Americans Are Already Paying Dearly for the National Debt

Fiscal hawks like to drum up interest in the national debt by making the astronomical numbers more tangible. The United States owes $31.6 trillion to public creditors, more than $290,000 for each household. You could spend $1 million every day for almost 86,000 years before having to borrow more. But no one really cares. Talking about how many times all of the dollars laid end to end would go to the moon and back (6,000, as it happens) is just not going to get people to think differently about the national debt.

What should matter is that the consequences of this debt are not off in the future, but already here. The government’s deficits have saddled many American families with higher costs, largely from rising interest rates. The Budget Lab, the policy research center at Yale where I am the executive director, recently estimated that congressional-spending decisions since 2015 have raised Treasury yields by almost a full percentage point, which affects what American households pay to borrow. For someone taking out a 30-year mortgage at last year’s median home price, this rise in long-term interest rates has increased their borrowing costs by about $2,500 a year, or roughly $76,000 over the life of the loan. (The Budget Lab has built a tool to help users calculate their own extra mortgage costs.)

The problem is not just for Americans who are lucky enough to buy a home. The bloated government budgets and waning federal revenues of the past decade are driving up costs across the board. Compared with a world in which these fiscal-policy changes did not take place, the annual borrowing costs on a typical auto loan are now up by about $120, and by about $770 on a typical small-business loan. Credit-card borrowing rates are also hovering near record highs.

Although affordability has become a watchword for politicians who understand that rising prices are hurting American families, lawmakers seem to have forgotten that reducing federal deficits would help bring down prices. In the 1990s, Congress and the White House prioritized bringing deficits down by both cutting spending and raising revenue—moves that lowered borrowing costs for American families by about 0.6 percentage points, according to Budget Lab calculations. But few lawmakers seem to be suggesting the spending cuts and tax increases necessary to lower costs now. [...]

Much of the big legislation of the past decade, such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, pandemic stimulus bills, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, has grown the deficit. Lawmakers have passed some legislation to improve the fiscal outlook, such as the Fiscal Responsibility Act in 2023, which cut spending and clawed back unspent coronavirus-relief funds, but most federal policy has lately involved spending money that the country doesn’t quite have. This is hurting consumers, businesses, and the federal government.

The cost of the war in Iran, which the Pentagon put at $29 billion last month (other estimates are higher), will put slight upward pressure on interest rates (0.002 percentage points), according to our calculator. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which we estimate will raise the deficit by $2.4 trillion over the next decade (not including interest costs), will raise interest rates on a typical 30-year mortgage by 0.4 percentage points by the end of 2030—about $1,060 annually for a home bought at the 2024 median price with a 20 percent down payment—and by 1.5 percentage points by the end of 2055.

Most economists support deficit spending during temporary crises, such as a recession, or in cases where an investment can be expected to generate more government revenues in the future, such as funding for infrastructure. But the United States has been spending far more than it takes in for well over two decades.

The main remedies for these problems—higher taxes and spending cuts—are generally politically unpopular. Every budget fix will have its critics, but some options are more palatable than others. Better funding for the IRS, for example, could help close the “tax gap”—the amount of taxes legally owed that are not paid in a timely way—which the IRS estimated at about $700 billion a year in 2022. Other levers include raising the retirement age and reducing Social Security benefits for high earners, who also tend to live longer; reforming Medicare Advantage, a program that has been shown to allow private insurers to overcharge the federal government; and removing the tax exemption on employer-provided health insurance, so that these benefits can be taxed as income. The Congressional Budget Office regularly publishes policies that could help close the deficit, and Americans need to decide what we’re willing to pay for and what we’re not.

A big challenge in making these hard choices is that the costs and benefits are asymmetrically understood: Whereas the costs of deficits are diffuse, the costs of policies that close the deficit are acutely clear only to those affected. For example, the Budget Lab has estimated that closing the carried-interest loophole could raise more than $100 billion in federal revenues over 10 years, which would help lower mortgage rates by 0.0064 percentage points. But this collective benefit is too slight for most people to know or care about it. The few people who benefit from this tax break, however, in industries such as private equity and venture capital, very much do care, so they are far more likely to push hard to keep it than the millions of affected Americans are to push to end it.

Politicians respond to electoral consequences. Right now there is nothing stopping them from doling out tax cuts and spending promises while also driving up interest rates. Voters may complain that their lives are becoming unaffordable, but hardly anyone seems to appreciate that federal deficits are partly to blame. If we want to see lawmakers actually address this problem, economists need to do a better job explaining the stakes. This means that instead of talking about the fact that our national debt could fill all 32 NFL stadiums with two tiers of construction pallets filled with $100 bills, we should be talking about how deficit spending is making it harder to pay our own bills.

by Martha Gimbel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: The Atlantic. Source: Getty

[ed. See also: America is Heading for a Debtpocalypse (Noahpinion):]

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As of 2026, we’re in double trouble. Our national debt is back up above 100% of GDP — similar to what it was right after WW2 (and much higher than in 1990). But now the interest rates our government has to pay on its debt are almost twice as high as they were after WW2: [...]

But things are worse under Trump than they were under Biden, for three reasons.

First, this is a very large annual deficit, and it’s all being borrowed at the new, higher interest rates. In addition, during Biden’s first two years in office, inflation eroded the debt. Inflation is back down to a fairly low-ish level now, meaning the debt isn’t getting eroded. And finally, interest rates have now been high for long enough that the debt Trump borrowed in his first term to pay for Covid relief is now being rolled over at higher rates.

So right now, the national debt continues to explode, because the government is borrowing money just to pay the interest on the money it borrowed before. This increased debt naturally results in even greater interest costs, forcing the government to borrow even more to fund those interest payments. And so on. Interest payments and debt just go to the moon.

***

[ed. Let that sink in - we're paying interest on loans we've taken out to pay interest on the national debt. Also: Federal Debt 101; and Going For Broke (DS). And this: The Fiscal Crisis Facing American Cities (Urban Proxima):]

***

As the cost of servicing the debt increases, Congress must borrow more, raise additional revenue, or devote a smaller share of the federal budget to everything else. Whichever path it chooses, the federal government will have less room to maintain the commitments on which American cities have come to depend. [...]

Federal money flows to cities in three flavors: direct transfers, indirect transfers, and what we call fiscal dark matter. Direct transfers are exactly what they sound like — money sent directly from the federal government to various localities. These include funds disbursed through programs like the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), which supports things like public infrastructure and neighborhood services. In 2022, direct transfers like the CDBG totaled $146.3 billion. That’s significant, but actually the smallest of the three categories.

Less visible are the indirect transfers. These monies are initially awarded to state governments, which then allocate funds to municipal-level programs and services in accordance with state prerogatives. The cleanest example is probably K-12 education, which receives federal Title I dollars to pay for teachers and programs, but federal highway dollars work essentially the same way. All told, in 2022, the federal government handed down $1.1 trillion to state governments. That amounted to 36% of overall state revenue for that year and, depending on the individual state, ranged from roughly 22% to 50% of state revenue. How much of that ultimately flowed down to cities is hard to say, which is itself a problem: it’s difficult to even establish how exposed local governments are to a pullback in federal support of state budgets.

The third category – our fiscal dark matter – is all the federal money spent into local communities that never shows up in a local budget. This includes housing subsidies like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and Section 8. It also includes food support programs like SNAP and even some direct funding for local food banks.

Rightfully or not, when the flow of federal money in this category starts to dry up, the resulting problems will fall squarely on the mayor’s desk. After all, the median voter is never going to see increasing numbers of homeless encampments and think to blame the head of HUD. [...]

The “eds and meds” economies that anchor cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Baltimore depend heavily on Medicaid reimbursements and federal research grants to sustain the hospitals and universities that rank among their largest employers. Cuts there could precipitate layoffs in the institutions that have been holding together post-industrial downtowns for 30 years. And therein lies the second part of the dark matter problem. Federal money doesn’t just fund services and pay for infrastructure. In some places, it also props up major employers who anchor the entire local labor market. [ed. And the integral supply chain business that support those services.]

Sheep that Bleat

My dog Toby and I were just back from our early morning walk and I was in the living room when I heard a single bleat of a sheep. It was 8:30. The sheep bleated again.

How to describe the sound? Demanding, worried, and hesitant. Half, “Well, what?” and half, “Oh dear, oh help!” Half low moan, half high and wavering supplication. It’s a sound, like birdsong, that I’d have to replay endlessly to describe even half-right. And yet I recognized it immediately as different from the bleating of the small herd my neighbor’s nephew Jesús keeps in the fields across the lane from my house. This mournful bleat proclaimed, I am alone.

I looked out the window and saw the animal, emerging from the shadows where the lane dead-ended at the gated entrance to a field. It hesitated, then, almost deerlike, it advanced. What was it doing here, and where had it come from? Behind it I could see the fence at the entrance. It appeared intact. Beyond were the green fields where the sheep grazed among the partially built houses of an abandoned project on the ridge above the river. The bank owns the land now, but my neighbor’s family has the use of the fields. No other sheep were in view.

My son had heard the sheep, too, and we both stepped out into the lane. The sheep retreated into the corner against the fence. We didn’t have the nephew’s number, so we called my neighbor instead. He was in Holland, visiting his son for a few days, but he assured us he’d call his nephew right away. For good measure, he also gave us the number.

My son and I kept an eye on the sheep. I knew that my neighbor’s sister and nephew lived five minutes away. I expected them any moment. The sheep made a couple of tentative starts into the lane but retreated each time to its corner. The third time, instead of turning back when it came up against us in the lane, it stood its ground. Then it took courage, gathered itself, and made a mad dash around us—to the freedom of the open lane, nothing to stop it or impede its progress. It looked like a young male—I could see its testicles. I followed and saw it turn off the lane onto the grassy slope behind the sports center. If it continued in that direction, it would hit city streets. I moved back, hoping it would not press on. The grass on the slope was very green. Maybe the sheep would linger to nibble.

Back at the house, I wondered what was taking the owner so long. I went inside, but a few minutes later, from the corner of my eye, I saw a sheep in the lane, just like the earlier one, drumming up its courage to get past my son, still outside. Wait! I shook my head. It felt like déjà vu.

“Same one?” I asked, stepping back outside, and my son said yes, same one—back in its dead end, only to try to escape again. And still no nephew. My son sent a WhatsApp message.

The sheep made a last attempt. My son and I, prepared this time, jumped in front of it, waving our arms. At the last moment, the sheep veered, turned, and charged back to its corner. It made a funny little leap into the air, twice, to come down on all four feet in a show of petulance. Then it lay down on a patch of grass by the gate. Shortly afterward, a car pulled up.

Instead of the story ending, however, it took a turn. Rather than the nephew, it was his mother, with his girlfriend driving. The women explained that they got a call from my neighbor, explaining that the nephew hadn’t picked up. The mother and girlfriend couldn’t get in touch with him, either—the man was at work. So they’d come.

I pointed out the sheep, lying quietly in the shade of the wall. The sister wore a worried expression. The girlfriend seemed amused. How do we catch it, I asked? Oh, we won’t, the sister said. Another nephew in the family, cousin to Jesús, was coming. He would catch it.

So while we waited for the cousin, we watched the sheep. It was on its feet again. Was it favoring the front left leg, injured perhaps while wriggling free through a fence? Would it put up a fight? While we talked, a call came: Jesús, finally alerted by my son’s message. His mother passed the phone to the girlfriend. The cousin appeared, climbed out of his car, engine running and door wide open. He was looking past us as he advanced toward the sheep, backed up against the gate. Almost immediately, even before he’d had time to size up the situation, he turned to us. “That’s not Jesús’s,” he declared. The girlfriend passed the phone to the cousin, and in a minute he passed it back to her. She passed the phone to Jesús’s mother, as if rewinding a skein that had come unwound. A few words to Jesús, and the mother hung up.

“Well, whose sheep could it be, then?” I wondered aloud.

Nobody knew. Call the police, the cousin said, and left. The two women got in their car to drive off, too. As they turned the car around, I stepped up to the window. “Did you call?” I asked.

“No, no—we don’t have the number.” And they too drove off. I stared after them. Well, why wouldn’t they leave? The sheep wasn’t theirs.

It wasn’t mine, either, though.

To me, it looked like a sheep had been dropped among us, and we should all make a contribution to getting it where it belonged. My 45 minutes counted as my effort. What was theirs?

To them, the situation might look different—as if I’d started it all by worrying about a sheep when it wasn’t my business to worry about it, disrupting the morning of any number of people by involving them, too. And now I was trying to hand off the Old Maid card. They weren’t taking it.

by Clelland Coe, American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: John Fowler/Flickr

WTF Happened In 1971?

via: [more:]

Claude Nori (b.1949), Les Amants du Pô

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Now That I Am Forever With Child

How the days went

While you were blooming within me

I remember each upon each —
The swelling changed planes of my body —
And how you first fluttered, then jumped
And I thought it was my heart.

How the days wound down
And the turning of winter
I recall, with you growing heavy
Against the wind. I thought
Now her hands
Are formed, and her hair
Has started to curl
Now her teeth are done
Now she sneezes.
Then the seed opened
I bore you one morning just before spring —
My head rang like a fiery piston
My legs were towers between which
A new world was passing.

Since then
I can only distinguish
One thread within running hours
You . . . flowing through selves
Toward you.

by Audre Lorde

[ed. Read aloud here by Amanda Holmes.]

A Guide to Rock, Paper, Scissors:

The practical upshot is to start with paper, but what broader lesson should we take from this? Since all options are mathematically identical, any difference in player behavior must come from connotations. Since rock feels strongest, a naive child would choose rock. But since everyone knows that, a slightly smarter person would choose paper. But since everyone knows that, an even smarter person might choose scissors. But since . . . and the lesson of this graph is that when playing the average member of the population, all of this galaxy-brained thinking provides negative value, because in practice most people never leave the naive first level.

via: ACX

This, Too, Shall Pass

In the winter of 2021, I had a minor surgery that required me to spend a week off my feet. To this day I don’t know if it was the lack of mobility or the prescription narcotic that ground my digestive system to a halt, but by the time I realized I hadn’t gone to the bathroom in seven days, why mattered less than how—that is, how to get it out. Which is how I found myself on my toilet, drenched in flop sweat, learning the phrase “impacted stool” from Google.

I don’t have children, but when my friends tell their birth stories I now nod along in tacit understanding—I know the horror of “There’s no way that will fit through there,” of “Oh god, what if this has to be surgically removed?,” of writhing around for a better angle. I chugged the water my husband, god bless him, handed me through the cracked door. I felt cold and also hot. When it was finally over, I broke out in full body shakes—I was pale, giddy, in shock. I looked back in proud relief. My marriage grew stronger for what we’d achieved together. When I meet others who’ve endured it, we find immediate brotherhood.

This experience, though humbling, wasn’t totally out of the ordinary for me. I’m a slow-motility girlie—I pack prunes and Smooth Move tea on trips; for years, I bought a fiber cereal hilariously called Kashi GO; I once had an Uber Eats guy deliver me a Fleet enema. My best friend likes to remind me of a night we spent at the emergency room trying to diagnose mysterious stomach cramps I thought were appendicitis but turned out to be garden- variety constipation. I’ve had to get comfortable discussing the scatological with clinicians, pharmacists, roommates I’ve shared bathrooms with. But barring the occasional nod from my fellow comrades in what one doctor called “sluggish digestion,” I’ve mostly suffered these slings and arrows solo—that is, until recently.

One day, it seems, the internet woke up and chose BMs, and suddenly the hottest girl you know is posting about scat. Now you have to go out of your way to not eat fiber—prebiotic supplements are in our soda, our candy bars, our cold foam. The beverage case is dominated by the likes of Olipop and Poppi and Culture Pop, all offering varying degrees of digestive assistance. The other day, I saw a smoothie blend in the freezer aisle called “Fiber Supremacy,” and earlier this year, Frito-Lay launched a fiber-packed version of both SunChips and Smartfood popcorn. Kraft is making a purgative macaroni and cheese that boasts six grams of fiber per serving (or 15 grams if you eat the whole box—which is, let’s be honest, how most people consume Easy Mac). Outside the retail space, home cooks are finding ways to fit chia and flax into not just their breakfasts but their meat loaf. They’re pureeing beans into sauces and veggies into puddings and cakes. Literal doctors are posting their #fibermaxxing menus to TikTok. And while this may sound like just another wave on the ocean of content we surf daily, it gets…weirder.

I’ve covered the ingestion of sustenance extensively in my 20 years of food writing; the passing of it, less so. We are biologically inclined to separate food talk from waste talk—unless you’re a new parent, the human body recoils from the plate at the mere mention of excreta. As such, there’s a glaring lacuna in our field when it comes to the business end of our alimentary canal. But as #fibermaxxing has given way to #poopmaxxing, culinary talk is shifting from what goes in to how easily it comes out. I recently watched a girl on TikTok showing off her “PoopMaxxer purse” in which she carries Dude Wipes, after-poo spray, toilet seat covers, extra TP, instant oatmeal packets, and fiber gummies because, she says, “in addition to a poopy butt I also have a sweet tooth.” She signs off the video with “Goodbye poopies,” because, I guess, why not.

What is going on here? Some have theorized this is just the latest way to get skinny—Ozempic is expensive, but Poppi is cheap. It’s hardly a coincidence that this trend comes on the heels of GLP-1 mania and #proteinmaxxing, two dietary fads known to cause constipation. “They’re all getting colonics!” a friend recently exclaimed to me in a breathless tone of conspiracy-crazed revelation, of the ultrathin celebrities in our newsfeeds.

Others attribute the fixation to the sudden rise in colorectal cancer rates among young people—and given how hard it can be to access and afford health care in the United States, who could blame us for taking our well-being into our own hands? This may also be why we’re more obsessed with lifestyle optimization than ever before—I know some couples who rarely eat together, because of how personalized each of their diets have become. We have more access to dietary research and more ways to track health data than at any time in human history, prompting many to turn their bodies into full-blown science experiments.

Whatever the reason, it’s now de rigueur to be regular. What was once my personal bête noire is the obsession of wellness queens everywhere, who are FODMAPing, fibermaxxing, and colon cleansing their way toward slenderness, Bethlehem, nirvana. But what becomes of life’s simple pleasures (sharing a meal, eating someone else’s cooking) when we value function over all else? Sure, we have a whole supermarket’s worth of ways to grease the gears now—but is our fiber fixation maybe missing the point?

I grew up in the early aughts, an era governed by the food rules of women’s magazines. They told us to suck in our stomachs, buy skim milk, avoid egg yolks, skip meals—or else eat lots of small ones to boost metabolism—and mangle a sandwich roll by digging out the middle. In my efforts to move on from this hellscape, I learned to seek out whole foods, swapping out this noxious morality for what seemed like a more righteous one. I thought Michael Pollan had single-handedly saved me from a lifetime of disordered eating when he published In Defense of Food, dispensing his now legendary dietary advice: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

And for a while, this worked. I went to the farmers’ market, bought local dairy, had my first good tomato. I made kombucha and sourdough bread and buckwheat brownies. Heck, I became a food writer. By embracing Pollan’s edict, I saw how food could be a paradise of unlimited possibility instead of a restrictive environment of guilt. I learned to approach food with curiosity instead of fear. I still sucked in my stomach out of vanity and believed in the virtue of frequent light snacking, but I was eating pretty much whatever I wanted (with the exception of my fiber cereal), and feeling healthier for it.

The body changes, though—it always does—and one day I woke up in my late 30s on various meds for migraine and anxiety and allergies that all listed constipation as a symptom, bloat bulging out the zipper of my high-waisted jeans. My BMs were fickler than ever and, for the first time in over a decade, I was feeling the urge to diet. Instead, I went to my GP, who recommended fruits, veggies, and grains—foods I was already consuming en masse, thanks to Mikey P. So I took psyllium. I got acupuncture. I went to a GI doctor who prescribed a weapons-grade laxative. I Googled “CBT for IBS” and tried meditation, in case this was all simply a matter of unclenching. I started taking 800 milligrams of magnesium per day and carrying Senna pills in my purse. The bloat only seemed to be getting worse. One friend suggested I just buy bigger jeans.

All of this is to say, the robots weren’t my first choice.

by Linni Kral, Taste |  Read more:

Image: Max Erwin

[ed. See also: A Clockwork Ozempic (Taste).]

Amanda Acker (b.1982) - Blue Night. 2025.

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What is It Like to Live in a World You Believe is About to End?

I opened my interviews for this article with a simple question: “How long do we have?”

Five years, or five to 10, or five to 20. One person said eight, then corrected herself to six; one said eight and stuck to it.

In this, they aren’t that far off from many estimates made by experts. The bluntly titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies has hit bestseller lists by warning of the imminent risks of artificial general intelligence (AGI). The scenario AI 2027, written by a former OpenAI employee, predicts AGI within the next few years. The AI company Anthropic consistently predicts AGI by early 2027.

“I think that in most timelines, humans will simply be irrelevant and extinct,” one interviewee said.

I heard that a lot. A few interviewees — mostly employed by frontier AI labs — expected the world to become unimaginably strange in a good way. One put a 30% chance on utopia, a 30% chance on dystopia, a 30% chance on extinction, and a 10% chance on something too weird to imagine. Several refused to make any prediction; several more said only that they still had hope. About half echoed one of my most blunt respondents: “I don’t think humanity is going to make it.”

What is it like to live in a world you believe is about to end?

Death was already inevitable

“I was born with a terminal condition,” said Matthew Gray, a board member at the existential risk community-building nonprofit Lightcone Infrastructure. “We call it aging. I’ve since picked up another. We call it multiple sclerosis. And AI is a third one on top. I’m not very worried about degenerating from multiple sclerosis because I’m pretty sure the robots will kill me first, just like I wasn’t that worried about aging-related deterioration because multiple sclerosis will get me first.”

From this perspective, AI doomers don’t face a new problem; they face the oldest problem humanity has ever faced.

I pushed back. If I look at an actuarial table, I can expect another 47 years of life. I’d be pretty upset to discover I had only five.

This, my interviewees thought, was naive. Even without AI risk, I could have been hit by a car; I could have gotten cancer; I could have been nuked in a hot war between Russia and the United States. It’s not that the difference in probability doesn’t matter. It’s worse to be certain that I’ll die in five years than to have a 50% chance of not hitting my allotted 47. But because my death has always been an inevitability, I have been coping all along with the precarity of my existence. From this perspective, AI risk isn’t shocking and unfamiliar; it’s a significantly worse version of a problem I already know I have to deal with.

“I was never guaranteed that I was going to get a long life and a long future and a chance to meet my grandchildren,” said Gretta Duleba, an independent technical AI safety researcher and former communications manager at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. “Those were never my right. Across human history, no one has ever been entitled to the future.”

Throughout the entire scope of human experience, many of my respondents said, apocalypse has been more the rule than the exception: the Holocaust, the Black Death, the An Lushan Rebellion, the Thirty Years’ War. AI doom, as many people pointed out, is the latest and the last iteration of a societal universal. AGI might be the end of the actual entire world, but it is far from the first time people have faced the end of their own individual worlds.

And AI doom is a remarkably cozy catastrophe. If you suffered through a historical apocalypse, you’d expect to starve, be raped, watch your children die in front of you, die a slow and lingering death of smallpox or plague or wound infection. The AI apocalypse — at least for those with the slack to be worried about it — takes place in a world of wealth and relative peace and technological marvels.

“Enjoy the fact that you get to have hot showers,” said Duleba. “Enjoy the fact that you get to eat delicious food. Enjoy the fact that you get to do escape rooms, which is one of my favorite things. This is great. Have you noticed how great this is?”

“There’s at least some hope that AI might become good,” said Robert Herr, a former senior political staffer who is transitioning into AI policy work, “and that is a lot more than many, many billions of people in history had.”

For some people with short AI timelines, the enormity of the AI apocalypse is its own perverse source of comfort. Once, they had to worry about many things: climate change, malaria, factory farming, democratic backsliding, the fertility crisis. Now, instead of many big problems, they have one enormous problem. Worry about AI frees them from having to worry about anything else.

“When you’re diagnosed with prostate cancer,” said Adam Grey, who isn’t involved in AI research but who follows AI news, “a lot of the time doctors say not to bother treating it because you’ll die of something else. This is the thing that’s going to kill us first — us as a civilization and also personally me. It clarifies what the most important issues are.”

Ambiguous loss

Although short AI timelines can be a source of clarity, some people also struggle with the uncertainty of humanity’s fate. Duleba, who was a therapist before she switched to working on AI, told me about the concept of “ambiguous loss,” originally developed by Pauline Boss in the 1970s.

In normal grief, your loved one is dead. While it’s painful, you know that it will never change. Ambiguous grief, however, occurs when a loved one is kidnapped, or is a soldier missing in action, or has slowly worsening dementia with occasional good days farther and farther apart. Your loved one’s death is never really over, so you can never really grieve. You are trapped in a cycle of mourning that never resolves.

AI doom can be a situation of ambiguous loss. You can’t know for sure when it will happen or whether it will happen at all — but the more you understand what’s going on, many people find, the easier it is to grieve and move forward.

“The more I know about something, the less I’m freaked out always,” said Tao Lin, a member of technical staff at a frontier AI lab (and a close personal friend). “The less I know about something, the less I will be rational about it. The rational part of your brain needs information to operate, and just having more information will make you be more premeditated and system 2 about everything.”

When he felt doomy, he did AI forecasting to put concrete numbers on his uncertainty. (He believes there is about a 20% chance of human extinction, a 40% chance of ”a great outcome,” and a 40% chance that “people survive and have a great time, but stuff is broadly bad.”) [...]

Most interviewees emphasized that the most important thing to understand about AI risk was how little control you had over it.

“There’s not much use worrying about a thing if the outcome is determined,” said Alyssa Riceman, a software engineer. “You’re just going to burn a whole bunch of emotional energy not making any changes out in the world. It’s only worth worrying about things if you’re in a position of control over them. So go out and check if you’re in a position of control, and if you are, control them.”

But what if you have partial control over a situation?

“Then you have to game out all the branches,” Riceman said. “Say ‘I can do this. If I do this, what happens then?,’ until everything bottoms out at either a situation you can completely control or a situation that’s out of your control.”

Duncan Sabien, who is the current communications manager for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, agreed. “I actually have no control over whether we succeed or fail,” he said. “All I can control is my own actions. And so if I am doing the best I can with what I know and what I have available to me, then that is the best I can do. I go home feeling like I’m a good person, and I get to go to sleep at night feeling like if the AI does kill us all, I did as much as I could, realistically and sustainably, to prevent it. And everything else is out of my hands. Everything else is always out of my hands.”

Living well in the apocalypse

What, then, do people decide to do?

by Ozy Brennan, Asterisk |  Read more:

Image: Karol Banach

Yuri Klapouh (Ukrainian b.1963), Apple Tree, Oil on canvas

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What Do Consultants Get Paid For?

A consultant I had lunch with recently is redesigning the loyalty program of a large airline. His team finished the analysis in two weeks. Months later the program still does not exist. This is because the purpose of the assignment is not to solve an analytical case study, but to figure out which redesign the parties will accept, and to get the people with authority to commit to implementing it.

I was not surprised to hear the story. In our just-published book Messy Jobs: The Work That AI Cannot Reach, Jin Li, Yanhui Wu, and I argue that a job is not a collection of independent tasks but a bundle of tasks and a position inside an organization. While many of the constituent tasks are clean, the job is messy because they must be combined under incomplete knowledge, conflicting objectives among the different parties and binding constraints on who has the authority to make decisions.

Hence we argue that automating the clean parts does not necessarily eliminate the job, because the remaining activities, tightly bundled with the rest, can remain the constraint. We argue that the bundle is strongest where separating the analytical/cognitive parts that can be automated would destroy local knowledge, trust, accountability or continuity.

Two objections

Critics of our argument raise two concerns. The first one has to do with advances in AI capabilities: models do some tasks extremely well and others badly. As they gain memory, use tools and acquire multimodal perception, critics would say, AI will get better at many other tasks like persuading, anticipating the objections raised in a meeting and adapting the tone. Hence even the interpersonal part by itself may not be a sanctuary for long. Just wait a bit for AI to get better, say the critics: Messy Jobs (in their view) describes the transition rather than the long run.

The second objection to our thesis is more radical. Maybe as long as we have humans in the loop, we need organizations. But if organizations really are a mess, slow, political, resistant to change, with a large role for humans precisely because someone has to hold meetings, build coalitions and learn the internal politics, why not get rid of the entire organization? What is the point of preserving the existing obsolete structures?

We believe that both objections fail, because some of the mess is substantive and necessary.

Where the “implementation” months go

To an outsider, my friend’s consulting project looks purely analytical. The team receives all the data, including all passenger records, redemption rates, customer-retention data, and so on. The team works out the key economic and financial trade-offs of the possible redesigns to figure out which redesign maximizes profits.

If doing this, given all the available data and the current AI tools, took two weeks, why has the project taken many months?

First, inside the airline, different parts of the business worry about different things. For instance, the salespeople have relationships with the hotel chains and do not want to disturb them, while the operations team worries about the staff at the airport counters who will have to deal with angry passengers who have grown used to certain privileges.

Second, there are the outside parties, from hotel chains to credit-card companies to the retailers that accept miles. Anything that improves the airline’s economics may reduce the value of the program to the hotels or to the card issuers. Each has a view on how card spending should count relative to flying, or how hotel nights should count relative to flying. There are winners and losers everywhere, and a reform that benefits the airline as a whole can hurt a particular business unit or a particular partner.

So the consultants spend weeks doing an enormous amount of work that looks peripheral to the problem. They repeatedly meet the head of the loyalty program, then the CFO, then the CEO. They also meet the commercial partners, and that means meeting the head of loyalty, then the finance team, then the chief executive. They revise the proposal. They redo the presentation.

And all of these people speak different languages. Organizations have different internal codes because they care about different things and deal with different problems. What the consultants are doing is a mix of analysis, translation and intermediation. The assignment of the consultants is to design a program that is an agreement that the relevant parties will authorize and implement.

Once the analysis is cheap, what remains is to learn what each party will actually accept, and to obtain commitments from those who are authorized to make them.

The real knowledge problem

An advocate of highly capable AI systems (“AGI-pilled”) would probably say this is a problem ready for AI. Have an agent redesign the program, have it meet the other constituencies, have it come back with a solution.

But what happens in those meetings deserves a closer look. There are four frictions in the room that make the meetings necessary.

by Luis Garicano, Silicon Continent | Read more:
Image: via

Shingles Vaccine and Dementia

[ed. Had one quite a while ago and need to get another. Update: Found out it's just one and done.]
Image: X

See here: Dementia Risk After Recombinant Herpes Zoster Vaccination in Older Adults With a Recent Skilled-Nursing Facility Stay: A Target Trial Emulation (Annals of Internal Medicine).

Peter Keane

[ed. See also: Tylersville Road and an excellent Bob Dylan cover - I Want You.]

Inconvenient Standards

This week the Blue Angels have been over Seattle for Seafair — they practiced Thursday, then have show days above Lake Washington. Hundreds of thousands will look up. So will every naval aviator. The crowd will be watching the jets. The fleet will be watching something else: what became of Pensacola.

Earlier this month, a Blue Angels F/A-18 crossed Pensacola Beach low enough to blast sand over families and send umbrellas tumbling down the shoreline. The team’s instinct was right: It acknowledged the aircraft had flown below standard profiles and promised a safety review against Navy and Federal Aviation Administration rules — rules meant to keep 500 feet between those jets and the people watching them.

Then the review died in public, at the top. Within about a day, the acting secretary of the Navy announced the outcome before there was a process: “No reprimands. No firings. No problem.” The Secretary of Defense turned it into a punchline; the Pentagon’s spokesman posted encouragement. In one news cycle, a safety process became a test of enthusiasm — and every junior officer, plane captain and lance corporal watched it happen.

I gave the Marine Corps 29 years and retired as a sergeant major, which means I spent most of my adult life enforcing standards that somebody, somewhere, found inconvenient. Here is what every noncommissioned officer knows and no news release can replace: A standard is not what the manual says. A standard is what happens the first time it is violated, in front of the formation. Hold the line and the line is real. Shrug, and the shrug becomes the new regulation. This time the formation was the whole internet, and the shrug came with emojis.

And Pensacola was not the first shrug — the third in five months. Eight National Guard aviators, grounded by their own command for buzzing South Carolina beaches, were flying again the morning after the secretary of defense posted about it. Apache crews suspended for hovering over Kid Rock’s Nashville mansion were absolved within a day. Each pardon lowers the real floor — not the one in the manual, the one in the cockpit. Aviators are competitive people. Unpunished showboating is an invitation.

The Navy knows the other road, because this same team once took it. In 2011, a Blue Angels commander flew a maneuver he judged unacceptably low. No one was hurt. Nothing was touched. He grounded the team and gave up command on his own. In 2021, after a training mishap, the Navy tightened the profiles — slower, wider, safer. Those profiles carry weight because this team has buried pilots — Beaufort in 2007, Smyrna in 2016 — and swore each time to learn.

What remains, now that the political layer has walked past the standard: A federal investigation has been reported; it should be completed and published, whatever news cycle it interrupts. Congress funds these teams and owns their oversight; it should ask for the review the Navy was not permitted to finish. Between that cockpit and that social-media account are admirals and captains who know what those profiles are for. The fleet is reading their silence. It could yet read their spine.

Nobody needs the Blue Angels grounded. We need them governed — because precision is the point. Six aircraft holding formation within inches of one another, exactly where they are supposed to be: that is discipline, made visible at 400 knots. An elite team held to its own rules is magnificent. An elite team excused from them is a stunt act with government paint.

by William R. McDonald, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Clark / The Seattle Times

Frank Zappa: The MTV Interview

[ed. Man, I still miss the guy. I wish we had politicians this intelligent, direct and honest. Actually, not just politicians, everybody. Had a good laugh around 12:20, after he got done talking about John and Yoko stealing one of his songs.]

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Salmon Sushi: Not a Japanese Tradition

Somewhere in Tokyo in the mid-1980s, a Norwegian marketing strategist stood in front of a room of Japanese seafood executives, served them raw salmon, and watched the room politely fall apart. The colour was wrong, they told him. Its smell, they said, had a river-like quality. Someone objected to the shape of the fish’s head.

I think about that meeting every time I sit at a conveyor belt and watch the orange slabs go past. Salmon nigiri has the settled look of something that was always there, parked next to the tuna and looking as venerable as a prawn tempura. It has been on Japanese menus for about thirty years.

What Japan actually ate before

Japanese cooks have used salmon for centuries. They grilled it, salted it, flaked it into rice balls and packed it into lunchboxes. Nippon.com describes grilled salmon and salmon flakes as fixtures of home cooking, with a hard line drawn between that cooked fare and anything sliced raw. The domestic workhorse was chum salmon: lean, firm, nobody’s idea of sashimi.

So the fish was there. The appetite for raw fish was very obviously there. Those two facts never met.

The parasite question, answered properly

There was a real reason for the line, and fussiness was not it.

Wild Pacific salmon carry Anisakis simplex, a nematode larva that causes a thoroughly miserable illness called anisakiasis if you swallow it alive. Heat kills it. Deep freezing kills it. Slicing the fish fresh and eating it does not, which is why generations of Japanese cooks treated raw salmon as a hazard to be cooked out.

Farmed Atlantic salmon raised on heat-treated pellets is a different animal. The Norwegian Food Safety Authority exempts farmed salmon and rainbow trout from the freezing rule that otherwise applies to fish destined to be eaten raw, on the grounds that the fish eat nothing but dry feed containing no viable parasites and barely graze on wild organisms in the pen. That exemption tracks a 2010 European Food Safety Authority opinion and its 2024 re-evaluation.

A survey published in the Italian Journal of Food Safety put numbers on it: 270 slices of smoked farmed Atlantic salmon examined, zero anisakids found, against ten positives out of thirteen slices of wild sockeye. One paper on one processed product, not a settled literature, but it points the same way the regulators do.

Norway had too much fish

Norway started farming salmon commercially in the 1970s, then watched its own population drift towards chicken and red meat.

Freezers filled up.

The Norwegian Seafood Council, which has every commercial reason to tell this story well, dates the campaign to 1985, when a delegation led by former fisheries minister Thor Listau flew to Tokyo. Their figures: two tonnes of Norwegian salmon went to Japan in 1980, and twenty years later the annual number was above 45,000 tonnes.

Underneath all of it sat one piece of arithmetic. Fish sold for the grill competes on price with every other cheap protein, while fish accepted for sashimi could fetch up to ten times more, as Bjørn Eirik Olsen, who ran market research for the project, later told The Japan Times.

A name change, then a decade of nothing

“We couldn’t just say that our fish doesn’t have parasites,” Olsen said in that interview. Walking into a foreign industry and announcing that its national fish is wormy tends to close doors rather than open them.

So he went after the word instead. The Japanese for salmon is sake, and sake carried every association he was trying to escape: grilled, salted, cheap, the thing in the lunchbox. Olsen borrowed the English word and pushed the katakana sāmon, the term still stamped on essentially every sushi menu in the country. Same animal, different shelf.

Then came the advertising, all clean fjords and clear arctic water, and it achieved almost nothing for years. Olsen told NPR that pressure from home to abandon the sushi idea and dump the stock into the grill market was relentless.

The deal that broke it open

In 1992, Olsen offered the frozen food giant Nichirei 5,000 tonnes of salmon at close to giveaway prices, with one condition written into it: the fish could only be sold as sushi. Nichirei said yes.

That was the crack in the wall. Through the 1990s, Iron Chef and celebrity chefs including Yutaka Ishinabe put Norwegian salmon onto national television, and appetite did the rest. Olsen has said he knew the campaign had landed when he started noticing plastic salmon nigiri in restaurant window displays.

Where salmon sits now

Salmon has topped Japan’s biggest conveyor-belt sushi survey for fifteen consecutive years. In the 2026 round, run by Umios (the company known as Maruha Nichiro until March), 47.7 per cent of respondents named it as the topping they eat most often, more than eleven points clear of lean tuna in second place. The split runs along age lines: older diners tend to open with lean white fish and work up to tuna, while younger ones go straight for the orange.

by Daniel Moran, Space Daily |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Not many people know this but there are actually six species of Pacific salmon (not five), including the cherry salmon (Oncorhynchus masou) in Japan.]

Feds Implement Temporary Water Sharing Agreement in Western States

Arizona, California and Nevada will be required to curb their use of the water from the Colorado River by about 20 percent over the next two years — and could ultimately face even larger cuts — according to three officials familiar with negotiations over a long-awaited federal plan to rescue the depleted river.

The plan, part of which the Bureau of Reclamation is expected to describe in an Environmental Impact Statement on Friday, comes at a time of escalating crisis for the Colorado, a crucial water source for seven states, 30 Native tribes and a swath of northwestern Mexico. But experts say it will not be sufficient to resolve a political standoff among the river’s many users or prevent the beleaguered waterway from teetering toward collapse.

The cuts proposed for the next two years resemble what the three states offered in a proposal this spring, and represent the first phase of a broader 10-year framework for operating the river’s dams and reservoirs, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations.

That framework is expected to call for operating plans to be developed every two years and outline a wide range of possible measures those plans could include — including reducing the amount of water released to the Lower Basin by as much as 40 percent.

The framework is not expected to consider mandatory cuts to water use from the four states in the upper part of the basin: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Arizona, California and Nevada make up the Lower Basin. [...]

The current operating rules, which expire at the end of September, have not prevented chronic overuse of the river amid a decades-long drought worsened by climate change.

After a historically meager winter snowfall and a scorching spring, the amount of water flowing into the river this year is less than a quarter of average annual demand, and levels in its major reservoirs have dropped to record lows. Scientists warn that one or two more dry years could crash the entire system, disrupting hydropower production, drinking water supplies and irrigation for some 5 million acres of farmland. [...]

The likely operating plan for 2027 and 2028, based on a May proposal from the Lower Basin states, is projected to save about 3.2 million acre feet of water — enough to fill roughly 1.5 million Olympic swimming pools. The plan will require significant “belt tightening,” particularly in Arizona, according to Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, but states have indicated they can tolerate the reductions.

Yet those measures are only half of what studies suggest is needed to bring water demand in line with the dwindling supply, Porter cautioned, increasing the likelihood of even steeper cuts down the road. [...]

The 330-mile system of canals and aqueducts, which supplies water to the most populated parts of Arizona, is poised to see the biggest cut in its history under the bureau’s operating plan for the next two years. If the agency chooses to implement some of the deeper reductions considered in the 10-year framework, CAP’s entire water allocation could be wiped out. [...]

Fraught negotiations

Experts say the rising tensions on the river result from a chaotic combination of bad weather, poor planning, intransigent state officials and federal missteps under the Trump and Biden administrations.

At the heart of the conflict is an impasse between the Upper and Lower Basin states over who should shoulder the burden of necessary cuts.

In the Upper Basin, home to the snowcapped mountains and winding tributaries that feed the river, there are few reservoirs to provide long-term water storage, leaving users reliant on natural flows. That means the Upper Basin takes an automatic cut during dry years, officials argue. They say responsibility for restoring water to Lakes Powell and Mead should fall on the Lower Basin states that use them.

Yet about three-quarters of the people who depend on the Colorado live in the Lower Basin. The region is also home to major cities and sprawling farms that provide most of the nation’s winter vegetable supply. Officials from these states say they have already curbed their water consumption by millions of acre feet in recent years. Overuse of the river is universal, they argue, and so too is responsibility for saving it.

The situation is complicated by the arcane legal framework governing the river, which prioritizes users chronologically. Without agreements among the states, major cuts would fall entirely on junior users, including huge cities such as Phoenix and Tucson, before more senior rights-holders such as the farmers in California’s Imperial Valley see any reductions.
Last summer, it looked like states might agree on a new method of apportioning the river based on actual flow, rather than historical averages and legal agreements. But those negotiations broke down over familiar disagreements about who should be subjected to mandatory cuts. [...]

A vanishing river

Brad Udall, a climate scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center, describes the tensions over the river as a “big collision of 19th-century water law, 20th-century infrastructure and 21st-century climate change and population growth.”

The Colorado has almost never contained enough water to satisfy everyone who has legal rights to it, Udall said, and human-caused warming has made the situation even worse. Since 2000, high temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns linked to climate change have diminished the amount of water flowing through the river by about 20 percent, compared to the 20th-century average.

The deficits have forced repeated negotiations over how to manage shortages. Past deals have helped curb consumption somewhat, but they were never stringent enough to reverse the inexorable decline of reservoirs that are intended to provide a buffer during bad years.

Lake Mead, the site of the Hoover Dam, is mere inches from its lowest level on record. A few hundred miles upstream, Lake Powell is approaching the point at which water can no longer flow through the turbines of the Glen Canyon Dam. That raises the risk of a phenomenon called cavitation, in which air bubbles form then implode in fast-moving water, releasing energy that can damage the dam itself.

“The reservoirs are depleted so low they’re really at the end of their capability,” Castle said. “We’re in such a precarious situation.”

by Sarah Caplan, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Caroline Brehman/Reuters
[ed. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Friday unveiled the framework that will guide operations on the Colorado River through 2036. See also: Lake Powell's Dying Days (CCG):]

***

The L.A. Times’ Ian James reported that Trump’s Interior Department would accept a proposal submitted by California, Arizona and Nevada — the Lower Basin states — to slash their water use by 12%, 31% and 28%, respectively, through 2028. They’ll receive $350 million from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to support water conservation.

The Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — will get $100 million in conservation funding. But unlike their downstream neighbors, they won’t face mandatory water cuts. However much water they end up saving, that will be good enough. [...]

If Powell’s water levels sink much lower, water won’t be able to pass through the dam’s hydropower turbines, which generate cheap electricity for communities across the West. That wouldn’t be a “dead pool” situation; water could still flow downstream to the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead through bypass tubes lower in the dam. But the bypass tubes are surprisingly frail and could break with sustained use.

Translation: We are frighteningly close to “de facto dead pool.” That’s why the Trump administration is ordering everyone to use less water.

Well, not everyone. California, Arizona and Nevada are willing to cut back dramatically, and federal officials seem happy to make them do it. The Upper Basin states — the ones upstream of Lake Powell — say they shouldn’t have to commit to mandatory reductions, in part because they already consume a lot less.

In a New York Times opinion piece earlier this year, I argued that the Upper Basin states need to do more. Podmore agreed.

“It’s a tricky situation, because the Lower Basin has always used more water, and that’s a convenient argument for the Upper Basin,” he said. “But also, there’s more people in the Lower Basin. And the most productive agricultural land that’s irrigated with Colorado River water is located in the Lower Basin.”

“Even with the cuts that the Lower Basin has offered, we still have a long way to go to balance the water budget,” he added. “Everyone needs to pitch in.”

[ed. But not everyone is agreeing to pitch in: California’s Biggest AI Data Center Is Suing for Colorado River Water (Yahoo News):]

***

The developer behind California's biggest planned AI data center publicly swore it would never touch Colorado River water. It would run on recycled wastewater — clean, virtuous, zero environmental impact. That pledge held right up until the cities of Imperial and El Centro said no thanks. Now Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing (IVCM) has sued the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) for access to the very river it promised to leave alone. The facility would sit in a desert valley where 180,000 people share exactly one freshwater source.

The Farm-to-Cloud Gambit

IVCM's legal strategy treats 160 acres of fallowed farmland as a water entitlement for a nearly million-square-foot AI campus.

The developer's playbook relies on a tactic called "buy and dry" — purchasing irrigated farmland, retiring it from production, then claiming its water allocation for industrial use.

China Now Uses 80% Artificial Sand

The world is running out of sand.

About 50 billion tons of sand and gravel are extracted annually, most of which is used for construction activities. This is a problem for two reasons. First of all, it’s not sustainable. Secondly, if we continue to extract sand at this rate, it will end up causing irreversible damage to the environment.

 

For instance, loss of sand from oceans, rivers, and beaches can lead to excessive flooding and degradation of marine ecosystems. It threatens coastal communities, and infrastructure. Plus, sand mining near aquifers can lower water tables, affecting water availability for humans, land animals, and agriculture.

And no, you can’t just use sand from the desert. Desert sands are typically rounded and smooth, which makes them less effective for construction purposes. For concrete, the rougher texture of river or beach sand is essential as it helps bind the materials together. Desert sand, with its finer and more uniform grains, lacks the necessary angularity to bond effectively with cement.

“The issue of sand comes as a surprise to many, but it shouldn’t. We cannot extract 50 billion tonnes per year of any material without leading to massive impacts on the planet and thus on people’s lives.” Pascal Peduzzi, a researcher at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), told BBC.

A 2024 study suggests China may have found a solution to the sand mining problem. The Chinese have been using artificial sand made by crushing rocks and leftover materials from mining for many of their construction projects. This simple technique has allowed them to drastically reduce their dependence on natural sand without slowing down their massive construction projects. [...]

The study authors developed a monitoring system that allowed them to examine the sand use pattern in China from 1995 to 2020. Their analysis revealed many surprising facts. For example, the Chinese have been producing artificial sand since the early 2000s, but it became popular in 2010.

2010 was also the year when the supply of natural sand in China reached its highest level. However, the next year’s supply of manufactured sand overtook that of natural sand, becoming the primary sand type used for construction activities.

In the following years, production of artificial sand continued to increase by 13 percent annually. In 2020, the use of natural sand reduced to the extent that it accounted for only 21 percent of the total sand supply, witnessing an 80 percent decline compared to 2010.

“China’s overall sand supply surged by approximately 400% over the study period, yet the proportion of natural sand dropped from ≈80% to ≈21% due to the increasing use of manufactured sand,” the study authors note.

“The percentage of manufactured sand in the Chinese market could now be close to 90 percent. The shift from natural sand to manufactured sand is a miracle for a country that has completed such massive infrastructure construction,” Song Shaomin, a professor at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, told SCMP.

by Rupendra Brahambhatt, ZME Science |  Read more:

Image: Nathan Cowley/Pexels

Valeri Larko, Train Trestle, Boston Post Road, 2020

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