Tuesday, May 12, 2026
May 10, 2026
There were two very different celebrations in Russia and in Hungary yesterday.
Russia celebrated Victory Day, the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Most of the Allies honor Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, on May 8, the day in 1945 that jubilant celebrations broke out as news spread of the Nazis’ unconditional surrender in Reims, France, on May 7, 1945. The Russians celebrate victory over the Nazis on May 9, for by the time the Germans surrendered to the Soviets in Berlin, the time difference meant it was already May 9 in Moscow.
May 9 is an important national holiday in Russia, marked with parades and honoring of relatives who fought in the war. In 2005, when Russia was still embracing democratic nations, more than fifty world leaders attended the sixtieth anniversary of Victory Day, including President George W. Bush; the leaders of China, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Denmark; the secretary-general of the United Nations; and the president of the European Commission.
But for the past several years, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has used the event to demonstrate the nation’s military strength and to rally supporters behind him and the war in Ukraine. He has showcased troops and military hardware in a grand parade in Moscow’s Red Square.
This year, as Zahra Ullah of CNN reported, Putin followed his usual pattern of equating the troops fighting in Ukraine with those who fought in World War II. As he has often framed the war as a struggle against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), he claimed today’s soldiers for Russia are “standing up to an aggressive force armed and supported by the entire NATO bloc.”
But the similarities between past celebrations and yesterday’s ended there. This year, the parade was dramatically scaled back. The parade included four parade units, including some from North Korea, and there was no heavy military hardware. Instead, screens spread across Red Square showed pre-recorded videos of drones, air defense forces, and submarines that state media claimed were from the front lines.
Although foreign leaders have attended the event in the past, this year there were few. As Matthew Luxmoore noted in the Wall Street Journal, Russian allies Venezuela and Hungary have recently lost their pro-Russian leaders, and Russian ally Iran is at war with the U.S. China’s leader Xi Jinping attended last year but did not attend this year. Russian officials allowed few foreign reporters to cover the event and warned people there could be restrictions on texting and the internet “to ensure security during the festive events.”
Putin’s scaled-back celebration reflects fear of Ukrainian drone strikes, which are hitting deep inside Russia. It also reflects growing discontent over the war and its devastation of the economy, and anger at the increasing repression with which Putin is trying to control opposition.
As former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul noted in McFaul’s World, Putin’s war on Ukraine has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s war with Nazi Germany and has achieved none of the goals Putin set out for the conflict. He has not subjugated Ukraine and has not succeeded in regime change. He has not “demilitarized” Ukraine; indeed, Ukraine is more militarized than ever before and has become an important player in global weapons systems. And not only has Putin failed to stop NATO from expanding, but in response to his invasion of Ukraine, both Finland and Sweden have joined the defensive alliance.
Instead of achieving Putin’s goals, the war has killed or wounded more than 1.2 million Russian soldiers and eaten up the economy. As criticism of the regime has become more outspoken, the Kremlin has curbed access to the internet, not only exacerbating that criticism but also, as McFaul notes, making it harder for people to use mobile banking, order a taxi, or use other online services. Rumors are circulating that Putin is increasingly concerned for his own safety. Rather than walking to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to lay flowers as usual, yesterday he took an armored bus. [...]
In Hungary, a different kind of celebration was underway as Péter Magyar took the oath of office as prime minister after winning a landslide victory over Putin ally Viktor Orbán.
In his 16 years of rule, Orbán rejected the liberal democracy his country used to enjoy, saying that its emphasis on multiculturalism weakened the national culture while its insistence on human equality undermined traditional society by recognizing that women and LGBTQ people have the same rights as straight white men. The age of liberal democracy was over, he said, and a new age had begun.
In place of equality, Orbán advocated what he called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” “Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal,” he said in July 2018; “it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues—say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.”
Orbán focused on LBGTQ rights as a danger to “Western civilization.” Arguing the need to protect children, his party has made it impossible for transgender people to change their gender identification on legal documents and made it illegal to share with minors any content that can be interpreted as promoting an LBGTQ lifestyle. After Orbán put allies in charge of Hungarian universities, his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. According to his chief of staff: “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women.”
The American right wing championed Orbán, who called for the establishment of a global right wing to continue to work together to destroy liberal democracy and establish Christian democracy. Before Hungary’s April election, Trump not only repeatedly endorsed Orbán but also promised “to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian people ever need it.” Vice President J.D. Vance actually traveled to Hungary to campaign for Orbán.
But the Hungarian people overwhelmingly rejected Orbán and his party, giving Magyar’s party more than a two-thirds majority in parliament. This will give it the power to overturn not only the laws Orbán and his party passed, but also the changes Orbán made to entrench himself and his party in power permanently. Magyar promised to root out the corruption that has made Orbán and his cronies rich, to restore the rule of law and freedom of speech, and to repair Hungary’s ties with the European Union, which Orbán had frayed almost to the breaking point with his loyalty to Vladimir Putin.
In his inauguration speech, Magyar vowed to “serve my country, not rule over it.” He noted that the corrupt members of the outgoing government “stole from the pockets of Hungarians” and left behind a huge budget deficit and a broken healthcare system. He vowed accountability for those who plundered the country and broke its laws, and promised to rebuild the nation’s shattered checks and balances. He urged Hungarians always to criticize their leaders and hold them accountable.
“We inherited a country where politics deliberately pitted Hungarians against each other,” he said, and he explained how Orbán mobilized supporters with hatred and fear, poisoning “the collective psyche of an entire nation.” “The Hungarian state must never again do this to its own citizens,” he said. He vowed to heal the country: “We will once again learn to think of ourselves as one nation,” he promised. [...]
Russia celebrated Victory Day, the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Most of the Allies honor Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, on May 8, the day in 1945 that jubilant celebrations broke out as news spread of the Nazis’ unconditional surrender in Reims, France, on May 7, 1945. The Russians celebrate victory over the Nazis on May 9, for by the time the Germans surrendered to the Soviets in Berlin, the time difference meant it was already May 9 in Moscow.
May 9 is an important national holiday in Russia, marked with parades and honoring of relatives who fought in the war. In 2005, when Russia was still embracing democratic nations, more than fifty world leaders attended the sixtieth anniversary of Victory Day, including President George W. Bush; the leaders of China, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Denmark; the secretary-general of the United Nations; and the president of the European Commission.
But for the past several years, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has used the event to demonstrate the nation’s military strength and to rally supporters behind him and the war in Ukraine. He has showcased troops and military hardware in a grand parade in Moscow’s Red Square.
This year, as Zahra Ullah of CNN reported, Putin followed his usual pattern of equating the troops fighting in Ukraine with those who fought in World War II. As he has often framed the war as a struggle against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), he claimed today’s soldiers for Russia are “standing up to an aggressive force armed and supported by the entire NATO bloc.”
But the similarities between past celebrations and yesterday’s ended there. This year, the parade was dramatically scaled back. The parade included four parade units, including some from North Korea, and there was no heavy military hardware. Instead, screens spread across Red Square showed pre-recorded videos of drones, air defense forces, and submarines that state media claimed were from the front lines.
Although foreign leaders have attended the event in the past, this year there were few. As Matthew Luxmoore noted in the Wall Street Journal, Russian allies Venezuela and Hungary have recently lost their pro-Russian leaders, and Russian ally Iran is at war with the U.S. China’s leader Xi Jinping attended last year but did not attend this year. Russian officials allowed few foreign reporters to cover the event and warned people there could be restrictions on texting and the internet “to ensure security during the festive events.”
Putin’s scaled-back celebration reflects fear of Ukrainian drone strikes, which are hitting deep inside Russia. It also reflects growing discontent over the war and its devastation of the economy, and anger at the increasing repression with which Putin is trying to control opposition.
As former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul noted in McFaul’s World, Putin’s war on Ukraine has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s war with Nazi Germany and has achieved none of the goals Putin set out for the conflict. He has not subjugated Ukraine and has not succeeded in regime change. He has not “demilitarized” Ukraine; indeed, Ukraine is more militarized than ever before and has become an important player in global weapons systems. And not only has Putin failed to stop NATO from expanding, but in response to his invasion of Ukraine, both Finland and Sweden have joined the defensive alliance.
Instead of achieving Putin’s goals, the war has killed or wounded more than 1.2 million Russian soldiers and eaten up the economy. As criticism of the regime has become more outspoken, the Kremlin has curbed access to the internet, not only exacerbating that criticism but also, as McFaul notes, making it harder for people to use mobile banking, order a taxi, or use other online services. Rumors are circulating that Putin is increasingly concerned for his own safety. Rather than walking to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to lay flowers as usual, yesterday he took an armored bus. [...]
In Hungary, a different kind of celebration was underway as Péter Magyar took the oath of office as prime minister after winning a landslide victory over Putin ally Viktor Orbán.
In his 16 years of rule, Orbán rejected the liberal democracy his country used to enjoy, saying that its emphasis on multiculturalism weakened the national culture while its insistence on human equality undermined traditional society by recognizing that women and LGBTQ people have the same rights as straight white men. The age of liberal democracy was over, he said, and a new age had begun.
In place of equality, Orbán advocated what he called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” “Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal,” he said in July 2018; “it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues—say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.”
Orbán focused on LBGTQ rights as a danger to “Western civilization.” Arguing the need to protect children, his party has made it impossible for transgender people to change their gender identification on legal documents and made it illegal to share with minors any content that can be interpreted as promoting an LBGTQ lifestyle. After Orbán put allies in charge of Hungarian universities, his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. According to his chief of staff: “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women.”
The American right wing championed Orbán, who called for the establishment of a global right wing to continue to work together to destroy liberal democracy and establish Christian democracy. Before Hungary’s April election, Trump not only repeatedly endorsed Orbán but also promised “to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian people ever need it.” Vice President J.D. Vance actually traveled to Hungary to campaign for Orbán.
But the Hungarian people overwhelmingly rejected Orbán and his party, giving Magyar’s party more than a two-thirds majority in parliament. This will give it the power to overturn not only the laws Orbán and his party passed, but also the changes Orbán made to entrench himself and his party in power permanently. Magyar promised to root out the corruption that has made Orbán and his cronies rich, to restore the rule of law and freedom of speech, and to repair Hungary’s ties with the European Union, which Orbán had frayed almost to the breaking point with his loyalty to Vladimir Putin.
In his inauguration speech, Magyar vowed to “serve my country, not rule over it.” He noted that the corrupt members of the outgoing government “stole from the pockets of Hungarians” and left behind a huge budget deficit and a broken healthcare system. He vowed accountability for those who plundered the country and broke its laws, and promised to rebuild the nation’s shattered checks and balances. He urged Hungarians always to criticize their leaders and hold them accountable.
“We inherited a country where politics deliberately pitted Hungarians against each other,” he said, and he explained how Orbán mobilized supporters with hatred and fear, poisoning “the collective psyche of an entire nation.” “The Hungarian state must never again do this to its own citizens,” he said. He vowed to heal the country: “We will once again learn to think of ourselves as one nation,” he promised. [...]
by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American | Read more:
Change in Private-Sector Jobs Since December, 2023
Healthcare and Social Assistance have added nearly 1.8 million private-sector jobs in the US since the end of 2023 while all of other industries combined have lost 127,800 jobs.
Source:
[ed. We all know about the jobs boom in data center construction, but it appears to be a blip in the overall big picture. With an increasingly aging population, more AI-related job losses, a dysfuctional if not entirely broken healthcare system (and Congress), etc. Human support industries will likely be the bedrock of whatever economy exists/persists going forward.]
Italian Brainrot
Italian brainrot is characterized by absurd images or videos created using generative artificial intelligence. It typically features hybrid figures combining animals with everyday objects, foods, and weapons. They are given Italianized names or incorporate stereotypical Italian cultural markers and are accompanied by AI-generated audio narration in Italian, which is often nonsensical. The names of these characters often have Italian suffixes, such as -ini or -ello.
The term brain rot was named Oxford Word of the Year in 2024, and refers to the deteriorating effect on one's mental state when overconsuming "trivial or unchallenging content" online. The term can also refer to the content itself. Online users often use this label to acknowledge the ridiculousness of Italian brainrot, while recognising the growing amount of AI slop present online.
Images: DevonRex368; alexey_pigeon
[ed. Presented here for no other reason than to highlight another example of the decline of western civilization. I'm beginning to think that if AI is inclined to wipe us all out it'll be a mercy killing. See also: Reading is magic (Sam Kriss):]
Probably the most alarming index of this was a study in which a group of English majors at two well-regarded public universities in Kansas were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening. Only 5% of the students could produce a ‘detailed, literal understanding’ of the text. The rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch of half-understood phrases, or could not comprehend anything at all.
***
"The kids can’t read. I don’t mean that they’re incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words, although an increasing proportion of them can’t do that either. In the US, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since. 40% of fourth-graders have ‘below basic’ reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any meaning from a written text; the number of illiterate students has been rising every year since 2014. But even when students can perform the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make their minds start working in textlike ways. It’s an entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes, and when they come to the written word they come to it from the outside. [...]Probably the most alarming index of this was a study in which a group of English majors at two well-regarded public universities in Kansas were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening. Only 5% of the students could produce a ‘detailed, literal understanding’ of the text. The rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch of half-understood phrases, or could not comprehend anything at all.
One particular stumbling block was the novel’s third sentence, which describes London in December: ‘As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’ The students found this figurative language impossible; they could only read the sentence with the assumption that Dickens was describing the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile in Victorian London. One respondent glossed it like this: ‘It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another. So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these characters have met in the street.’ The study assessed this person as a ‘competent’ rather than a ‘problematic’ reader, because they’d at least managed to form an idea of what the text meant, even if it was wrong.
Bleak House is not an elitist text; not so long ago, it was mass entertainment. When Dickens visited America in 1867, over 100,000 people paid to see him speak. Delighted crowds mobbed him in the streets. Today, a person studying English literature at degree level responds to his work in essentially the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the 1930s, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality. [...]
This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks... A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets."
Bleak House is not an elitist text; not so long ago, it was mass entertainment. When Dickens visited America in 1867, over 100,000 people paid to see him speak. Delighted crowds mobbed him in the streets. Today, a person studying English literature at degree level responds to his work in essentially the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the 1930s, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality. [...]
This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks... A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets."
Monday, May 11, 2026
The Real Cost of Downsizing Social Security
Under new leadership, the agency has reduced the role of field offices across the country and centralized its operations, making it harder for millions of Americans to get help with their benefits.
Since last spring, I’ve been in touch with a woman I’ll call Jean, the manager of a Social Security field office in the Midwest. She and her team assist beneficiaries, by phone and in person, with retirement and disability claims, Medicare applications, Social Security cards, Supplemental Security Income, and other government programs. Their service area, based on Zip Code, spans hundreds of square miles. It isn’t unusual for people to drive two and a half hours to get help.
Jean joined the Social Security Administration more than a decade ago. She started as a claims representative, taking calls and staffing the front desk. The S.S.A. provides benefits to seventy-five million Americans. It’s enormous, and enormously complex, yet there’s an odd intimacy to the work. People come through at the most important junctures of their lives: childbirth, disablement, incarceration, immigration, retirement, death. Twelve hundred field offices are open five days a week. With the exception of the U.S. Postal Service, the S.S.A. is the only federal agency with such a direct, brick-and-mortar connection to the American public.
Early last year, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, of the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency, accused the S.S.A. of widespread fraud—Musk said on X, without evidence, that millions of centenarian “vampires” were collecting checks from the agency—and listed dozens of offices for closure. Trump appointed a long-time agency employee named Leland Dudek as the acting commissioner after Dudek boasted that he had “circumvented the chain of command” to help DOGE access confidential data. Then, last May, Frank Bisignano, a fintech executive with no government experience, was confirmed by the Senate to lead the S.S.A.; later, he was appointed to run the Internal Revenue Service as well. (A spokesman for the S.S.A. said that Bisignano serves both agencies “100 percent of the time,” and declined my request to interview him.) At an early meeting, Bisignano told a group of S.S.A. managers that he’d known nothing about the agency when he was tapped by Trump. “I’m, like, ‘Well, what am I gonna do?’ ” he said, in audio obtained by ABC News. “So, I’m Googling ‘Social Security,’ you know?”
In 2025, the S.S.A. shed more than seven thousand of its fifty-seven thousand employees, including some three thousand workers who provide direct customer service. Over-all staffing has hit its lowest point since the late nineteen-sixties, when the system served approximately fifty million fewer beneficiaries. In 2024, an index measuring employee satisfaction gave the S.S.A. a score of fifty-four out of a hundred; in 2025, a similar index gave it a score of fifteen.
Bisignano was not one of the Trump appointees who promised to destroy their own agencies. He demonstrated no outward hostility toward the S.S.A., which has dealt with inefficiencies and delays that have stumped Democrats and Republicans alike. But he did introduce significant changes, often—according to Jean and twenty other S.S.A. workers, recipients, and experts I spoke to—without fully understanding the implications of those decisions. Most of his reforms seemed to shrink the role of field offices and nationalize operations.
Jean’s Midwest region, for instance, was combined with much of the West, so that it now stretched from Ohio to Alaska. The head count at the consolidated headquarters went from around five hundred to just sixteen, eliminating many policy experts who had assisted field offices with difficult cases. Bisignano was keen to implement technologies such as A.I. call sorting, and set a goal of reducing in-person visits by fifty per cent in 2026—from nearly thirty-two million to fifteen million. (This goal was circulated to employees in writing, but the S.S.A. spokesman denied its existence, saying, “the fake news media is eager to ignore the truth to scare seniors.”) In November, Bisignano’s chief of field operations told field offices that they should no longer operate like “independent ‘mini-SSAs.’ ” Jean believed that this reflected a misunderstanding of how the public interacts with the agency. “If you keep it local and we are ‘mini-S.S.A.s,’ we’re your source,” she said. “You have someone accountable to fix your problem. You know them. You know their name.”
[ed. When I signed up for Medicare I had to visit the local field office (which served both SSA/Medicare) in person, 35 miles away. They said they needed to review and copy my personal records before my application could be processed (ID, birth certificate, marriage dissolution papers, etc.). It took me three separate tries/trips before I could get in because the office was so overburdened. There were about 30 seats, each one taken, and three SSA/Medicare workers to help everyone. Each interview took about 20-30 minutes, sometimes longer, and there was a line stretching out the door with another 25 or so people waiting to get in. When I finally got lucky on my third try (after only an hour's wait), a barely qualified interviewer who couldn't answer my most basic questions pushed me into a one-size-fits-all template, then immediately sent my application off for processing. When I got home I reviewed my application and compared it to the Medicare booklet and regulations I'd previously been sent. It was then that I realized they'd given me wrong information. If my application went through it would cost me another $1000+/month in additional Medicare monthly payments. So I called back and requested they change it, but the details were apparently too difficult for the staff on hand to comprehend and they told me it was too late anyway - the forms had already been sent out and they couldn't change them again. So after another couple calls and dealing with that roadblock over and over again I called a Medicare representative on their website toll number. Again, I had to do this three times because every time I called I kept getting a different person who gave me a different explanation or conflicting information. Finally, I gave up and contacted my state Representative's office and laid the whole mess out to them and asked for help. They were finally able to get the manager on the phone who personally reviewed my application, agreed with me, and got everything fixed and resubmitted. But the whole experience was beyond aggravating. Field offices are definitely needed because so many people's situations are unique, but only if they're well staffed with knowledgeable people who have the time and incentive to help (mine wasn't). It was like going to DMV but a hundred times worse. I can't imagine what it's like now.]
Early last year, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, of the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency, accused the S.S.A. of widespread fraud—Musk said on X, without evidence, that millions of centenarian “vampires” were collecting checks from the agency—and listed dozens of offices for closure. Trump appointed a long-time agency employee named Leland Dudek as the acting commissioner after Dudek boasted that he had “circumvented the chain of command” to help DOGE access confidential data. Then, last May, Frank Bisignano, a fintech executive with no government experience, was confirmed by the Senate to lead the S.S.A.; later, he was appointed to run the Internal Revenue Service as well. (A spokesman for the S.S.A. said that Bisignano serves both agencies “100 percent of the time,” and declined my request to interview him.) At an early meeting, Bisignano told a group of S.S.A. managers that he’d known nothing about the agency when he was tapped by Trump. “I’m, like, ‘Well, what am I gonna do?’ ” he said, in audio obtained by ABC News. “So, I’m Googling ‘Social Security,’ you know?”
In 2025, the S.S.A. shed more than seven thousand of its fifty-seven thousand employees, including some three thousand workers who provide direct customer service. Over-all staffing has hit its lowest point since the late nineteen-sixties, when the system served approximately fifty million fewer beneficiaries. In 2024, an index measuring employee satisfaction gave the S.S.A. a score of fifty-four out of a hundred; in 2025, a similar index gave it a score of fifteen.
Bisignano was not one of the Trump appointees who promised to destroy their own agencies. He demonstrated no outward hostility toward the S.S.A., which has dealt with inefficiencies and delays that have stumped Democrats and Republicans alike. But he did introduce significant changes, often—according to Jean and twenty other S.S.A. workers, recipients, and experts I spoke to—without fully understanding the implications of those decisions. Most of his reforms seemed to shrink the role of field offices and nationalize operations.
Jean’s Midwest region, for instance, was combined with much of the West, so that it now stretched from Ohio to Alaska. The head count at the consolidated headquarters went from around five hundred to just sixteen, eliminating many policy experts who had assisted field offices with difficult cases. Bisignano was keen to implement technologies such as A.I. call sorting, and set a goal of reducing in-person visits by fifty per cent in 2026—from nearly thirty-two million to fifteen million. (This goal was circulated to employees in writing, but the S.S.A. spokesman denied its existence, saying, “the fake news media is eager to ignore the truth to scare seniors.”) In November, Bisignano’s chief of field operations told field offices that they should no longer operate like “independent ‘mini-SSAs.’ ” Jean believed that this reflected a misunderstanding of how the public interacts with the agency. “If you keep it local and we are ‘mini-S.S.A.s,’ we’re your source,” she said. “You have someone accountable to fix your problem. You know them. You know their name.”
by E. Tammy Kim, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Chris W. Kim[ed. When I signed up for Medicare I had to visit the local field office (which served both SSA/Medicare) in person, 35 miles away. They said they needed to review and copy my personal records before my application could be processed (ID, birth certificate, marriage dissolution papers, etc.). It took me three separate tries/trips before I could get in because the office was so overburdened. There were about 30 seats, each one taken, and three SSA/Medicare workers to help everyone. Each interview took about 20-30 minutes, sometimes longer, and there was a line stretching out the door with another 25 or so people waiting to get in. When I finally got lucky on my third try (after only an hour's wait), a barely qualified interviewer who couldn't answer my most basic questions pushed me into a one-size-fits-all template, then immediately sent my application off for processing. When I got home I reviewed my application and compared it to the Medicare booklet and regulations I'd previously been sent. It was then that I realized they'd given me wrong information. If my application went through it would cost me another $1000+/month in additional Medicare monthly payments. So I called back and requested they change it, but the details were apparently too difficult for the staff on hand to comprehend and they told me it was too late anyway - the forms had already been sent out and they couldn't change them again. So after another couple calls and dealing with that roadblock over and over again I called a Medicare representative on their website toll number. Again, I had to do this three times because every time I called I kept getting a different person who gave me a different explanation or conflicting information. Finally, I gave up and contacted my state Representative's office and laid the whole mess out to them and asked for help. They were finally able to get the manager on the phone who personally reviewed my application, agreed with me, and got everything fixed and resubmitted. But the whole experience was beyond aggravating. Field offices are definitely needed because so many people's situations are unique, but only if they're well staffed with knowledgeable people who have the time and incentive to help (mine wasn't). It was like going to DMV but a hundred times worse. I can't imagine what it's like now.]
Kash Patel’s Personalized Calling Card
One of J. Edgar Hoover’s greatest reforms at the FBI was his embrace of fingerprinting. During the 1930s, visitors to the FBI offices in Washington, D.C., received souvenir fingerprint cards featuring his name. The men who succeeded him as FBI director were more discreet and judicious, mindful of the cult of personality that had developed around Hoover. They generally avoided giving out branded swag.
But then came Kash Patel.
President Trump’s FBI director has a great deal of affection for swag. Merchandise for sale on a website he co-founded—still operating, nearly 15 months into his term—includes beanies ($35), T-shirts ($35), orange camo hoodies ($65), trucker caps ($25), “government gangsters” playing cards (on sale for $10), and a Fight With Kash Punisher scarf ($25).
One thing not for sale is liquor, because liquor is something Patel gives away for free.
Last month, I reported that FBI personnel were alarmed by what they said was erratic behavior and excessive drinking by Patel. (The FBI director has denied the allegations and filed a defamation suit against The Atlantic and me.)
After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “Kash Patel FBI Director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: Ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it. (The person who sold it to us did not want to be named, but said that the bottle was a gift from Patel at an event in Las Vegas.)
Patel has given out bottles of his personalized whiskey to FBI staff as well as civilians he encounters in his duties, according to eight people, including current and former FBI and Department of Justice employees and others who are familiar with Patel’s distribution of the bottles. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.
Patel has distributed his self-branded bottles while on official business, including during at least one FBI event. He and his team have transported the whiskey using a DOJ plane, including when he went to Milan during the Olympics in February. One of the bottles was left behind in a locker room, according to a person who was there. (I reviewed a photograph of the bottle.) On the same trip, Patel was filmed drinking beer with the gold-medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team—behavior that officials have said did not sit well with the teetotaling president. Patel defended himself at the time, saying he was just celebrating with his “friends” on the hockey team. Patel’s use of DOJ aircraft to transport cases of alcohol has been the subject of discussion among FBI staff.
The FBI did not dispute that Patel gives out bottles of whiskey inscribed with his name, but in response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson portrayed the gifts as routine within the FBI and the broader government. He added that “the bottles in question are part of a tradition in the FBI that started well over a decade ago, long before Director Patel arrived. Senior Bureau officials have long exchanged commemorative items in formal gift settings consistent with ethics rules. Director Patel has followed all applicable ethical guidelines and pays for any personal gift himself.”
The spokesperson declined to clarify which ethical rules Patel was following, when the bottles were engraved with Patel’s name, or whether any bottles had actually been reimbursed as personal gifts. The FBI also declined to provide images of bottles bearing the names of past directors. When I reached a former longtime senior FBI official to ask whether he’d ever seen personally branded liquor bottles distributed by a previous FBI director, he burst out laughing. [...]
A spokesperson for Woodford Reserve said she did not have information about who had ordered the bottles or when. “Consumers who purchase Woodford Reserve occasionally have images and messages engraved on the bottle,” Elizabeth Conway, the director of external communications for the distillery’s parent company, told me. “These engravings occur after the point of purchase.”
Patel’s affection for bourbon is long-standing; during the first Trump administration, he and his colleagues at the National Security Council kept a barrel of it on hand to celebrate successful hostage negotiations and rescues, The New Yorker reported last year. (Patel served as the council’s senior director for counterterrorism at the time.)
Patel’s enthusiasm for self-branded merchandise is also well documented. “He is known as being very merch forward,” one DOJ employee told me. Even before he was confirmed as FBI director, Patel sent out Ka$h-branded merch boxes that included hats, socks, and other items depicting the comic-book character the Punisher, one person who received such a box told me. As my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro reported in 2024, before Patel became FBI director, he previously sold “Justice for All” #J6PC tees in honor of those arrested for their actions on January 6, 2021. (That item is no longer available from the Kash Foundation, which was founded by Patel but is now, according to its website, “an independent nonprofit, not endorsed by, associated with, or influenced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, or any government agency.”)
In a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed in September, former Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office Steven Jensen described an interaction in Patel’s conference room in which the director presented him with an abnormally large challenge coin—a memento often given out by leaders in law-enforcement and military organizations. The coin was inscribed Director at the top and Ka$h Patel at the bottom.
“Jensen then noticed a collection of whiskey bottles and cigars on Patel’s desk,” the complaint states. According to the complaint, “Patel explained that he used to produce his own brand of cigars, but they are not in production anymore.” Jensen, who oversaw parts of the investigation into the pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, was fired in August. (The U.S. government has moved to dismiss the case, and the lawsuit is pending.) Jensen’s lawyer, Margaret Donovan, told me in a statement that “there are line agents out there spending their nights and weekends trying to finish warrants, write reports, plan arrests. Yet the FBI Director apparently has the time to design logos, go to hockey games, sit for multi-hour podcast interviews. This is one of the most serious jobs in the country, not a vehicle for self-promotion and branding.”
by Sarah Fitzpatrick, The Atlantic | Read more:
Images: The Atlantic; Ebay; CSPAN; William Turton/X; Health Ranger Report
[ed. What a sad little man, but then no different than his boss. See also: Kash as the Poster Boy for Kakistocracy (Richard Hanania).]
But then came Kash Patel.
President Trump’s FBI director has a great deal of affection for swag. Merchandise for sale on a website he co-founded—still operating, nearly 15 months into his term—includes beanies ($35), T-shirts ($35), orange camo hoodies ($65), trucker caps ($25), “government gangsters” playing cards (on sale for $10), and a Fight With Kash Punisher scarf ($25).
One thing not for sale is liquor, because liquor is something Patel gives away for free.
Last month, I reported that FBI personnel were alarmed by what they said was erratic behavior and excessive drinking by Patel. (The FBI director has denied the allegations and filed a defamation suit against The Atlantic and me.)
After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “Kash Patel FBI Director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: Ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it. (The person who sold it to us did not want to be named, but said that the bottle was a gift from Patel at an event in Las Vegas.)
Patel has given out bottles of his personalized whiskey to FBI staff as well as civilians he encounters in his duties, according to eight people, including current and former FBI and Department of Justice employees and others who are familiar with Patel’s distribution of the bottles. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.
Patel has distributed his self-branded bottles while on official business, including during at least one FBI event. He and his team have transported the whiskey using a DOJ plane, including when he went to Milan during the Olympics in February. One of the bottles was left behind in a locker room, according to a person who was there. (I reviewed a photograph of the bottle.) On the same trip, Patel was filmed drinking beer with the gold-medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team—behavior that officials have said did not sit well with the teetotaling president. Patel defended himself at the time, saying he was just celebrating with his “friends” on the hockey team. Patel’s use of DOJ aircraft to transport cases of alcohol has been the subject of discussion among FBI staff.
The FBI did not dispute that Patel gives out bottles of whiskey inscribed with his name, but in response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson portrayed the gifts as routine within the FBI and the broader government. He added that “the bottles in question are part of a tradition in the FBI that started well over a decade ago, long before Director Patel arrived. Senior Bureau officials have long exchanged commemorative items in formal gift settings consistent with ethics rules. Director Patel has followed all applicable ethical guidelines and pays for any personal gift himself.”
The spokesperson declined to clarify which ethical rules Patel was following, when the bottles were engraved with Patel’s name, or whether any bottles had actually been reimbursed as personal gifts. The FBI also declined to provide images of bottles bearing the names of past directors. When I reached a former longtime senior FBI official to ask whether he’d ever seen personally branded liquor bottles distributed by a previous FBI director, he burst out laughing. [...]
A spokesperson for Woodford Reserve said she did not have information about who had ordered the bottles or when. “Consumers who purchase Woodford Reserve occasionally have images and messages engraved on the bottle,” Elizabeth Conway, the director of external communications for the distillery’s parent company, told me. “These engravings occur after the point of purchase.”
Patel’s affection for bourbon is long-standing; during the first Trump administration, he and his colleagues at the National Security Council kept a barrel of it on hand to celebrate successful hostage negotiations and rescues, The New Yorker reported last year. (Patel served as the council’s senior director for counterterrorism at the time.)
Patel’s enthusiasm for self-branded merchandise is also well documented. “He is known as being very merch forward,” one DOJ employee told me. Even before he was confirmed as FBI director, Patel sent out Ka$h-branded merch boxes that included hats, socks, and other items depicting the comic-book character the Punisher, one person who received such a box told me. As my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro reported in 2024, before Patel became FBI director, he previously sold “Justice for All” #J6PC tees in honor of those arrested for their actions on January 6, 2021. (That item is no longer available from the Kash Foundation, which was founded by Patel but is now, according to its website, “an independent nonprofit, not endorsed by, associated with, or influenced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, or any government agency.”)
In a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed in September, former Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office Steven Jensen described an interaction in Patel’s conference room in which the director presented him with an abnormally large challenge coin—a memento often given out by leaders in law-enforcement and military organizations. The coin was inscribed Director at the top and Ka$h Patel at the bottom.
“Jensen then noticed a collection of whiskey bottles and cigars on Patel’s desk,” the complaint states. According to the complaint, “Patel explained that he used to produce his own brand of cigars, but they are not in production anymore.” Jensen, who oversaw parts of the investigation into the pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, was fired in August. (The U.S. government has moved to dismiss the case, and the lawsuit is pending.) Jensen’s lawyer, Margaret Donovan, told me in a statement that “there are line agents out there spending their nights and weekends trying to finish warrants, write reports, plan arrests. Yet the FBI Director apparently has the time to design logos, go to hockey games, sit for multi-hour podcast interviews. This is one of the most serious jobs in the country, not a vehicle for self-promotion and branding.”
by Sarah Fitzpatrick, The Atlantic | Read more:
Images: The Atlantic; Ebay; CSPAN; William Turton/X; Health Ranger Report
[ed. What a sad little man, but then no different than his boss. See also: Kash as the Poster Boy for Kakistocracy (Richard Hanania).]
Logitech’s Tiny Folding Mouse
Logitech is reportedly developing a new wireless mouse that folds in half to make it easier to carry around in a bag or pocket. According to leaked marketing images shared by WinFuture, Logitech’s foldable mouse caused “22 percent less muscle strain” compared to using a laptop trackpad, and can be used across “multiple operating systems.”
Logitech’s design is visually similar to Microsoft’s Surface Arc mouse and Lenovo’s Yoga mouse, sporting the same arched shape when unfolded for use. One key difference is that while Microsoft and Lenovo’s offerings can only be folded flat, the new Logitech mouse — the name of which is still unknown — folds in half like a clamshell. There’s no official specifications or dimensions available yet, but one image shows that it’s very compact when folded, seemingly dwarfed by the hand that’s sliding it into a pocket.
In place of a traditional scroll wheel, WinFuture reports the new Logitech mouse will feature a so-called “Adaptive Touch Scrolling” area between the two standard mouse buttons that enables users to scroll by swiping over a small trackpad. A green light can be seen on this touch-sensitive area, which likely indicates an active wireless connection. The new Logitech mouse can be paired with up to three host devices via Bluetooth, according to WinFuture, and its shape allows it to be used by both left- and right-handed users.
Logitech’s design is visually similar to Microsoft’s Surface Arc mouse and Lenovo’s Yoga mouse, sporting the same arched shape when unfolded for use. One key difference is that while Microsoft and Lenovo’s offerings can only be folded flat, the new Logitech mouse — the name of which is still unknown — folds in half like a clamshell. There’s no official specifications or dimensions available yet, but one image shows that it’s very compact when folded, seemingly dwarfed by the hand that’s sliding it into a pocket.
In place of a traditional scroll wheel, WinFuture reports the new Logitech mouse will feature a so-called “Adaptive Touch Scrolling” area between the two standard mouse buttons that enables users to scroll by swiping over a small trackpad. A green light can be seen on this touch-sensitive area, which likely indicates an active wireless connection. The new Logitech mouse can be paired with up to three host devices via Bluetooth, according to WinFuture, and its shape allows it to be used by both left- and right-handed users.
by Jess Weatherbed, The Verge | Read more:
Images: WinFuture
Sunday, May 10, 2026
920 Pounds of Leverage
An F-35 fighter contains 920 pounds of rare earth minerals. A Virginia-class submarine needs 9,200. An Arleigh Burke destroyer requires 5,200. Strip those magnets, actuators, and critical inputs out of the supply chain, and the most advanced military on earth grinds to a halt. The country that processes nearly all of them is China.
That uncomfortable fact sits behind almost every headline coming out of the Iran war and the conflict over critical resources. According to Jim Puplava, who has been arguing since 2020 that we are living through another commodity supercycle, the conflict in the Middle East is not an isolated flare-up, but part of a broader contest over the chokepoints that determine who can build, fuel, and arm the modern economy.
The War Beneath the War
Puplava points to a striking asymmetry exposed by the fighting: Tehran can produce roughly 100 ballistic missiles a month, while the United States manufactures only six interceptors in the same period. Each Tomahawk, THAAD, and Patriot fired costs millions of dollars and depends on materials refined almost exclusively in China.
That math has not been lost on Beijing. Some analysts now suspect China is content to watch the Iran conflict drag on, since every interceptor launched over Tel Aviv is one fewer available for a future contest over Taiwan. “In a kinetic conflict, the side that controls the magnets controls the missiles,” Puplava says. Replenishing the stockpile, by most estimates, will take years.
The Periodic Table as Statecraft
China’s grip did not happen by accident. While the West chased software and asset-light business models, Beijing built the gritty back end of the modern economy: mines, smelters, refineries, magnet factories.
Puplava argues that Western elites suffer from what he calls “physical illiteracy,” the conceit that we have built a weightless digital civilization. In reality, a green grid requires 400 percent more copper and 2,000 percent more lithium than the fossil fuel system it would replace. Semiconductors, electric vehicles, AI servers, data centers, and precision weapons all run on the same short list of elements.
Beijing has begun pulling the lever. In 2024 and 2025, China placed export restrictions on gallium, germanium, antimony, tungsten, and high-grade magnets, citing military end-use concerns. Gallium and germanium feed high-speed semiconductors and night vision optics. The magnets show up in F-35s, Columbia-class submarines, drones, and sonar arrays.
“We’ve traded energy dependence on the Middle East for a more rigid mineral dependence on the People’s Republic of China,” Puplava says. Even mines reopened on American soil, such as Mountain Pass in California, still ship their concentrates to China for processing. [...]
The War Beneath the War
Puplava points to a striking asymmetry exposed by the fighting: Tehran can produce roughly 100 ballistic missiles a month, while the United States manufactures only six interceptors in the same period. Each Tomahawk, THAAD, and Patriot fired costs millions of dollars and depends on materials refined almost exclusively in China.
That math has not been lost on Beijing. Some analysts now suspect China is content to watch the Iran conflict drag on, since every interceptor launched over Tel Aviv is one fewer available for a future contest over Taiwan. “In a kinetic conflict, the side that controls the magnets controls the missiles,” Puplava says. Replenishing the stockpile, by most estimates, will take years.
The Periodic Table as Statecraft
China’s grip did not happen by accident. While the West chased software and asset-light business models, Beijing built the gritty back end of the modern economy: mines, smelters, refineries, magnet factories.
Puplava argues that Western elites suffer from what he calls “physical illiteracy,” the conceit that we have built a weightless digital civilization. In reality, a green grid requires 400 percent more copper and 2,000 percent more lithium than the fossil fuel system it would replace. Semiconductors, electric vehicles, AI servers, data centers, and precision weapons all run on the same short list of elements.
Beijing has begun pulling the lever. In 2024 and 2025, China placed export restrictions on gallium, germanium, antimony, tungsten, and high-grade magnets, citing military end-use concerns. Gallium and germanium feed high-speed semiconductors and night vision optics. The magnets show up in F-35s, Columbia-class submarines, drones, and sonar arrays.
“We’ve traded energy dependence on the Middle East for a more rigid mineral dependence on the People’s Republic of China,” Puplava says. Even mines reopened on American soil, such as Mountain Pass in California, still ship their concentrates to China for processing. [...]
The New Great Game
Rudyard Kipling called the nineteenth-century rivalry between Britain and Russia the Great Game. Its twenty-first-century version is being played out in the Lithium Triangle of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, the cobalt corridors of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the long highways of China’s Belt and Road. Beijing offers infrastructure in exchange for exclusive commodity agreements. American counteroffers, freighted with labor and environmental conditions, often lose the bidding.
Iran fits the same map. The Strait of Hormuz remains the world’s most important energy chokepoint, yet the conflict is accelerating the very transition that favors China. Disruption in oil markets pushes buyers toward EVs and batteries, sectors where Chinese firms make some of the cheapest and best products on the planet. Beijing has even managed to pose as a responsible mediator while Washington escalates militarily. As Puplava puts it: “In the twentieth century, it was about blue-water navies protecting oil lanes. The twenty-first century looks to be about deep-earth diplomacy.”
Rudyard Kipling called the nineteenth-century rivalry between Britain and Russia the Great Game. Its twenty-first-century version is being played out in the Lithium Triangle of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, the cobalt corridors of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the long highways of China’s Belt and Road. Beijing offers infrastructure in exchange for exclusive commodity agreements. American counteroffers, freighted with labor and environmental conditions, often lose the bidding.
Iran fits the same map. The Strait of Hormuz remains the world’s most important energy chokepoint, yet the conflict is accelerating the very transition that favors China. Disruption in oil markets pushes buyers toward EVs and batteries, sectors where Chinese firms make some of the cheapest and best products on the planet. Beijing has even managed to pose as a responsible mediator while Washington escalates militarily. As Puplava puts it: “In the twentieth century, it was about blue-water navies protecting oil lanes. The twenty-first century looks to be about deep-earth diplomacy.”
by Financial Sense | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Possibly true, but this feels like it was written by an AI. Who's Jim Puplava (who's most notable credentials seem to be that he's "been arguing since 2020 that we are living through another commodity supercycle")?]
Sunstones
For over a thousand years, historians thought the Viking "sunstone" was nothing more than a myth, until the ocean gave up its secret. The Norse sagas repeatedly referenced a mysterious object called a "sólarsteinn" or sunstone, a navigational tool so powerful that Viking sailors could locate the exact position of the sun even on the most overcast and cloudy days. For centuries, scholars debated whether this was real technology or simply folklore embellished over generations of retelling. Most assumed it was legend. They were wrong.
Iceland spar possesses a property called birefringence, meaning it splits a single beam of light entering the crystal into two separate beams. When you hold the crystal up toward the sky and slowly rotate it, the two beams will vary in brightness independently until, at one specific angle of rotation, they become perfectly equal in intensity. That precise angle points directly toward the sun, regardless of whether the sun is visible to the naked eye. Cloud cover, fog, and even twilight conditions cannot defeat it.
In 2013, marine archaeologists excavating a British warship that sank near the Channel Islands in 1592 made a stunning discovery buried among the wreckage. Alongside navigational instruments including a pair of dividers and a slate, they found a rectangular chunk of translucent crystal. Testing confirmed it was Iceland spar, a remarkably pure form of calcite with extraordinary optical properties. The fact that it was found stored alongside other precision navigation tools was not a coincidence.
Iceland spar possesses a property called birefringence, meaning it splits a single beam of light entering the crystal into two separate beams. When you hold the crystal up toward the sky and slowly rotate it, the two beams will vary in brightness independently until, at one specific angle of rotation, they become perfectly equal in intensity. That precise angle points directly toward the sun, regardless of whether the sun is visible to the naked eye. Cloud cover, fog, and even twilight conditions cannot defeat it.
Researchers from the University of Rennes in France conducted extensive testing and published their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Their experiments demonstrated that Iceland spar could locate the sun's position with an accuracy of within one degree, even under completely overcast skies. For Viking navigators crossing the North Atlantic toward Iceland, Greenland, and eventually North America, this accuracy would have meant the difference between a successful voyage and sailing hopelessly off course into open ocean. The Viking Age spanned roughly 793 to 1066 AD, and during this period Norse sailors were completing oceanic crossings that would not be replicated by other European cultures for another 400 years. Historians had long puzzled over how they achieved such consistent navigational precision without magnetic compasses, which did not reach Europe until the 12th century. The sunstone appears to be a significant part of that answer.
What makes the Channel Islands find especially compelling is that the 1592 shipwreck is far outside the traditional Viking era, suggesting that knowledge of this navigational technique survived and was still being used by European sailors centuries after the Viking Age officially ended. The crystal was not a relic or a curiosity on that ship. It was working equipment.
via: SubRosa/X
Why Almost Everyone Loses—Except a Few Sharks—on Prediction Markets
John Pederson, 33, couldn’t work. The former Outback Steakhouse line cook was recovering from a car crash and running out of money. Kalshi, the prediction market, promised a quick way to fix that. He took out a variable-interest loan and started betting.
At first, it worked. Pederson turned about $2,000 into close to $8,000 by betting on daily snowfall totals in Detroit, where he lives. He parlayed that into $41,000 by trading on sports, using a strategy he developed with the help of AI, according to a Wall Street Journal review of his account records.
Then he placed his most audacious bet yet: All $41,000 that a celebrity would say a particular word on TV. He lost it all.
Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket advertise themselves as life-changing tools for regular people—implying everyone has a fair chance to score. “I was about to be unable to pay my rent, but I got two years of rent through Kalshi’s predictions,” gushed one woman in a Kalshi ad on TikTok.
But for most users the reality is nothing like that.
Instead, casual traders are bleeding cash while a small number of sophisticated pros—including trading firms with access to vast streams of data—eat their lunch, according to a Journal analysis of platform data and interviews with traders.
On Polymarket, the Journal found, 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts. That means less than 2,000 accounts netted a total of nearly half a billion dollars. The Journal analyzed 1.6 million Polymarket accounts that have traded since November 2022. There are at least 2.3 million total accounts on the site. [...]
Casual traders “have no chance. Systematically,” said Michael Boss, a former professional poker player and a statistician by training. On Kalshi, Boss places 60 trades a minute and modifies his bids and asks 30 times a second.
by By Neil Mehta, Katherine Long and Caitlin Ostroff, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
At first, it worked. Pederson turned about $2,000 into close to $8,000 by betting on daily snowfall totals in Detroit, where he lives. He parlayed that into $41,000 by trading on sports, using a strategy he developed with the help of AI, according to a Wall Street Journal review of his account records.
Pederson isn’t alone in walking away empty-handed from the bet-on-anything markets, which cover sports, celebrities, news and more.
Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket advertise themselves as life-changing tools for regular people—implying everyone has a fair chance to score. “I was about to be unable to pay my rent, but I got two years of rent through Kalshi’s predictions,” gushed one woman in a Kalshi ad on TikTok.
But for most users the reality is nothing like that.
Instead, casual traders are bleeding cash while a small number of sophisticated pros—including trading firms with access to vast streams of data—eat their lunch, according to a Journal analysis of platform data and interviews with traders.
On Polymarket, the Journal found, 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts. That means less than 2,000 accounts netted a total of nearly half a billion dollars. The Journal analyzed 1.6 million Polymarket accounts that have traded since November 2022. There are at least 2.3 million total accounts on the site. [...]
Casual traders “have no chance. Systematically,” said Michael Boss, a former professional poker player and a statistician by training. On Kalshi, Boss places 60 trades a minute and modifies his bids and asks 30 times a second.
by By Neil Mehta, Katherine Long and Caitlin Ostroff, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: Alexandra Citrin-Safadi/WSJ?iStock
[ed. No chance unless they're insiders with special access to some form of classified information. Like... maybe, half of Washington, DC.]
Who Stands to Gain Most From the MAGA Split
Hint: It’s the world’s most hypocritical podcaster.
Call me naive, but I think I had given up on hypocrisy as a defining feature of American politics—I thought we had gone all the way past that to open avarice and the unapologetic exercise of force—but I guess if there’s one constant in life, it’s that there will be a place in politics for hypocrisy. So there was something refreshingly quaint about Tucker Carlson’s recent break with Trump right at the moment when a wedge issue formed in the MAGA coalition and Carlson could start to position himself for a 2028 presidential run. The news cycle was duly roiled with Tucker’s discovery of principles, even as it was evident on slightly closer inspection that the principles all benefited Tucker in the long-term.
The ostensible reason for the break is legible enough. Carlson has been an advocate for America First policies for a long time. He criticized Trump’s killing of Qasem Soleimani in 2020 and reportedly advised Trump against an Iran strike at that time. He campaigned—avidly—for Trump in 2024 on the premise that Trump would keep America out of foreign wars, and the attacks on Venezuela and then on Iran seem to have registered for Carlson as a genuine shock, and then led to the kind of falling out with Trump that, short as the memories of these two are, will be hard to patch up again.
On April 6, responding to Trump’s “Open the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards” posts on Truth Social, Carlson said on his show, “How dare you speak that way on Easter morning to the country? Who do you think you are? You’re tweeting out the f-word on Easter morning?”
On April 7, Trump, skipping over the theological bits, countered by saying “Tucker’s a low IQ person that has absolutely no idea what’s going on.”
On April 20, Carlson hosted his brother, a longtime Republican operative, on the Tucker Carlson Show, and, in anguished and deeply religious terms, talked about his reasons for the break. “You and I and everyone else who supported him, we’re implicated in this for sure,” he said.
“We’ll be tormented by this for a long time, I mean I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional.”
It’s a little hard to believe that there were no warning signs of what sort of person Trump might prove to be—not calling a beauty pageant contestant “Miss Piggy,” not boasting that he likes to grab women by the pussy, not going out to see a movie on the day of his brother’s death, not exploiting his father’s dementia to bilk his relatives out of their inheritance, and not encouraging a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol. But Pastor Tucker was in a very Christian frame of mind. Yes, Trump had his character failings, but “there are tons of people of low character who outperform their character,” he declared.
And what a compelling, nay, biblical picture that makes—prodigal Tucker misled by his overly compassionate nature and his desire to avoid foreign wars having his Road to Pennsylvania Avenue (er, Damascus) moment over Trump’s “or you’ll be living in hell” post. By now fully ascending the pulpit, Tucker had it in him to offer a remarkably ecumenical message to all faiths. “No decent person mocks other people’s religions,” he said. “To mock other people’s faith is to mock the idea of faith itself.” Never mind that he has discussed the “Islamic cult” and the “Islamic problem” and in 2019 a guest on his show called Islam “the most hateful, intolerant religion in the world.” Tucker, even in the depths of his torment, was in a forgiving mood, forgiving even for such a sinner as himself, and in his grace and willingness to look beyond past trifles he appeared, yes, positively presidential.
I really mean this. The betting odds site Polymarket has JD Vance leading the Republican GOP field with 39%, followed distantly by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at 22%, and then Carlson all the way behind them at 6%. I would never ever give betting advice to any Persuasion reader, but if I did, I might well counsel laying some sweet cheddar on Carlson. Vance is giving major Jeb Bush vibes at the moment—linked to an America First point of view that he seems to at one point have felt deeply but knowing that if he breaks with Trump over Iran or anything else he loses virtually the entirety of his support. Rubio was never exactly in his element as a presidential candidate and seems to have found his ceiling as more of a backroom boy.
But Carlson is a survivor, and comes with a built-in audience, and knows how to work the media in a way that resembles Trump himself. He also speaks to what may be the single most stable voting bloc in American politics—Christian nationalism.
So Tucker really is one to watch—for her part, Marjorie Taylor Greene was virtually the first to hop on the bandwagon and declare on March 5, “I SUPPORT Tucker … Tucker would beat Trump if he ran for president”—and this break with Trump may well be the start of the Making of the President 2028, when he would be the first modern candidate to run on a Christian nationalist platform as well as the first-ever Dancing With the Stars contestant to reach the White House. [...]
Faith and patriotism are, in the end, the last refuge of a scoundrel—and they are formidable sanctuaries... But that’s the beauty of cloaking oneself in faith. Repentance is the ultimate get-out-of-jail free card, and there is no reason why Carlson’s path to repentance can’t coincide with a White House run.
That really is the only meaningful fissure that can break the MAGA coalition. Epstein won’t do it; and a foreign policy excursion like Iran isn’t enough. But religion could do the trick. Evangelical voters, through a bit of deft theology and a vituperative hatred of Hillary Clinton, managed to support Donald Trump, but it was always an uneasy and sometimes comical alliance. Tucker speaks that language far better than anybody in the more Trump-y core of MAGA.
On April 6, responding to Trump’s “Open the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards” posts on Truth Social, Carlson said on his show, “How dare you speak that way on Easter morning to the country? Who do you think you are? You’re tweeting out the f-word on Easter morning?”
On April 7, Trump, skipping over the theological bits, countered by saying “Tucker’s a low IQ person that has absolutely no idea what’s going on.”
On April 20, Carlson hosted his brother, a longtime Republican operative, on the Tucker Carlson Show, and, in anguished and deeply religious terms, talked about his reasons for the break. “You and I and everyone else who supported him, we’re implicated in this for sure,” he said.
“We’ll be tormented by this for a long time, I mean I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional.”
It’s a little hard to believe that there were no warning signs of what sort of person Trump might prove to be—not calling a beauty pageant contestant “Miss Piggy,” not boasting that he likes to grab women by the pussy, not going out to see a movie on the day of his brother’s death, not exploiting his father’s dementia to bilk his relatives out of their inheritance, and not encouraging a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol. But Pastor Tucker was in a very Christian frame of mind. Yes, Trump had his character failings, but “there are tons of people of low character who outperform their character,” he declared.
And what a compelling, nay, biblical picture that makes—prodigal Tucker misled by his overly compassionate nature and his desire to avoid foreign wars having his Road to Pennsylvania Avenue (er, Damascus) moment over Trump’s “or you’ll be living in hell” post. By now fully ascending the pulpit, Tucker had it in him to offer a remarkably ecumenical message to all faiths. “No decent person mocks other people’s religions,” he said. “To mock other people’s faith is to mock the idea of faith itself.” Never mind that he has discussed the “Islamic cult” and the “Islamic problem” and in 2019 a guest on his show called Islam “the most hateful, intolerant religion in the world.” Tucker, even in the depths of his torment, was in a forgiving mood, forgiving even for such a sinner as himself, and in his grace and willingness to look beyond past trifles he appeared, yes, positively presidential.
I really mean this. The betting odds site Polymarket has JD Vance leading the Republican GOP field with 39%, followed distantly by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at 22%, and then Carlson all the way behind them at 6%. I would never ever give betting advice to any Persuasion reader, but if I did, I might well counsel laying some sweet cheddar on Carlson. Vance is giving major Jeb Bush vibes at the moment—linked to an America First point of view that he seems to at one point have felt deeply but knowing that if he breaks with Trump over Iran or anything else he loses virtually the entirety of his support. Rubio was never exactly in his element as a presidential candidate and seems to have found his ceiling as more of a backroom boy.
But Carlson is a survivor, and comes with a built-in audience, and knows how to work the media in a way that resembles Trump himself. He also speaks to what may be the single most stable voting bloc in American politics—Christian nationalism.
So Tucker really is one to watch—for her part, Marjorie Taylor Greene was virtually the first to hop on the bandwagon and declare on March 5, “I SUPPORT Tucker … Tucker would beat Trump if he ran for president”—and this break with Trump may well be the start of the Making of the President 2028, when he would be the first modern candidate to run on a Christian nationalist platform as well as the first-ever Dancing With the Stars contestant to reach the White House. [...]
Faith and patriotism are, in the end, the last refuge of a scoundrel—and they are formidable sanctuaries... But that’s the beauty of cloaking oneself in faith. Repentance is the ultimate get-out-of-jail free card, and there is no reason why Carlson’s path to repentance can’t coincide with a White House run.
That really is the only meaningful fissure that can break the MAGA coalition. Epstein won’t do it; and a foreign policy excursion like Iran isn’t enough. But religion could do the trick. Evangelical voters, through a bit of deft theology and a vituperative hatred of Hillary Clinton, managed to support Donald Trump, but it was always an uneasy and sometimes comical alliance. Tucker speaks that language far better than anybody in the more Trump-y core of MAGA.
by Sam Kahn, Persuasion | Read more:
Image: Al Drago/Getty
[ed. Anyone paying attention could have picked up on Carlson's presidential aspirations a long time ago. Despite being a strong J.D. supporter you know he'll slip the knife in when it's the right time. He's playing the long game and when the 2028 elections roll around and everyone is completely over this train wreck of an administration he'll be sufficiently positioned to respresent a new direction. Plus, everyone hates J.D. there's only one thing he can hope for...]
Saturday, May 9, 2026
Why Consciousness Researchers Have Failed (So Far)
Oh god, I barely made it through.
Experienced sensations while reading: frustration, dread, restless legs, and overwhelming waves of weariness. At one point I felt physically nauseous.
I’ve been trying to figure out why, since (a) Michael Pollan is a great writer who has proven his chops over countless other topics, and (b) this is objectively quite a good book about the science of consciousness. Indeed, I should be happy! Consciousness is clearly having “a moment” right now—a science book about consciousness has been on The New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks, and meanwhile, the online world is abuzz with debates about AI consciousness.
And yet… I hated Pollan’s book.
I felt that every next chapter or section could have been predicted by some statistical machine for producing books about consciousness (“Okay, here’s the part about David Chalmers coming up”). And yes, I have the advantage of being a researcher in the same subject and have even worked with some of the figures Pollan writes about, which is why in my own The World Behind the World (we all seem to gravitate to the same titles, huh) I broadly told much the same story. But you can even go back to science journalist John Horgan’s The Undiscovered Mind, published in 1999, to get similar progress beats and quite familiar names. It’s been 27 years, during which the discussion has (as many fields of science do) centered around major figures like neuroscientists Christof Koch or Giulio Tononi or Antonio Damasio or philosophers like David Chalmers. There’s always the part where Alison Gopnik makes an appearance. Karl Friston pops his head in. And all these people are intellectual titans. Truly. But honestly, this stage of consciousness research feels played out.
Like you have Christof Koch, one of the highest-profile figures, who broke open the field in the 1990s with Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA’s structure) and gave one of the first proposals for a neural correlate of consciousness: gamma oscillations in the ~40Hz range in the cortex.
Koch, who is soon to turn seventy, was for a while after the death of Francis Crick a staunch supporter of Integrated Information Theory (I was part of the team that worked on developing that theory after Giulio Tononi proposed it, and even once did a conference submission with Koch himself). But now Koch has apparently moved on to other approaches to consciousness, mentioning his attendance of an ayahuasca ceremony and his accessing of a “universal mind.”
Here’s Pollan talking to Koch at the end of the book:
Consciousness is not here for our personal therapy. It’s not tied to our life journeys. And I’m guilty of all that artsy and personal stuff too! But it’s no longer about how the grand mystery makes us feel, or the friends we made along the way.
It’s all changed.
HOW WE FAILED
Right now, there’s some college student falling in love with a chatbot instead of the young woman who sits next to him in class, all because science literally cannot tell him that the chatbot is lying about experiencing love. On the other hand, if somehow AIs are conscious, either right now (to some degree), or near-future ones will become so, then they deserve rights and protections, and the entire legal and social apparatus of our civilization must expand rapidly to include radically different types of minds (or we must choose to restrict what kinds of minds we create). There are immediate practical matters here. Long term, we also need to protect against extremely bad futures where only non-conscious intelligences remain—the worst of all possible worlds is that our civilization acts like a reverse metamorphosis, where something weaker but more beautiful, organic consciousness, gets shed in the birth of some horrible star-devouring insect made of matrix multiplication. And then it turns out there is nothing it is like to be two matrices multiplying.
While it’s my opinion that modern LLMs operate more like tools right now, or at best like a lesser statistical approximation of what a good human output would be (with their main advantage being search, not insight), this is all just the beginning of the technology. The door is open and will never be closed again.
Of course, consciousness matters far beyond just AI. Table stakes for actual scientific progress on consciousness include shifting neuroscience and psychiatry from pre-paradigmatic to post-paradigmatic sciences (and all the pile-on effects from that). This was always true. But my point here is that LLMs act like a forcing function. Before everything changed, consciousness research was an unhurried subfield of neuroscience that was always a little weird and niche; therefore academics are guilty of treating consciousness like an academic exercise. [...]
Due to the rise of behaviorism and logical positivism, “consciousness” became a dirty word in science for half a century or more—precisely when the rest of the sciences rocketed ahead! The consciousness winter only really ended in the 1990s because of the collective weight of several Nobel Prize winners (like Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman) determined to make it acceptable again.
The two major scientific conferences (which are how scientists organize) devoted to consciousness also only started in the mid-90s. That’s just 30 years ago! Modern science is incredibly powerful, maybe the most powerful force in existence, but in the grand scheme of things, 30 years is not long at all. That’s just one generation of scientists and thinkers. Kudos to them. Pretty much all of the big names (including definitely Koch) deserve their laurels, and contra Pollan, I do think consciousness actually has made progress over the last 30 years, in that our conceptions are a lot cleaner, the definitional problem is pretty much solved, a lot of the space of initial possible theories is mapped, the problems and difficulties are much better known and clearly outlined, and there is organizational and behind-the-scenes structure that exists in the form of established conferences and labs and minor amounts of funding, etc.
And that’s another thing: no one has tried throwing money at the consciousness problem, at all—and for many problems, from AI to cancer cures, a necessary component often ends up being finance and scale and concentrating talent.
Humanity spends something like a billion dollars a year on CERN. To compare, let’s look at the biggest scientific funder in the United States, the NIH. Out of 103,280 grants awarded to scientists during the 2007-2017 decade, want to guess how many were about directly studying the contents of consciousness?
Five.
That’s probably, at most, a couple million dollars in funding over a decade. Total. So if you’re a consciousness researcher, what can you do, cheaply? What can you do, for free? You can pontificate. You can propose your own theory of consciousness! That requires no funding whatsoever. And so for 30 years the meta in consciousness research has been to create your own theory of consciousness. We’ve let a thousand flowers bloom. The problem is that, if any flower is at all true or promising, you can’t identify it, as its sweet subjectivity-solving scent is completely masked by the bunches of corpse flowers around it. We have too many flowers, and one more just isn’t meaningful anymore. As is sometimes said at the end of fairy tales: “Snip, snap, snout. This tale’s told out.”
What we need are efforts at field-clearing, and methods that can actually make progress on consciousness in ways not tied to just promoting or trying to find evidence for some pre-chosen pet theory—which means finding ways to select over theories, to test theories en masse, so you don’t reinvent the wheel each time, and, perhaps most importantly, you have to do all this while scaling institutions with funding to specifically get a bunch of smart people in a room working together on this.
Experienced sensations while reading: frustration, dread, restless legs, and overwhelming waves of weariness. At one point I felt physically nauseous.
And yet… I hated Pollan’s book.
I felt that every next chapter or section could have been predicted by some statistical machine for producing books about consciousness (“Okay, here’s the part about David Chalmers coming up”). And yes, I have the advantage of being a researcher in the same subject and have even worked with some of the figures Pollan writes about, which is why in my own The World Behind the World (we all seem to gravitate to the same titles, huh) I broadly told much the same story. But you can even go back to science journalist John Horgan’s The Undiscovered Mind, published in 1999, to get similar progress beats and quite familiar names. It’s been 27 years, during which the discussion has (as many fields of science do) centered around major figures like neuroscientists Christof Koch or Giulio Tononi or Antonio Damasio or philosophers like David Chalmers. There’s always the part where Alison Gopnik makes an appearance. Karl Friston pops his head in. And all these people are intellectual titans. Truly. But honestly, this stage of consciousness research feels played out.
Like you have Christof Koch, one of the highest-profile figures, who broke open the field in the 1990s with Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA’s structure) and gave one of the first proposals for a neural correlate of consciousness: gamma oscillations in the ~40Hz range in the cortex.
Koch, who is soon to turn seventy, was for a while after the death of Francis Crick a staunch supporter of Integrated Information Theory (I was part of the team that worked on developing that theory after Giulio Tononi proposed it, and even once did a conference submission with Koch himself). But now Koch has apparently moved on to other approaches to consciousness, mentioning his attendance of an ayahuasca ceremony and his accessing of a “universal mind.”
Here’s Pollan talking to Koch at the end of the book:
When I confessed to Koch my fear—that after my five-year journey into the nature and workings of consciousness, I somehow knew less than I did when I started—he simply smiled.No, it isn’t!
“But that’s good,” he said. “That’s progress.”
Consciousness is not here for our personal therapy. It’s not tied to our life journeys. And I’m guilty of all that artsy and personal stuff too! But it’s no longer about how the grand mystery makes us feel, or the friends we made along the way.
It’s all changed.
HOW WE FAILED
Right now, there’s some college student falling in love with a chatbot instead of the young woman who sits next to him in class, all because science literally cannot tell him that the chatbot is lying about experiencing love. On the other hand, if somehow AIs are conscious, either right now (to some degree), or near-future ones will become so, then they deserve rights and protections, and the entire legal and social apparatus of our civilization must expand rapidly to include radically different types of minds (or we must choose to restrict what kinds of minds we create). There are immediate practical matters here. Long term, we also need to protect against extremely bad futures where only non-conscious intelligences remain—the worst of all possible worlds is that our civilization acts like a reverse metamorphosis, where something weaker but more beautiful, organic consciousness, gets shed in the birth of some horrible star-devouring insect made of matrix multiplication. And then it turns out there is nothing it is like to be two matrices multiplying.
While it’s my opinion that modern LLMs operate more like tools right now, or at best like a lesser statistical approximation of what a good human output would be (with their main advantage being search, not insight), this is all just the beginning of the technology. The door is open and will never be closed again.
Of course, consciousness matters far beyond just AI. Table stakes for actual scientific progress on consciousness include shifting neuroscience and psychiatry from pre-paradigmatic to post-paradigmatic sciences (and all the pile-on effects from that). This was always true. But my point here is that LLMs act like a forcing function. Before everything changed, consciousness research was an unhurried subfield of neuroscience that was always a little weird and niche; therefore academics are guilty of treating consciousness like an academic exercise. [...]
Due to the rise of behaviorism and logical positivism, “consciousness” became a dirty word in science for half a century or more—precisely when the rest of the sciences rocketed ahead! The consciousness winter only really ended in the 1990s because of the collective weight of several Nobel Prize winners (like Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman) determined to make it acceptable again.
The two major scientific conferences (which are how scientists organize) devoted to consciousness also only started in the mid-90s. That’s just 30 years ago! Modern science is incredibly powerful, maybe the most powerful force in existence, but in the grand scheme of things, 30 years is not long at all. That’s just one generation of scientists and thinkers. Kudos to them. Pretty much all of the big names (including definitely Koch) deserve their laurels, and contra Pollan, I do think consciousness actually has made progress over the last 30 years, in that our conceptions are a lot cleaner, the definitional problem is pretty much solved, a lot of the space of initial possible theories is mapped, the problems and difficulties are much better known and clearly outlined, and there is organizational and behind-the-scenes structure that exists in the form of established conferences and labs and minor amounts of funding, etc.
And that’s another thing: no one has tried throwing money at the consciousness problem, at all—and for many problems, from AI to cancer cures, a necessary component often ends up being finance and scale and concentrating talent.
Humanity spends something like a billion dollars a year on CERN. To compare, let’s look at the biggest scientific funder in the United States, the NIH. Out of 103,280 grants awarded to scientists during the 2007-2017 decade, want to guess how many were about directly studying the contents of consciousness?
Five.
That’s probably, at most, a couple million dollars in funding over a decade. Total. So if you’re a consciousness researcher, what can you do, cheaply? What can you do, for free? You can pontificate. You can propose your own theory of consciousness! That requires no funding whatsoever. And so for 30 years the meta in consciousness research has been to create your own theory of consciousness. We’ve let a thousand flowers bloom. The problem is that, if any flower is at all true or promising, you can’t identify it, as its sweet subjectivity-solving scent is completely masked by the bunches of corpse flowers around it. We have too many flowers, and one more just isn’t meaningful anymore. As is sometimes said at the end of fairy tales: “Snip, snap, snout. This tale’s told out.”
What we need are efforts at field-clearing, and methods that can actually make progress on consciousness in ways not tied to just promoting or trying to find evidence for some pre-chosen pet theory—which means finding ways to select over theories, to test theories en masse, so you don’t reinvent the wheel each time, and, perhaps most importantly, you have to do all this while scaling institutions with funding to specifically get a bunch of smart people in a room working together on this.
ME GETTING OFF MY ASS
If the 2020s were all about intelligence, then necessarily the 2030s will be all about consciousness. Intelligence is about function, while consciousness is about being, and forays and progress into understanding (and shaping) function will in turn force our attention toward a better understanding of being. And if the answer to “Why has consciousness not been solved?” is secretly “Material and historical conditions made it hard for anyone to actually try!” then the answer is to actually try.
I refuse to live in a civilization where we consciousness researchers have so obviously failed. I refuse to live in a civilization where we cannot tell consciousness from non-consciousness. Where we can offer no guidance for the future. Where we cannot explain the difference between actually experiencing things vs just processing them. In the short term, this is destabilizing and harmful. In the long term, it may be literally existentially dangerous.
[ed. I thought consciousness research was going great guns since it's central to determining AGI (artificial general intelligence). Huh. See also: His ‘Machine’ Could Uncover the Origin of Human Consciousness—And if It Truly Connects to the Whole Universe (Popular Mechanics)]If the 2020s were all about intelligence, then necessarily the 2030s will be all about consciousness. Intelligence is about function, while consciousness is about being, and forays and progress into understanding (and shaping) function will in turn force our attention toward a better understanding of being. And if the answer to “Why has consciousness not been solved?” is secretly “Material and historical conditions made it hard for anyone to actually try!” then the answer is to actually try.
I refuse to live in a civilization where we consciousness researchers have so obviously failed. I refuse to live in a civilization where we cannot tell consciousness from non-consciousness. Where we can offer no guidance for the future. Where we cannot explain the difference between actually experiencing things vs just processing them. In the short term, this is destabilizing and harmful. In the long term, it may be literally existentially dangerous.
by Erik Hoel, Intrinsic Perspective | Read more:
Image: Michael Pollan/Penguin Random House
Stratos Data Center Gets Initial Approval
The angry crowd’s jeers outweighed the voices of commissioners and guests, especially when they spoke about water rights and the county’s tax revenue prospects stemming from the project. Many in the audience asked to allow presenters to be heard, but shouts prevailed throughout the meeting.
No one was escorted out, but instead commissioners left the room and broadcast their quick vote on a screen available to the public.
“Cowards,” some in the audience yelled. Others repeatedly shouted “people over profit.”
The resolutions were required by state law to allow the Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, to move forward with the Stratos project. MIDA, an entity created by the Utah Legislature to advance economic development with a military focus, needed local consent since the data center would be located on private land without zoning regulations. [...]
The data center campus sponsored by Kevin O’Leary, a celebrity investor featured in the reality TV hit “Shark Tank,” is set to house its own natural gas plant to supply 9 gigawatts of energy to self-sustain the center, more than double what the entire state consumes in a year. That power generation will be isolated from the grid Utahns share, so it wouldn’t have any effect on utility rates, developers say.
Developers are also planning on using a closed-loop system to cool their equipment, using privately-owned water rights that are unsuitable for drinking or irrigation. But, without a definitive environmental study, the public remains skeptical. [...]
‘We can’t build anything in this country anymore’
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said on Thursday, during his monthly news conference broadcast by PBS Utah, that at the rate in which machine learning and artificial intelligence is changing, building data centers has become a national security issue.
“We have an obligation, I think every state has an obligation, when it comes to this space, to allow for these types of data centers to be built in their states,” Cox said. “We have to do this. We can’t just say ‘no’ and shut the doors and go home and let China win this, this technology race, so that just can’t be an option.”
Data centers can’t be installed everywhere, and the government should be careful with its resources, but this site may be able to fulfill environmental standards and won’t be someone’s nextdoor neighbor, Cox said.
“If you can’t put this here, then we can’t put them anywhere,” Cox said.
He also fiercely disputed that the approval process has been rushed.
“I’m so tired of our country taking years to get stuff done. It’s the dumbest thing ever. We think that taking time makes things better or safer, it absolutely does not,” he said. “You get a chance to give your feedback, and then decisions get made. That’s how we have to do stuff in this country and in this state.”
The state denies many requests because of feedback, but it can’t say no to everything, Cox said.
“We’ve let the people against virtually everything, destroy our country, destroy our industrial base, destroy our mining base, destroy our housing base, because we can’t build anything in this country anymore,” he said. “And those days are over. We’re done with that.”
Friday, May 8, 2026
AI Systems Are About to Start Building Themselves.
What does that mean?
I’m writing this post because when I look at all the publicly available information I reluctantly come to the view that there’s a likely chance (60%+) that no-human-involved AI R&D - an AI system powerful enough that it could plausibly autonomously build its own successor - happens by the end of 2028.
This is a big deal.
I don’t know how to wrap my head around it.
It’s a reluctant view because the implications are so large that I feel dwarfed by them, and I’m not sure society is ready for the kinds of changes implied by achieving automated AI R&D.
I now believe we are living in the time that AI research will be end-to-end automated. If that happens, we will cross a Rubicon into a nearly-impossible-to-forecast future. More on this later.
The purpose of this essay is to enumerate why I think the takeoff towards fully automated AI R&D is happening. I’ll discuss some of the consequences of this, but mostly I expect to spend the majority of this essay discussing the evidence for this belief, and will spend most of 2026 working through the implications.
In terms of timing, I don’t expect this to happen in 2026. But I think we could see an example of a “model end-to-end trains it successor” within a year or two - certainly a proof-of-concept at the non-frontier model stage, though frontier models may be harder (they’re a lot more expensive and are the product of a lot of humans working extremely hard).
My reasoning for this stems primarily from public information: papers on arXiv, bioRxiv, and NBER, as well as observing the products being deployed into the world by the frontier companies. From this data I arrive at the conclusion that all the pieces are in place for automating the production of today’s AI systems - the engineering components of AI development. And if scaling trends continue, we should prepare for models to get creative enough that they may be able to substitute for human researchers at having creative ideas for novel research paths, thus pushing forward the frontier themselves, as well as refining what is already known.
Upfront caveat
For much of this piece I’m going to try to assemble a mosaic view of AI progress out of things that have happened with many individual benchmarks. As anyone who studies benchmarks knows, all benchmarks have some idiosyncratic flaws. The important thing to me is the aggregate trend which emerges through looking at all of these datapoints together, and you should assume that I am aware of the drawbacks of each individual datapoint.
Now, let’s go through some of the evidence together.
The seven deadly curses of superhuman AI:
I’m writing this post because when I look at all the publicly available information I reluctantly come to the view that there’s a likely chance (60%+) that no-human-involved AI R&D - an AI system powerful enough that it could plausibly autonomously build its own successor - happens by the end of 2028.
This is a big deal.
I don’t know how to wrap my head around it.
It’s a reluctant view because the implications are so large that I feel dwarfed by them, and I’m not sure society is ready for the kinds of changes implied by achieving automated AI R&D.
I now believe we are living in the time that AI research will be end-to-end automated. If that happens, we will cross a Rubicon into a nearly-impossible-to-forecast future. More on this later.
The purpose of this essay is to enumerate why I think the takeoff towards fully automated AI R&D is happening. I’ll discuss some of the consequences of this, but mostly I expect to spend the majority of this essay discussing the evidence for this belief, and will spend most of 2026 working through the implications.
In terms of timing, I don’t expect this to happen in 2026. But I think we could see an example of a “model end-to-end trains it successor” within a year or two - certainly a proof-of-concept at the non-frontier model stage, though frontier models may be harder (they’re a lot more expensive and are the product of a lot of humans working extremely hard).
My reasoning for this stems primarily from public information: papers on arXiv, bioRxiv, and NBER, as well as observing the products being deployed into the world by the frontier companies. From this data I arrive at the conclusion that all the pieces are in place for automating the production of today’s AI systems - the engineering components of AI development. And if scaling trends continue, we should prepare for models to get creative enough that they may be able to substitute for human researchers at having creative ideas for novel research paths, thus pushing forward the frontier themselves, as well as refining what is already known.
Upfront caveat
For much of this piece I’m going to try to assemble a mosaic view of AI progress out of things that have happened with many individual benchmarks. As anyone who studies benchmarks knows, all benchmarks have some idiosyncratic flaws. The important thing to me is the aggregate trend which emerges through looking at all of these datapoints together, and you should assume that I am aware of the drawbacks of each individual datapoint.
Now, let’s go through some of the evidence together.
by Jack Clark, Import AI | Read more:
[ed. From what I can tell, most people in the AI field find this timeline entirely plausible (give or take a couple of years). Others expect, the next five years to be a time of great change and turbulence. See also:]
The seven deadly curses of superhuman AI:
Going For Broke
Now it’s over $31 trillion, bigger than our entire economy. Here’s what that means: If the federal government were to demand, for an entire year, that all workers hand over 100 percent of their wages, that all landlords hand over 100 percent of their rents, that all investors hand over 100 percent of their capital returns and that all corporations hand over 100 percent of their profits, then at the end of that nightmarish year, the government would still be in debt.
That’s not healthy. The United States hasn’t held this much debt since World War II. And it’s still growing, fast.
Yet neither voters nor politicians seem worried, my colleague Tony Romm writes. Both parties keep cutting taxes, even as aging Americans receive more money from Medicare and Social Security. Lawmakers keep spending more on the military. And the Treasury must make debt interest payments so huge that they exceed the annual cost of Medicare.
Our views on the debt, clearly, have changed. Why?[ed. Probably a couple of reasons: 1) the attitude that "I'll be gone soon and it'll be somebody else's problem" (so why not get while the getting's good); and 2) most people don't have a firm grasp on how the economy works or the ability to internalize long-term risks (climate change being another example). Maybe a third reason, too: that AI will fix everything. From the story by Tony Romm referenced above:]
***
The root of the problem is well-documented and widely known. U.S. debt has soared in recent years because of a mismatch between federal spending and tax revenue, one complicated by a rapidly aging population, which has driven up costs across government.For economists, the fear is that these conditions are inching the United States toward a fiscal crisis, one in which its debt is so great that the country can’t easily afford to pay the rising interest on it. But their warnings have long gone unheeded in Washington, calcifying the strains on the government’s balance sheet in ways that President Trump’s agenda is expected to exacerbate.
Despite winning a congressional majority, Republicans have cut little in spending over the past year. With the few savings they did achieve, they put that money toward offsetting a fraction of the cost of Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, which are still expected to add more than $4 trillion to the debt in the coming years.
***
[ed. See also: Ray Dalio's interview with Ross Douthat posted here yesterday.]
The Life and Times of an American Tween
Every Wednesday, at exactly 2:15 P.M., the electronic bell at San Francisco’s A. P. Giannini Middle School sounds with a dull, droning buzz, and hundreds of students stream from the building. They wear big pants and bucket hats, cropped tanks and cargo jeans, Athleta sets and Air Force 1s. They carry ergonomically unsound backpacks dripping with bag charms and key chains: athletic affiliations, memorabilia, miniature stuffies. They pull thick socks up over their leggings; fix hydrocolloid stickers, star-shaped and cutesy, atop angry, interloping zits. Their lip tint is red and thickly applied. Their water bottles are status symbols. Their press-ons are shellacked and combat-ready. There are boys, too, small and gangly. They move in packs, magnifying their bulk like synchronized minnows. They look dressed by their mothers. On early-dismissal days, the afternoon yawns with possibility. The students dash to the bus or wander the nearby commercial drag, which has little going for it save the hardware store, where there is candy. They exchange their allowance for matcha ice cream at Polly Ann; gobble Domino’s to no intestinal detriment. They buy boba and punt each other with tapioca bullets. They flock to Starbucks for magenta Cannon Ball Drinks, creamy Pink Drinks, sludgy Dubai Chocolate Mochas. They chug the unchuggable. Twelve blocks to the west, the Pacific Ocean glitters and threatens, waves dragging out in the wind.
On a Wednesday afternoon, I was joined outside A.P.G. by Mira, a sixth grader with an open, angelic face and an ebullient presence. It is often chilly and overcast in the Outer Sunset, but this was a warm and clear day, and Mira, who is interested in matters of fashion, wore low-slung cargo sweatpants and a white tube top. Her hair, which is long, dark, and curly, had recently been treated to a bathroom Manic Panic job, and the front strands were dyed a light peach. She smoothed a strand as one might the tail of a cat. Mira is good company: frank, funny, and self-deprecating in a way that suggests confidence rather than its lack. At four feet eight, she is small for her age, but manages to occupy space laterally. She moves with a noodle elasticity, and is prone to breaking into dance moves while going about her business: a full-body wave from wrist to wrist, an entire sequence from a Katseye music video. The first time we met, we were mid-conversation when she inexplicably dropped into a side split, grabbed her ankles, and rolled backward, placing her toes on the floor behind her head. “At the beginning of the year, I couldn’t do an aerial”—a hands-free cartwheel—“and I can kind of do one now,” she told me, harrowingly assuming the starting position.
Mira is twelve years old and lives in the Avenues, San Francisco’s foggy western neighborhoods, with her mother, Michalle, who is a nurse practitioner, her father, Patrick, who is a full-time parent, and her sibling, Dylan, who is nine. (Last year, Dylan requested to use they/them pronouns, which the family mostly remembers to honor.) Like most kids her age, Mira exists in the murky, thrilling bardo between childhood and maturity. She is a gracious host—quick to offer guests a Spindrift—who totes a lunchbox adorned with a sticker of a unicorn. She is learning to cook, mostly quesadillas, but if she could she would live on Cheetos, boba, Trü Früs, and Coke. She razzes her parents in a way that makes them laugh, but no longer tells them everything. Mira’s first middle-school dance was coming up, and there was discussion among her friends about dresses and hair styles. I was excited to see which of her dance moves would make an appearance.
For years, Mira has been agitating for more independence. Last August, she began commuting to and from school alone, hurtling around the edge of the continent on the public bus. Since fifth grade, she has worn a silver Apple Watch, a glorified tracking device, which she pushes to the outer limits of usability. She is a member of several large group chats, including one called “4th Period Baddies,” and regularly consults Siri, summoning facts and images from the ether. (“Photos of hazel eyes.” “What does A.S.M.R. stand for?”) Still, the watch is no phone. A phone would be much cooler; would be, perhaps, the coolest thing. An Apple Watch was a bridge from childhood to adulthood. A phone would be a portal.
That Wednesday, Mira went to Polly Ann with her friends Kaitlyn and Sloane. At the counter, the girls realized no one had brought money. They began plumbing their wallets—pink, pleather, flat—for stray coins. Sloane called her mother on her Apple Watch and, in a mix of English and Mandarin, requested a transfusion of Apple Cash. She hung up just as Mira and Kaitlyn discovered, miraculously, that if they pooled their assets they could afford to split something. “Never mind we found money exclamation point,” Sloane said into her watch.
“Sloane, no!” Mira said. “We were going to get money!” Giggling, the girls ordered a pint of watermelon ice cream, requested three spoons, and dropped their last dime into the tip jar. They headed to a playground, a regular hangout spot for their peers, and settled onto a boulder. Smaller children from a nearby elementary school were availing themselves of climbers, slides, and beams. But by the boulder the real action was social and discursive. Two sixth-grade boys appeared, one tall and floppy-haired, the other wiry and blond. “Mira, I have a question for you,” the floppy-haired boy said. “Are you straight?” Mira looked at him, her face grave and blank. “No, no, not for me, for one of my friends,” he said, putting his hands out in front of his body, as if to distance himself from any association with crushing. Mira wanted to know who had dispatched him, but the boy wandered off to a playground structure, singing Jimmy Eat World to himself. [...]
The literature on adolescence marks middle school as a turning point, a time when kids begin to pull away from their parents, discard childish pursuits, and pursue, full thrust, the exhausting project of individuation. It is a period of intense, hormonally driven emotional flux. Self-consciousness sets in. The adult world is studied and emulated in a manner that suggests praxis but no theory. There is an aspect of camp to it all: a kind of LARP or drag, as young people transition from play-acting adulthood to inhabiting it. Actual adults are ancillary. Tweens and teens look to each other for clarity and guidance on how to behave and how to feel, all the while gambling with each other’s social confidence and self-esteem. It is natural, and it is psychotic.
The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described the period between twelve and eighteen as one of essential identity formation: a time of trying on personas and roles. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Erikson was sensitive to the ways that society could shape personality, but no one could have anticipated the explosion of potential identities, interests, aesthetics, subcultures, and life styles that children would be exposed to by globalization and, later, the internet: now there are clean girls, tomato girls, vanilla girls, office sirens, femboys, e-boys, looksmaxxers; one can be avant basic, old money, new money, quiet luxury, cottagecore, goblincore, fairycore. Adolescent anxiety and depression have been on the rise for years, and there is abundant public debate about why: economic inequality, strained family ties, sleep deprivation, smartphones. Childhood has never been easy, but these days the on-ramp to adulthood seems somehow shorter and more perilous.
by Anna Wiener, New Yorker | Read more:
Mira is twelve years old and lives in the Avenues, San Francisco’s foggy western neighborhoods, with her mother, Michalle, who is a nurse practitioner, her father, Patrick, who is a full-time parent, and her sibling, Dylan, who is nine. (Last year, Dylan requested to use they/them pronouns, which the family mostly remembers to honor.) Like most kids her age, Mira exists in the murky, thrilling bardo between childhood and maturity. She is a gracious host—quick to offer guests a Spindrift—who totes a lunchbox adorned with a sticker of a unicorn. She is learning to cook, mostly quesadillas, but if she could she would live on Cheetos, boba, Trü Früs, and Coke. She razzes her parents in a way that makes them laugh, but no longer tells them everything. Mira’s first middle-school dance was coming up, and there was discussion among her friends about dresses and hair styles. I was excited to see which of her dance moves would make an appearance.
For years, Mira has been agitating for more independence. Last August, she began commuting to and from school alone, hurtling around the edge of the continent on the public bus. Since fifth grade, she has worn a silver Apple Watch, a glorified tracking device, which she pushes to the outer limits of usability. She is a member of several large group chats, including one called “4th Period Baddies,” and regularly consults Siri, summoning facts and images from the ether. (“Photos of hazel eyes.” “What does A.S.M.R. stand for?”) Still, the watch is no phone. A phone would be much cooler; would be, perhaps, the coolest thing. An Apple Watch was a bridge from childhood to adulthood. A phone would be a portal.
That Wednesday, Mira went to Polly Ann with her friends Kaitlyn and Sloane. At the counter, the girls realized no one had brought money. They began plumbing their wallets—pink, pleather, flat—for stray coins. Sloane called her mother on her Apple Watch and, in a mix of English and Mandarin, requested a transfusion of Apple Cash. She hung up just as Mira and Kaitlyn discovered, miraculously, that if they pooled their assets they could afford to split something. “Never mind we found money exclamation point,” Sloane said into her watch.
“Sloane, no!” Mira said. “We were going to get money!” Giggling, the girls ordered a pint of watermelon ice cream, requested three spoons, and dropped their last dime into the tip jar. They headed to a playground, a regular hangout spot for their peers, and settled onto a boulder. Smaller children from a nearby elementary school were availing themselves of climbers, slides, and beams. But by the boulder the real action was social and discursive. Two sixth-grade boys appeared, one tall and floppy-haired, the other wiry and blond. “Mira, I have a question for you,” the floppy-haired boy said. “Are you straight?” Mira looked at him, her face grave and blank. “No, no, not for me, for one of my friends,” he said, putting his hands out in front of his body, as if to distance himself from any association with crushing. Mira wanted to know who had dispatched him, but the boy wandered off to a playground structure, singing Jimmy Eat World to himself. [...]
The literature on adolescence marks middle school as a turning point, a time when kids begin to pull away from their parents, discard childish pursuits, and pursue, full thrust, the exhausting project of individuation. It is a period of intense, hormonally driven emotional flux. Self-consciousness sets in. The adult world is studied and emulated in a manner that suggests praxis but no theory. There is an aspect of camp to it all: a kind of LARP or drag, as young people transition from play-acting adulthood to inhabiting it. Actual adults are ancillary. Tweens and teens look to each other for clarity and guidance on how to behave and how to feel, all the while gambling with each other’s social confidence and self-esteem. It is natural, and it is psychotic.
The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described the period between twelve and eighteen as one of essential identity formation: a time of trying on personas and roles. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Erikson was sensitive to the ways that society could shape personality, but no one could have anticipated the explosion of potential identities, interests, aesthetics, subcultures, and life styles that children would be exposed to by globalization and, later, the internet: now there are clean girls, tomato girls, vanilla girls, office sirens, femboys, e-boys, looksmaxxers; one can be avant basic, old money, new money, quiet luxury, cottagecore, goblincore, fairycore. Adolescent anxiety and depression have been on the rise for years, and there is abundant public debate about why: economic inequality, strained family ties, sleep deprivation, smartphones. Childhood has never been easy, but these days the on-ramp to adulthood seems somehow shorter and more perilous.
by Anna Wiener, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ok Causland
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