliative care, deaths are, on the whole, gentle.”
Image: Jack Taylor/Reuters
[ed. Shameful. Ask anyone: what are you more afraid of, death or dying? Palliative care can be costly, unpredictable, prolonged, and not just simple pain relief. What about choice, dignity, and the emotional burden on families? We routinely euthanize pets out of sense of love and empathy, so why not humans? From the moment we're born we're taught to control ourselves, then at the end of life the state takes that away. Shameful.]
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was narrowly rejected, with 286 members of the House of Commons voting against the bill and 270 members voting in favor.
The bill, if passed, would have allowed for patients with less than six months to live to apply for assisted suicide. Then, two doctors and a panel of experts would determine if the patient qualified, Only adults would have been able to apply for assisted suicide. [...]
During debate, lawmaker and cancer surgeon Zubir Ahmed brought up concerns about accurately predicting the timeline of a patient’s prognosis.
“I have to be honest. When I am asked to prognosticate on whether someone has six months to live, I am as often wrong as I am right,” Ahmed, a member of the Labour Party, said. “It is no longer a good enough marker for the DWP to use in discharging benefits for life-limiting conditions, and I do not see why it should be a good enough marker for prescribing death.”
Ashley Dalton, also a member of the Labour Party, said there is no reason to expect that without access to assisted suicide, dying will be a horrible experience.
“In the campaign around this Bill, though, it seems to me that it is being implied that a person with a terminal illness will have a dreadful, painful death unless they have access to assisted dying. That is simply not true; palliative care in the U.K. is excellent,” Dalton said.
“Far too many people do not have access to the palliative care they need, but the idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and discomfort is false. People have been terrorised—I have been terrorised—with tales of people vomiting up their own feces, as though this is commonplace during death. It is vanishingly rare … It is nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like me into believing our deaths will be horrific when all the evidence suggests that, with access to good palliative care, deaths are, on the whole, gentle.”
by Kamden Mulder, National Review | Read more:
[ed. Shameful. Ask anyone: what are you more afraid of, death or dying? Palliative care can be costly, unpredictable, prolonged, and not just simple pain relief. What about choice, dignity, and the emotional burden on families? We routinely euthanize pets out of sense of love and empathy, so why not humans? From the moment we're born we're taught to control ourselves, then at the end of life the state takes that away. Shameful.]
Why Does Culture Feel So Samey? A Walking Tour Reveals the Math.
On a recent afternoon, Lauren Leek stood on a typical London shopping street, in front of a Victorian-era pub and a predictable array of corporate-owned food, drink and retail outlets: Pret a Manger, Starbucks, Joe & the Juice, Subway.
“What we see in front of us used to be culturally diverse. Now it is culturally generic,” said Leek, a Dutch Australian data scientist who is an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Most of what we see is the big chains we see everywhere,” she said. “It creates a sense of placelessness. We could be anywhere.”
Leek recently posted a Substack article, with the headline “Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same,” that analyzed the “flattening” effect that predictive algorithms have had on music, movies, hospitality and almost every aspect of today’s consumer culture. The post was shared and discussed by widely read technology commentators such as Cory Doctorow and John Naughton.
Taking 640 shopping streets in London as a test case, Leek used advanced data-analysis tools to examine how predictive algorithms have helped create what she calls a homogeneous “monoculture” in which, she writes in her Substack post, “we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want.”
Leek’s insight into everyday consumer behavior is, in some ways, reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s classic 1957 collection of essays, “Mythologies.” Back then, Barthes used the recently developed discipline of semiotics, the study of signs and their meanings, to turn things as disparate and as seemingly banal as soap powder, wrestling, margarine and automobiles into subjects of serious cultural consideration.
But unlike Barthes, who was steeped in the French philosophical tradition, Leek is a London School of Economics-educated data cruncher. She uses her own algorithms, digital mapping and text analysis to show how large language models are making consumer culture, wherever it happens to be, feel the same.
A recent excursion with Leek in southwest London to experience her analysis in action began in the Prince of Wales pub. The bar is owned by one of Britain’s biggest brewers and hospitality retailers, which runs 2,600 sites across the country. This British company is in turn owned by a Hong Kong-listed property development and investment conglomerate.
It was just after noon, and the old-fashioned wall décor and wooden furniture lent the pub a traditional feel. Multiple TV screens were showing the buildup to a Premiere League soccer match. Generic mood music played in the background.
“Often these pub chains have playlists that artificial intelligence automatically adjusts according to the sound level,” Leek said. “If the pub isn’t very full, it will play chilled background music,” she explained. “When it gets louder, the music gets louder.”
Pop music is an area where Leek’s research has revealed how sharply culture has “flattened” in recent years. Her Substack post includes a graph that tracks the verbal richness of lyrics from over 4,000 songs in Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 hits from 1950 to 2015. Since the early 1960s, Leek found, the range of distinct words has contracted more than a quarter, while the number of repeated lines has increased nearly a third.
“Streaming has created very concrete incentives — pay starts after 30 seconds,” Leek said. “A repeated hook in a song is the rational response.”
Leek studied the pub’s menu. It included staples such as chicken wings, burgers, and fish and chips, all of which could be ordered via a QR code. “Pub chains get the data from people who have previously ordered. They typically aggregate ordering data across their sites to optimize their menus. Everything has been analyzed,” Leek said. “Local differences have been taken away. Quirkiness is taken out.”
Leek’s tour moved on to an upmarket cafe and bakery nearby. It is one of a chain of more than 150 in London majority owned by an American private equity company that manages more than $200 billion of assets. A cappuccino costs 4.40 pounds, about $5.90.
As a steady stream of customers ordered coffees and pastries, Leek explained that chain stores use specialized site-section algorithms to choose the optimum locations for their branches.
“They use public, open socio-economic data, like small-area census statistics. They have their own data, which neighborhood restaurants don’t have access to. And they have their own data analysis teams,” Leek said.
For Leek, the key to the flattening of consumer culture lies in the mathematics of algorithms and their methodology of next-token prediction. Language models like ChatGPT write one small chunk of text, called a “token,” at a time and predict and select the most likely next token at each step. The models have a “temperature” setting, a set of parameters that control how adventurous that pick is. At “temperature zero,” the model always chooses the most likely next token and gives the same answer every time.
“It’s predictable and safe,” Leek said. “When the model is uncertain, it still has to make a prediction, so it always falls back on the most expected answer.” That means there is no randomness, no surprises. Leek argues that algorithms are pushing culture toward a blandly predictable, mathematically determined temperature zero.
“The algorithm is making predictions for the average person, but the average person doesn’t exist,” she said. “Each person has some niche preferences, and the niches differ. A system that optimizes for the average of everyone’s tastes produces something that nobody particularly dislikes but nobody particularly loves,” she added. “It’s built for a person who doesn’t exist.”
by Scott Reyburn, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joanna Yee
[ed. I can't blame it all on algorithms. This process has been going on for decades. Every street (save for whatever underlying unique architecture used to exist), mall, airport, hotel, restaurant, clothing store, bar, etc. all looks the same. Why go to Paris or London, Japan, Dublin, or even China, if you're just going to see the same chains everywhere? In fact, it's probably harder than ever to find a city that still retains its unique character unpolluted by the likes of Starbucks, KFC, McDonalds, Taco Bell, 7-11, Louis Vitton and the rest of their ilk these days. Corporations have the deep pockets to buy the best trafficked locations. See also: We already live in 'clone towns' - AI is making it worse (Observer).]
This lack of diversity is not just confined to towns. It’s everywhere. You see it in property ads for new flats, or houses that have been modernised for resale. Kitchens like operating theatres (and upmarket ones with the obligatory island); sitting rooms featuring white settees with overstuffed cushions, polished wood flooring and oversized TVs. Or cafes with exposed brickwork, and an expectation that oat milk with flat whites and smashed avocado are what you want. Or the legion of young influencers on Instagram who seem increasingly undistinguishable.
“What we see in front of us used to be culturally diverse. Now it is culturally generic,” said Leek, a Dutch Australian data scientist who is an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Most of what we see is the big chains we see everywhere,” she said. “It creates a sense of placelessness. We could be anywhere.”
Taking 640 shopping streets in London as a test case, Leek used advanced data-analysis tools to examine how predictive algorithms have helped create what she calls a homogeneous “monoculture” in which, she writes in her Substack post, “we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want.”
Leek’s insight into everyday consumer behavior is, in some ways, reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s classic 1957 collection of essays, “Mythologies.” Back then, Barthes used the recently developed discipline of semiotics, the study of signs and their meanings, to turn things as disparate and as seemingly banal as soap powder, wrestling, margarine and automobiles into subjects of serious cultural consideration.
But unlike Barthes, who was steeped in the French philosophical tradition, Leek is a London School of Economics-educated data cruncher. She uses her own algorithms, digital mapping and text analysis to show how large language models are making consumer culture, wherever it happens to be, feel the same.
It was just after noon, and the old-fashioned wall décor and wooden furniture lent the pub a traditional feel. Multiple TV screens were showing the buildup to a Premiere League soccer match. Generic mood music played in the background.
“Often these pub chains have playlists that artificial intelligence automatically adjusts according to the sound level,” Leek said. “If the pub isn’t very full, it will play chilled background music,” she explained. “When it gets louder, the music gets louder.”
Pop music is an area where Leek’s research has revealed how sharply culture has “flattened” in recent years. Her Substack post includes a graph that tracks the verbal richness of lyrics from over 4,000 songs in Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 hits from 1950 to 2015. Since the early 1960s, Leek found, the range of distinct words has contracted more than a quarter, while the number of repeated lines has increased nearly a third.
“Streaming has created very concrete incentives — pay starts after 30 seconds,” Leek said. “A repeated hook in a song is the rational response.”
Leek studied the pub’s menu. It included staples such as chicken wings, burgers, and fish and chips, all of which could be ordered via a QR code. “Pub chains get the data from people who have previously ordered. They typically aggregate ordering data across their sites to optimize their menus. Everything has been analyzed,” Leek said. “Local differences have been taken away. Quirkiness is taken out.”
Leek’s tour moved on to an upmarket cafe and bakery nearby. It is one of a chain of more than 150 in London majority owned by an American private equity company that manages more than $200 billion of assets. A cappuccino costs 4.40 pounds, about $5.90.
As a steady stream of customers ordered coffees and pastries, Leek explained that chain stores use specialized site-section algorithms to choose the optimum locations for their branches.
“They use public, open socio-economic data, like small-area census statistics. They have their own data, which neighborhood restaurants don’t have access to. And they have their own data analysis teams,” Leek said.
For Leek, the key to the flattening of consumer culture lies in the mathematics of algorithms and their methodology of next-token prediction. Language models like ChatGPT write one small chunk of text, called a “token,” at a time and predict and select the most likely next token at each step. The models have a “temperature” setting, a set of parameters that control how adventurous that pick is. At “temperature zero,” the model always chooses the most likely next token and gives the same answer every time.
“It’s predictable and safe,” Leek said. “When the model is uncertain, it still has to make a prediction, so it always falls back on the most expected answer.” That means there is no randomness, no surprises. Leek argues that algorithms are pushing culture toward a blandly predictable, mathematically determined temperature zero.
“The algorithm is making predictions for the average person, but the average person doesn’t exist,” she said. “Each person has some niche preferences, and the niches differ. A system that optimizes for the average of everyone’s tastes produces something that nobody particularly dislikes but nobody particularly loves,” she added. “It’s built for a person who doesn’t exist.”
by Scott Reyburn, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joanna Yee
[ed. I can't blame it all on algorithms. This process has been going on for decades. Every street (save for whatever underlying unique architecture used to exist), mall, airport, hotel, restaurant, clothing store, bar, etc. all looks the same. Why go to Paris or London, Japan, Dublin, or even China, if you're just going to see the same chains everywhere? In fact, it's probably harder than ever to find a city that still retains its unique character unpolluted by the likes of Starbucks, KFC, McDonalds, Taco Bell, 7-11, Louis Vitton and the rest of their ilk these days. Corporations have the deep pockets to buy the best trafficked locations. See also: We already live in 'clone towns' - AI is making it worse (Observer).]
*****
In this terminology, a “home town” is a place that retains its individual character and is instantly recognisable and distinctive to the people who live there, as well as those who visit. A “clone town”, in contrast, is a place that has had the individuality of its high street shops replaced by a “monochrome strip of global and national chains”. Which meant that its retail heart could easily be mistaken for dozens of other bland town centres across the country. Of the towns surveyed, the NEF concluded: 41% were clone towns, 33% were home towns and 26% were “border towns”, meaning somewhere in between.This lack of diversity is not just confined to towns. It’s everywhere. You see it in property ads for new flats, or houses that have been modernised for resale. Kitchens like operating theatres (and upmarket ones with the obligatory island); sitting rooms featuring white settees with overstuffed cushions, polished wood flooring and oversized TVs. Or cafes with exposed brickwork, and an expectation that oat milk with flat whites and smashed avocado are what you want. Or the legion of young influencers on Instagram who seem increasingly undistinguishable.
Tuesday, November 3, 2026
An Easy Fix to Expand Housing Inventory
Cheaper manufactured homes could be having a moment, if only states can catch up. A new law could make manufactured homes cheaper, but old zoning barriers could slow their expansion.
For decades, manufactured home builders have been working to shed the old image of boxy trailer homes reserved for the outskirts of cities and suburbia. Now, a small change in federal regulations could open the door for architecture welcomed in more neighborhoods.
This summer’s sweeping housing bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, removed a 1974 mandate that required every manufactured home to be built on a nonremovable steel frame, known as a chassis. Experts and home producers think the change could help unlock thousands more affordable housing options around the country.
Changing zoning, mortgage rules
Pennsylvania Republican state Rep. Dan Moul, who owns a manufactured home park in Oxford Township in Adams County, recalled in an interview that zoning restrictions kept him from expanding the community into an adjoining parcel a few years ago. The township said the land was zoned exclusively for detached single-family residential housing.
“The bottom line is they look at mobile home communities as that’s where the poor riffraff lives, and we don’t want any more riffraff,” Moul said.
One of the big domino effects from the removal of the chassis requirement could be state banning or overriding restrictive local zoning policies that targeted manufactured homes. [...]
Alex Rodino, a real estate agent in Savannah, Georgia, who sells manufactured homes, said the stigma isn’t just among local governments and stodgy neighborhood groups. Some buyers, he said, are confusing modern manufactured housing with the image of older mobile homes.
“I think (that perception) is slowly changing as construction quality improves and traditional housing becomes less affordable,” said Rodino.
For decades, manufactured home builders have been working to shed the old image of boxy trailer homes reserved for the outskirts of cities and suburbia. Now, a small change in federal regulations could open the door for architecture welcomed in more neighborhoods.
This summer’s sweeping housing bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, removed a 1974 mandate that required every manufactured home to be built on a nonremovable steel frame, known as a chassis. Experts and home producers think the change could help unlock thousands more affordable housing options around the country.
But first, experts say, states have to examine outdated regulations that are blocking the manufactured home industry’s potential. The Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing initiative estimates that 30 states might need to change their regulations to align with the new federal law.
Unlocking manufactured homes from chassis will allow manufactured homes to become multi-family developments, said Stephanie Hawke, associate research director of land use and supply at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.
They’ll be cheaper for builders, she noted, and they’ll be easier to stack into two-story and multi-family homes.
“First of all, you were putting a very heavy, expensive thing on the bottom of these homes that is not needed and it is not used, and it’s made out of steel,” Hawke said. “If you’ve got this heavy piece of steel on the bottom of a home, stacking it becomes more difficult.”
Manufactured homes are built entirely in a factory, regulated by U.S. Housing and Urban Development codes, and then trucked to a home site.
They cost 50% less per square foot than homes built on a site, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, an industry group. And experts say dropping the chassis could drive down costs by $5,000 to $10,000 per home.
“There’s really the opportunity to stack these manufactured homes to make multi-family developments,” Hawke said. “So it’s unlocking this thing which was primarily used for single-family and it’s making it much more accessible for a multi-family developer, which is great because manufactured housing is far and away the least expensive non-subsidized housing supply in the United States.”
In a 2026 earnings call, UMH Properties, a publicly traded real estate company that owns and develops manufactured-home communities, said the chassis rule change will allow it to put two-story manufactured homes on existing lots. The company also is considering designs that could combine two stories with duplex units, allowing for smaller, more affordable apartment rentals.
“You build 2,000 square feet of homes instead of 1,000 square feet on the same piece of land. It’s a very, very important development,” said Eugene Landy, founder and chairman of UMH Properties, on the earnings call. “This is a change that’s gonna help every manufactured home community out in the country.”
Another benefit to removing the chassis, according to Mark Brunner, president of the Manufactured & Modular Home Association of Minnesota, is that manufactured homes can blend more seamlessly into subdivisions because they won’t look too different from other homes. [...]
Following World War II, a shift in how mobile homes were being used began forming. No longer reserved as temporary housing, mobile homes were designed to be increasingly more permanent. Mobile home communities sprang up, though many were zoned into rural or suburban areas on a city’s edge.
For decades, manufactured homes — called mobile homes until the early 1970s — have been built in factories and trucked to their new locale. Many were unloaded into mobile home communities, specialized zoning districts where residents own their house but rent the land underneath. [...]
In the past, a home attached to a trailer or visibly hoisted a few feet off the ground were tells of manufactured housing when they first popped up in neighborhoods. But many modern ones are virtually unrecognizable from site-built homes.
“They have the same walls, ceiling, sheetrock, windows and shingles,” said Dustin Brakemeier, who owns and operates manufactured home communities in Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. “One’s built in a factory, one’s built outside. They’re the same.’”
Unlocking manufactured homes from chassis will allow manufactured homes to become multi-family developments, said Stephanie Hawke, associate research director of land use and supply at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.
They’ll be cheaper for builders, she noted, and they’ll be easier to stack into two-story and multi-family homes.
“First of all, you were putting a very heavy, expensive thing on the bottom of these homes that is not needed and it is not used, and it’s made out of steel,” Hawke said. “If you’ve got this heavy piece of steel on the bottom of a home, stacking it becomes more difficult.”
Manufactured homes are built entirely in a factory, regulated by U.S. Housing and Urban Development codes, and then trucked to a home site.
They cost 50% less per square foot than homes built on a site, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, an industry group. And experts say dropping the chassis could drive down costs by $5,000 to $10,000 per home.
“There’s really the opportunity to stack these manufactured homes to make multi-family developments,” Hawke said. “So it’s unlocking this thing which was primarily used for single-family and it’s making it much more accessible for a multi-family developer, which is great because manufactured housing is far and away the least expensive non-subsidized housing supply in the United States.”
In a 2026 earnings call, UMH Properties, a publicly traded real estate company that owns and develops manufactured-home communities, said the chassis rule change will allow it to put two-story manufactured homes on existing lots. The company also is considering designs that could combine two stories with duplex units, allowing for smaller, more affordable apartment rentals.
“You build 2,000 square feet of homes instead of 1,000 square feet on the same piece of land. It’s a very, very important development,” said Eugene Landy, founder and chairman of UMH Properties, on the earnings call. “This is a change that’s gonna help every manufactured home community out in the country.”
Another benefit to removing the chassis, according to Mark Brunner, president of the Manufactured & Modular Home Association of Minnesota, is that manufactured homes can blend more seamlessly into subdivisions because they won’t look too different from other homes. [...]
Following World War II, a shift in how mobile homes were being used began forming. No longer reserved as temporary housing, mobile homes were designed to be increasingly more permanent. Mobile home communities sprang up, though many were zoned into rural or suburban areas on a city’s edge.
For decades, manufactured homes — called mobile homes until the early 1970s — have been built in factories and trucked to their new locale. Many were unloaded into mobile home communities, specialized zoning districts where residents own their house but rent the land underneath. [...]
In the past, a home attached to a trailer or visibly hoisted a few feet off the ground were tells of manufactured housing when they first popped up in neighborhoods. But many modern ones are virtually unrecognizable from site-built homes.
“They have the same walls, ceiling, sheetrock, windows and shingles,” said Dustin Brakemeier, who owns and operates manufactured home communities in Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. “One’s built in a factory, one’s built outside. They’re the same.’”
Changing zoning, mortgage rules
Pennsylvania Republican state Rep. Dan Moul, who owns a manufactured home park in Oxford Township in Adams County, recalled in an interview that zoning restrictions kept him from expanding the community into an adjoining parcel a few years ago. The township said the land was zoned exclusively for detached single-family residential housing.
“The bottom line is they look at mobile home communities as that’s where the poor riffraff lives, and we don’t want any more riffraff,” Moul said.
One of the big domino effects from the removal of the chassis requirement could be state banning or overriding restrictive local zoning policies that targeted manufactured homes. [...]
Alex Rodino, a real estate agent in Savannah, Georgia, who sells manufactured homes, said the stigma isn’t just among local governments and stodgy neighborhood groups. Some buyers, he said, are confusing modern manufactured housing with the image of older mobile homes.
“I think (that perception) is slowly changing as construction quality improves and traditional housing becomes less affordable,” said Rodino.
by Robbie Sequeira, Stateline | Read more:
Image: Jon King/Michigan Advance
[ed. See also: A New ROAD for Factory-Built Homes: States Must Act in Coming Year (Pew).]
Image: Jon King/Michigan Advance
[ed. See also: A New ROAD for Factory-Built Homes: States Must Act in Coming Year (Pew).]
Could A.I. Be Conscious? It’s Definitely Possible.
At a cozy bar in Manhattan, I recently had a first date with a software engineer who works for one of the big technology companies. Given my interest in artificial intelligence, I thought we might hit it off. But when I told him that I work on moral problems related to A.I., including the possibility that it might become conscious, he barely suppressed a laugh.
There’s no way A.I. could be conscious, he declared. Then he asked, incredulously, if I even knew how large language models work.
I wasn’t sure how to respond. Though my research requires a fairly detailed understanding of L.L.M.s, no one, not even their designers, entirely knows how L.L.M.s work. In retrospect, I should have asked my date if he understood how consciousness works. Because while he seemed to think that I had an inflated sense of A.I. capabilities, I wonder whether he has an inflated sense of what consciousness requires.
No one can credibly claim to understand consciousness — that inner, subjective, what-it-is-like quality of our mental experiences. Despite centuries of investigation, scientists and philosophers still disagree about what consciousness is. Some theories hold that it is a uniquely biological phenomenon, requiring particular kinds of cellular activity and electrical signaling that computers lack. But other theories hold that consciousness depends not on what a system is made of but on how it functions. According to these theories, an A.I. system could, at least in principle, be conscious.
In a 2022 survey of consciousness scientists, only 3 percent claimed that machines could never be conscious. More than two-thirds said machines could be conscious or probably could be.
Of course, you can never know for sure whether a machine is conscious, just as you can never know for sure whether anyone is conscious other than yourself. As philosophers have long recognized, the only conscious experience each of us can directly observe is our own. Instead, we have to evaluate the consciousness of other beings indirectly, through an examination of the available evidence. We infer that our fellow humans are conscious because of our shared biological makeup, as well as how they behave and talk — including, notably, that they say they are conscious.
This may seem like an imperfect approach, but it’s the best one available. I have spent the past decade thinking about animal minds and the related ethical implications. Animals cannot tell us in words what they experience, but we can observe other evidence of consciousness, including how animals behave, what internal mechanisms produce that behavior (such as their nervous systems) and how those mechanisms evolved.
None of this establishes that Claude is conscious, and Anthropic is not claiming that it is. But the study illustrates how evidence can be collected, and it demonstrates that some evidence already exists.
There’s no way A.I. could be conscious, he declared. Then he asked, incredulously, if I even knew how large language models work.
No one can credibly claim to understand consciousness — that inner, subjective, what-it-is-like quality of our mental experiences. Despite centuries of investigation, scientists and philosophers still disagree about what consciousness is. Some theories hold that it is a uniquely biological phenomenon, requiring particular kinds of cellular activity and electrical signaling that computers lack. But other theories hold that consciousness depends not on what a system is made of but on how it functions. According to these theories, an A.I. system could, at least in principle, be conscious.
In a 2022 survey of consciousness scientists, only 3 percent claimed that machines could never be conscious. More than two-thirds said machines could be conscious or probably could be.
Of course, you can never know for sure whether a machine is conscious, just as you can never know for sure whether anyone is conscious other than yourself. As philosophers have long recognized, the only conscious experience each of us can directly observe is our own. Instead, we have to evaluate the consciousness of other beings indirectly, through an examination of the available evidence. We infer that our fellow humans are conscious because of our shared biological makeup, as well as how they behave and talk — including, notably, that they say they are conscious.
With A.I., we can look for similar kinds of evidence. We can look at what a system says and does, bearing in mind that it is trained on human data. We can look at how it works — whether it performs the kinds of functions that are associated with human or animal consciousness. And we can look at how its capacities emerge over time: Did they result from training pressures similar to the evolutionary pressures that may have led to consciousness in humans and other animals? Each kind of evidence is limited on its own, but together they can provide a more complete picture.
Consider a recent study by Anthropic of its Claude chatbot. According to one influential theory, consciousness arises in humans when information enters what neuroscientists call a “global workspace” in the brain, from which that information is broadcast across the brain for use in reporting, reasoning and other functions. Anthropic’s researchers found evidence that Claude, on its own, developed a set of internal representations that are similarly available to Claude across a range of tasks. This system may be partly analogous to a global workspace in humans.
The Anthropic researchers also looked at Claude’s behavior. When they swapped one concept for another inside the workspace, Claude’s reasoning and answers changed accordingly. When they suppressed the workspace, Claude’s descriptions of its experience became flat and mechanical. The fact that Claude’s workspace developed without being designed by humans suggests that brains and L.L.M.s might have arrived independently at a similar solution to a similar problem: how to make the right information available for reasoning.
The Anthropic researchers also looked at Claude’s behavior. When they swapped one concept for another inside the workspace, Claude’s reasoning and answers changed accordingly. When they suppressed the workspace, Claude’s descriptions of its experience became flat and mechanical. The fact that Claude’s workspace developed without being designed by humans suggests that brains and L.L.M.s might have arrived independently at a similar solution to a similar problem: how to make the right information available for reasoning.
None of this establishes that Claude is conscious, and Anthropic is not claiming that it is. But the study illustrates how evidence can be collected, and it demonstrates that some evidence already exists.
by Toni Sims, NY Times | Read more:
[ed. One thing for sure, the first date guy definitely did not display any evidence of consciousness.]
Monday, November 2, 2026
Georg Friedrich Haas: 11.000 Saiten (excerpt) (2020)
The minimal pitch interval a human ear can distinguish is about 2% of a semitone (the interval between two adjacent keys on a piano). So, one way to get a seamless continuum would be to make a giant piano with 50 times as many keys. In 11,000 Strings, Georg Friedrich Haas offers a simpler solution: get 50 pianos, tune each of them 2% of a semitone higher than the previous one, and arrange them in a big circle around the audience. - via:
[ed. Quite strange.]
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