Gordon Mortensen, “Yellow Iris” 

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Wall Street’s Not-So-Golden Rule

We’re all familiar with the Golden Rule — Do unto others as you would have them do unto you — and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that its message of reciprocity and empathy is the bedrock of human civilization, certainly of Judeo-Christian thought. As Hillel the Elder said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.”

There’s a variation of the Golden Rule — I don’t think it’s a stretch to call it a perversion — that is the bedrock of the business of Money, a business that goes by the shorthand of ‘Wall Street’. This not-so-Golden Rule is the source of pretty much all of the unexpected Bad Things that happen from time to time in markets, where there’s a shock to the system that ‘no one could have foreseen’, like a sudden crash in the price of something or like a run on a bank or an investment firm. That perversion of the Golden Rule is this:

Do unto others as they would do unto you. But do it first.

It’s a perversion of the Golden Rule in two ways. First and most obviously, it’s got that extra sentence about doing the thing before the other guy. But second and less obviously, it’s normative-negative, which is a ten-dollar phrase to say that it’s not talking about doing good things (‘as you would have them do’), but is pretty obviously saying that you should do something that will actively hurt the other guy.

If you’re in the business of Money for more than a nanosecond, you will see this not-so-Golden Rule in action all around you. More to the point, if you want to stay in the business of Money and be successful in the business of Money, you must adopt and live by this not-so-Golden Rule yourself. Seems harsh, I know, but as Hyman Roth so aptly put it in The Godfather, Part II, “this is the business we have chosen.”

And it IS harsh. You can rationalize it by saying that he would have done the same thing to you if the situation had been reversed — and you are almost certainly correct in that assessment! — but the fact remains that YOU are doing the negative thing to the other guy. If you’re a thinking, feeling, non-sociopathic human being you will feel bad about doing that negative thing, but you will also get over it pretty quickly because it is absolutely, unequivocally, 100% the rational thing to do, and if you’ve been entrusted with managing Other People’s Money you have a moral if not legal obligation to do that rational thing despite the blecch feeling you have inside.

The first time I experienced that blecch feeling keenly was in December 2007 when I called our Bear Stearns rep and told him that we had decided to leave Bear Stearns as our hedge fund’s prime broker and we were pulling our money out. A prime broker is basically the ‘bank’ for a hedge fund. They provide lots of services, but the main ones are that they lend you money against the value of your portfolio so that you can buy more stock without using actual cash to go long (bet that the stock price will go up), and they locate and secure the shares of stock that you have to borrow in order to go short (bet that the stock price will go down). In exchange you pay them interest on the ‘leverage’ you used to buy more stock, just like you’d pay interest on a bank loan, and even more importantly from their perspective (and also just like a bank) you ‘deposit’ your stock holdings and some cash with them, which they can use to fund the loans and leverage they’re making available to other clients. It’s arguably the most important counterparty relationship that most hedge funds will have, certainly back then, and it’s a very profitable business for Wall Street investment banks, certainly back then.

What you need to understand is that I didn’t like working with Bear Stearns … I loved working with Bear Stearns. Loved the people, loved the attitude, loved the business terms. Bear Stearns was famously unafraid to take a chance on up-and-comers, both in its hiring of non-pedigreed entry-level employees (preferring, in legendary CEO Ace Greenberg’s words, to hire people who were ‘PSDs’: poor, smart, with a deep desire to be rich) and in its willingness to work with non-pedigreed hedge funds like mine. To be sure, it helped that the larger firm of which my fund was a part was filled with ex-Bear employees, all friends who would vouch for me and my partner. This was back in the day when vouching for someone meant something. It still does, I suppose, but a lot less than it used to. Bear stepped up to be our hedge fund’s prime broker from the very start, putting real time and real effort into a dinky little fund when nobody else would. Yes, they made good money off our business as we grew into a non-dinky fund, but I also owed a personal debt of gratitude to Bear Stearns for taking a chance on us.

And it didn’t matter.

Once I figured out in late fall of 2007 that if we had a nationwide decline in home prices, Bear Stearns faced enormous potential losses in the mortgage-backed securities that they owned, losses big enough to wipe out the entire bank because of their internal leverage on assets – or rather, once I suspected that I had figured this out, because you never know this stuff for sure unless you’re on the inside — then I knew for a certainty that it was only a matter of time before other prime broker clients of Bear Stearns would come to the same suspicion. And once that word got around — that there were doubts and suspicions about Bear Stearns as a counterparty — then I knew for a certainty that what would start as a trickle of clients taking their money out of the prime brokerage ‘bank’ would become a stream and then a river and then … well, then the dam breaks and the investment bank fails and if you’re still there as a prime brokerage client you get really, really hurt.

It didn’t matter if I was right about Bear Stearns and the risks to their balance sheet. I was, but I swear that didn’t matter. What mattered was the not-so-Golden Rule of Wall Street. What mattered is that you must act first when you have even a suspicion of counterparty risk, well before you know for sure whether or not you are ‘right’ about that risk, because everyone else on Wall Street will act first if you don’t. And if you don’t act first, or at least early … if you wait until you’re sure that there’s a counterparty risk … well, you’re screwed.

In December 2007, Bear Stearns still traded for over $100/share. In three months, it was below $5, before finally being taken out by JP Morgan for $10/share in a mercy killing. From suspicions to lights out in three months. Life comes at you fast when the not-so-Golden Rule of Wall Street comes into play. Getting out when we did saved our fund untold hassle and legal tie-ups, gave us the time to move to another prime broker out of strength and not desperation, and set us up for a career-making year in 2008.

Is this sort of run on the bank a self-fulfilling prophecy of doubt and ruin? Yep. If everyone had just kept their prime brokerage account in place would Bear Stearns have survived? Maybe. Do you have a choice but to get out before everyone else does, no matter how much it pains you personally and no matter how much your getting out might accelerate the sad and disappointing outcome? Nope. This is the business we have chosen. (...)

Why am I telling you this story?

I’m telling you this story because I think that Trump a) recognizes he made a mistake by overplaying the tariff card, b) is sidelining the ideologue pro-tariff crew like Navarro and Miran, and c) is actively looking for off-ramps and de-escalation in the China trade war. I think he may find an off-ramp and de-escalation in the China trade war, and that would be a wonderful thing for the United States and the world.

And it doesn’t matter.

by Ben Hunt, Epsilon Theory |  Read more:

Image: Margin Call (2011); Godfather Part II

[ed. Trust lost is almost impossible to regain. See also: ‘Trump wanted to break us’, says Carney as Liberals triumph in Canadian election' (Guardian); and (the not to be missed) Crashing the Car of Pax Americana. (Epsilon Theory).]

"Mirroring a theme of the campaign, Carney told election-night supporters that Trump wanted to “break us, so that America can own us”, adding: “That will never, ever happen,” to shouts from the crowd.

He also gave a stark assessment of a world order once defined by an integrated global trading system with the US at the centre, saying such a system was over, and he pledged to reshape Canada’s relationships with other nations.

“We are over the shock over American betrayal. But we will never forget the lessons,” he said."

[ed. And this: 2035: An Allocator Looks Back Over the Last 10 Years (AQR):]

"We really did not see this underperformance coming. After all, the prior 30 years saw much higher IRRs on private equity than total returns on public equity. What we didn’t count on, I mean who could see this coming, was this outperformance reversing. I mean, what better way is there to estimate what will happen in the future than looking at what happened in the past!?"

Peter Brüning, Ohne Titel, Um 1960.
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Kwame Akoto (a.k.a. Almighty God) (Ghanaian, b. 1950) “LET US STOP SMOKING PLEASE” “My Friend No One teaches a child GOD, In tears I SAY PRAY FOR ME
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Zhang Dequan
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The Price of Eggs

Or, death of a chicken

The chicken was unwell. She no longer ran to the summons of the leftovers pail to scratch at the compost heap with the other hens. Morning found her in a corner of the henhouse facing the wall, with only an unfamiliar smell for company. I am neither a farmer nor a veterinarian, but even a man unschooled in country ways knows the odor that announces that Death has removed his hat and entered the room.

In a few days, the bird would be dead. I would be her executioner. And I feel a need to relate the events that preceded the death, not because the fowl and I were overmuch close (we were not), nor to assuage a guilt (though there is always blame to hand around after such things), but because as E. B. White wrote of his own barnyard loss, she suffered in a suffering world. And pain deserves to be marked, even when it wears the confetti of farce, and though the only thing we have left to offer afterward is words, useless as they are.

I’d been away from the house on that March day, two months previous, when a message had come from my neighbor: A friend had been visiting him, he wrote. The friend had a dog, and the dog had found its way through the hole in my fence. It had returned to its owner carrying my small Rhode Island Red in its jaws: the first of the casualties. I returned home to find russet feathers strewn under the lilacs and hawthorn—more in some places, a few in others—as clues to the progression of the crime. In the weeks afterward, the cedar waxwings used these feathers to pad their nests.

It was difficult to know where to place my anger. True, the dog had trespassed. But the neighbor was contrite. And I had known about the hole in the fence for weeks. Winter squats heavily around the few acres I call Poverty Flats, though, and the list of spring repairs was long, and I am slow and generally loath to deal with any repair that requires use of any tool more sophisticated than a hammer, to say nothing of fence tighteners and in-line straighteners. Now the chicken had paid for human laxity on all sides, and for a dog being a dog.

There was an inexorableness to the event. My few western acres sit between mountain ranges where the land opens like a lap, a brief pause in geography that permits domesticity and also lays the table for the creatures that would dine upon it. Between the red-tailed hawks perched on the electrical wires that lope beside the county road and the coyotes that sing on the hill, the life expectancy of a chicken is not long here. One hopes for life, but expects death.

So the red hen was gone. I found a second injured bird cowering beneath a pyracantha. She did not resist when I picked her up. The dog had delivered a solid bite to her rear. On such occasions, one is made aware of how much of a chicken isn’t chicken at all, but instead simply feathers and air: an illusion of poultry. Without her tail and covert feathers, which the dog had removed in toto, the bird now resembled only the front end of her former self. Friends who heard about the attack inquired how many hens remained. I replied truthfully, “Four and a half.”

The chickens had arrived the previous spring, unasked for, like most of life’s obligations. The teenaged daughters of a friend had pronounced my empty henhouse forlorn and returned the next week with a cardboard box containing a half dozen chicks. I kept them in the house beneath a heat lamp, unnamed until certain they would survive, like pioneer children. When you live in the country, as I do, it is easy to acquire animals. Friends that see you own land assume you wish to fill it, an empty field to their eyes seeming an injury to Protestant industry. Over the years, my desire not to offend their generosity has nearly led to ownership of several dogs, three or four geese, and a barn full of mousing cats. There had been talk of a horse to stand in the overgrown paddock, and a few sheep to keep the horse company. In this way, a single man at middle age who lacks resolution soon becomes a bachelor farmer without having bought a single head of livestock.

At the feed store in town, I sought advice about the chicks. It is one of those stores that used to be common in rural places but is rare nowadays—dimly lit, a dog sleeping in the aisle, the pale smell of dry goods in the unmoving air. On the sidewalk, a sign displays a new joke every few days. I asked Katrina behind the counter what young chickens like to eat. She nodded over her shoulder at the bags of chick starter in the rear.

“Any of ’em roosters?” she said.

“How can you know?” I asked. Through the window, the sign read: i wonder if tacos ever think about me.

“Hard to tell at first,” Katrina said. “I had that problem once. Turned out I had two.” She let the gravity of this dilemma percolate, then she leaned over the counter. “Took ’em out for a midnight walk.” She nodded in the slow way of a conspirator.

Once the chicks had grown into awkward pullets (all of them females, as it turned out), I gave them names, which real farmers never do. The red (RIP) was Hen-rietta. The two Easter Eggers I called Roger Featherer and Lilly Pullet-zer. A mottled Araucana with a puff of gray feathers beneath her chin was Janice, the Bearded Lady. And the pair of identical Buff Orpingtons I called Muffy and Buffy. The injured one now in my arms, bloody and stunned, was Muffy. Though as with any one-year-old twin, who could be certain?

Muffy had been a handsome bird. Along with her sister, she was the largest of the flock, squash-colored, with the classically curved back of the breed, a white feather-duster rump and a modest but proud sail of a comb. Both were consistent layers of large brown eggs. Muffy was particularly fond of shade and languor, and she spent warm spring days beneath the lilacs wallowing in dust baths where she suffocated mites.

Each morning, though, upon hearing the screen door slam, which signaled the arrival of the bucket of table scraps, composure abandoned her. She appeared at a sprint with the other hens, her large body yawing from drumstick to drumstick like a chunky child who chases the ice cream truck. After feasting, Muffy roosted for hours atop an overturned stock tank in the yard and watched the horses graze in the neighbor’s field. Orpingtons are poor flyers, and she was no exception. She gravely considered even the shortest drop back to earth before undertaking. Once airborne, she had the glide path of a watermelon.

Sometimes, in the course of other chores, I bent low to examine a hen’s comb for pox. When I did so, the bird in question froze and crouched and allowed herself to be inspected. I scooped her up and carried her in the crook of an arm around the yard and spoke soothingly to her. I told myself the hens also enjoyed these encounters and that this signaled a growing bond between man and bird—even if upon being set down once more, the hen always gave herself a thorough shake, like St. Paul dusting off his sandals at the city limits of Antioch.

“Your hens consider you the rooster,” said Daren, a rancher and man of wood-plank Norwegian practicality. “They crouch because they think you’re going to mount them.” This information cast these interactions with the chickens in a more tawdry light and made me reach for them less often. After that, our relationship became strictly mercantile: If I had nothing to offer, they scattered at my approach. Any move by me toward the shed where the bin of black oil sunflower seeds were stored, however, and they followed close on my heels. In return, they laid more eggs than I could eat. In summer when insects were their chief diet—ants being plentiful, and grasshoppers in August—their yolks took on the color of a sunset and tasted good enough that I presented them as gifts to friends in the city.

Muffy had been a handsome bird. Along with her sister, she was the largest of the flock, squash-colored, with the classically curved back of the breed, a white feather-duster rump and a modest but proud sail of a comb.

***

But let us return to the day of the incident: now I had an injured bird to deal with. And it is hard not to have some feeling for whom one provides daily care, even if that care goes unacknowledged. (I imagine this is what it is like to have a teenager in the house.) 

Friends had been invited to the house for the evening, and though events had left a stain on the day and I no longer felt in the mood for company, the excuse of a dead chicken seemed a poor one. We sat on the patio in the cooling dusk, the injured Muffy at our feet. Craig, a friend, lifted the bird, turned her rear-first, and considered her cloaca for a long time, as if he expected tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers to appear.

“Not gonna make it,” he announced finally, and he reached into his pocket for the jackknife that resided there. “I can take care of her for you.” Craig spends his days riding on the valley’s rural ambulance service, and the quickness with which he was willing to dispatch a life unnerved me. Instead, I followed the advice of Sarah, Daren’s wife and a sometimes doula. She advised an indoor convalescence, with regular cleaning of the wound.

Here I must confess that my sympathy for the chicken was not unpolluted. I am at best a reluctant landowner, more in love with the views the land provides than the unceasing work required to steward even my smallest curve of earth. I don’t find the work ennobling. During chores, my eyes always wander to the horizon. I want things to go easy. The hen’s struggle had disrupted the quiet ticking of the place. Her injury had breached the unspoken contract between us, upon which my laissez-faire philosophy depended. I was newer to life in the country, then, and didn’t understand that a barnyard isn’t a place but a series of unforeseen emergencies—irrigation leaks and downed fences and sudden illnesses. Something, living or not, is always breaking. Life is a daily war against entropy.

That night I prepared a small crate for in the house, lining its floor with yesterday’s news about inflation and Israel. I swabbed the backside of the traumatized hen with antiseptic and placed her inside. Then animal and man sat down and waited. For several days, very little happened. I hadn’t known that a chicken could experience shock. Sarah took a turn, cleaning her with care. The hen slowly began to recover. Two weeks after the attack, on a caressing day in April when the lilacs were in bud, I carried the box outside and lifted the injured chicken onto the soft warm grass for her to eat.

The other hens attacked. The sight of Muffy’s wound, and her bare skin, sent them into a frenzy. The Easter Eggers pursued her with particular ruthlessness. Already they had forgotten their flock-mate. Muffy cowered beneath the mock orange beside the front door. A second attempt at integration the next morning failed again. A man will reconsider the choices he has made while running down vindictive poultry at dawn, the hem of his bathrobe sodden with dew.

“They’ll bully her until they reestablish the pecking order,” said Katrina at the feed store, to which I had retreated. Outside, the sign mocked my incompetence: i want to grow my own food, but i can’t find bacon seeds. “Put her in the coop at night when it’s dark and they can’t see her,” she said. “That will help reintroduce her back to the flock.

“But that’s not your only problem,” she said. “Chickens will peck at the sight of blood. You need to cover it up.” She chinned toward the rear of the store. The bottle of Rooster Booster Pick-No-More was small, expensive, its liquid purple and thick like sap. It was a toss-up who was less content, the squawking bird whose tender rear had to be finger-painted to aubergine each morning, or the reluctant painter who applied the salve. The chicken and I were bound together now.

by Christopher Soloman, Orion |  Read more:

Image: the author

Scientists Have Birthed a ‘Super Cannibal’ That Never Grows Up

Quiet optimism that gene-edited ‘Peter Pan’ tadpoles could help control one of the world’s worst invasive species.

The toad’s eyes seemed to glow red, its warty and poison-soaked skin – normally splodged in browns – instead a porridge of creamy whites. This albino toad was produced by a team of scientists with one foot in a Sydney university laboratory and the other in a research station on the vast tropical savannahs and wetlands far away to the north near Humpty Doo.

It was September 2023 and for the man who dreamed it into being, the toad was but an opening act in a radical new play against one of the world’s worst invasive species.

The molecular biologist Maciej Maselko was stunned by how quickly the team was able to successfully inject a cane toad egg with a mixture of proteins and RNA to knock out a gene needed for pigmentation.

“I was astonished,” the Macquarie University associate professor says.

“I mean, I knew it was technically feasible, but we got – within a few months – as far as I hoped we would get within, maybe, two years. Basically, one of our very first attempts at genetically engineering the cane toads worked.”

This, however, was just stage one in the plan put to Maselko – meant only to prove “the capabilities necessary” for stage two. Because the injected tadpoles, normally jet black, were instead pure white, it was immediately obvious that the scientists could, indeed, use Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing technology on cane toads.

What they would produce next was a tadpole that – should eggs dream – would belong to a cane toad’s most diabolical of nightmares. They called it Peter Pan – and it was a “super cannibal”.

But while Maselko and the likes of post-doctoral researcher Michael Clark brought the genetic engineering expertise needed to execute the plan, it was not one of which they had conceived.

Macquarie University’s Prof Rick Shine, an evolutionary biologist, ecologist and author of Cane Toad Wars, has dedicated much of his life to devising novel strategies in the ecological defence against the toads. In 2016, he won the prime minister’s prize for science for teaching quolls and goannas not to eat the invading amphibians by feeding them cane toad sausages.

That year he also won the New South Wales scientist of the year award for developing pheromone traps that lure cane toad tadpoles using the toad’s own poison.

“The Peter Pan approach is definitely [Shine’s] baby,” Maselko says.

By knocking out a single gene in toad eggs, the scientists produced hatchlings unable to metamorphose beyond tadpoles, hence their likening to the boy who wouldn’t grow up.

So how does this tale turn from fantasy to – for a cane toad at least – horror? The answer lies in its brief but storied Australian history.

The cane toad was introduced in 1935 in an effort to stop native beetles devastating sugar cane crops. An utter failure as a biological control, it was spectacularly successful as an invasive species.

The toads now number more than 200 million, having conquered the entire east coast of Queensland, swept across the tropical north, and are now marching down Australia’s west coast. Along the way they have devastated big predators naive to their deadly toxins, from lizards more than 1 metre long to freshwater crocodiles, marsupial carnivores to king brown snakes.

“The history of biocontrol is littered with failures,” Shine says. “But the introduction of cane toads to Australia is one of the classic examples of a truly stupid decision.” (...)

Shine has spent time in the toad’s native South American range. There, kept in check by parasites and co-evolved predators, and in competition with similar species, the cane toad can be “hard to find”.

Largely freed of these population checks in Australia, it thrives in such “fantastic abundance” that a cane toad’s greatest threat to its growing up is tens of thousands of other rival cane toads.

“If you are a cane toad tadpole and a female toad comes along and lays 20,000 eggs in your little pond, there are going to be 20,000 hungry mouths all trying to eat exactly the same stuff that you need,” Shine says.

Over years of observation and research, the ecologist and his team learned Australian tadpoles have responded by becoming irresistibly attracted to the scent of cane toad eggs, which they devour before the competition can hatch.

“We’ve discovered that the toads have evolved to be voracious cannibals in the course of their Australian invasion,” he says.

According to the team’s field studies, 99% of cane toad eggs are eaten in ponds that already have tadpoles – meaning eggs have next to no chance of survival until those tadpoles metamorphose and leave. (...)

Shine says that unable to transform into toads, his Peter Pans grow larger and exist as tadpoles for as long as three months, as opposed to – under ideal conditions – fewer than three weeks.

Which means that if Peter Pans were put into a pond, they might eat just about every single egg laid in it for an entire breeding season. Then, unable to metamorphose, they too would die.

by Joe Hinchliffe, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Terri Shine; TerryJ/Getty Images/iStockphoto
[ed. Truly awful animals (they're also in Hawaii). Thankfully, in the last 60-70 years, the idiocy of introducing non-native species into new environments has been tempered by failure after spectacular failure. Mongoose are another Hawaiian example (nearly wiping out native bird populations because people thought they'd prefer rats). I remember a toad once jumping into our house through an open door and our dachshund immediately pouncing and throwing it back out. She started foaming at the mouth and nearly died from the toxins in its skin. Like I said, awful. Wipe 'em all out.]

ChatGPT 'Glazing' Users

Oh God Please Stop This

[ed. Must think we're all Donald Trump. Scary.]

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Savage Meritocracies

No matter how many times I read it, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go breaks my heart all over again. Although it might be my favorite novel, I don’t have a clear memory of the first time I encountered it. Over the years, I’ve read it multiple times, at least five or six, and my memories overlap and blur (as is the case with so many of Ishiguro’s narrators) so that it’s hard to tease them apart. What I know for sure is that the cadences of this lovely, melancholy novel are ingrained in me. Some books belong to a specific place and time in a person’s life, and when you go back to them, they don’t fit you anymore: perhaps the politics hasn’t aged well, or a character’s voice no longer resonates, or the particular wound you brought to it, which made it speak to you, has healed. That’s not the case for me with Never Let Me Go.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the book’s publication. Widely acknowledged as one of Ishiguro’s best, number nine on the (admittedly flawed) New York Times list of the top novels of the 21st century, Never Let Me Go has now reached the age at which its youthful protagonists confront the cruel reality of their lives: that they are clones created to serve as organ donors, soon to die painful, premature deaths.

Rereading it this fall, I found the book more resonant than ever. The questions it raises around cloning feel less immediate than they used to, but the world it presents—fundamentally extractive, inequitable, and threaded with loss—is more than ever our own.

Never Let Me Go is narrated—I want to say remembered—by Kathy H., the longest-surviving member of a trio of friends who grew up together at Hailsham, a mysterious yet unmistakably British boarding school in the countryside. Degrees of intimacy among Kathy and her friends Ruth and Tommy shift and swing as they grow from childhood to adulthood, but Kathy remains both the anchor point of the triangle and the person left, by the end of novel, to sift through the detritus of their lives for what treasures endure. As an adult, Kathy works as a “carer” for “donors,” a job she finds difficult but rewarding: “Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural.”

Each of these statements raises its own question—about what it means to be natural and not a machine, what it means to have a kind. Kathy evidently takes pride in her work, but what she describes sounds less like care than control. Her donors, she says, have impressive recovery times, and “hardly any of them have been classified as ‘agitated,’ even before fourth donation.”

What is this world in which caring is containment, and donations are numbered? It takes some time for the ideas of the book to unfold for the reader, as it did for Ishiguro himself. He first conceived of Never Let Me Go as far back as the early 1990s. In his 2008 Paris Review interview, he outlined the process:

The original idea was to write a story about students, young people who are going to go through a human life span in thirty years instead of eighty. I thought that they were going to come across nuclear weapons that were being moved around at night in huge lorries and be doomed in some way. It finally fell in place when I decided to make the students clones. Then I had a sci-fi reason for why their life spans are limited. One of the attractions about using clones is that it makes people ask immediately, What does it mean to be a human being? It’s a secular route to the Dostoyevskian question, What is a soul? (...)

Never Let Me Go appeared in 2005, a work of art in the age of biotechnological reproduction. As the interview quote suggests, Ishiguro’s novel wrestles less with scientific questions than with human ones. The clones are not laboratory experiments but students—of the human condition, and of their own. The fullness of their existence as clones dawns only gradually on Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth. Like any children, their view of the world is blinkered; their identity is a fact about themselves that they grow up knowing yet not knowing at the same time.

The first part of the book centers on the day-to-day routines of their lives at Hailsham, where they are reared by “guardians” and encouraged to express themselves creatively through sculpture, drawing, and painting. Throughout their safe, secure childhood, occasional ominous notes sound; darkness lingers around the edges. A shared intimacy develops between characters and readers as our understanding grows alongside theirs. An early clue to the situation arrives when Madame, an external figure of authority, visits the school to collect some of their artwork for her “gallery.” The children of Hailsham have the sense that she dislikes them, and they decide to swarm around her in greeting to test her response:

I can still see it now, the shudder she seemed to be suppressing, the real dread that one of us would accidentally brush against her. And though we just kept on walking, we all felt it; it was like we’d walked from the sun right into chilly shade. Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders.

Being the spiders: Ishiguro’s choice to narrate the story from the perspective of the othered lends the novel its beauty and its chill. Madame’s shudder throws their evanescing innocence into relief—this is a tale not about children feeling different but about seeing that difference refracted through the gaze of society. To come of age is to understand the implications of that gaze. Tucked away at Hailsham, where they feel safe, they are being raised for harvest. It’s not a school—it’s an abattoir. Like the butler in 1989’s Remains of the Day and the AI doll in 2021’s Klara and the Sun (all three of Ishiguro’s narrators share similarities of affect, and the books seem to compose a trilogy of English life past, present, and future), Kathy H. will grapple all her life with the harsh truths of her home. (...)

Never Let Me Go maintains its timelessness in part via the euphemistic terminology Ishiguro assigns to cloning (the word itself appears in the book only a few times). When they become adults, the clones “donate” three or four times before they “complete” and die. The specifics around clone technology remain opaque—there are no scientist characters, no labs, no public debates. Cloning is as given and mysterious as death itself.

Can you call something a donation if the person is required to give it, has been bred for the very purpose of giving? It’s like saying cattle donate hamburgers. Can you call a life complete when it doesn’t include agency around choices of career or family? In its gnomic simplicity, Ishiguro’s language calls attention to the ways in which social agreement shellacs over the complicated reality of extraction. (...)

Because of its speculative element, Never Let Me Go is sometimes referred to as a science-fiction novel, but I don’t think the label fits. The novel inhabits an uncanny valley all its own, staking out a particular relationship to place and time. In much of his work, Ishiguro writes about and from a mythic England, deploying recognizable iconography: the boarding school, the countryside of cottages and hedges and winding roads, trips to the seaside. This allows him to weave the fabric of his story out of imagined touchstones rather than a specific lived reality. (...)

Against the backdrop of these “savage meritocracies,” Ishiguro’s gaze rests purposefully on his three main characters in the foreground. The political context gives shape to the human dramas of love and friendship; at the same time, the attention paid to those dramas insists upon the fundamental value and worth of the characters. In her narration, Kathy often addresses the reader directly: “I don’t know how it was where you were,” she says, or “I’m sure somewhere in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day.” There’s an anxious, beseeching quality to these addresses that escalates in pathos as the book goes on.(...)

Holding on tightly against forces that will sweep them away—this is what Kathy and Tommy can do for one another. Matthew Salesses has pointed out that causally connected, character-driven plots emphasize individual choices; such stories revolve around “the idea that human agency is how to make sense of the human experience.” But not every person, and not every character, has that agency. Ishiguro’s novels often center the perspective of marginalized individuals who have little control over the larger political forces of their times. Just because individuals don’t have meaningful agency doesn’t mean their lives don’t have meaning. Like Kafka, Ishiguro shows how the dictates of systems override the capacity of the individual. But unlike Kafka, his systems can be beautiful, even beloved. Stevens loves Darlington Hall; Kathy loves Hailsham; and Klara loves the human girl she’s made to befriend, the girl who will abandon her. So too do many of us love a world that doesn’t always love us back.

Once they realize what’s happening to them, the clones don’t fight back, or try to escape. There’s no clone uprising, no battle scenes; nobody takes to the streets. Over the years, talking about my love for the novel, I’ve met many people who object to this aspect of it. As a representative Goodreads reviewer wrote in 2009, “Kathy and Tommy finally get all the answers about their school and what was actually going on, and they respond by … going about their lives in the exact same way as before. I mean, good God.” People are entitled to their own responses, but isn’t this the most resonant part of all? In 2025, as oceans rise, glaciers melt, violence increases, and dictators expand their powers, many of us do the same as Kathy and Tommy: we keep living our lives as best we can, holding on to moments of human decency where we find them, taking care of one another.

by Alix Ohlin, LA Review of Books | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Excellent review. One of my favorite books (maybe top five). What struck me most was the precision of the writing. Every word and sentence, perfect. See also, art imitating life:
Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine (MIT Technology Review):]

***

"It may be disturbing to characterize human bodies in such commodifying terms, but the unavoidable reality is that human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress. (...)

There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman."

Duane Michals, “Madame Schroedingers Cat”. 1998.
via:

[ed. Probabilities.]

Gérard DuBois, Who can sleep?
via:

Kurt Cobain

[ed. Wanted to be Ringo.]

Death By a Thousand Emails

How Administrative Bloat is Killing American Higher Education

In recent years, Yale has achieved the unfortunate distinction of having more administrators and managers than undergraduate students. For its fewer than five thousand undergraduate students, Yale proudly employs an army of over 5,460 administrators. Like many of its peer institutions, Yale faces an epidemic of administrative bloat: a self-perpetuating ecosystem of expensive career administrators who are far removed from the classroom. In the last three decades, the number of administrators and managers employed by American colleges and universities has ballooned, dwarfing the growth of student and faculty populations. From 1987 to 2012, 517,636 administrators and professional employees were hired at colleges and universities across the country—an average of 87 hires for every working day. After disproportionate growth, these oversized administrative states needlessly increase costs and encumber the operation of institutions.

As Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg describes in his book, The Fall of Faculty, the American university has undergone many evolutions in its lifetime. As recently as the 1970s, schools were heavily influenced by faculty ideas and concerns. Top administrators were typically drawn from teaching staff and many mid level managerial tasks went to faculty members. These academics typically participated on a temporary basis and cycled in and out of teaching roles. Because professors were so involved in university management, presidents and deans could do little without faculty support. The college’s core educational mission was hard to ignore with administration composed primarily of semi-retired academics. Administrative tasks were a means to an academic end. As demand for services and the complexities of modern administrative requirements grew, however, a professional management class rapidly emerged.

Compared to academic leadership of the past, today’s professional administrators view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience and come directly from management degree programs or other non-teaching roles in higher education. The Department of Education Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Survey (IPEDS) defines administrators as “staff whose job it is to plan, direct, or coordinate policies [and] programs, [tasks that] may include some supervision of other workers.” The IPEDS further states that although “Postsecondary Deans should be classified in this category as well,” the vast majority of administrators do no teaching or research. In many cases, their jobs are unrelated to the most crucial university functions. These career managers serve a bureaucracy that is fundamentally disconnected from the classroom experience.

The first problem with this self-reproducing professional class is its overwhelming cost. Administrative costs account for nearly a quarter of total spending by American universities, according to Department of Education data. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) found that, across the entire higher education landscape, spending on administration per student increased by 61% between 1993 and 2007. This growth extends even to public universities, like the UNC System, which “saw a nearly 50 percent, inflation-adjusted increase” in 11 short years. This growth is unsurprising given administrators are exceedingly well compensated compared to faculty. Presidents at both public and private universities often make comparable salaries to business executives of similar size institutions, and receive extensive perks typically associated with corporate executives. Within middle management, armies of deans and provosts typically make salaries comfortably in the six-figures.

by Lance Dinino, The Bowdoin Review |  Read more:

Image: YuLin Zhen
[ed. So when this system gets threatened, who'll win? See: Yale faculty call for admin hiring freeze, independent audit amid concerns over bureaucratic expansion (Yale Daily News):]

***

Over 100 Yale professors are calling for the University administration to freeze new administrative hires and commission an independent faculty-led audit to ensure that the University prioritizes academics.

In a letter written to University President Maurie McInnis and Provost Scott Strobel, signatories addressed the “collision of two opposing forces: extraordinary financial strength and runaway bureaucratic expansion.”

The request comes after Yale announced a broad hiring and salary slowdown as it braces for funding cuts from the Trump administration. Letter signees told the News they hope the adoption of their suggestions will place faculty at the center of University governance.

“With the second-largest per-student endowment in the world, Yale can navigate economic uncertainty without compromising its academic essence,” the letter reads.

Professor Juan de la Mora, a letter’s signee, said that a significant number of Yale professors believe that the institution is using funding for “improper” purposes and neglecting the school’s founding principles of emphasizing faculty and students.

He said that the Yale administration is turning into a bureaucracy lacking intellectual focus and noted that faculty do not have access to information on the administration’s growth and purpose.

via:

via:

[ed. Binkying bunnies.]

NASCAR Faces Future Viewership Crisis

NASCAR broadcasting icon Mike Joy has sent a warning to NASCAR about the future of the sport. Speaking on Kevin Harvick's Happy Hour podcast, Joy admits that the sport has failed in its attempt to attract young fans. This is an issue that threatens the very future of NASCAR, according to the experienced pundit.

After being part of NASCAR broadcasting for almost five decades, Joy has seen it all. He's seen sport blow up as it did in the 1990s, and now is watching its popularity fall once again to a worrying degree.

Talking on the podcast, he said the following about a growing age gap between its drivers and fans.

"We have 18 and 20-year-olds coming into the Cup Series and making a mark," Joy said. "The fan base is getting older. We're not attracting the younger fanbase that we need to move this sport forward into the next decade, [and] into the next couple of decades."

In 2017, the average age of a NASCAR fan in the United States was 58 years old. This was a nine year increase from when the same analysis was done in 2006, and this trend has likely continued.

"You couldn't go into a supermarket without knowing about NASCAR," he admitted. "It was everywhere. When the sponsors stopped activating toward the general public and toward the race fans, the sport just took a giant dump in the relative to everyday life department.

"We lost a lot of that young fanbase that we really need to covet if we're going to grow this sport again."

Joy added that the movie Talladega Nights was a peak of the sport's ebbing and flowing popularity.

"That was when we hit our peak for fan engagement and crowds at the racetrack. I remember going into a Food City in Bristol, Tennessee, and you couldn't push your cart down any aisle without knocking over a cardboard cutout of some driver hawking something. You couldn't go in a supermarket without knowing about NASCAR. It was everywhere." (...)

NASCAR has been trying to reach a new audience for many years, but the sport's executives have offered a more optimistic view with CMO Jill Gregory saying in 2020 that 40% of the sport's viewership were women.

"One of our points of differentiation has always been the passion and loyalty of our fans. Almost 70% of them consciously support NASCAR sponsors," she said. "We also have an increasingly diverse set of fans, with the biggest growth coming from a younger audience.

"About 40% of our fanbase is women, and we’ve got the highest amount of female TV viewers per event of any U.S. sport other than the NFL. Our percentage of multicultural fans is growing, too, and that’s an effort we’ve been very deliberate about."

by Alex Harrington, Motorsport.com |  Read more:

Image: Sean Gardner/Getty Images
[ed. R.I.P. Everything in 'sports world' is in crisis these days (except the NFL). I'm not surprised NASCAR would be a first major casualty. Admit it, it's just boring (except for the crashes and drunk people). Plus, with streaming platforms splicing and dicing subscriptions, nobody can see anything on one channel anymore. See also: Here’s why sports media can’t talk about sports anymore (awfulannouncing.com).]

Politically Connected Startup to Overhaul $700 Billion Government Payments Program

Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, financial technology startup Ramp published a pitch for how to tackle wasteful government spending. In a 4,000-word blog post titled “The Efficiency Formula,” Ramp’s CEO and one of its investors echoed ideas similar to those promoted by Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk: Federal programs were overrun by fraud, and commonsense business techniques could provide a quick fix.

Ramp sells corporate credit cards and artificial intelligence software for businesses to analyze spending. And while the firm appears to have no existing federal contracts, the post implied the government should consider hiring it. Just as Ramp helped businesses manage their budgets, the company “could do the same for a variety of government agencies,” according to the blog and company social media posts.

It didn’t take long for Ramp to find a willing audience. Within Trump’s first three months in office, its executives scored at least four private meetings with the president’s appointees at the General Services Administration, which oversees major federal contracting. Some of the meetings were organized by the nation’s top procurement officer, Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service.

GSA is eying Ramp to get a piece of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at GSA have been moving quickly to tap Ramp for a charge card pilot program worth up to $25 million, sources told ProPublica, even as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency highlights the multitudes of contracts it has canceled across federal agencies.

Founded six years ago, Ramp is backed by some of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley. One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in the tech world and who spent millions aiding Vice President JD Vance’s Ohio Senate run. Thiel’s firm, Founders Fund, has invested in seven separate rounds of funding for Ramp, according to data from PitchBook. Last year Thiel said there was “no one better positioned” to build products at the intersection of AI and finance.

To date, the company has raised about $2 billion in venture capital, according to startup tracking website Crunchbase, much of it from firms with ties to Trump and Musk. Ramp’s other major financial backers include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures; Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, a firm run by Musk allies.

The special attention Gruenbaum paid to Ramp raised flags inside and outside the agency. “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards that are set up to prevent contracts from being awarded based on who you know,” said Scott Amey, the general counsel with the bipartisan Project on Government Oversight. He said career civil servants should lead the process to pick the best choice for taxpayers.

A senior GSA official, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said the high level attention Ramp received was unusual, especially before a bid had been made public. “You don’t want to give this impression that leadership has already decided the winner somehow.”

GSA told ProPublica it “refutes any suggestion of unfair or preferential contracting practices,” with a spokesperson adding that the “credit card reform initiative has been well known to the public in an effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Ramp did not respond to requests for comment.

Rabois, one of Ramp’s earliest investors, is part of an influential group of tech titans known as the “PayPal Mafia.” Leaders of the early payments company include several influential players surrounding the Trump administration, including Musk and Thiel. Rabois and his husband, Jacob Helberg, hosted a fundraiser that pulled in upwards of $1 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to media reports. Trump has nominated Helberg for a senior role at the State Department.

Rabois sits on Ramp’s board of directors. He has said he had no plans to join the Trump administration, instead telling CNBC: “I have ideas, I can spoon-feed them to the right people.” He told ProPublica his comments to CNBC were about big-picture policy ideas and that he had “no involvement in any government-related initiatives for the company.” Ramp “could be a great choice for any government that wants to improve its efficiencies,” Rabois added.

Helberg said he has no involvement “in anything related to Ramp whatsoever.”

Thrive Capital, Kushner’s firm, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Thiel did not provide a comment. 8VC did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the White House or Musk; previously, Musk has said “I’ll recuse myself” if conflict-of-interest issues arise.

Ramp’s meetings with Gruenbaum — who comes from private equity firm KKR and has no prior government experience — came at an opportune moment. GSA will decide by year’s end whether to extend the SmartPay contract, and preparations are afoot for the next generation of the program. SmartPay has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the financial institutions that currently operate it, U.S. Bank and Citibank.

Gruenbaum and acting GSA administrator Stephen Ehikian entered the agency with a strong belief that SmartPay and other government payment programs were rife with fraud or waste, causing huge losses, sources within GSA say — an idea echoed in Ramp’s January memo.

Yet both GOP and Democratic budget experts, as well as former GSA officials, describe that view as ill-informed. SmartPay, which provides Visa and Mastercard charge cards to government employees, enables the federal workforce to purchase office supplies and equipment, book travel and pay for gas.

The cards typically are used to fund travel and purchases up to $10,000.

“SmartPay is the lifeblood of the government,” said former GSA commissioner Sonny Hashmi, who oversaw the program. “It’s a well-run program that solves real world problems … with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in.”

Jessica Riedl, a GOP budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, said the notion that there was significant fraud in the charge card technology was far-fetched. She had criticized waste in government credit card programs before the latest SmartPay system was implemented in 2018.

“This was a huge problem about 20-25 years ago,” she said. “In the past 15 years, there have been new controls put into government credit card purchases.”

by Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro, Pro Publica |  Read more:

Image: smartpay.gsa.gov

[ed. Every time someone uses the term 'waste, fraud and abuse' I know they're either lying or clueless. It has to be the most hollow and meaningless phrase to come out of this administration and others since 'thoughts and prayers' and 'fake news'. You don't fire 17 agency inspector generals who's duties were doing exactly that: rooting out waste, fraud and abuse if you're actually serious.]

Françoise Huguier, Return from burial, La Martinique, 1986

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Never Miss a Call

In our notification-heavy world, there is still one activity where you might just miss that buzz on your phone or ping on your smartwatch – while you’re vacuuming. Thankfully, Samsung has a solution.

Its newest cordless stick vac, the new Bespoke AI Jet Ultra ($1,099), now has an LCD display control panel that, along with standard features such as power level and battery life, can notify you when you have an incoming phone call or text message. The vacuum, which works with an auto-empty charging station, also features 400AW suction and 100-minute battery life.

Even better, if you’re doing the wash and left your phone in the other room, Samsung’s added touchscreens to its washers and dryers, including the new Bespoke AI Laundry Vented Combo washer/dryer ($3,099). This lets you answer a call directly on the built-in 7-inch LCD screen. The Combo can also (perhaps more usefully) put detergent in for you automatically and then, when the cycle is done, open its door.

by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Samsung

[ed. We're all gonna die.]

Texas vs. Virginia: Cover Your Breast

School officials in one part of the Lone Star State are no fans of the lone nipple on the Virginia state flag, so they have nixed an online lesson that included a picture of the banner.

Virginia’s flag and state seal feature Virtus, the Roman goddess of virtue, whose name suggests a buttoned-down gal but whose toga tells another story — draped so low on her left that one breast is fully out there for God Almighty and everybody else to see.

Some people call that art. The Lamar Consolidated Independent School District, in fast-growing territory west of Houston, calls it “frontal nudity” — something banned from its elementary school materials. (...)

Lamar’s school board voted 5-1 in November to update its library materials policy, which included adding this provision: “No material in elementary school libraries shall include visual depictions or illustrations of frontal nudity.” The Virginia lesson disappeared within days... (...)

“We have unlocked a new level of dystopian, book-banning, and censorship hell in Texas,” the Texas Freedom to Read Project declared on its website. (...)

Virtus has graced the state seal since it was created in 1776 and the state flag since 1861, with a few makeovers over the years changing the figure’s appearance. She started out fully clothed but her left breast has been exposed for more than a century.

A case of early 20th-century gender confusion led to the breast baring in the first place. In 1901, Secretary of the Commonwealth D.Q. Eggleston complained that Virtus “looked more like a man than a woman and wanted to correct it. He instructed designers to add the breast to clarify her sex,” the Virginian-Pilot reported in a 2023 deep dive into how Virginia wound up with the only state flag boasting an exposed nipple.

Bare breast aside, Virtus is a fighter, not a lover. She holds a spear and sword, one foot planted atop a defeated tyrant sprawled on the ground. Instead of a come-hither look she telegraphs the state motto: “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” which means “Thus Always to Tyrants.”

by Laura Vozzella, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Minh Connors/Washington Post

[ed. C'mon. Who's against seeing a nipple now and then. Texans? Really?]

The New Space Race with China

On January 23rd, three hundred miles southwest of Beijing, a rocket the size of a fifteen-story building ascended on a thundering pillar of flame from the Taiyuan spaceport. It was carrying a five-ton payload: a batch of eighteen satellites for the Qianfan (“Thousand Sails”) satellite internet project. There have been four Thousand Sails launches so far, with 72 now in orbit. Many more will be launched this year.

Thousand Sails will be a “megaconstellation,” a new category of orbital satellite constellations that number in the thousands. SpaceX’s Starlink is the first and biggest such megaconstellation, with seven thousand satellites in orbit, a feat China aims to match. Thousand Sails is scheduled to have over one thousand satellites by 2027 and 14,000 in the 2030s. These are credible plans, both because there are no new technical challenges to overcome and because Chinese space organizations have had a good track record in recent decades of achieving their announced timelines.

Other Chinese constellations are also underway, such as the more secretive and defense-oriented Guowang (“National Net”) project run by the state-owned enterprise China SatNet, which current plans also place at 13,000 satellites by 2035. The first ten National Net satellites were launched on December 16, 2024, this time on a rocket with three times the payload capacity. Details are unclear from public information, but the rocket lift capacity suggests these new satellites may be the size of Starlink V3 satellites (close to 2,000 kilograms). SpaceX has not yet deployed Starlink V3, which will provide substantially higher network capacity; the company is waiting on the higher payload offered by Starship, their new launch vehicle.

China now has over 800 satellites in orbit, recently having overtaken the United Kingdom for second-most behind the United States. While the United States might seem far ahead at almost 9000, as recently as 2017 the U.S. had less than 800 satellites in orbit. Once new launch vehicles are developed, the number of Chinese satellites might quickly increase to match or exceed those launched by the United States. There is a revolution underway in space technology, with the United States leading and only China catching up. These are by no means the only Chinese space accomplishments in recent years.

The day after the first National Net deployment, Chinese astronauts Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong broke the record for the longest spacewalk in human history. The Chinese astronauts spent over nine hours working on maintenance and upgrades to the Chinese Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) space station, circling the Earth six times before their work was done. New, more lightweight and flexible Chinese spacesuits helped make this long spacewalk less tiring and dangerous. These achievements are not exceptional but expected for the modern Chinese space industry. Gone are the days of infrequent launches and deep caution.

In 2024, China launched 68 orbital rockets—a new record, and lagging behind only the United States. There were two failures in the growing commercial launch sector, but other commercial launches were successful. Recent Chinese successes in space have ranged from the Tianwen-1 (“Heavenly Questions”) mission, driving a rover around the Martian surface for almost a year from 2021 to 2022, to commercial satellite launches for friendly nations, to a series of lunar exploration missions, starting with the Chang’e-1 lunar orbiter in 2007 and including the Chang’e-6 mission in 2024, which was the first mission by any nation to return samples from the dark side of the Moon. The United States undeniably finds itself in a new space race that its politicians and the American public barely know anything about. Unless that changes, it might well be a space race the Western superpower ends up losing.

The Chinese Plan to Outdo the Apollo Program

In the wake of the second successful Chinese lunar sample-return mission, Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping met with space program leaders in September 2024 and redoubled his emphasis on space achievements in the pursuit of national greatness, encouraging accelerated development. Xi has made his goals clear: to “explore the vast universe” and “become a great power in space.” The requirements for great power status, however, are relative. Cai and Song’s record-setting spacewalk was only barely longer than the old record after all—just enough for a news headline.

China’s space program, carried out by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), has become a focal point in building up national prestige and an aspirational mindset. Tellingly, contemporary CNSA program names such as the Chang’e series of lunar missions—named after the Chinese Moon goddess—draw from Chinese mythology rather than the history of revolutionary communism as with the Long March rockets—programs that began in an era when the Soviet Union, not just the United States, was far ahead in space technology.

Chinese lunar exploration has clearly become focused on sending a crewed mission to the Moon and landing astronauts on its surface, matching the United States’ accomplishment and prestige as currently the only country whose astronauts have walked on the Moon. The Chinese intend to go this decade too: current plans schedule a manned landing for 2030. After that, they intend to build a Moon base.

Various state-owned enterprises within the Chinese space industry are working on improving all the technologies they have developed over the last decade to help achieve this goal. These projects include more advanced spacesuits, a lunar lander, and, most importantly, a new super heavy-lift rocket. By U.S. conventions, a super heavy-lift rocket is one that delivers fifty metric tons to low Earth orbit (LEO). The Long March 10 rocket has a stated capacity clocking in at seventy metric tons to LEO and 27 to trans-lunar injection—the more energetically expensive trajectory required to reach the Moon. The first test flight is planned for 2026.

The third and final module of the Tiangong space station was installed in 2022. Launched on a Long March 5B rocket, the Mengtian (“Dreaming of the Heavens”) module weighed 23,000 kg at launch and had to be accelerated to over seven kilometers per second to achieve a stable orbit four hundred kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Delivering to the existing modules with a crew on board required careful orbit alignment and a large robot arm to help manipulate the module into place. This was the realization of a plan conceived in the early 1990s. Chinese astronauts have inhabited the Tiangong station ever since, performing countless spacewalks, experiments, and live streams for the Chinese public.

The construction of the first permanent space station is not just an achievement in and of itself but a crucial stepping stone for manned missions deeper in space. Tiangong and the International Space Station (ISS) are the only space stations humans today operate in the Earth’s orbit. While the ISS is set to be decommissioned in the coming years, the Chinese space agency is preparing a new space telescope module to be launched in 2026 and periodically dock to their space station. The Chinese station has seen notable research take place, including experiments such as microgravity rice cultivation for feeding crews on long space voyages and tests of artificial photosynthesis to produce ingredients for rocket fuel. (...)

The Windfall of a Second Space Race

Chinese satellite internet may or may not be better than that of U.S. companies, but they are very likely to complete megaconstellations made up of thousands of satellites providing service across vast parts of the globe, if only for their own national security needs. CNSA may well beat NASA’s Artemis to the Moon, and they will almost certainly achieve manned lunar landing at lower cost. If SpaceX does send humans to Mars, barring unlikely changes in the nature and interests of the governing regime, China will quite likely have the capability to reach Mars not too much later.

China is expanding the vision of its space program. For example, future stages of the Tianwen interplanetary exploration missions include sample returns from the atmosphere of Venus in the 2030s. NASA has plans for this too, perhaps sooner but perhaps not. Venus is closer than Mars, has more Earth-like gravity, and the upper layers of its atmosphere may be able to support habitable colonies—floating cities in the sky above the lightning storms and acid rains. However, our understanding of the exact composition and properties of its atmosphere remains incomplete. If NASA is too mismanaged to keep to project timelines, China may well fill the gap.

by Oberon Dixon-Luinenburg, Palladium | Read more:
Image: Global Times/Long March-5B rocket launching in 2022
[ed. See also: The Moon Should be a Computer; and, A Trillion Tons in Orbit (Palladium):]

"Gerard O’Neill, a physicist at Princeton University who had previously applied for NASA’s Astronaut Corps, was dismayed at the growing apathy about space and the future that he was seeing in his students. To inspire them, he began a weekly freshman seminar in 1969 for a group of eight to ten students focused on large-scale engineering problems that could benefit a broad spectrum of humanity. The theme of his first seminar was “Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding technological civilization?”

Over the course of the seminar, O’Neill and his students considered if, instead of colonizing Mars, we should build a megastructure that could serve as a space colony. Looking at the possible constraints of such a project from first principles, they began to realize they were solvable. This included an analysis of the economics, safety, simplicity, and ruggedness of every element of the megastructure’s conceptual design. (...)

The design concept the group settled on became known as “O’Neill cylinders.” These were to be vast space stations dwarfing the small scientific outposts of the 1970s such as Skylab or the contemporary International Space Station, and featured a pair of 20-mile long cylinders with three land areas alternating with three vast windows, plus three mirrors that open and shut to create a day-night cycle. The cylinders rotate in opposite directions, enabling them to remain aimed toward the sun and generating a centrifugal force that simulates the effect of gravity. (...)

Mars colonization is widely viewed as the logical end point for the first phase of space exploration. But we should again be asking if this is the right goal, and whether Gerard O’Neill’s vision represents a better path to colonizing space and a better driver of technological development."