Just Stop the Anthropic IPO Already

[ed. At the risk of turning this into a full-on AI-centric blog, I do think this is important information to process.]

I want to delve into the full scope of the Anthropic AI takeover of politics happening over the past week. Yesterday, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei came out and explicitly asked for antitrust laws not to apply to the biggest AI firms. His biggest rival, Sam Altman, quickly agreed. And they are suggesting this legal change just before Anthropic seeks to sell shares on the stock exchange, minting a whole series of AI millionaires and billionaires.

Why do they want to suspend antitrust laws for AI firms? Well these guys say they need the industry collectively “pace the frontier,” aka in their framing, slow development of this technology so as to reduce the probably of human extinction at the hands of autonomous swarms of AI bots. And they can’t do that, they argue, without suspending laws prohibiting price-fixing cartels.

Then the Information reported today that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have been having backchannel conversations about establishing an AI standards organization, which presumably would coordinate this cartel.

Let me start with a very simple point. It is already illegal to release products that hurt people. It is illegal to compete by releasing products that hurt people. If these guys are genuinely manufacturing things that kill innocent people, the FBI should be arresting them immediately. The idea that they would not only release such products, but also issue stock for the American people to invest in multi-trillion dollar initial public offerings for such ventures, as Anthropic is planning, is utter lunacy.

I wrote about this attempt to terrify us into giving away our liberties on Friday, in a piece titled “Stop Panicking About AI.” But the IPO is something I didn’t think through. Apparently they think we should all get rich building world-ending product lines.

All that said, whether Anthropic goes public isn’t just up to the people at Anthropic. I asked some former Securities and Exchange Commission officials, and they told me that the SEC effectively has the authority to block initial public offerings. Here’s how.

Every company, before it goes public, submits an S-1 initial registration statement to the SEC. And the SEC can refuse to clear it if the commission believes that it doesn’t adequately disclose the risks a corporation’s securities present to investors. Technically, the SEC could go to court and get an injunction to block the IPO, but it rarely comes to that - the lack of clearance for an S-1 is red flag for investors so companies won’t go public until they get it.

In a functional system, there would be a dozen accountants and disclosure experts with sector training going back and forth with the lawyers telling them to expand on this or that, etc. And the commissioners either themselves or on a delegated basis won’t clear it until they’re satisfied. Today, it’s more likely that Trump himself just decides. Regardless, if Anthropic goes public, it’s not just because of the corporate insiders, it’s because Trump explicitly allowed it.

If I were a member of Congress, I’d be screaming mad right now, and yelling at Trump and the SEC to stop this event which will bestow hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth on a strange doomsday cult. [...]

There is one more point to cover. There is an ongoing political campaign to do something about AI, with a large swath of elites demanding action. That includes Barack Obama, who rarely demands anything except the most banal conventional wisdom. So when he says “AI policy is critical’ to Democrats, you know that it has reached peak elite acceptance. Still, what is that ‘something?’

The basic fight is over framing, not risk. Everyone sees risk here, but the root cause differs based on your perspective.

The AI doomers want their systems to be imagined as rogue agents bent on civilizational conquest, or as some sort of inevitable new technological paradigm that needs an entirely new legal framework superseding existing inadequate laws embedded in those musty old nation-states. Amodei argued the industry should have self-regulation, some sort of antitrust exemption to collaborate across the industry, and a global agreement among AI firms within democracies on how to manage risks. These developments, to Amodei, are inevitable, no human is responsible, though we must all act quickly.

Generally, this side is winning the debate. For instance, Senator Jon Ossoff, a 2028 hopeful who generally echoes whatever seems to be the most appealing line of Trump criticism of the moment, has mostly adopted that frame. Bernie Sanders seems to have given up on his campaign against oligarchy to promote Dario Amodei’s ideas. And in the core of the Democratic establishment, this view has taken hold. For instance, here’s Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the likely successor to Chuck Schumer, praising Amodei.

Brian Schatz@brianschatz 

I am still studying this but it’s a reasonable start, and takes seriously the proposition that we need real proposals that can be enacted rapidly.

Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei 

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our
8:27 AM · Sep 12, 2026 · 42.7K Views

There are many calls to convene Congress in emergency session to act, and Trump’s advisors are trying to get him to announce immediate emergency action. Given that the big AI companies are already having discussions about coordinating their AI model development, it seems like they are just pushing for final legal permission to openly run AI as a cartel.

The debate, however, is not quite over. So what’s the alternative view? Well, the rule of law adherents look at these AI systems merely as unsafe products. As such, their request isn’t for new laws, but enforcement of existing rules. All products are subject to standard nuisance claims and other torts, unfair and deceptive practices laws, and so forth. Agents are, as Cory Doctorow notes, malfunctioning machines, or “autonomous malicious software” operated by reckless people at OpenAI and Anthropic. Moreover, it is actually illegal to build unsafe products as a method of competition, or to keep up with rivals by also creating unsafe products.

Former FTC Chair Lina Khan listed a bunch of laws that could already apply. And she let slip that state attorneys general are looking at potential criminal liability for AI CEOs.

Lina Khan@linamkhan 

Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books —…
11:31 AM · Sep 13, 2026 · 183K Views

(Khan did actually start enforcement against AI developers when she was Chair. And it notable that one of the very first things that Trump-Vance FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson did was set aside the penalty of an AI developer she penalized for creating unsafe and fraudulent tools.)

So who will win? Well I am fairly pessimistic, as the bludgeoning from the superrich works in crisis moments, especially when Bernie Sanders is on the side of the establishment.

But the debate doesn’t fracture on obvious partisan or factional lines. Much of the industry is going to be split on the matter. For instance, David Sacks, a generally malevolent crypto investor and technologist, is making cogent arguments, because his crew would be excluded in an OpenAI/Anthropic cartel world. He’s a die-hard Trumper and despised Khan when she ran the FTC, but he retweeted her argument here.

A lot of policymakers, such as Senators Richard Blumenthal, Rep. Ro Khanna, and others, see liability as an obvious way to shape the industry to be more safe. The Senate is also full of people who are used to blocking each others’ legislation; Maria Cantwell and Ted Cruz are trying to work together on AI safety, but are fighting over whether to preempt state laws.

There are a host of proposals out there, and the details will matter. And there is something of a stampede for an emergency session to take action. If Trump chooses to accept the need for action, then it’s likely the Anthropic/OpenAI/Google types will get what they want. If not, then the debate will continue, perhaps until the financial markets impose a different mental model.

At any rate, we can all agree that Anthropic shouldn’t go ahead with its IPO. Or at least, that’s something we should all be able to agree on.

by Matt Stollar, BIG |  Read more:

Image: via

Turn Yourself Into A 1985 Photo

[ed. Because everybody has a secret Miami Vice jones...]

Gotta Serve Somebody

[ed. Unfortunately, not this country.]

Cheers and whistles accompanied President Trump’s prizefighter-like arrival in the House chamber to deliver his State of the Union address in February. While Republicans leaned into the aisle to shake Trump’s hand, several Democrats refused to turn his way, and their House minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, remained seated. From the rostrum, the president took in the peculiar mixture of sustained applause and stark silence with a lofty smile. Then he began, and nothing in his words or manner gave the impression that the legislative branch arrayed before him was intended to be his coequal.

In truth, they no longer were his coequal. The president now dictated what they did, what they didn’t do and even how they behaved. Trump saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
Announcing a new round of tariffs that he planned to implement on unspecified “countries that were ripping us off for decades” (to replace his previous tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down), Trump breezily said, “Congressional action will not be necessary.” He predicted that his executive orders on prescription-drug pricing would never be overturned by any future administration, but then he turned to Senator John Thune, the majority leader, and Representative Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, and casually added, “John and Mike, if you don’t mind, codify it anyway.”

About halfway into his record-setting 107-minute address, Trump challenged every member of Congress to stand if they agreed with the principle that America should first protect its citizens rather than “illegal aliens.” While the Republicans stood, clapped and hooted, Trump leaned over the lectern and glowered at the unanimously seated and stone-faced Democrats. “You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up,” he told them. The Democrats, he declared later in his speech, were “pro-crime.” They were “sick people.”

A few House Democrats, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, openly jeered the president. Another, Representative Al Green of Texas, was escorted from the chamber by Capitol security officials for holding up a sign that read, “Black People Aren’t Apes!” (in reference to the president’s Truth Social post that month of a video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes). More notable, however, were the empty seats: Roughly half the Democrats in both the House and the Senate chose to boycott the address.

That so many members of Congress refused to take part in their one annual public event counted as yet another first of the Trump era. “I went because I’m an institutionalist,” Representative Terri Sewell, an eight-term Democrat from Alabama, later told me. “This body can still be a powerful voice for good. That’s the reason why I did it. But it’s increasingly harder to stomach, to be honest.”

The Republican members, for their part, dutifully issued statements praising Trump’s address. “Last night, President Trump highlighted the wins of his administration and the Republican-led Congress for the American people,” began the news release of Representative Dave Joyce, a seven-term congressman from Ohio and an appropriations subcommittee chairman. But Joyce offered a more somber assessment a few months later, when I asked him if he felt that Congress had assumed an overly submissive posture toward Trump.

“I think we have, unfortunately,” Joyce replied. He recalled the first State of the Union address he attended, in 2014, just after President Barack Obama had threatened to use his pen to sign executive orders and take other executive actions to pass his agenda if Congress failed to do so. “I was sitting next to a Democrat, and I said, ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ But we’re just as bad. We continually cede power to the executive. The president blows things up, and then we just go home,” Joyce said. On occasions when Trump has expressed displeasure over a legislative matter — as he did over the release of the Epstein files and the failure to pass voter restrictions — Republican congressional leaders have complied by going into recess rather than holding votes they knew would anger the president.

“At this point,” Joyce concluded, “there’s no will to overtake that.”

The question is whether that will has been permanently extinguished. On Nov. 3, American voters will decide which party controls the House and the Senate for the remainder of Trump’s presidency. In theory, at least, the outcome of their decision should be enormously consequential. If the Republicans somehow manage to defy the current ill portents — an unpopular leader, a sluggish economy and a costly war with no end in sight — then the president will have a final two years to place his indelible stamp on American life. Should the Democrats regain control of both chambers, or at least the House (as they are expected to do), then Trump’s opposition will possess the legislative and investigatory tools to bring the president’s agenda — and potentially the entire Trump era — to a decisive halt.

But the two scenarios rest on the assumption that Congress still functions as the founders planned when they devoted Article I of the Constitution to the legislative branch. Among those functions, described in Section 8 of Article I, are the exclusive power to impose taxes, fund government agencies, declare war, regulate commerce with foreign nations and, above all, “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing Powers.”

Few Americans — including members of Congress themselves — believe that the legislative branch is fulfilling its duties as the founders intended. As Representative Jim Himes, a moderate Democrat from Connecticut who has served in the House for 18 years, told me in June, “Congress is somewhere between dysfunctional and irrelevant — and is despised by the people.”

Congress was already unpopular decades before Trump became president. Since 1974, according to Gallup polling, its approval rating has averaged a dismal 28 percent. As of July, Congress has the lowest favorability ranking, 9 percent, of any institution in America. A low regard of this magnitude cannot be ascribed to one person.

Trump has nonetheless taken an already weak legislative body and made it subservient. He left office in 2021 only after his followers violently raided the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a failed effort to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results and keep him in office. The fact that a majority of House Republicans voted against certifying the election mere hours after the riot, coupled with the role of Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader at the time, in acquitting Trump of impeachment charges weeks later, created a permission structure for Trump’s eventual return to power. That ugly episode also left its mark on Congress, Himes said: “It’s a huge unhealed wound that continues to separate the two sides of the aisle.”

Trump’s deep thumbprints on the Republican-controlled 119th Congress are unmistakable. It achieved a near historic low last year in the number of bills passed, with prioritization placed on Trump’s tellingly named One Big Beautiful Bill tax legislation. This year, the president has strong-armed the House into funding an unpopular war in Iran after having vowed on election night, “I’m not going to start a war — I’m going to stop wars.”

At the same time, Trump has defied congressional authority through his tariffs and his National Guard deployments, by tearing down agencies and erecting new federal buildings — all with the barest of pushback by Republicans on Capitol Hill. Those in his party who have occasionally stood up to Trump — such as Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, by forcing him to agree to release the Epstein files, and Senators Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn, by, respectively, voting to impeach him and suggesting in 2023 that Trump’s “time has passed him by” — have been harried out of office.

“They’re just petrified of Trump,” said Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who served in the House for 36 years before voting to impeach Trump in January 2021 and subsequently deciding not to seek another term. “Name the issue. It’s just amazing. No one’s got a spine.”

Upton elaborated further on the fear among Republicans: “Look, I know the pressure. If you signal you’re going to vote the wrong way, leadership calls you in. Then the White House starts to turn the screws. Then you start getting threats on social media. I’ve had very serious threats to my home. We put in security cameras that connected directly to the Police Department. And now they have trackers who look for you in restaurants. Today it’s worse than ever. Remember, Trump has the command over the Republican Party in every state and county. There’s no anti-Trump Republican bastion.”

But Trump’s bullying influence on the legislative agenda, and on legislators themselves, does not adequately capture how he has shaped Congress. It is his pugilistic, attention-seeking conduct that now permeates the Capitol, and hardly by coincidence. Trump has backed candidates in his own image and has set off a state-by-state redistricting war of attrition in which centrist swing districts have been replaced by hyperpartisan ones. Most of all, Trump has reshaped Congress by example — by showing how bragging, lying and name-calling can amount to a formula for success.

“There’s a degree to which Trump has normalized disreputable behavior among people who’ve been here for a long time,” said Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who came into office two years before Trump’s first term and is now leaving after unsuccessfully running for the Senate. “But it’s also attracted disreputable people. Under Trump, the quality of my colleagues has noticeably decreased.”

Moulton made clear to me that he wasn’t just talking about Republican colleagues and that Trump’s lovers and haters alike have taken on his self-absorption. His view is shared by members on both sides of the aisle. “What you see now are too many people who come in viewing Congress as their green screen,” Joyce said. “And they’re going to make a name for themselves and don’t give a damn about anything else.”

In seeking to understand how Trump has left his mark on Congress, which I’ve been covering for more than a decade and a half, I interviewed more than 30 current and former members from both parties and chambers, as well as congressional aides from both parties. In response to a request for comment, a White House spokeswoman, Olivia Wales, wrote in a statement: “President Trump and the White House have worked closely with our partners in Congress to deliver on many important promises to the American people.” She added: “President Trump will continue working with Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, lower costs for working families and deliver on the commonsense, America First agenda that Republicans were elected with an overwhelming mandate to enact.”

Its current noisy state of brokenness is complicated to untangle. If Trump bears some responsibility, so do the lawmakers who have sublimated themselves to him — and so, for that matter, do the voters who maintain that they want Congress to work together to solve the nation’s problems but then send to Washington individuals who have no interest in doing so. “Internecine warfare is what has become vogue,” said Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who has decided not to seek another term after serving for 22 years. “You’re elected not to get along with the other side and get good things done for the country. You’re elected to fight and kill the other side.”

by Robert Draper, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Derek Brahney
[ed. I've got nothing against Republicans, some of my best friends are so afflicted haha... and truthfully, there were once some very reasonable and honorable people in the party going all the way back to Eisenhower, Ford, and, in his own way, Bush senior (not to mention folks like Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol). But if you're voting for the Republican party as it exists today, or because that's the way you've always voted (or just hate liberals), then you're as complicit as the rest of these spineless jellyfish who move in whatever direction the tide tells them to. I actually have a somewhat shameful admission to make, and that is not being fully invested in the next election (stolen or not). If Republicans win, we'll get the full Monty, and even true believers (and future generations) will be hard pressed to want to revisit that hell. The party might get set back for decades. But if Democrats win they'll be cursed like always to come in after a Republican administration and try to clean up the messes it created and get blamed for those hard choices. Rinse and repeat.]

Some Ways AI Could Kill Us All

[ed. Nearly everyone agrees by now that AI is an existential threat, but the hows and whys are often vague or imcomplete.] 

I don't think this is how it will actually play out. If you play a chess grandmaster, you can predict that they will beat you even if you can't predict how. I chose these examples because I don't think they require much imagination or accepting exotic assumptions.

It is important to note that if chimpanzees were to guess how humans would decimate them, they would get it wrong. Chimpanzees would not imagine guns. They would not foresee poison gas. They would not conceive of chemical castration. They would not imagine humans going around and intentionally infecting them with AIDS. They have no concept of these things; they would not see it coming.

Perhaps they might guess we'd be really good at throwing rocks. Amazingly good. Well, technically, that's what guns do: throw "rocks" really really well.

So how will superintelligent AI actually wipe us all out? Probably in a way I couldn't conceive of. Nonetheless, it's not hard to see how deadly they could be with what we already know about.

by Ruby, Less Wrong |  Read more:

Image: DALL-E via; and here. 

[ed. I wouldn't necessarily conflate super intelligence with ill-will. Most likely AIs will just be pursuing some unrelated goal and exploring every possible means by which to achieve it (including removing human barriers). That is, unless bad (human) actors are involved, which should not be discounted. See also: How My Students Think About AI (LW).]

Ellen Starr Lyon, Green Altar I, 2023

via:

Neil Welliver aka Neil Gavin Welliver, Winter Rainbow, 1983

via:

The Final Battle For Democracy

Forget November 3. It’s January 3 when Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans might bury our democracy once and for all. Here’s how.

Over the past year and a half since his return to the White House, Trump has exploited every conceivable unlawful means possible to rig the midterm elections in favor of the Republicans, and the federal courts have struck down as unconstitutional every one of these unlawful attempts. He will try every unlawful means over the remaining weeks to ensure that Republicans handily win the midterm elections in November. Those of us who oppose his illegality will look to the courts, but the federal courts will be institutionally incapable of checking his final unlawful rampage. [...]

***

This is how the crisis would unfold. The precursor of the crisis will come sometime before noon on January 3, when Speaker Johnson removes current House Clerk Kevin McCumber and replaces him with a person loyal to Johnson and House Republicans who they know will refuse to list on the statutory roll of representatives-elect to the 120th Congress any Democrat-elect whom Johnson and the Republicans direct him or her not to list. Under Rule II, Clause 1 of the Rules of the House, the Speaker of the House has the unilateral power to remove the incumbent clerk, and then the power under Title 2 U.S.C. § 5501(a) to replace him temporarily with whomever he wishes until the House elects a successor. McCumber is a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.

The first moment of constitutional crisis will come when, sometime before the 120th Congress has been gaveled into session, the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress. At that moment, interested members-elect and others will be forced to seek a writ of mandamus—a court order to a government official instructing him or her to perform a mandatory duty—from the federal court to the temporary clerk, ordering him or her to list on the clerk’s roll all members-elect who have been certified by the states as having been elected from their districts to the new Congress.

Members-elect will argue that the clerk has a ministerial duty under 2 U.S.C. § 26 to list all representatives-elect whose properly filed state certifications show that they were “regularly elected in accordance with the laws of his state or of the United States.” Because the clerk has no authority to omit any duly certified representative-elect, even if a representative-elect’s election is contested, the clerk unquestionably has a ministerial duty under law to list all duly certified representatives-elect. But this begs the question whether a court will issue the writ of mandamus to the acting clerk.

At first blush, a court will be reluctant to order the clerk to list all duly certified representatives-elect because of an instinctive belief that such an order would interfere with the constitutional process of the House to judge its own elections and returns. The wise and learned judge, however, will understand that rather than interfering with the House process, issuance of the writ will actually enable the House process to proceed to completion without judicial interference. Were that wise and learned judge to issue the writ, his or her order would immediately be appealed to the Court of Appeals, and from that court to the Supreme Court, while the country and the world wait in suspense.

The next moment of constitutional crisis will come if and when, after appeals, the court finally issues the writ of mandamus, and the clerk refuses to obey the court’s order to list the Democratic representatives-elect. At that point, it is possible there will be no further federal court involvement until such time as the 120th Congress officially convenes and votes not to seat representatives-elect. Then, that vote by the 120th Congress will be immediately reviewable by the federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States.

Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis, helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election. [...]

The House has historically claimed that its decision not to seat a member-elect because of fraud or irregularities in the elections is unreviewable by the federal courts. But its decision is reviewable. The Constitution unquestionably requires the House to seat a member-elect who was validly elected in a free and fair election. The Article 1, Section 5 power of the House to be the judge of its elections and returns does not give the House the power to deny a seat in the Congress of the United States to a candidate elected by the American people in a free and fair election on the mere assertion, pretextual or otherwise, by a simple majority of the House that the candidate’s election was tainted by fraud.

Thus, on and after January 3, if congressional Republicans were to determine that a Democratic member-elect was elected because of fraudulent voting and refuse to seat him or her, that determination would be scrutinized by the federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court.

It will never be a nonjusticiable political question whether the United States House of Representatives by simple majority vote can refuse to seat a member elected to Congress by the American people in a free and fair election on the pretextual and unsupported assertion that the member-elect’s election was tainted by fraud. Such is the very opposite of a nonjusticiable political question committed to the House of Representatives. For in the decision of this question lies the answer to perhaps the most fundamental question under the Constitution: Is the United States of America a democracy, in which “We the People” elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?

I don’t intend to be overly sanguine about this Supreme Court. This is the court that shattered the one constitutional truth in the U.S. since 1789 that “no man is above the law” and placed Donald Trump of all presidents above the law in Trump v. United States. This is the court that betrayed the Constitution by refusing even to decide whether Trump was disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his insurrection against the Constitution, which he clearly was. This is also the court that has cynically authorized Trump’s lawlessness for the past two years through its aptly named “shadow docket,” without so much as briefing, argument, or written opinion.

But surely by now this court must understand what it has wrought for the U.S. and the Constitution, and is aghast as we all are, even if it is not penitent. Surely, surely, it will understand the signal moment in American constitutional history that would be presented, and this time understand its supreme obligation to the nation.

by Michael Luttig, TNR |  Read more:

Image: Mark Harris; Getty (x6)

Cloudy With a Chance of Controversy

Somebody messed with Alaska’s weather last month. Before anybody checks the skies for black helicopters, relax.

On Aug. 23, a California company called Rainmaker Technology Corporation launched a drone near the head of Kachemak Bay and flew it into clouds cold enough to contain supercooled water. The drone released less than 1 pound of silver iodide. Rainmaker says the experiment coaxed about 19 million gallons of additional precipitation from those clouds over three hours.

That sounds dramatic. It wasn’t. Spread over roughly 100 square miles, 19 million gallons amounts to about one-hundredth of an inch of rain. If you had been standing underneath it, you might have noticed a drizzle. You also might have continued mowing the lawn.

Given the collective social media freakout, you’d be forgiven for thinking Rainmaker had pointed a weather-controlling laser beam right at Homer and hit “deploy” from a top-secret mission control bunker.

The experiment produced an impressive online meltdown after residents and local elected officials discovered it had happened without much advance notice. State Rep. Sarah Vance called on Rainmaker to cease operations in her district. Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Peter Micciche raised questions about why local residents weren’t informed. Social media did what social media does whenever the words “weather modification” appear together. Cue the chemtrail conspiracy theorists.

Cloud seeding isn’t science fiction, and it certainly isn’t a secret government plot. Scientists have experimented with it since the 1940s. The basic idea isn’t especially difficult to understand.

Some cold clouds contain tiny droplets of water that remain liquid even below freezing. Introduce particles such as silver iodide, whose structure helps ice crystals form, and some of those droplets freeze, grow and become heavy enough to fall as snow or rain. Some. That is the key word there.

Cloud seeding can’t manufacture a thunderstorm over a cloudless desert; it can’t steer hurricanes; and it can’t turn a passing cloud into Noah’s flood. It can, however, give the right kind of existing cloud a little nudge of inclement encouragement.

Research has become considerably more sophisticated, too. The 2017 SNOWIE experiment in Idaho demonstrated that scientists could detect and measure precipitation produced by silver iodide seeding under the right conditions.

Now, that doesn’t mean every question has been answered. A 2024 Government Accountability Office review found that studies estimated cloud seeding can increase precipitation anywhere from zero to 20%, depending on conditions, and said more research is needed to understand when it works best. The GAO also found that existing research suggests the amounts of silver iodide currently used do not pose an environmental or human health concern, while noting that the effects of much more widespread use aren’t as well understood.

In other words: We need to do more science, and Alaska is a pretty good place to do it.

Rainmaker came here because cloud seeding requires particular atmospheric conditions, including clouds cold enough for the process to work, which Alaska has. The potential applications extend far beyond producing an August drizzle near Homer.

Western states are staring at increasingly serious water problems. Reservoirs and rivers supplying farms, cities and hydroelectric projects are under pressure. Snowpack is, in effect, nature’s water-storage system. Even squeezing a few additional percentage points of precipitation from suitable clouds could matter enormously when repeated across the right watersheds.

Cloud seeding won’t solve climate change or replace conservation efforts, but if better engineering can help put more snow on mountains and more water into reservoirs, we should be rooting for the scientists trying to figure out how.

That brings us to the one part that beckons reasonable criticism.

Rainmaker says it notified the Alaska Department of Natural Resources before the test. DNR determined the drone research was a generally allowed use of state land, but the department says it has no jurisdiction over cloud seeding itself. The Department of Environmental Conservation is now reviewing what happened.

That’s a little bit of an awkward gap but despite the naive handwringing by elected officials, we shouldn’t be falling all over ourselves to make new laws here. Alaska doesn’t need to construct a regulatory fortress around every weather balloon, drone or scientific experiment, nor should every experiment become subject to the whims of pitchfork-carrying mobs at a town hall. Scientific questions aren’t settled by whoever draws the angriest crowd, and that needs to be balanced with residents knowing what’s happening in their communities — or, in this case, over their communities.

The state should consider a simple notification and oversight process. Tell local governments when these types of experiments are planned, and make information about the chemicals, quantities and science readily available. But any public process must not be allowed to be hijacked by petty naysayers.

Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant — even when we’re talking about making clouds. Then let the scientists do their science-y thing. Too often, good projects or experiments are derailed by irrational conspiracy theories shouted at public meetings (or by elected officials) and the result is that we don’t move forward. That’s a bad outcome any way you slice it.

by Editorial Board, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image: Anne Raup/ADN

[ed. Another example of artifical intelligence gone awry.]

Loren Holmes, Alaska pollock trawl fishery (ADN)
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AI Goes Hollywood

via: (more at the link, podcasts, interviews, etc.)

James Taylor

[ed. Great barn concert. Full playlist here. History of the Frozen Man here (do watch untill the end).]

Carly Simon and James Taylor
via:

[ed. Everybody had the hots for Carly back then (and Linda Rondstadt). She actually came from a very wealthy family; you've heard of the publishing company Simon and Schuster? When she was young she thought her dad made shoes for a living (Shoe-ster). Hahaha...]

Outsourcing Mom

Worried About Your College Kid? Now You Can Hire a Local Mom. At some universities, parents can pay to make sure their children are cared for, the way they were back home.

Concierge companies offering student support have existed for decades. But in recent years, a new crop of upstarts — such as Horwitz’s company, MindyKnows; the Bama Mama in Alabama; the GA Mom in Georgia; and Campus Mom in Texas — have met additional demand from a new generation of worried parents.

Historically, college has been a time for young adults to gain a sense of independence. They run their own errands, do their own laundry, organize their own lives. That’s changing, according to Monteigne Long, a co-founder of Campus Mom, who said the parents of this generation of college students are much more involved in their children’s day-to-day lives.

“When I came to college in 1998, my parents dropped me off on a Saturday and were gone,” Long said. “Parents are staying much more tuned in and connected with their students’ college experience than they have in the past. When they can’t be here, they want someone who can be that stand-in for them.”

The arrangements, though, have drawn occasional criticism online and from experts who worry young adults won’t learn enough essential life skills with so much additional support.

“Sometimes people think that we’re coddling students,” Horwitz said, “and I just don’t think that anything could be further from the truth. They’re 18, 19 years old, and they’re just off independently for the first time. We’re just a support system.”

The specific services vary here and there, but share commonalities. Campus Mom offers “holistic wellness check-ins,” laundry services and sorority recruitment support packages, sent to the sisters to up a child’s odds of acceptance. Carrie Eckhardt, the Bama Mama, will clean students’ dorm rooms and check in if parents haven’t heard from their child in a few days (“just pop in and say hi, and take a picture and send it to their mom”).

This month, one parent told Eckhardt it seemed like her daughter was going out to a bar every night. But she had opted to stay in, and the mother wanted to celebrate the decision with a “stay-in basket” that included her favorite ice cream, cookie and socks.

Horwitz, for her part, brings students balloons on their birthdays and chicken soup when they’re sick, sits with them in the emergency room and picks up their prescriptions if they’re busy. She bakes homemade challah, coordinates with the bedbug exterminator, texts photos and updates to faraway parents and doles out recommendations on the best local doctors and landlords.

by Kristi Albert, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kate Munsch for The New York Times
[ed. Why not cut to the chase. Just hire somebody to take all their classes and summarize everything with AI. Of course, cheating on tests would be an optional additional expense.]

We Already Have the Tools to Regulate AI

I want to delve into the full scope of the Anthropic AI takeover of politics happening over the past week. Yesterday, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei came out and explicitly asked for antitrust laws not to apply to the biggest AI firms. His biggest rival, Sam Altman, quickly agreed. And they are suggesting this legal change just before Anthropic seeks to sell shares on the stock exchange, minting a whole series of AI millionaires and billionaires.. [...]

Let me start with a very simple point. It is already illegal to release products that hurt people. It is illegal to compete by releasing products that hurt people. If these guys are genuinely manufacturing things that kill innocent people, the FBI should be arresting them immediately. The idea that they would not only release such products, but also issue stock for the American people to invest in multi-trillion dollar initial public offerings for such ventures, as Anthropic is planning, is utter lunacy. ~ Matt Stoller: Just Stop the Anthropic IPO Already.

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These are for profit corporations taking in billions of dollars from the world. You can't ensure your product isn't dangerous? Then don't release it until you figure it out! ~ Comments section, Lina Khan post (below):

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Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books — a point @FTC emphasized repeatedly during my tenure.

1. There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products. For example, releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an “unfair or deceptive” act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws). And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity. 

2. Existing laws also prohibit “unfair methods of competition.” This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same. As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed." 

3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: ftc.gov/news-events/ne…). Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead. 

4. As AI tools dramatically change the landscape of cybersecurity risks and hacks, all businesses should be doubling down on having core security protections in place. Firms that fail to invest in adequate data security measures or fix known vulnerabilities can also be breaking the law. A recent analysis showed that around 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies do not even have a way to notify them about security issues. During my @FTC tenure, we sued firms for poor data security practices and held CEOs liable when they were personally responsible.

5. As policymakers consider new legal regimes, we should be looking to lessons from prior efforts to govern major sectors, such as banking and other networks, platforms, and utilities. Tools like structural separations, nondiscrimination, and supervision could be key, and there’s a rich history of what works and what doesn’t. But we can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws.

by Lina Khan, Former Chair, Federal Trade Commission 2021-2025 |  Read more:

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1) AI will not eradicate humanity. Humans survived an ice age, the Black Death, two world wars, and (so far) the advent of nuclear weapons. Anyone who is loudly warning of AI-caused human extinction should not be taken seriously. 

2) If you worked in a company where you anticipated a 10% chance that your product would kill ten people, let alone all people, the correct response would be horror, ceasing all operations, and likely contacting the police or other criminal authorities. I am obviously no Coxon booster but at least his behavior is in line with his stated beliefs. Any current AI company employees saying "yes, me too, the thing we are building and about to IPO may kill all humans" should, again, not be taken seriously. Their actions betray their actual beliefs. 

3) Antitrust law does not prevent AI companies from coordinating to make sure AI does not hurt people. It does not prevent companies working together to make sure it doesn't hack people; the DOJ and FTC made this clear a decade ago when they issued a policy statement saying that the agencies "do not believe that antitrust is – or should be – a roadblock to legitimate cybersecurity information sharing." The same principles apply here. See: justice.gov/archives/opa/p… 

4) Antitrust law does absolutely prevent AI companies from organizing to prevent the entry of cheaper, upstart rivals because the bigger companies are burning cash and failing to achieve sufficient profitability. The panic of individual employees may be sincere if misguided, but the moves by their CEOs to achieve some kind of broad "antitrust waiver" or "exemption" should be meet with deep skepticism in light of the economics of the industry and the threat they face from open models.

by Alvaro Bedoya, Former Commissioner Federal Trade Commission 2022-2025 | Read more:

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“It’s a hoax,” Mr. Trump said during the five-minute call, which Mr. Huang put on speaker. “The robots are not going to be taking over the world. That’s not going to happen.” ....

Mr. Trump made it clear that in Silicon Valley’s roiling debate over what to do about A.I., the president is very much on the side of executives who argue worries about safety are overblown and the government should avoid regulation. His disinterest in government involvement runs counter to pleas from leading A.I. companies like Anthropic. ~ Idiot in Chief (via NYT).

See also: Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I. [ed. Certainly useful, if we had one.]

Did 9/11 Really Change Everything?

One of the best firsthand accounts of the Sept. 11 attacks I’ve read is a short essay titled “Diary of Disaster” by Nicholas Spangler, at the time a 25-year-old journalism-school student and today a reporter for Newsday on Long Island. Spangler happened to be downtown that morning, close enough to the World Trade Center to arrive on the scene between the first and second planes. Like many early recollections of the first hours at ground zero, written before memories had been corrected to fit the dimensions of history, his is as strange as it is horrifying.

He hears the bodies of the north tower’s jumpers hitting the pavement, and also the easy-listening music still drifting out of the building’s outdoor speakers. Under a tree newly stripped of its leaves lies a severed leg wrapped in burlap. Barely an hour after the second tower’s collapse, onlookers enlist Spangler to take a souvenir photo of them posing in front of the wreckage with a disposable camera. It’s the end of the world, or at least of a world, and people have not yet figured out how they are supposed to act.

Days later, trying to make sense of what he has seen, Spangler writes: “I believe that our present way of life ended in those minutes or hours. The American ethos — the way we see the world and our place in it — fractured and will perhaps have to be discarded.”

When he revisits that passage three months later, however, it feels wrong to him. “Our way of life did not end so much as it was interrupted,” he writes, “and if there is such a thing as an American ethos, it has not been significantly altered. There are those relative few whose lives bear the permanent bloody brand of that day but most of us continue to be shaped by much more banal events.”

Did 9/11 change everything? For years, people who agreed on nothing else about the attacks’ aftermath would have agreed that the answer was yes. Arguing otherwise would have been an affront to the victims, to the war on terror’s civilian and military casualties and to the common sense of anyone who has had to take off their shoes at airport security. But question and answer alike have always been colored by the assumption that 9/11 was supposed to change everything: that in being attacked as it was, the United States was being presented with a test that it could pass or fail.

A quarter-century on, it is possible to consider the question with at least some critical distance. Far too much of our current reality stems directly from 9/11 for anyone to argue credibly that it was not a hinge point in our recent history: the ubiquity of surveillance technology, the vague open-endedness that all American military operations now acquire, the general up-armoring of everyday life. At the same time, considering the most dystopian facets of this reality, 9/11’s influence is not as singular as it might have once seemed. It is a middle chapter in the story of American fracture rather than the pyrotechnic beginning. [...]

Of course, in the end, the United States got neither self-awareness nor self-actualization. What it got, a decade and a half later, was Donald Trump, whose election in 2016 has often been cast as a culmination of what the journalist Spencer Ackerman, in his 2021 book “Reign of Terror,” describes as the “decadent phase of the war on terror.”

Trump’s path from reality-TV celebrity to the presidency ran through the Islamophobic fever swamps of the post-9/11 right — the ground zero mosque panic, Obama birth-certificate conspiracism — but also through an increasingly bipartisan discontent with the war on terror that had, by 2016, curdled into cynicism. Trump was the first Republican presidential nominee to break the formidable taboo against affirming what most Americans by then believed, that the country’s post-9/11 military adventurism had been a mistake. He also did little to seriously curtail it in his first presidency and has enthusiastically expanded it in his second.

It has long been tempting to view Trump’s presidencies as the logical conclusion of the folly of the post-9/11 era, and as support for the liberal contention that the right’s calls for patriotism in that era were always really about seizing domestic power. But Trump has also enabled a re-examination of history, and even recent history, that complicates the tale of 9/11’s primacy. [...]

Trump’s 2016 election “represented the crystallization of elements that were still inchoate” in the early 1990s, John Ganz writes in “When the Clock Broke,” his recent history of the period’s underappreciated malaise. In retrospect, 9/11 was paradoxically both a respite from and accelerant of polarizations and pathologies that were already well underway by then. It allowed Americans to ignore them for a moment, until they came roaring back with redoubled force. [...] [ed. So, explain Obama.]

If you do not remember the Berlin Wall but had an adolescence shaped by social media and cellphones, the brightest dividing lines in recent history are technological — and, with the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence, are becoming more so. This is clear in the borrowed nostalgias of Gen Z, the bits of the past that 20-somethings have recently pressed into service as emblems of a lost golden era: “Friends,” John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, ’90s high-school-class home videos, music videos and concert footage from bands like Alien Ant Farm and Puddle of Mudd.

These artifacts span the pre- and post-9/11 years, and the lost innocence they represent has nothing to do with the attacks. Their interest comes from their evocation of a period when people hung out with friends in person and sweated alongside strangers at clubs and music festivals; teenagers goofed un-self-consciously for cameras rather than posing for them like jaded celebrities; and popular culture could be loud and dumb and not picked apart in the digital panopticon for its social politics. The shape that looms ominously over them isn’t the Twin Towers. It’s the iPhone. [ed. lol...ok.]

by Charles Homans, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Chantal Jahchan
[ed. Nice words, but no. C'mon. 9-11 was our last opportunity to cohere as a country, and we whiffed it. Instead we got a war on terror, as stupid and amorphous as any initiative based on a feeling (War on Anxiety?). A Patriot Act that gave subsequent crimes a never-ending veneer of political cover. 'Homeland' security, a Nazi term repurposed for new times. Two stupid reactionary wars (neither won) that among other things validated torture as official US state policy. Guantanamo Bay. A newly militarized culture. An expanded surveillance state. And fear... fear everywhere of some 'other' where strength and self-assurance used to be.]

How To Avoid Becoming A Doomsday Prepper

I knew I had gone too far when the question of whether we should buy a gun crossed my mind. This came at the apex of a weeklong anxiety spiral triggered by a New York Times feature about the possibility of an 18-month nationwide blackout. I was uneasy seeing the phrase “art form” used to describe the archaic manufacturing process of the transformers that underpin our electrical grid; the process involves painstakingly bespoke techniques of winding copper coils, wrapping paper insulation, and binding wiring, all by hand. The intensity and intricacy of that process means that there is a backlog of transformer manufacturing and repair, sometimes stretching as long as five years. There are more than 55,000 substations in the United States, but according to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission official cited in the article, only nine of the most powerful substations would need to be taken out to trigger a nationwide blackout, which could go on to last as long as 18 months.

 

At the same time I read this article, an actual blackout was taking place in Gary, Indiana, a state where more than 370,000 people—the population is disproportionately black—were left in the dark for two weeks before power was restored. ... I replayed the videos and then thought about them for days, imagining how I would respond in that type of situation and knowing that I was completely unprepared to defend myself if I needed to do so. [...]

The Covid pandemic was a lesson in catastrophe, a confirmation for many of us that the worst can actually happen. And the likelihood of disaster, which has always loomed in the background, continues to escalate in unprecedented ways. The air is dense and orange because wildfires are ravaging the north. Flash flooding caused horrific mudslides in Nepal. A super El Niño is brewing in the Pacific. How does a person, in good conscience, bring a baby into a world like this?

It was in this miasma of paranoia, anticipation, and horror that a self-preservation instinct began to take over, one grounded deeply in my ability to purchase comfort and safety. This is how I ended up on the Preppers subreddit, reading about the relative merits of pre-made emergency kits (pre-made is better than nothing, but you’re generally better off compiling your own) and the most important things to do in the first 12 hours of a blackout (stockpile as much water as you can, but also consider stocking cigarettes and alcohol for bartering). I let myself drift into a prepper spiral and bookmarked generators and hand-crank radios, and then considered how much space in my basement could be dedicated to storing food and water.

The websites that sold emergency prep kits depicted a post-blackout world as a ravaged apocalypse and the would-be owners of their kits as savvy, self-sufficient survivors. “When the grid dies,” one site says, “you don’t.”

The Reddit preppers recommended thousands of dollars worth of products, but they also extolled the virtues of practical knowledge. You should know basic construction, they said, and also collect seeds, and also know self-defense. There were always ways you could go deeper and become more self-sufficient. This is how people end up with massive compounds filled with weapons and enough food to last years. I could see the logical jumps my mind could make to land me there.

My personality is particularly susceptible to this kind of anxiety, and so is my partner’s. After a few days of sending links back and forth to each other, we sat down to talk about how far we actually wanted to take this. We landed on a 30-day supply of freeze-dried food from Costco and an emergency first aid kit—a modest financial investment toward alleviating our shared anxiety. We kept generators and solar panels off the table, but when the thought of buying weapons fleetingly crossed my mind, I knew I needed to call a timeout and figure out what I was actually worrying about.

I was afraid of losing control, of life not going according to plan, of another major disruption changing the course of history. I was afraid that my neighbors would turn on each other, that the world would turn into every post-apocalyptic movie I’ve ever seen, and that I would regret not doing everything I could to protect my family. I was afraid of the horror my child would inevitably experience when confronted with the cruelty and neglect that humans are capable of, and I was afraid that as their parent, I wouldn’t be able to do anything to protect them from it.

Once I articulated these fears, I realized I could not control them even if I spent my entire life in a defensive crouch of paranoid preparation. If the U.S. is plunged into an 18-month national blackout, it will be a cataclysmic event that will touch every part of our society and economy such that continuing any kind of normal life will be impossible. The amount of preparation I would have to do to maintain a semblance of normalcy in that instance would require such absurd investments of time and money that it would force me to adopt “emergency preparedness” as a main personality trait and hobby. And doing that would require a change of my fundamental values and worldview, too, because it would make me live in a way that assumes people are more likely to hurt than help each other.

Coincidentally, my partner, who is a college professor, taught a lesson recently contrasting Hobbesian and Lockean states of nature for his Intro To Government class. Thomas Hobbes believed that people were driven by competition, distrust, and scarcity. In projecting a disaster scenario, Hobbes would expect neighbors to steal from each other and would place a priority on self-defense and independence. John Locke, on the other hand, believed that people’s actions are generally governed by natural law to not hurt “Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions,” that peace is the natural condition of society, and that any conflict that arises is an exception, rather than its fundamental nature. This doesn’t mean that Locke imagines a utopian response to disaster, but even if conflict arose, he would expect a greater amount of cooperation between people.

You can see why Hobbes and Locke are taught at the beginning of a government class: The way you view the world determines how you live in it. These two theories also underpin the central policy differences between the left and the right. What is responsible for the problems in our world, and how do we go about solving them? If you believe that people are mostly selfish and hungry for power and resources, for example, you will be less likely to advocate for social safety nets. I realized that my anxiety was leading me into an imaginary Hobbesian hellscape, and I was using my impending parenthood to justify it.

Later that day, we walked over to a block party in our neighborhood hosted by a coffee shop/bar/event space that some neighbors founded in an old church. The shop, West Art, serves as a third space and community hub for our neighborhood. Free clubs meet up there nearly every night of the week, from songwriting circles to watercolor painting; the actual church space is booked up multiple times a day for events like children’s art classes, political organizing, square dancing, and concerts. West Art’s founders, Josh Gibbel and Rufus Deakin, are two of my neighbors who just acted on the very common intrusive thought of “What if this was something?” They bought the church in 2023, and since then they’ve transformed it into what they call “the living room of Lancaster.”

The block party was an all-day event where vendors set up shop along the residential street that West Art occupies, along with two stages for bands to perform, food trucks, a bounce house, and lots of community organizing. As I sat on the ground and watched kids throw balls at the fundraising dunk tank, my anxieties about the apocalypse began to feel small and silly. If disaster does come, I’m lucky to live in a community of people who already have lots of practice in looking out for each other. There’s privilege in that; it’s easier to live up to your values, whatever they are, when you have a fridge full of groceries and a roof over your head. Even still, the block party was a reminder to me of the state of nature I believe in, where people are more likely to help than hurt each other and one’s survival isn’t just a matter of individual responsibility. 

by Alex Sujong Laughlin, Defector | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. I was in a community once that suffered a week long electrical blackout. First off, you don't open the refrigerator much, except for quick grabs. Then the backyard cookouts, everyone trying to use up whatever frozen items like meat, fish and other perishables that would spoil. It was a tight community so people were used to sharing, and that helped a lot. After a few days neighbors came up and would ask if you had enough to eat (with canned chili and ramen being especially welcome). The two supermarkets were closed (no credit/debit card readers, cash registers or lights), so too the gas station (electric gas pumps, cash registers), banks (computers, security), and everything else that ran on electricity (including ATMs - cash is king). And of course, all electrical outlets were dead (no phone charging). One woman (a stranger) even offered to lend me money because the ATMs and bank weren't working and she saw my frustration. Also, when the sun goes down so does everything else. No lights, tv, reading, music or anything unless you have laterns or candles. Some folks brought out guitars and other instruments and little song circles formed here and there. Even better, kids were everywhere outside doing kid things again. You never really think about how electricity powers everything until it's gone. Since then I've always kept a good supply of canned goods and other necessities stored, and have a go-bag with all the important stuff I need (papers, id, passport, medication, money, some clothes, first aid, enough food and water for a few days, and an added solar phone charger. Depending on your community you might want to consider a gun and some ammo. Mostly, I was just impressed at how everyone pulled together, sharing goods and news, and trying to stay positive together.]

It's All Good, Bro

Callaway Golf Got Wrecked By YouTube Doofuses Because Everyone’s Out Of Ideas

Try this, maybe: Think of the internet as an ocean vast enough to contain a near-infinite constellation of distinct watery biomes, each populated by creatures that have evolved to suit the one in which they live—a bunch of weird creatures traveling in schools, chasing each other around, eating each other, and, in the most inhospitable depths, eating shit in the inky dark. Even to get your feet wet in this ocean is to know that it is bigger and colder than you could grasp. I don't know how to properly describe the uncanny feeling of becoming aware of how many online realities are unfolding, often in ways that draw big audiences and throw off real profits, in browser tabs I will never open, just as that hideous translucent deep-sea crapfish could not describe the experience of living in water. It would in some ways be a cruel thing to drag it up from the depths to show it a bunch of cavorting dolphins, but mostly it would be pointless. It would be too bright for it to see anything at all.

This is how I feel when confronted with the story of Good Good, which started as a golf YouTube channel and swiftly grew into a sprawling brand that sponsored PGA Tour players and a PGA event; they partnered with the brand Callaway Golf and raised $45 million from a group including the Manning brothers' Omaha Productions. This company was growing fast and lucratively, in a number of different directions, in a part of the ocean that I do not visit or really even know how to look at. Golfweek described the company's vision as "blending creator-driven entertainment, professional-caliber competition, and fan engagement into a format designed for golf's next generation of consumers." This is legible enough, but also there's a lot going on in that sentence, little pockets of vibe and affinity that are related enough to exist within the same space, but otherwise not notably in conversation. A lot of companies and a lot of YouTube are also like this.

The events that have led to the unraveling of Good Good over the past few weeks, by contrast, are easy enough to understand. As part of their partnership with Callaway, Good Good made a strange, bad ad that begins with Good Good creator and co-founder Garrett Clark violently pushing a woman, golfer and fellow Good Good creator Alexis Miestowski, to the ground when she tries to touch his Callaway driver. Clark then stands over her and says in a menacing tone, "Do not touch my new driver."

The ad, which was ostensibly a riff on the movie Obsession but otherwise too bad to parse, went over poorly. Major retailers pulled Good Good merchandise from their shelves, and Golf Galaxy took its name off a Golf Channel show it had sponsored alongside Good Good, which led the network to table the show. PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp described the ad as "concerning." In a statement in which he admitted that his company had approved the ad, which Good Good produced, Callaway CEO Chip Brewer said "that approval should never have happened. Mistakes were made and we are taking the matter very seriously."

Callaway subsequently pulled the ad, made one fulsome apology and then a second, donated $1 million to charities dedicated to preventing domestic violence, and cut ties with the brand. Good Good, for its part, duffed not one but two attempts at an apology. Co-founder and CEO Matt Kendrick posted, at 3:38 a.m. ET, a tweet which read: "Interesting that Callaway Golf asks us to make an ad then approves it then asks us to take the fall then drops us in a coordinated media blitz and covers it up by giving a million dollars away thinking everyone will be ok with it. 30 for 39 will be legendary." Last Wednesday, Kendrick and Good Good president Joe Flannery, who had started just days before the ad was released, both stepped down.

There are some extremely obvious lessons to take from this, regarding how to not market your pioneering new golf club as well as the risks of aligning your big global brand with YouTube dunces, and it seems both redundant and rude to remind Callaway of those at this moment. The other brands that have taken long positions on partnering with social media creators and influencers have surely made note of all that, too.

None of this is especially difficult to understand in the abstract. Creators like Good Good have an audience that companies like Callaway want to reach and mostly do not understand. "There's probably a stigma from like the older golf fan that 'only 12-year-olds watch that,'" Kendrick told Golfweek back in 2025. "Well, if you actually knew our demographic, you would know that it's 24-to-35 is our main demographic." In giving Good Good the benefit of the doubt, on things like this bafflingly and obviously bad ad but also in general, Callaway entrusted the brand's reputation to an outside partner that they trust to speak to that audience in a way they'll understand. That Good Good duffed it is inarguable at this point, but there is also that classic showing-dolphins-to-a-crapfish aspect inherent in this sort of thing even when it works. Ben Goren, a writer and marketer, summed those risks up well in his newsletter in late August:

For as ubiquitous as social media is, it has become almost unfathomably segmented. You can earn millions of views and millions of followers without Joe McAverage American having any clue who you are. Joe McAverage American is probably upset that you think he should know who that random TikToker is. And when someone doesn’t know who you are, they are extremely unlikely to have even a moment of hesitation before throwing you into the garbage can when you bore them, confuse them, or, in the case of Good Good, upset them.

In a second post, Goren does a good job illustrating the broader state of play in the golf influencer space, and how the big brands have approached and should approach partnerships with them. There are lessons there, too, both for brands trying to figure out how to use influencers to their advantage and a sport trying to figure out where its next generation of players will come from. As someone who is less interested in marketing or golf than Goren, what I find interesting about this story has less to do with its YouTube-damaged or golfy particulars and more to do with how likely it is to repeat itself elsewhere in the culture.

But also the golfy particulars seem instructive. The sport is in the middle of an authentic surge in popularity, and confronting the happy challenge of having to figure out how to get all those interested new golfers, many of them kids, onto actual golf courses. The brands and institutions that stand to profit from this interest—companies like Callaway, which will sell them clubs and bags for as long as they are playing golf—know where those golfers are, but not really who they are or quite what they want; this is mostly because they are brands and institutions, and as such would naturally struggle with this kind of thing.

And so they have to delegate, or just defer to what YouTube's viewer stats tell them about what those people like and want. This is how cycling's Vuelta a España winds up bringing aboard a member of the Vertical Video Community to chaotic effect, or how the previously bottomless resources of Saudi Arabia's Private Investment Fund created a new and ostentatiously "louder" golf tour that went bankrupt before it figured out what else it might have been. The institutions are guessing, and sorting rude metrics from high to low. The size of the ocean humbles even the biggest fish in it. [...]

But if the Good Good story illustrates the peril inherent in big brands trusting feral web goofs to tell their stories, the cringe and carnage of those big brands trying to tell that story themselves demonstrates why they still need to rely on influencers and creators.

It seems reasonable enough to assume that Callaway approved Good Good's awful, stupid, brand-wrecking ad because they assumed that there was something in it they didn't get; that assumption, and that sense of what they didn't understand, is why they got into business with them in the first place. Callaway's size and status meant that they could survive being wrong in a way that Good Good couldn't, but the problem that brands like Callaway bring in creators like Good Good to solve is a stubborn one, and one those companies are uniquely ill-suited to address. They know enough to know that they don't know how to find or talk to the people they need to reach, and they're right about that; they're astute enough to identify the creators that do know that, and rich enough to pay them. But that's not enough.

If these brands knew what they wanted to say—if they actually had anything in particular to say, or any real sense for the people they want to say it to—it might be easier. Goren, for instance, makes a case for selling golf not as just another backdrop for Good Good-style bits and goofs, but as a worthwhile craft and pursuit in itself. In the absence of any such commitment, institutional players—and businesses, politicians, and others with an interest in shaping and steering those people's opinions—are mostly just casting baited lines out there to see what they can catch in the places where they think they might catch them. But the ocean is the ocean, and having a map of it is very different than having a useful understanding of it. All that money and all that reach and all that work, and they still can't think of what's down there as anything but food.

by David Roth, Defector |  Read more:

Image: Kenneth Richmond/Getty Images

Butchering a £5,000 Bluefin Tuna With a Sushi Master

We break down the entire fish from head to tail, exploring the different cuts of tuna, how the fat content and texture change throughout the fish, and which parts are best suited to sushi, sashimi, grilling and cooking. Along the way, we taste some of the most prized and unusual cuts.

In this video:

•⁠ ⁠Break down a whole 200kg bluefin tuna
•⁠ ⁠Learn professional tuna butchery techniques
•⁠ ⁠Explore the different cuts of bluefin tuna
•⁠ ⁠Taste lean, medium-fatty and fatty tuna
•⁠ ⁠Learn how tuna is prepared for sushi and sashimi
•⁠ ⁠Discover rarely seen cuts
•⁠ ⁠Learn traditional Japanese sushi techniques 

•⁠ ⁠See how different parts of one tuna can taste completely different

Jamie Hewlett, 2005
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