The Most Effective Attacking Run at this World Cup

And why it works so well.

Heading into its quarter-finals, the 2026 World Cup had seen more than 90,000 passes, with close to 1,800 of those leading to chances on goal, and 2,367 shots, 280 of which found the back of the net.

These are some of football’s most quantifiable actions, simple to both track and evaluate their effectiveness because they involve the most important piece of equipment in the sport. The ball.

Naturally, players who move the ball closer to goal or are involved in possession sequences that end up in opportunities to score can be seen as impacting the game, the value of their actions derived from tangible outcomes.

But football is not a static sport. And as players move, they interact; swapping positions, creating spaces for others and dragging opponents into other areas of the pitch.

So what about decisions and movements without the ball, those that indirectly affect possession plays by creating that extra second of time and space for team-mates?

Developments in the quality and the availability of tracking data mean that some of football’s key off-ball movements are well-integrated into public analysis. But there is still ground to break when it comes to evaluating the secondary effects of off-ball runs on a wider scale: which ones are the most quietly effective, and who performs them best?

Using in-house data, FIFA’s Football Performance Insights team have noticed a trend.

Compared to previous World Cups, they have spotted that possessions including an off-ball run which targets the inside channels and the space in behind the opposition defence are leading to successful actions more frequently. In other words, attacking the gap between the widest defender and the centre-back nearest to them with a forward run is increasingly valuable.

Compared to the previous World Cup four years ago, possession sequences that include such a movement in the 2026 tournament are leading to around 2.7 shots on goal per 30 minutes of ball-in-play time — an increase of around 34 per cent.

Those runs are effective because they cause tension in the opponents’ defence. Most often, that full-back will have their eye on a winger, while the centre-back on that side will be tracking the striker.

A run from deep through that gap means one or the other has to leave their current player to follow it — and in the time it takes for the defenders to decide which of them should do that, the attacking player, with their forward momentum, has already stolen a march.

Here is an example from the round of 32, as England seek to break down a compact DR Congo defence, who are sitting a little deeper to try to get to extra time...

by Thom Harris, The Athletic |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/The Athletic

No Great Loss

Lindsey Graham was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention.

Let it be known for all time that he knew exactly what Donald Trump was from the very beginning, and chose him over his country:

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it. 

I believe Donald Trump would be an absolute, utter disaster for the Republican Party, destroy conservatism as we know it.

We would get wiped out and it would take generations to overcome a Trump candidacy.

Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee of the Republican party. If he is, that’s the end of the Republican Party.

Trump is an interloper and a demagogue of the greatest proportion.

When Donald Trump attacked America, and tried to burn down the republic built by Washington, saved by Lincoln and redeemed by King, he was aided by Lindsey Graham who supported the lies, dismissed the insanity and sought personal gain from it all.

Lindsey Graham was a pathetic man, a true cynic and a faithless servant of the Constitution.

He was a simple man to understand and a tragic one. He lacked a moral core and any sense of right and wrong. The great empty spaces of his life were filled with an insatiable need for “relevance.” He found it as a cast member in the most malignant reality show ever made.

Let there be no confusion about what Lindsey Graham was. There was no complexity to the man, nor much in the way to plumb and analyze about his journey to the bottom of the Trump sewer.

Lindsey Graham lived his life as a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators. He was a sidekick and the hollowest of hollow men. Here is what I once shared with Rolling Stone:

People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.

Let there never be any confusion over the choice Lindsey Graham made. [...]

He was a warmonger and the architect of a lost war against Iran.

Lindsey Graham helped Trump divide America and break our alliances, ideals and traditions.

He was no patriot. [...]

I won’t mourn Lindsey Graham’s death, but rather the country he helped break.

He was a most contemptible man.

by Steve Schmidt, The Warning |  Read more:

Image: Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
[ed. Pretty much says it all. I'd only add the same epitaph his buddy Trump used on the occasion of Robert Mueller's death: "Good... He can no longer hurt innocent people." See the official NY Times obit here.]

The Decline of Deviance 2

In The Decline of Deviance, I argued that:

Many forms of risk-taking and rule-breaking have declined since the 1990s.

This is both good (less crime) and bad (less innovation).

Deviance is declining because prosperity has increased—people have more to lose, and they’re acting like it.

Since I put it out last October, this has become my most-read post of all time. Lots of folks have chimed in with hypotheses, critiques, and good old-fashioned internet dunks, so let’s see if we can take this idea one level deeper, and weave something out of all these loose threads.

That’s right: we’re doing a sequel to the post about how there are too many sequels.

THE KIDS STOPPED SMOKING AND NOBODY CARED

The most common response I got was: “how awful!”

(The trends, not the post itself, although that too sometimes.)

To most folks, the decline of deviance is a turn for the worst. Previous generations got to live through artistic golden ages, while we have to suffer through an era where there are four different movies that are all, technically, Spider-Man 2.[...]

But this response misses half the post, and the most important point.

In 1995, half of high school students drank, 35% smoked, and 40% had at least tried weed. 10% of them had brought a weapon to school at some point. About 6% of girls aged 15-19 were pregnant. Crime rates were about as high as they had been since we started keeping track of them.

Over the next 30 years, all of these problems shrank and some of them nearly disappeared. And not because of anything we did on purpose! We have no idea how to get kids to stop smoking—when we try to persuade them, we sometimes cause them to smoke more. No, these improvements happened basically by magic, for free, and—I think—as a byproduct of our increasing prosperity. This is like waking up one day to find that you’ve been left a large fortune by a long-lost aunt.

How does this great, unearned victory make us feel? Apparently, it doesn’t make us feel anything. We would have spent billions to solve all of these problems back in the 1990s—no doubt we were spending considerable sums of money on anti-drug programs and public service announcements, wasting almost all of it—and yet when we got the thing we wanted so badly, we didn’t even notice.

Now we’re on to worrying about whether the kids are too sad, whether they play outside enough, etc. Which is all reasonable and fine, but also, can we take a win? Can we at least try to reverse-engineer how some of these trendlines ended up going in our preferred directions, so we can make more of them do that?

I, too, would like to see a movie that is not Spider-Man 2. But I also appreciate that I can watch it safely in my home without fear of being attacked by pregnant teenage criminals.

THE INTERNET DIDN’T DO IT

Many people looked at the trends I presented and said, “Oh, the internet did this”. Maybe the internet killed the vibe by enabling mass surveillance—everyone’s afraid to be weird inside the digital panopticon, where all of your behaviors are recorded, uploaded, and permanently preserved. Or maybe the internet flattened culture by subjecting it to algorithmic curation. We can’t have nice things anymore because the computers won’t show them to us.

Both of these hypotheses are probably wrong, because the internet—at least, the internet as we know it today—simply showed up too late to be a plausible suspect. A majority of Americans didn’t get broadband until 2007. Instagram only launched in 2010, which was also the year that iPhones got a front-facing camera. So the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s, where we see many forms of deviance declining, is not really the transition from “pre-internet” to “post-internet”. That transition happened somewhere around 2012 when a majority of people got a smartphone, and long after most of these trends were already in motion.

So I don’t think the internet is the killer, but I do think it’s an accessory after the fact. In particular, I think the internet accelerated three trends that don’t get much attention. I’m going to call them cultural carcinization, de-frictioning, and the flat-Earth problem.

1. CULTURAL CARCINIZATION

In nature, apparently, being a crab is a good way to be. Several independent evolutionary lineages have ended up with crab-like body plans, a process called carcinization.

Culture can carcinize too, not in the sense that we all turn into crabs, but in the sense that we converge on a small set of strategies. If you’ve ever played a “social deduction” or “hidden role” game like Werewolf, Mafia, The Resistance, Avalon, or Secret Hitler, you’ve seen this happen in real time. Things start out wild and unpredictable as people get a feel for the rules. But everyone’s tactics have to evolve because each gambit can only work once (“If you’re the Secret Hitler, raise your hand right now!”). If you play long enough with the same group, eventually you’ll end up with a handful of maneuvers that continue to be viable even after they’re known, often because they’re difficult to pull off. At this point, the game becomes both extremely competitive and extremely repetitive. This is what cultural carcinization looks like.

The faster we can communicate, the faster we culturally carcinize. When information only travels as fast as humans can walk or horses can run, it takes a long time for any given strategy to play itself out. As we acquire steamships, railroads, telephones, and airplanes, the pace of the game picks up, and tactics have to turn over faster and faster. By the time we get the internet, it’s like every human on Earth is playing Secret Hitler a million times a day. (Except some people are not-so-secretly Hitlers.) Strategies appear and go out of date almost instantaneously until we all end up in a Nash equilibrium, where there’s no way for anyone to get the upper hand anymore.

The internet gives every social trend a pair of rocket-powered roller skates, speeding it toward its crablike final form. On Twitter, for instance, memes go from punchy to passé in a matter of days rather than decades. But if we could play culture on 1x speed rather than 10x speed, if we had time to screw around with different strategies before the game reached its cutthroat stage, we might have discovered different paths entirely. Maybe some folks would end up as crabs, while others became lobsters or kangaroos. Instead, in a hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas, we end up with the same few memes, all done to death.

2. DE-FRICTIONING

We’ve forgotten how much time people in the past spent consuming content that they didn’t actually want to consume: the unskippable clunker of a song that came in the middle of an album, the late-night infomercial that you sat through because there was nothing else on, the magazine you read cover-to-cover in the waiting room because your doctor was 45 minutes late.

Each new media technology reduces this friction. CDs, TiVo, satellite radio, streaming—they all allow us to spend more time with the content that we supposedly desire. And what happens when this friction goes away? Well, in the mid-1990s, a pair of Russian artists named Komar and Melamid surveyed people around the world about their artistic preferences, and then they painted the “most wanted” scene from each country. The results looked like this:

The lesson here is that when people can articulate exactly what they want, and when the marketplace can give it to them, most folks end up sucking down slop. But I don’t think this is because humans yearn for crap and kitsch. I think it’s because no one knows actually what they like until they’re confronted by it. If you cater to people’s raw, undeveloped preferences, sure, you’re going to take them to Sloptown. But people are capable of acquiring more interesting tastes, if you give them the chance. This is the work art does for us—it stretches our desires, rather than merely satisfying them. [...]

This is Komar and Melamid’s second lesson: if you want to see something interesting, you have to see things that you might dislike. And I don’t mean things that merely bore you, like an AI-written Netflix series that’s only meant to be half-watched while you also shop for shoes on your phone. I mean things that grab your attention, only to slap it around. Acquiring new tastes means, from time to time, spitting things out.

In a frictionless environment, however, this never has to happen. The internet excels at identifying what people already seem to want, and giving it to them good and hard. Oh, you liked that video where a monkey eats a piece of cantaloupe? How about 30 million more of those? How about an anteater licking a watermelon? Will that keep your attention for another three seconds? Wait, don’t go yet!! We’ve got a baby hedgehog nibbling on a pineapple!!

3. THE FLAT-EARTH PROBLEM

People once theorized that globalization would cause niche culture to thrive because small-timers could make their living by selling to a tiny proportion of the populace spread all over the globe—the so-called “long tail”. That did become possible, but it didn’t become desirable. Everybody came to the same realization: once you can reach anyone, why not try to reach everyone? Why sell to one thousand people in every single country, when you could sell to every single person in every single country?

Here’s the rub: the more customers you want, the more you have to cater to the lowest common denominator. If you want your film to play in every theater on earth, then it has to appeal to eight billion different sensibilities, which also means it’s going to suck. This is the flat-Earth problem.

It’s easy to see these effects if you know where to look. Because Hollywood wants to sell movies in every market, they’re willing to do everything from editing out laundry clotheslines that make a country look “too backward” to pretending that Freddie Mercury wasn’t gay. [...] 

AM I JUST UNCOOL?

While some folks blamed the internet for the decline of deviance, other people denied the decline entirely.

One common retort to my argument was that I’m just an old fuddy-duddy. For example, a blogger named Jenn claims that I am too uncool and out of touch to understand the cultural innovation happening in new forms of media like YouTube and Roblox. “Before I take a ‘culture is stagnating’ take seriously,” Jenn writes, “I want to see proof of work by the critics.” She concludes: “The culture is fine. Go play Return of the Obra Dinn.” (Return of the Obra Dinn is a video game.) [...]

Pettiness aside, I think Jenn’s claim is plausible: the older you get, the less access you have to the most interesting parts of culture. If you think things are stagnating, you’re just admitting that you aren’t getting invited to the cool parties anymore. Plus, old folks can’t stop themselves from seeing the past through rose-colored glasses—in survey after survey, people think pretty much everything in culture just happened to peak when they were between four and twelve years old:

(source: YouGov via The Washington Post)

But things get a little more complicated when you separate people’s responses by age. When you first glance at this YouGov survey, it seems like every generation strongly prefers the music from their own childhood:

But look a little closer. The responses from Gen X, Baby Boomers, and the Silent Generation all have a clear peak flanked by much smaller hills. Millennials’ preferences, on the other hand, are more spread out. And Gen Z’s preferences are basically a plateau—they’re almost equally likely to nominate the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.

We can’t know whether this is an age effect that they’ll grow out of—maybe every generation was culturally omnivorous when they were younger, and their tastes only calcified when they got older. But I doubt it. For all you Gen X’ers out there, did you spend your teenage years spinning your parents’ Perry Como records until you suddenly switched to Led Zeppelin in adulthood?

Besides, Jenn’s age argument cuts both ways. Old folks are biased by nostalgia, but young folks are biased by inexperience. When you’re young, everything seems new because it’s new to you. You don’t know that your favorite anime is a rehash of a movie from the 1980s, because you weren’t alive in the 1980s. You’re not tired of the tropes yet because you’ve only seem them a few dozen times. You can’t pine for what you lost because you never had it in the first place.

It’s reasonable to be skeptical of any narrative of decline—I did my PhD on why people perceive declines that haven’t actually happened. But (a), unlike most of those spurious nostalgic fantasies, the decline of deviance has both pros and cons. And (b), there are so many weird phenomena here and they need explaining, not just waving away.

For instance— [...]

NO MORE STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

Another theory that readers put forward: the deviance got scarce because life got hard. Nobody can do cool art anymore because everything is too expensive: housing, college, supplies, etc.

I think this is probably wrong. I suspect that it’s always been hard to be an artist, and previous generations were simply more willing to starve for it—not because they were braver, but because the difference between starving and not-starving used to be much smaller. [...]

You don’t have to go that far into the past to find a kind of poverty that feels foreign today. I read an article a while back about punk musicians living in New York in the 1970s, and they’re sleeping in roach-infested flophouses, they’re making music in abandoned buildings, they’re getting evicted and mugged and addicted to drugs.They’re truly broke, not “I can’t contribute to my retirement fund this month” broke, but “I might have to spend the night on this bench because I can’t afford a bus ticket back home” broke. I know plenty of aspiring musicians are out there slumming it right now, but this is a level of deprivation that most folks in developed countries would find unacceptable, if not downright dangerous. Once you’re sleeping rough, it’s time to hawk the guitar and call the temp agency.

That’s not because dire poverty became less glamorous—it was never glamorous!—but because it became uncommon. When five musicians spend the night in a bus station, that’s called being punk. When one musician spends the night in a bus station, that’s called being homeless.

The richer the world gets, the higher the opportunity cost that starving artists have to pay. If you’ve got the chops to write a great novel, then you might also have the chops to make $95k working as a product manager for some mid-sized fintech firm. If your alternative was tilling turnips or spending six months at sea hunting sperm whales, you might say, screw it, I’d rather go hungry for my art than go somewhat less hungry for anything else. But that manuscript in your desk drawer is less enticing when you can have PTO and dental and an annual international vacation where you get to sleep in a bed that doesn’t have any strangers in it. [...]

As William James wrote 100 years ago:

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. [...] We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly,—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.

The difference is that today we don’t despise people who elect to be poor, I think, because we don’t know any of them.

THE DECLINE OF DEVIANCE, THE RISE OF TOLERANCE

Many people asked some version of, “Is the decline of deviance actually an increase in tolerance?” After all, even if you wanted to be deviant today, how would you do it? [...]

So no doubt part of the decline of deviance is an increase in tolerance. But I think it, too, can be explained by the rise of mass prosperity.

The economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that nations get rich when they build inclusive economic and political institutions. Oligarchs and aristocrats fear any growth or reform that they can’t control, which in practice means basically all growth and reform. (“We do not desire at all that the great masses shall become well off and independent,” once remarked Frederick Gantz, an imperial flunky of Francis I of Austria. “How could we otherwise rule over them?”) If the plebs and the serfs can get a bit of money and power, however, it kicks off a virtuous cycle. Once people have some cash and influence, it becomes bad business and bad politics to shut them out—if you won’t engage with them, someone else will, and your more open-minded rivals will eventually out-compete you.

This process takes a long time, it’s uneven, and it’s not close to being completed. However, a few generations of semi-inclusive institutions have created a much wider spectrum of acceptable lifestyles. If you want to live in a polyamorous, genderless vegan witch commune, you can order your nutritional yeast on Amazon, trade memes with your friends on Tumblr, and vote for Democrats who think your choices are a-ok. If you want to live in a neoreactionary monarchist compound where you stockpile weapons and hunt bears, you can buy your guns at Wal-Mart, read posts on TruthSocial, and vote for Republicans who are on board with all of it. As long as you have money to spend and ballots to cast, someone can get ahead by catering to you.

(Case in point: one of the “platinum sponsors” of the New York City Pride Parade is Deutsche Bank.)

This is a good thing. Inclusive institutions make everybody better off, except for the few cleptocrats who used to live in palaces while everyone else lived in shacks.

The downside is that every corner of culture gets commercialized. Reading comic books, listening to death metal, piercing body parts other than your ears—these used to be legitimately countercultural acts that distanced you from polite society and bonded you to an alternative community. Now you can do all these things at the mall. The Hot Topic-ization of culture means that anything new and interesting gets co-opted and mass-produced, thus draining it of everything that made it cool in the first place.

by Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History | Read more:
Images: Mr. Mastrioianni; Joanna M. Wolfe; YouGov/WaPo; YouGov

Chat GPT-Voice

A new generation of voice models for natural human-AI interaction, now powering ChatGPT Voice. (OpenAI).]

[ed. Yeah...pretty dorky video, but you get the picture. Here's another one highlighting the voice/language translator.]

Introducing Plan A

A Is For America

It’s increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real. Some people have suggestions, but they’re all things like “regulate a little more” or “regulate a little less” or “react to things as they come up”. This won’t be enough. Not just because things may move too quickly - although they will - but because in order to regulate or react, you need to know what you’re aiming for, and it’s increasingly clear that people can’t even visualize what AI going well could look like. What would it take to honestly tell our children that we rose to the occasion, to make the AI transition go down alongside the American Revolution and D-Day as one of our country’s finest hours? If your brain sputters and throws an error message at the question, isn’t that a problem?

It’s a total coincidence that Plan A comes out the week after America’s 250th birthday. It was supposed to come out earlier, but got delayed. Then it was supposed to come out later, but got pushed forward.

Still, the saying goes “A wizard is never late, nor is he early; he arrives exactly when he means to.” And if anyone qualifies as wizards, it’s Daniel Kokotajlo and his team of forecasters at the AI Futures Project. I previously wrote about Daniel’s eerie accuracy over the 2021 - 2025 period. Since then, they’ve gained worldwide fame for their AI 2027 scenario, which predicted the rise and quick takeover of coding agents in early 2026, plus something like the fight over Fable1.

Plan A isn’t another prediction. It’s a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating the future. It describes the best course of action that Daniel and the AI Futures Project can come up with, and what would happen if we took it.

“Really? You got America a policy paper for its 250th birthday? Doesn’t America already have enough policy papers?” Sort of, but it’s not exactly a policy paper. It starts in a timeline similar to that of AI 2027, on track for a poorly-controlled intelligence explosion that either ends the world or dooms it to permanent techno-oligarchy. But this time, America is blessed with some extra foresight and determination, and makes only good choices (all non-Americans behave naturally, including trying to thwart America when incentivized to do so). It gives a year-by-year description of this best-of-all-possible-worlds, from now through 2040, as predicted by the best AI forecasters alive, with over a dozen supplements explaining all the implementation details.

This is a crazy thing to try releasing. Daniel gave me several justifications for doing it anyway, but the one I remember most is that it’s supposed to be a floor. When some politician proposes a data center ban, or says that we have to gut safety regulation to compete with China, or promises a job retraining program, think to yourself: does this person have a vision for where all of this ends up? If so, is it as good as Plan A? If not, consider demanding that they do better.

I did a lot of writing for AI 2027 and was listed as a co-author. Some of my writing made it into Plan A too, but it was a bit less. The difference is of degree rather than kind, but because of this - and to give me more latitude to discuss it the way I like with less PR blowback - we decided not to put me as a co-author this time. I continue to be proud of having a part in this, small as it may be.

(related: everything in this post is my opinion only, and not officially endorsed by the AI Futures Project)

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: AI Futures Project

[ed. Important. Here's that link again: AI 2040: Plan A. See also: Plan A: Suggestions For Further Work (AI Futures Project). Also: What Should Be Done (Hyperdimensional).]

They’re the Best-Dressed Golfers in the World, and They’re Just Getting Started

The year is 2026, and the driving range at Riviera Country Club is packed with the best female golfers in the world for the United States’ national open. They’re wearing pleated pants, sweater vests and knitted polo shirts. Some are in ruffled skirts, others Bermuda shorts; a few are sporting long sleeves, others tank tops.

The No. 1 player in the world, Nelly Korda, is wearing a U.S. Men’s National Team soccer jersey, and Ina Kim-Schaad, the Mid-Amateur champion, has already gone viral for her wide-leg, high-waisted trousers, argyle cardigan and matching neck scarf.

What we’re seeing at events such as the U.S. Women’s Open and this week’s Evian Championship is only the beginning, and the women’s golf fashion space still has a long way to go in terms of variety, function and style. But those within the industry agree there is a window of opportunity, as companies are finally gathering the resources and utilizing the avenues needed to take off.

“It was just amazing to get the outpouring of support that I did,” Kim-Schaad, a former Wall Street trader turned sports psychologist, says. “And I do think that does signal, to some degree, that there is that craving for something different.”

There comes a time in every woman’s experience in golf when her attire is called into question. Whether it is the length of her skirt or the amount of her shoulders that is showing, country clubs and golf organizations have been policing women’s clothing since the moment they deigned to let women enter.

Professional players are increasingly buying into fashion choices that take full advantage of the freedom Michelle Wie West led the charge for during her LPGA playing days, from a creative and comfort standpoint. Now, the questions are shifting from “Is that allowed?” to “Where’d she buy that?”

You’d think it was the other way around. But the PGA Tour has more stringent attire policies than the LPGA Tour. Male touring professionals on the PGA Tour are required to wear long pants during competition and may wear shorts during practice rounds only if they are “knee-length, tailored and neat in appearance.” There is a 3-by-5-inch limit on logo size. The women on the LPGA are not subject to the same restrictions regarding their apparel or sponsorship logos.

The LPGA’s dress code is exactly one sentence: “Players are expected to dress in a professional manner and reflect a positive image to the public.”

Stephen and Erica Malbon, the couple behind the streetwear-inspired golf clothing company Malbon Golf, are never surprised when one of Jason Day’s splashy outfits gets flagged by the governing bodies in men’s golf. At the 2024 Masters, Augusta National famously asked Day to remove his sweater vest. So Malbon has naturally gravitated more heavily toward women’s golf fashion in recent years. Those same rules do not apply, and Malbon Women, with popular Englishwoman Charley Hull as its lead athlete, has been growing faster in popularity than they ever expected.

“The PGA (Tour) is like the no-fun police,” Stephen Malbon says. “The LPGA is like, be who you are, have fun, play and just get out here. I love that about women’s golf. The men look like sh– compared to the women, and it’s because the men can’t look good. What are you going to do with a polo and pants?”

As the women’s game has grown recreationally, so, too, has its fashion ecosystem. According to the National Golf Foundation, women account for 60 percent of the growth in on-course participation in the U.S. since 2019, aided by the sport’s boom during the pandemic. There are a record number of female golfers in the country, 7.9 million, topping the previous record of 7.1 million set in 2006, before participation dipped from 2007 to 2011 due to the recession.

“I think there’s been a trickle-down effect of OK, it’s not just old white guys playing golf anymore,” Erica Malbon says. “From our perspective in the industry, we want to make clothes that show people’s personalities, make a better offering for them to play golf and also feel fashionable and like themselves.” [...]

...]

Mastering women’s golf attire goes beyond keeping up with current styles or trends. It can be successful only if it prioritizes function while also providing options for differing preferences.

The sporting goods powerhouse considered new details, from certain silhouettes creating unwanted tan lines to the way a skirt drapes when a woman bends over to pick up her tee.

Any female golfer will tell you that women’s apparel has been plagued by one particular issue, which Nike has also addressed: pockets. The game is still figuring out how to incorporate pockets that are deep enough for yardage books, balls and tees. One tiny coin pocket placed on the very back side of a skirt or pair of pants just isn’t going to cut it.

Female golfers are especially in tune with the way clothing feels and looks on the body, too. Korda says she’s hyperaware of movement in her apparel — does it flow in the wind or stay stationary? Wie West says she isn’t fond of clothing that creates noise, so she avoids certain fabrics that cause her to hear herself while swinging. [...]

“The more diversity of design we have, the more women will feel like, wow, they’re really speaking to me, this feels authentic.”

Kim-Schaad says the majority of her golf wardrobe is not purchased from golf brands. She’d rather dress in styles that make her feel comfortable and confident than blend in with the rest.

“I think that’s the biggest thing. Guys have no problem all wearing the same polo. But for women, it’s actually very different,” Kim-Schaad says. “It’s how we show our own personal flair.

“The more diversity of design we have, the more women will feel like, wow, they’re really speaking to me, this feels authentic.”

by Gabby Herzig, The Athletic | Read more:
Images:Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photos: Ryan Sirus, Dylan Buell, Brenton Tse / Getty Images; Warren Little / Getty Images; Sean Haffey / Getty;Scott Halleran / Getty Images
[ed. Watching the Evian this week I thought the same thing... women's golf attire sure has gotten stylish and cutting edge these days. Very modern and flattering. Other segments of the 'athleisure' industry (and beyond) should take note.]

Samsung Blows Out the Stops

Samsung passes Nvidia to become most profitable company in the world

Samsung announced stellar results last night, noting a 19x quarterly increase in operating profit, allowing the firm to pass Nvidia as the most profitable in the world. Kim Yong-Kwan, president and head of corporate management, strategy, and operations for Samsung Electronics' Device Solutions (DS) division, said that the semiconductor unit's 2026 operating profit will exceed everything it has earned across roughly 40 years in the chip business at a company town hall last Friday, according to a report published Monday by Korea JoongAng Daily.

Brokerage consensus puts Samsung's full-year 2026 operating profit near 300 trillion won ($196 billion), and its second-quarter figure at about 84.6 trillion won ($55.1 billion). Samsung easily beat the consensus with $58.5 billion when it posted preliminary results on July 7, overtaking Nvidia's most recent quarterly operating profit of $53.54 billion and becoming the most profitable technology company in the world for the period, on the back of AI-driven memory demand.

Samsung's DS division booked 53.7 trillion won ($35.1 billion) of the company's 57.2 trillion won in total operating profit during the first quarter of 2026, roughly 94% of the total, which is why the division's projection sits so close to Samsung's full-year consensus.

"This year's profit will exceed the cumulative profit generated over the past 40 years since we entered the semiconductor business," Kim Yong-Kwan told staff, scoping the claim to the chip business rather than the wider conglomerate.

Samsung entered the semi space by acquiring Korea Semiconductor in 1974 and shipped its first 64Kb DRAM in the mid-1980s. SamMobile estimates the division's cumulative operating profit from 1985 to 2025 at under 300 trillion won. Samsung's smartphone, display, and appliance businesses have earned far more than that over the same period, so the record applies to memory and logic chips, not to Samsung overall. [...]

Samsung is releasing preliminary second-quarter figures on July 7, so these record projections are still estimates. The reported profit will also absorb a profit-sharing agreement that pays chip workers 10.5% of DS operating profit as stock, worth as much as $26.6 billion this year. 

by Luke James, Tom's Hardware |  Read more:

Image: Getty/Jung Yeon-Je

Huang Yongyu - Spring Sorrow is just like the Southern Riverbank, 1989

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How to Offset Your Brain

You slide your hand into your coat pocket and find an old, folded $100 bill. In the other pocket, you find a coin.

Now, here’s the gamble: flip the coin. Heads, you win another $300. Tails, you hand over your $100 bill. Do you take the risk?

Mathematically, you should. One coin flip gives you two equally likely futures: in one, heads, you gain $300; in the other, tails, you lose $100.

Because each future has a 50 per cent chance of happening, you count half of each outcome: half of $300 is $150, and half of $100 is $50. Balance those against each other, and taking the gamble puts you $100 ahead on average. Decision scientists call this positive expected value.

Even when someone grasps the mathematics, however, it’s hard to take the risk. Why?

About 50 years ago, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed that this hesitation is not random. People depart from logic in patterned ways. One of the most durable patterns is loss aversion: our tendency to feel the pain of losing more sharply than the pleasure of an equivalent, or even greater, gain.

This is where mindfulness becomes interesting. Mindfulness is usually defined as paying attention to the present moment, on purpose, without immediately judging what is happening. In practice, that can mean noticing a thought before believing it, feeling an emotion before acting on it, or returning attention to the body, the breath, or the world around you. At its simplest, mindfulness creates a pause between what arises in the mind and what we do next.

That pause helps because many of our choices are made before we have fully examined them. We may think we are deliberating over the coin toss, but often the body has moved first: recoiling from loss or preserving a decision simply because we have already invested in it. These mental shortcuts are called cognitive biases, and the study of this kind of human misjudgment is central to decision science.

When we hesitate at the coin toss, we might be deliberating – but often, we’ve already decided.

Impulse has its benefits. A mind that had to reason from scratch every moment would be paralysed. But when these shortcuts override reflection, they can distort the decisions we make. Without careful thought, a patient may fail to seek the best medical care. People lose wealth because they cling to their current savings plans. You might know the feeling of preserving a job or a relationship simply because you invested so much in it. Internally, these cognitive biases feel instinctive. The question is whether we can catch these instincts before they harden into choices we mistake for reason.

I came to this question from two directions. I teach and research behavioural economics, where we study the systematic ways people depart from logic, and I also work as a licensed therapist, where I watch those same patterns play out in higher-stakes places: in relationships, in health, and in the stories people tell themselves about who they are. I have long been interested in the tension where a person knows better but cannot quite do better. Over time, I became less interested in theories of irrationality and more interested in what helps people catch themselves before their old reflexes take over.

Mindfulness kept appearing as an answer. But it was an imprecise one. If mindfulness means present-moment awareness without immediate judgment, what exactly is doing the work? Attention? Emotional steadiness? Curiosity? Acceptance? Biases do not all arise from the same source. Some are driven by emotional projection, some by inattention, and others by a failure to stay mentally engaged with a changing situation. So it would be surprising if one version of mindfulness could interrupt all biases in the same way. After all, what we call mindfulness is a cluster of distinct capacities: attention, nonreactivity, acceptance, curiosity and openness to novelty. Different biases may yield to different forms of the mindful state.

Loss aversion, for instance, may depend on how well we tolerate discomfort. Delay discounting, our tendency to overvalue immediate rewards, may depend on whether we’re attentive to change, nuance and emerging possibilities. Mental accounting – our habit of treating the same dollar differently depending on which mental bucket it lands in – may ease when we pay attention to all our money at once.

So, what are the different ways the mind slips off track, and how can mindfulness pull it back? To answer that question, it helps to distinguish the two strands that shaped modern mindfulness research. One is rooted in curiosity and active noticing, the other in meditative, nonreactive awareness.

The first school of thought is represented by the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, who believes that active noticing – engaging curiously with the environment – leaves us better equipped to deal with uncertainty and change. The second path comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn, who first encountered mindfulness through meditation. A PhD student in molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in the 1960s, Kabat-Zinn asked whether the Zen Buddhism, Vipassana and other forms of meditation he studied could be adapted to secular medicine. Not long afterward, he launched Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and used meditation, yoga and other mindfulness practices to help patients relate differently to stress and chronic pain.

Put side by side, the contrast between the two versions of mindfulness is telling. Langer teaches us to open our eyes and notice something new. Kabat-Zinn teaches us to close our eyes, accept and let go. One form of mindfulness keeps us engaged with the world; the other helps us disengage from unhelpful inner patterns. Both begin with attention to the present moment, but they train attention to do very different psychological work. If biases arise from different sources, the kind of mindfulness that eases one may not touch another.

If it still feels abstract, try this thought experiment. Imagine that I’m a local researcher, and I’ve asked to meet you at your school or workplace. You walk down the familiar hall and sit at your usual spot. Surrounding you is the same flooring, windows and lights as usual. I want you to notice three new things that you’ve never noticed before.

It might not seem like much is happening, but actually you’ve just entered a much more mindful state. Following those instructions, you influenced how your mind was taking in the world around you. As you twisted your neck to find a chip of paint or a dusty corner, you interrupted your usual way of being in the moment and, instead, engaged with it. It may seem like I was just making you more aware of your surroundings. But, actually, I was switching off your autopilot – your mindlessness – and bringing you into the present moment, where details, nuance and context abide. Your brain probably didn’t feel that interrupted. But it followed this cognitive movement enough to reach a mindful state. It is mindfulness not as stillness, but as fresh contact with the world.

This is the novelty-noticing task designed by Langer. It triggers a specific form of mindfulness, and she and her team have shown how even a small shift in attention can change behaviour. [...]

Langer’s version of mindfulness reduced many biases – but not loss aversion. Why? Perhaps because loss aversion was never a cognitive problem to begin with. It’s an emotional one. It is about the heart’s deep reluctance to surrender the comfort of a long-term relationship, the certainty of a career path, or the belonging of a community. It’s the instinct to avoid difficult conversations, not because they won’t help, but because they might cost you comfort, approval or a sense of control. It is the reluctance to leave a life that no longer fits, because the shape of the old life still feels safer than the unknown.

That’s where Kabat-Zinn’s softer approach, focused on emotional regulation, comes in.

by Pam Weintraub, Aeon | Read more:
Image:Richard Baker/Getty Images

Gordon Parks, Alexander Calder's Hand and Mobile, 1952
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David Hockney (British, b. 1937), California Bank, 1964.
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Moving On

The rupture of the world order is going much better than expected.

At first there was rage at America’s betrayal, when President Trump called for the annexation of Canada, threatened Greenland, imposed tariffs on its friends and began his campaign to undercut NATO, which continued at its latest meeting this week, in Ankara, Turkey. Now, a strange feeling is emerging in some of the countries that used to be known as America’s allies: Optimistic determination. There’s an established principle in chess that applies to geopolitics as well: “The threat is stronger than the execution.” The possibility of U.S. abandonment of the world order was terrifying. The reality turns out to be a new beginning.

Canada, America’s neighbor, was the first to see it, naturally. Since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term, American bullying on trade has been ferocious. As a result, Canada has had to consider what American favor or disfavor is worth. The Bank of Canada recently ran a scenario in which the United States imposed a 25 percent tariff on everything Canada exports to the United States. Canada’s growth of its gross domestic product would slow by about 2.4 percentage points, which over a period of adjustment is well within Canada’s capacity. A disaster, to be sure, but not the end of the world. That’s the worst-case scenario.

A recent study by economists at the Canadian Shield Institute, commissioned for the podcast “Gloves Off,” which I host, found that Canadian merchandise exports to the United States last year fell by over 30 billion Canadian dollars, (21 billion U.S. dollars), or over 5 percent of exports to the United States. But that loss was offset by nearly 29 billion Canadian dollars in new demand from the rest of the world. When services were included, total exports from Canada increased by almost 7 billion dollars. America can make whatever threats it likes, but if you have the aluminum or oil or potash, somebody will buy it.

It’s not just Canada. European equities outperformed American equities in 2025, and surged in the first two months of 2026. The European Defense Industrial Strategy, put in place in 2024, is keeping more of Europe’s rapidly expanding military spending within the continent. And after the threat of the European Union’s anti-coercion instrument, the so-called trade bazooka allowing rapid counter tariffs, forced Mr. Trump to back down from his early round of Greenland threats, the Europeans now know that they have their own Strait of Hormuz — their own pain point that can make America flinch.

American military threats have the same diminishing power. If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that when the United States decides to achieve a geopolitical aim by means of military force, you can make a pretty safe bet that aim will not be achieved. Against all odds in a war with the United States, Iran’s corrupt and cruel regime has maintained its power and is now receiving sanctions relief. While the U.S. military invents whole new genres of defeat, the Gulf states, and their airports, have now learned during the Iran war exactly what an American security guarantee is worth.

At the NATO meeting in Ankara, where Mr. Trump berated allied nations — especially Spain — and repeated his call for U.S. control of Greenland, the leaders of Spain and Denmark took Mr. Trump’s comments as the idle threats they self-evidently are. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada may well say that Mr. Trump “won the argument” on NATO members raising their spending levels for defense. The reason they are spending more now may be that they know that American military power is in retreat. American support, whatever that even means anymore, guarantees nothing.

It’s not just NATO. Bureaucracies once defined by their lethargy are moving at surprising speed to limit their exposure to both the U.S. government and the companies that serve as outposts of American power. Since taking office a little over a year ago, Mr. Carney’s government has made just over 100 international trade deals. The European Union has expanded its defense procurement deliberately to avoid integration with American military forces. Disentanglement from American technology will be the thorniest knot to undo, but the work is already underway on this, too: The European Union has switched from Google to the French Qwant as a default search engine in its official systems, while Belgium and Finland have both moved away from Amazon Web Services.

The post-American reality is not a world without America, of course. As a geopolitical actor, the United States has become a kind of lumbering zombie — a beast that can be startled into reflexive actions but lacks higher functions. Much of the world understands that another round of elections in the midterms or in 2028 won’t solve anything. The American people are so divided that the future will be chaotic whoever wins, many outside the United States feel. They fear a sane Republican or Democratic president would not be able to guarantee a stable American policy or consistent application of even the vaguest principles in international relations.

“What is America?” is no longer a grand theoretical question. It is a practical matter. Governors of a number of U.S. states have rational political programs. American institutions survive. Some Americans have even kept their ideals. But as for the entity known as the United States of America, there’s no there there. There’s no America to deal with. An increasingly isolationist America is no longer the leader of the free world. How can it be, when it’s no longer the leader of itself? [...]

“The threat is stronger than the execution” was the wisdom of Aron Nimzowitsch, a leading figure of the hypermodern school of chess. The reason it applies to the chessboard is that all the time and energy you spend trying to figure out how to avoid a disaster turns out to be worse than the disaster itself. Once the worst has happened, you can focus on incremental improvement rather than avoidance. You can become active rather than passive. In geopolitics, too, so much of power is the appearance of power.

Everybody who believes in freedom and democracy and the dignity of the person and the right of nations to self-determination should be working toward the destruction of the United States’ capacity to project power — to end the strange hold it has over the world so we can all move on. So far, no one is helping more than the United States itself.

by Stephen Marche, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Aaron DuRall

Take the Money and Run

Fire Any Financial Advisor Who Tells You to Utilize a Trump Account

I’m serious, and this is not just my disgust with everything Trump. There is no good reason for the overwhelming majority of people in the country to ever put a dollar in a Trump account for their kids.

To be clear, I’m not in favor of tax-sheltered accounts in general. They strike me mostly as a very inefficient way to accomplish public goals, in this case making education more affordable. The more efficient route would be to have more public funds go to support public colleges and community colleges. [...]

In addition, tax-sheltered accounts put a lot of money in the hands of the financial industry. Tens of billions of dollars go to the people and companies who administer these accounts, creating a pointless layer of wasteful bureaucracy.

To be fair, the Trump accounts limit fees to 0.1 percent of assets, far lower than is charged by many accounts. This is an important point. People can get low-cost funds in other accounts also. Stock index funds generally have the lowest fees, and most people would be wise to take advantage of them. People will tell you that they will beat the market, but most won’t, and you’ll just end up wasting money in higher fees and trading costs.

But that has nothing to do with individuals’ decisions on where to put their money. For better or worse, Trump accounts exist. The question is whether people will be helping their kids by putting money into them. And, as I said above, the answer for almost everyone is no.

The main reason is that we already have 529 accounts for the purpose of saving for a kid’s education. The big difference between the accounts for this purpose is that it is possible to withdraw money from a 529 account, if it’s needed, where it is not possible to withdraw money from a Trump account for any reason, until the kid turns 18.

People do pay a penalty for taking money out of a 529 early, but at least they can have access to it if they need it. And unexpected events do happen. People can lose a job, have serious medical expenses, or get divorced. These and other unanticipated situations can require people to dip into whatever savings they have. With a 529 plan, they can use the money if they really need it. With a Trump account, they are out of luck.

It is important to recognize that withdrawals for non-education purposes are fairly common. A recent study by Vanguard found that 2 percent of accounts had an unqualified withdrawal in an average year. If an account is open on average for 20 years, this would mean that 40 percent of accounts have an unqualified withdrawal. People don’t expect bad things to happen, but they do.

Also, since the penalty is based only on the earnings portion of the 529 plan, not the whole sum in the plan, in most cases it is likely to be small. Suppose someone pulls $5K out of a 529 plan, where earnings are currently 40 percent of the money in the plan. That means they would pay taxes on $2,000, plus a penalty of 10 percent. If they are in the 10 percent bracket, their taxes would be $200, and their penalty would $200. If they were in the zero bracket, say because they had lost their job, they would only pay the $200 penalty. That compares to being unable to touch their money at all in a Trump account. (The money in a 529 is not taxable at all if used for educational purposes. The earnings in a Trump account are taxable.)

It’s also worth mentioning that it’s not even possible to change asset allocations in a Trump account. Suppose your kid is 17, one year too young to make a withdrawal. If you’re worried there is an AI bubble likely to burst, and you would rather have your money in Treasury bonds, you’re out of luck. Trump accounts won’t let you make the switch; you have to go down with Elon Musk and the rest of the market.

The silliest argument given by proponents of Trump accounts is that they can be rolled over into an IRA to allow for lifelong wealth accumulation. So can the money in 529 accounts, up to a ceiling of $35,000.

The Trump gang makes a big issue of the $35,000 ceiling, but this is something only elite types with lots of money would care about. Very few people ever accumulate more than $35,000 in a 529 account, and the vast majority of people who do will find some education-related expense that would reduce the value of the account to less than $35,000. Remember, even food and housing can count as education-related expenses.

But let’s say someone ends up with an amount over $35,000 that they can’t use for education-related expenses. Suppose they have $40,000 that they want to roll over into an IRA. In this situation they would have to pay a 10 percent penalty on the amount over $35,000. That would be $500 on the $5,000 difference.

They would also have to pay taxes on the $5,000. The beneficiary is the one receiving the money, so they would be paying the tax. Since they are just beginning their working career, they likely have a relatively low income. This means they will almost certainly be in the 10 percent or 15 percent tax bracket, and quite possibly the zero bracket.

So, this is the bad scenario that Trump account proponents say it is important to avoid, and therefore skip a 529 and put your money in a Trump account instead? That seems pretty whacky, and why you need to fire your financial adviser if they suggest putting money in a Trump account.

To be clear, take the $1K that Trump wants to give newborn kids. It would be a much better use of tax dollars if we provided food and medical care to kids from low-income families than giving out $1K checks to millions of families that don’t need it. But you aren’t going to change the policy by turning down the money. If it bothers you, donate the money to a good cause, but do take the money and don’t ever put another penny in a Trump account.

by Dean Baker, Common Dreams |  Read more:

Image: Koala imagess via

[ed. More details on the accounts here.]

Air Conditioners to Anchovies

China keeps the U.S. and Japan Cool. And most other places. The Chinese make more than 80% of the world’s air-conditioners. And they could… stop. 

The world’s biggest fan clubs for air-conditioning are the United States, and two Asian allies/ vassals, Japan and South Korea. In these three places, 88% to 91% of homes have such devices (IEA estimates). 

The demand for Chinese air-cons is rising world-wide, as heatwaves proliferate. Viral videos this week show customers fighting over the devices at shops in Europe. 

Is there any risk of China halting exports, in the way the US might do? Thankfully not, at the moment, analysts say. China keeps the industry entirely politics-free: We build, you buy, at a price that benefits both sides. 

The 'Assembled In...' Trick

The world has 2.4 billion air conditioners, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency. But few people around the planet are aware that their aircons come from China, because of branding techniques.

by Nury Vittachi, X | Read more:

***

One of the world’s current hottest commodities is in the midst of a huge disruption. It may sound like I’m talking about oil and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, but this is even more severe. The supply shock is far greater — and so is the price response: Global production has plunged as much as 40% from a year ago; prices are up 80% over the same period to an all-time high. The commodity in question? The humble anchovy.

The tiny fish may sound utterly mundane, but its importance to the global economy is far larger than just foodies’ craving for the umami taste. The anchovy sits at the bottom of a crucial supply chain that sustains the $500-billion-a-year global aquaculture industry. Anchovies are the main ingredient in fishmeal, and without enough of it, global production of salmon, seabass, shrimp, oysters and other seafood will suffer, pushing up supermarket prices. Soon, the shortage could catch the attention of Wall Street and central banks. 

Peru is the Saudi Arabia of anchovies — its annual catch, after drying and milling, accounts for about 20% of the world’s supply of fishmeal. Add the catches of neighboring Ecuador and Chile and you have nearly a third of global output. And therein lies the problem.

Because the South American anchoveta species has a relatively short lifecycle, its population can rise and fall substantially every year depending on environmental variables. The key one is El Niño, the weather event that regularly warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean near the Equator, reducing the stock of nutrients and, therefore, of fish. [...]

In mid-May, Peru imposed a 15-day ban on anchovy fishing; the moratorium was later extended until June 10. Then, the government in Lima shocked the fishing business with an indefinite ban. The South American anchoveta is the world’s largest single-species fishery. The ban has triggered a dramatic drop in global fishmeal production, which industry executives estimate to be down 30% to 40% from a year ago.

With demand from the aquaculture industry still strong, the cost of fishmeal in the wholesale market has nearly doubled over the last year to an all-time high of $2,990 per metric ton in late June. Further increases are likely. As feed prices rise, aquaculture companies will respond by trimming output, and the cost of cultivated fish and seafood will climb over the next year. [...]

Once upon a time, this would have been a first world problem. Not anymore. Back in 1997-1998, the last time the world faced a very strong El Nino and, as a result, a fishmeal shortage, the aquaculture business accounted for less than a quarter of the world’s fish supply. Since then, the size of the industry has exploded, and today the world consumes more than half of its fish and seafood from farms, requiring a huge fishmeal supply. At the same time, fish consumption per capita has also jumped, reaching 21.3 kilograms per year in 2024, up from 14.3 kilograms on average in the 1990s, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

If the industry’s fears are confirmed, salmon prices are likely to rise to an all-time high by 2027. Salmon is the highest-value farmed fish worldwide. The rise of the aquaculture industry transformed it from a luxury into an everyday supermarket purchase, with its price dropping from about $8 per kilogram in the early 1980s to an all-time low of $2.50 per kilogram in the early 2000s. Since then, it’s risen above $10 per kilogram. Industry executives are tight lipped about how much prices could increase, but 20% to 25% seems like a reasonable expectation.

by Javier Blas, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: REDA/Universal Images Group Editorial

[ed. Globalization and supply chain logistics.]

Attempted Coop

The Vances added a chicken coop to the vice president’s residence. We had questions. (Washington Post/Seattle Times).

Images: Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post

[ed. That coop looks better than some Seattle apartments. My son and family raise chickens (and ducks). They're pretty cool. The ducks are way cooler, though.]

Careening Toward a Breaking Point

Lake Powell, a vital reservoir, plunges toward unprecedented low levels as water crisis deepens in US west (The Guardian)

Image: RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post/Denver Post/Getty Images

The Pre-Crime Machine

The Seminar Room

At an AI seminar at my university, I submitted three photographs of myself: one frontal, one profile, one smiling. Within a minute or so, the system had generated a video of me. What I watched was not a rough approximation. The micro-behaviors of my face, the slight asymmetry in my smile, the way my eyes crease at their corners, were all reproduced with an accuracy that made my skin cold. I had fed it three still images, and it handed me back myself.

I am a psychologist. I know what behavioral prediction means. I understand what large datasets do to the concept of individual uniqueness. But sitting in that seminar room, watching my own face move on a screen I had not animated, something shifted in my understanding of where we are and where we are going. I did not feel excitement. I felt the specific dread of a person who has just understood the nature of the cage being built around him.

Let us be honest about what is happening. The question is not whether artificial intelligence can predict human behavior. It already can, with a precision that should terrify every person who still believes in the concept of a private self. The question is who owns that capacity, whose interests it serves, and what kind of world they are constructing with it.

We Are More Predictable Than We Realize

Human beings are, as any serious scholar of behavioral science knows, far more predictable than we like to believe. We are creatures of pattern, of repetition, of legible habit. The self we experience as sovereign and spontaneous is, in aggregate, astonishingly consistent. Subtle cues in our environment routinely trigger our behavior without our awareness, while we experience the resulting action as a free and sovereign choice. Big data revealed this about us long before the current generation of AI systems arrived to exploit it.

What has changed is the scale and the granularity of the exploitation. Researchers have already demonstrated that AI systems can predict the sound of a person’s voice from a photograph alone, inferring the acoustic properties of the throat, the shape of the oral cavity, the structure of the face, and from these physical facts reconstructing something no still image was ever supposed to contain. We did not consent to this inference. We did not know it was possible. The technology did not ask us.

The invasion runs in both directions. As far back as 2022, before most people had any reason to pay attention, AI could take nothing but the sound of your voice and reconstruct your face. You were already legible from the inside out

The Pre-Crime Machine

Now consider what becomes possible when you feed an AI system not thousands but millions of hours of therapy footage, prison recordings, detention center surveillance, clinical interviews with people who have committed acts of theft, violence, or predatory sexual abuse. The AI does not think. It does not judge. It finds patterns in facial microexpressions, in the geometry of eye movement, in the timing of certain muscle groups, in behavioral signatures so subtle that no human observer could consciously detect them. And then it generalizes. It builds a model of what a future thief looks like before the theft. What a future abuser looks like before the abuse. It assigns probabilities to faces.

Connect this to the smart cameras already embedded in our streets, our transit systems, our shopping centers, our workplaces. Cameras that do not merely record but analyze, in real time, the faces and bodies of everyone within their field of view. The alert that fires to a police control room does not say this person has committed a crime. It says this person is behaving with seventy percent similarity to the behavioral profile of someone who will. Philip K. Dick imagined this in 1956 and called it science fiction. We have built it and call it public safety.

A Mask Changes Nothing

But facial recognition is, by now, almost the least of it. The more consequential technology is gait recognition, a biometric system that identifies individuals not by their face but by the specific, anatomically determined way they walk. The curvature of the spine, the rotation of the hips, the particular rhythm of a stride, these are as unique as a fingerprint and far harder to disguise. Gait recognition systems currently deployed can identify a person from security footage even when the face is turned away, obscured by a hood, or hidden behind a mask. The protesters who covered their faces at demonstrations believed they were protecting themselves. They were not. The system had already read them from the ankles up.

Gait recognition tells the system who you are, even when you believe you are hidden. What comes next moves deeper. Layer on top of this the emerging field of real-time emotion recognition, AI systems embedded in that same CCTV infrastructure that classify emotional states from facial expression, assigning labels of agitation, hostility, fear, or concealment to the faces of people who have done nothing except exist in a public space.

And the system is getting better.

Accuracy is what billions of dollars of investment buys, and the investment is relentless. The day is approaching — closer than most people understand — when the system reads the thousand markers encoded in your face, your gait, your microexpressions, and states with ninety-five percent certainty that you will commit a murder. That you will commit a rape.

Not that you have. Not that you tried. That you will. And when that threshold of confidence is reached, the pressure to act on it will be overwhelming. Society will accept it as grounds for intervention, for detention, for pre-emptive removal, and pre-crime will stop being a dystopian metaphor and become official state policy. A system that labels your face as hostile does not need to be right today. It only needs to become right. And it is. [...]

Palantir and the Architecture of Control

Palantir is not a hypothetical. It is a company with a current market valuation measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, deep contractual relationships with the United States military, the CIA, the FBI, the Mossad, MI6, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a product suite specifically designed to do what I have been describing.

Its Gotham platform aggregates data from tax records, DMV files, employment history, educational records, immigration status, subpoenaed social media accounts including private messages and location history, and synthesizes this into individual dossiers that can be searched by tattoo, by neighborhood, by association, by movement pattern. Its immigration enforcement application, called ELITE, populates a map with what it designates as deportation targets and assigns each one a confidence score estimating the probability that a given address is where they currently sleep. The word target is theirs, not mine.

This is not a system built for national security in any meaningful sense of that phrase. National security was the pretext used to build it. What it actually does is make the population legible, sortable, and actionable to whoever holds the contract. Right now, those contract holders include an administration that has already demonstrated its willingness to use these tools against students who attended the wrong protest, academics who signed the wrong letter, immigrants whose only crime was existing without documentation in a country that spent decades depending on their labor.

by Karim, BetBeats Newsletter |  Read more:

Images: uncredited