The Mastermind

He built Seahawks Super Bowl winners from scratch — twice: What’s John Schneider’s secret?

The timing wasn’t ideal, but Marshawn Lynch insisted.

In the aftermath of the 2015 NFC title game, which sent the Seattle Seahawks back to the Super Bowl after a thrilling come-from-behind victory over the Green Bay Packers, NFL agent Doug Hendrickson celebrated at the home of Lynch, Hendrickson’s client and the Seahawks’ mercurial star running back.

During the festivities, Lynch got serious, then gave Hendrickson a mandate: Negotiate a new contract with Seattle. Immediately.

That was a little complicated. Lynch held out ahead of the season in an effort to force a new deal with Seattle before agreeing to a compromise that converted some incentives into guarantees. Conversations between the two sides had been ongoing since then, but nothing was imminent.

Hendrickson left Lynch’s house around midnight and headed to a victory party hosted by Seahawks general manager John Schneider, the man he’d been sparring with over Lynch’s deal. All seemed forgotten when the agent arrived at the GM’s house. The pair hung out, shared drinks and enjoyed the night, but before leaving, Hendrickson broached the topic of a contract extension for Lynch … preferably before Super Bowl 49.

The good vibes vanished. Schneider was incredulous.

“He looked like he was going to kill me,” Hendrickson said.

They went back and forth, hurling profanities into the night until they were the last ones left. No deal was reached. By then, Hendrickson was having some trouble getting a ride. He needed a place to crash for the night. So he slept on Schneider’s couch.

When Hendrickson woke up, there was his unexpected host. Hours after a heated debate that at times sounded as if they might come to blows, the pair hugged it out, apologized and agreed to hammer out an extension. Eventually.

The good vibes were back.

“You need a ride home?” Schneider asked.

Schneider is a small-town Midwesterner whose entry into the NFL began with cold calling the GM of his hometown Green Bay Packers after some “courage beers” and advice from friends in 1992. More than three decades later, he’s the top architect in America’s most popular sport.

Some of Schneider’s friends refer to him as “relationship-based.” Dave Wyman, the co-host of Schneider’s local radio show, describes him as “openly curious” and cites that as the reason he will never turn down an invite to grab a beer.

“I don’t even care if we talk about football,” said Wyman, a former linebacker who played six of his nine NFL seasons with the Seahawks. “It’s really interesting to see how his mind works, but more than anything he’s just like your best buddy.”

Schneider’s adversaries don’t turn him down, either. Some of the most contentious negotiations in his 17 years running the Seahawks came via Mark Rodgers, the former agent for quarterback Russell Wilson. One day, during the middle of Wilson’s 10-year run with the franchise, Schneider invited Rodgers to Dino’s Pub, the dive bar near team headquarters. That rainy afternoon was unlike any of their many spirited debates over guaranteed money, no-tag clauses, franchise tags or trade destinations.

“We didn’t talk about football a lick,” Rodgers recalled. “We just talked about life. He wanted to know a little bit more about me, and I enjoyed getting to know a bit more of him.”

With the Seahawks’ win over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 60, Schneider, 55, became the first NFL GM to secure multiple championships with the same franchise despite zero carryover between the rosters or coaching staffs. Since Schneider was hired in January 2010, Seattle has the league’s fifth-highest win percentage, three conference titles and two Super Bowl wins. In that time, he has become someone other Super Bowl-winning GMs admire, players appreciate, agents respect — and the guy everyone in the league wants to grab a beer with.

Knowing Schneider, they probably have.

“He manages to be one of the smartest minds in the league, but he’s also the guy that’s most likely to convince you that one more round is a great idea,” said Tampa Buccaneers GM Jason Licht.

Schneider’s longevity stems from an impeccable scouting eye and the premium he puts on the people part of the business. Some of the key moves that led to Seattle lifting the Lombardi Trophy — including the hiring of head coach Mike Macdonald — were products of Schneider’s strong relationships with his peers. In a hypercompetitive NFL landscape, his relationship-based approach to the job is a unique and underrated part of his success and one of the defining elements of the team’s culture.

“We’re all under intense pressure, stress to perform every single day, and to be able to have someone like John that you can lean on — that you trust like that, you can talk to, can help you work through things — it just goes a long way,” said former Tennessee Titans president of football operations Chad Brinker. “It’s rare. It’s not like that all around the league. John is different. He is. And that’s why he’s been in that chair 17 years.” [...]

He is the last man standing from what was once the league’s best Big Three, with Schneider at GM, Pete Carroll at head coach and Russell Wilson at quarterback. Schneider’s success independent of Carroll and Wilson has buoyed his case to join mentor Ron Wolf in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“He’s a gold-jacket GM,” Brinker said. “That’s the way we view him.”

by Michael-Shawn Dugar, The Athletic | Read more:
Images: Steph Chambers; Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

I, Pencil

I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.

Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.

You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, as a wise man observed, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that's too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U. S. A. each year.

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye—there’s some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!

The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.

Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!

Don’t overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation from California to Wilkes-Barre!

Complicated Machinery

Once in the pencil factory—$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine—each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop—a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich.

My "lead" itself—it contains no lead at all—is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth—and the harbor pilots.

The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder—cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.

My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all of the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involves the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!

Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?

My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.

Then there's my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as "the plug," the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadium sulfide.

Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?

No One Knows

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.

Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.

There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.

by Leonard E. Read, Wikisource |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Now with AI, the Invisible Hand may eventually kill us all.]

***

... the incentives which free markets sometimes create for self-interested people to accidentally act in the public interest, even when this is not something they intended.

Whenever there are "externalities"—where the actions of an individual have impacts on others for which they do not pay, or for which they are not compensated—markets will not work well. Some of the important instances have long understood environmental externalities. Markets, by themselves, produce too much pollution. Markets, by themselves, also produce too little basic research. (The government was responsible for financing most of the important scientific breakthroughs, including the internet and the first telegraph line, and many bio-tech advances.) But recent research has shown that these externalities are pervasive, whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect risk markets—that is always. Government plays an important role in banking and securities regulation, and a host of other areas: some regulation is required to make markets work. Government is needed, almost all would agree, at a minimum to enforce contracts and property rights. ~ Joseph E. Stiglitz

What's In a Name?

A ‘Morally Binding’ White House Accord on AI Safety

The leaders in AI were invited to the White House. We left with a White House agreement that is nonzero Actual Progress rather than a step backwards.

The key to success, in many situations, is to call the whole operation something else. [...]

Concretely, say we are on a bus called ‘the economy and AI progress and beating China’ or whatever that will blow up if we go below 50 miles an hour, but also we are currently hitting the gas so fast we are now going 100 miles an hour on pace for 200+. Both sides can get what they want at the same time. [...]

Artificial Intelligence

The other supposed agreement was a distinct executive order to change the name of AI to [AI], which Trump claims the lab leaders signed off on. I’m sorry I have this tick, I try to type [artificial intelligence] and instead I end up with brackets.

Andrew Curran: President Trump ‘We’re going to be signing a document today at about five o’clock, renaming Artificial Intelligence, because it’s not artificial, we all agree on that, and we’re going to be renaming it [Artificial Intelligence]. Officially renaming it.’

I am very curious if Trump plans to now get mad every time Dario or Altman or Musk says the words ‘artificial intelligence.’

Trump is also claiming he is going to start talking about ‘Artificial News’ to describe the media, which is about the time I realized I kept typing the brackets. Shall we say.

So why would Trump go this hard on something like this?

The obvious explanation is this is Vintage Trump. He’s all about renaming things, and finding nicknames, and invoking vibes. He has a been a world class vibe invoker, nicknamer and term associator, especially in the 2016 election. If you think he chose the most annoying possible name due to namespace clashes, it’s probably because he was optimizing for that on some level. There is method to the madness.

You can also see it as a ‘bend the knee’ moment, the way various regimes and cultures often insist people affirm absurdist things. If you can get the makers of AI to start calling it [AI] instead, in a sense you own them. They have shown loyalty. And this is a way of weeding out those who won’t play along. Will Dario say AI or [AI]?

Money, Dear Boy

There is also an alternative explanation that is dumb and corrupt even for 2026, that has been put forward by Adam Cochran. As additional suggestive evidence, two of the three alternative options for the renaming that were in Trump’s initial poll, and both of the final two after he restarted it under false pretenses, started with S.

As counterpoints, the term ‘superintelligence’ was already being used as marketing by Meta and talked about by others, so these investments were smart anyway, and the timing would mean that this was a plan months in the making, which would not be Trump’s style, and would be in conflict with this looking strongly like a reaction to the HuggingFace incident and Pacing the Frontier.

Is it possible that this is part of the motivation for the renaming drive? Of course, yes, we absolutely live in a timeline roughly this dumb.

My strong presumption, however, is that primary causation runs the other way. Any insider trading is mostly a free action given plans that exist for other reasons, rather than a driving force causing the changes. I don’t like it, but I am not that mad about it.

Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth): SCOOP: Trump’s “Super Intelligence” Scandal:

I believe Trump’s “SI” Executive Order was ANOTHER criminal plot to enrich the Trump family. Insiders seem to have profited MILLIONS off of .si domain names before his Truth Social posts.

It’s no surprise that .AI domain names are a hot commodity and almost all taken by squatters. But what wasn’t?

.si domain names. .si is the domain extension of Slovenia (coincidentally where Melania and Barron Trump are both citizens of)

On September 19th Trump made a random Truth Social post about renaming “Artificial Intelligence” to “Super Intelligence” without any clear reason.

This set off a flurry of people buying and registering .si names related to AI. But it wasn’t the first time… The .si registry has around 55/day registrations in 2023-2025, but in 2026 the numbers started to pick up. On June 24th they saw more than 400 in a single day.

This volume spiked with more than ***7000*** new domains registered in July. And a sudden flurry of buying .si domains in the aftermarket. AI related .si names started going for tens of thousands of dollars.

… Since Trump’s announcement .si domain have seen *MILLIONS* of dollars in turn over. Much of it going to domains that were registered in the last 60 days before the announcement.

TL;DR:
-Trump made the SI executive order to try and force companies to brand as “SI” instead of “AI”
-In the past 60 days insiders bought thousands of .si domain names
-They’ve profited hundreds of millions of dollars so far.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV |  Read more:

Image: Seating chart, uncredited

[ed. See also: Trump’s Crazy AI Rebrand Was a Loyalty Test for Tech Execs—and It Worked (Wired):]

***

One can’t help but see this as the ultimate presidential flex—for all the executives’ trillions of dollars and all their actual intelligence, the alpha in the room was the guy with the orange skin. Changing a name might seem like a minor matter compared to the enormity of constraining a potentially catastrophic technology. But to this crowd, artificial intelligence is much more than a bunch of letters strung together. It’s their foundation. Their identity. When they were kids reading science fiction books under the covers, the term ignited their imaginations. They built or transformed their companies in service of AI, and it's just about all they’ve talked about for the past four years.

Yet when the president used his lunch soiree to win their approval for his wacky idea to undo 70 years of history, apparently not a single person in the room expressed an objection. Not Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Greg Brockman, Alex Karp, or Elon Musk.

Jacob Weisberg, author of the recent book Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, views the episode as a classic Trump loyalty test, meant to assess if otherwise powerful people will demean themselves to curry the president’s favor and avoid his wrath. If you pass the loyalty test, you fail the backbone test. “The only way to resist this kind of thing is by acting collectively,” says Weisberg. “If all of those guys had just said, ‘We'll agree to the terms of the self-regulation, but we don't accept [the name change], what would he have done?” [...]

My bet is that they will do the minimum to avoid presidential ire while trying to run out the clock until the next administration puts this bizarre idea out of its misery. It’s been suggested that the executives actually welcome a rebranding of what has become a toxic term. I’m skeptical of that, especially since the president’s mandated replacement, “super intelligence,” is a hell of a lot scarier than the original term.

From a scientific perspective the change also makes no sense. No less an expert than Nick Bostrom, the philosopher who popularized the term superintelligence in an eponymous book, seems baffled by the idea. Superintelligence, he explained to me in an email, “refers specifically to systems that greatly surpass all the best human brains. ‘AI’ has referred to a much broader category of systems, which includes, for example, email spam filters, spell checkers, simple navigation systems, early LLMs, and the chess engines of the ’70s that didn’t yet match the best human chess players. It seems awkward to refer to these as ‘superintelligent.’”

Firefox ReDesign

Interview: Firefox’s chief on why he hopes a redesign will help win users from Chrome.

Today, the Firefox 157 update will roll out a redesign of the web browser across desktop and mobile platforms. The team that made it hopes it will help expand the browser’s audience beyond privacy-conscious techies and open-web or open source advocates to a broader audience who might simply pick the browser because they prefer its user experience over competitors like Chrome, Edge, and Safari.

In advance of the redesign’s launch, I spent half an hour chatting with Mozilla’s head of Firefox, Ajit Varma, about Firefox’s current market position and product strategy, and what barriers or opportunities there are for gaining ground in a Chromium-dominated landscape.

Firefox’s interface has recently felt more conservative than niche browsers. And when I asked Paddy Harrington, a senior analyst at Forrester who covers this space, what Firefox’s main barrier to adoption is, he was frank.

“The biggest is they’re not Chrome,” he replied. “That sounds simplistic, but it’s the clear truth. Safari and Edge are built into the leading operating systems in business and consumer markets, yet people still download and deploy Chrome.”

That said, for many of the people who have chosen to use Firefox, “it’s not Chrome” is much of the appeal. Google-led Chromium dominates the web. It doesn’t just power Google’s own Chrome browser (which has majority market share by a wide margin), it powers most of the rest of the competition, too, including Microsoft Edge.

Firefox, which is built on the open source Gecko, serves as a Chromium-free alternative and has become one of the go-to choices for users who don’t want to contribute to one company’s dominance of the open web—though there is even tension there, and a deal to offer Google search as Firefox’s default provides Mozilla with the majority of its revenue. For now, Firefox seeks independence for the web while remaining financially dependent on its dominant competitor.

But to expand beyond the relatively small market share it now has, Firefox has to inspire users to actively select it over incumbents by providing a better browsing experience; most people don’t care whether Chromium dominates, and most have never heard of Gecko.

In our conversation, Varma expressed hope and ambition that these modernizations will help more users choose Firefox for its merits as a product. We also discussed the Firefox team’s competing priorities, its development resources, AI features and tooling, the general browser market, and more.

A conversation with Ajit Varma

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ars Technica: It’s nice to see a bit of modernization of the design of Firefox. But what problems does this redesign solve? How does it advance browser choice and the open web beyond just being a browser that’s a little more appealing and a little easier to use?

Ajit Varma: Yeah, I think there’s been a lot of questions around, “What are we doing this at the cost of?” Like should we be focused on performance? Should we be focused on compatibility?

We are trying to do all of the above and work faster, and I think that’s one of the challenges that Firefox had in the past, was there was slow decision-making. There was a lot of debate, and in the last like year and a half, we’ve actually been trying to say, can we get a lot more velocity, and compete? And part of this is made possible by AI tools, to be honest with you. We are able to do a lot more.

People want to feel like they’re in a modern browser—things that match the design language of the operating system. So that’s part of it. We are bringing back compact mode as well… and we also have launched more customization options.

There’s a lot of functionality that’s been built to give all the modern productivity things that people wanted, and those are all very utilitarian, but it’s also the emotional connection, and do people feel like it’s a browser that feels modern as well.

by Samuel Axon, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Mozilla

[ed. I'd use Firefox exclusively if it didn't conflict in small ways with a couple programs I use (like this one, Blogger).]

Meta's New AI Muse is About to Make the Internet More Annoying

Someday we'll redesign the internet for tools like this. Until then, you're in for a wild ride.

Last week, my finger hovered over the download button for Meta's new AI Muse. I felt a little bit scared of my phone.

Muse wants to help. It's an AI agent, a tool that goes out into the world for unsupervised tasks. Using its own web browser, Muse can cancel your gym membership, haggle with customer service people, buy groceries, invite friends to parties, you name it. Soon it will make phone calls.

It's the first free, full-featured agent from a big company. Millions downloaded Muse in its opening weeks, and OpenAI just announced its own new agent. More are coming. It's the dawn of a new chapter for the web. What will it be like?

According to experts I interviewed, the internet is about to get more frustrating. These agents may cause a cascading chain of problems that shake the foundations of digital infrastructure. Chances are good that you're about to live through an era of online chaos.

The internet was built for humans with limited time and patience. AIs don't have those restraints. You'll probably have to fight with robots over concert tickets and booking appointments. Small businesses could drown in machine-made pestering. AIs don't look at ads, and websites that rely on them are already crumbling. You'll be buried in endless loops of proving you're human. And if you use these AI tools, some may betray you.

Eventually, we'll rebuild the internet for this new reality. Perhaps that world will be better. Until then, things may get ugly.

"Imagine there are no rules of the road. And you release billions of cars – the AI agents – and you just let them drive through playgrounds, hitting kids. That's where we are," says Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US who studies AI agents. "It's a pivotal moment."

To access the road, Muse arguably asks for more trust and sensitive information than any product in the history of Mark Zuckerberg's empire. When you open it, the cutesy avatar asks for a name. Then it asks for total control of your Gmail, calendar and entire computer if you're on a Mac.

There, staring at the download button, I felt a moment of panic. People begged me to say no. "I wouldn't use it," says Patrick Wardle, co-founder of Objective-See, a US nonprofit security foundation that uncovered serious flaws in the Muse app. "Personally, I would tell you to uninstall it altogether."

Despite the warning, I need to see what Muse users are up against. So I named my AI "Bob", gave it the keys to my life, and stepped into the future. [...]

Things fall apart

Muse is useful. Over the course of a week, I had it reach out to a seller on Facebook Marketplace with questions. The AI ordered the dental floss I like. It negotiated a $31 (£23) discount on a software subscription.

Now picture millions or billions of agents doing this all simultaneously, performing multiple tasks that might take weeks for a human to get to.

"What happens if bots send 600 inquiries to a website a day, when normal humans might only send two?" says Shroeder. "Businesses and individuals are going to have a lot to deal with."

AI is already decimating online business. Google and chatbots now answer questions directly. As a result, people are visiting fewer websites. Robots don't click on ads or buy subscriptions, and it's causing an extinction event for companies across the web. Agents will supercharge this problem.

Meanwhile, one analysis found web traffic from bots spiked 124% in the year to June 2026. Some websites and services are crumbling because they aren't built for that digital load.

Meta's spokesperson says Muse works to complete your tasks while respecting the interests of websites.

Will the robots betray you?

There are also personal risks. "If you're empowering an agent to make things like purchasing decisions, or choices about taste and preferences, you're opening yourself up to being exploited," says Shroeder.

If Muse plans your holiday trip, Shroeder says there's no way to know if it got you the best deal, or if it chose flights and hotels that benefit Meta's business partners. If you ask for music recommendations, will they be based on your taste, or will you hear about artists who inked deals with the social media company?

Meta's spokesperson says Muse's built-in protections and user controls put people "absolutely in charge" of it, and Muse "behaves like a personal assistant acting for a single person" that follows ethical guidelines to protect users.

However, Shroeder says she's examined Muse's terms of service, and there's no guarantee the app will act in your favour. {...]

Hacks and love letters

Stop for a moment and consider your email inbox.

I've had the same Gmail address for 21 years. It's my login for hundreds of accounts. It holds medical test results, contracts and legal documents, conversations with family and endless receipts and financial information.

My inbox even has love letters an ex-girlfriend sent, from an era when email (briefly) felt suitable for romance. (I got her permission before handing it to Muse.)

More than any other digital service, my email is a window into my brain. Now Meta has it. If that's not enough, Muse also suggested I give it my bank accounts. No thanks. I didn't let the AI run wild on my computer hard drive, either.

Meta makes some explicit promises about privacy. The company says it won't connect any of the data Muse collects to its advertising systems. Special systems are supposed to prevent the AI from seeing passwords or payment methods. And when you plug it into Gmail, the AI asks if you want it to scan the whole inbox, or just read messages related to specific tasks.

However, Meta uses your Muse data to train new AI models by default. Shroeder says it's impossible to remove data built into an AI model, and AIs can sometimes be tricked to reveal their training data. Meta says your data is "sanitised" to remove personally identifiable information before it's used for training, and you can opt-out of AI training with a setting.

But given Meta's history of privacy problems, should you trust what it's telling you now?

by Thomas Germain, BBC | Read more:

Image: BBC/Serenity Strull/Getty Images
[ed. I wouldn't trust Zuckerberg with a box of matches. One thing is clear though: it'll definitely be a  more dog eat dog world (if we survive) once AI becomes more widely adopted by the public. Think Ebay auctions and armies of bots placing bids up to the last micro-second - for everything.]

"Sardinemaxxing"

I Surrendered All My Decisions and Desires. All It Took Was Many, Many Tins of Fish (NYT).

***

"... today, tinned fish is as much a sensible grocery item as it is a status symbol, a viral “hot girl food,” a borderline luxury good. I think it would probably take a long time to explain... why you can buy limited-edition tinned fish at concerts and why there is coveted merch for sale about tinned fish and why a store exists in New York City called the Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine where a single-serving tin of said fantastic sardine can cost $44. [...]

Because $44 feels like a small price to pay for a sociological education, I spent some weeks recently sampling as much of this genre as I could. I ate not just sardines but also smoked salmon marinated in chili oil, small-batch mussels in sweet pepper and garlic, various types of trout, anchovies and an enormous amount of t*** — so much t*** that I refuse to look at the word anymore and you cannot make me spell it out — and what I learned is that most of it tastes kind of just … OK?

... But as I “made dinner” after work every night, i.e. nibbled t*** straight out of the package like a raccoon (tinned-fish cookbooks do exist, but if you are someone who enjoys defaulting to the lowest common denominator of effort available, you, too, might be a secret raccoon), a different idea occurred to me.

by Amy X. Wang, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Hannah Whitaker for The New York Times

The Creative Class is Being Decimated. Why?

America is Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs in Media, Film & the Arts. How Much is AI to Blame?

America has lost more than 200k jobs in “creative” industries over the last four years, with roughly 50k lost within the last year alone. That makes for one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern US history, with similar job loss intensity and duration occurring only during the major economic recessions of 2001 and 2008. Yet there’s no generalized recession today—instead, this period of job loss coincides with the rise of AI systems that can compose wholesale novels, photorealistic images, soundalike music, and practically every other form of digital art, en masse and at extremely low costs. Is this the fall of the Creative Class?

Proving the exact amount of AI-driven job loss in the arts is extremely difficult. Media firms are decidedly coy about their AI use, both to protect against public backlash and, more financially important, to preserve the legal basis for their copyrights. The effects of AI are also hard to disentangle from other factors currently affecting arts businesses, like consolidation in Hollywood, offshoring of content production, or the continued displacement of traditional media providers in favor of social media creators. Yet perhaps the clearest evidence of AI’s influence is just that all subsectors of the digital arts industry are losing jobs, while in-person entertainment is still growing at a healthy pace.

Some of those digital job losses are just a continuation of prior trends, like in the publishing industry where technological change has been continually grinding away newspaper and magazine jobs for decades. Yet for sectors like live broadcasting, streaming, or graphic design, recent experience is an unusual downturn compared to the tranquility of years prior. Then there’s the worst-hit sector, movie & sound recording, which has been bleeding jobs at a nearly unprecedented pace over the last three years.

Hollywood has never seen a stretch as bad as the last four years, with the movie & TV industry losing more than 100k jobs, nearly one-third of the sector’s total. At the depths touched this summer, total employment was lower than at any point since the 2008 recession and approaching the lowest point in 30 years. The streaming era has proven an extremely difficult transition, with traditional films and TV shows losing watch time to user-generated and increasingly AI-assisted or AI-generated content flows.

Overall, nearly half the media job losses of the last four years have been concentrated in the movie & sound recording sector that includes Hollywood. Written publishing has been the next-largest source of job loss, with employment down by more than 70k over the same time frame. Yet the job losses have by no means been contained to any particular part of media; instead they’ve hit nearly every subsector at some point. Nor do they show any sign of abating, with losses consistently hovering at around 50k per year and even accelerating in recent months. Will further AI development continue displacing workers in creative industries?

Can the Arts Business Model Survive?

To understand what could happen to the business of art amidst the rise of AI, it’s important to understand what did happen to it during the first digital transition, the rise of the internet.

It was the turn of the millennium, and Metallica had a problem. Demos of their upcoming, unreleased tracks were bouncing around radio and the internet, originally leaked onto a new internet file-sharing website called Napster. There they found thousands of files shared amongst hundreds of thousands of users, many of which were direct rips of albums that sold for $15 being offered for free. The most anticipated albums were often leaked online even before they were on store shelves. Metallica sued Napster for copyright infringement, and they were soon joined by separate suits from other prominent artists and eventually the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Much of the general public was understandably unsympathetic to Metallica, perceived as a bunch of already-successful millionaires trying to bilk even more money from listeners, and were even less sympathetic towards the RIAA, perceived as scurrilous middlemen who take from artists and fans alike. But the two of them easily won their lawsuit, forcing Napster into bankruptcy. Yet Metallica may have been right on the law but were on the wrong side of technology; the RIAA had won the battle but was losing the war.

The modern internet made file-sharing extremely easy, and no matter how much whac-a-mole companies played, they could not possibly catch every illegal upload. The perennial threat of piracy undermined their copyright and limited their ability to charge for music. Eventually, the value of individual songs fell to the point that companies like Spotify and Apple Music could swoop in to acquire massive catalogues, consolidate them, and charge a comparatively trivial fee for access. For what a single Metallica album would have cost in 2000, you can now get a month’s worth of unlimited access to nearly all human-made music.

The music industry has never returned to the heyday paydays of the peak CD era—even without adjusting for inflation, streaming revenue pales in comparison to ‘90s physical media sales. This was a massive boon to consumers, but it was also a squeeze on musicians that forced them to fundamentally change their business model over time. Instead of just selling records to earn money directly, music itself increasingly became a loss-leading advertisement for the live concerts (and merch) that provided a growing share of artists’ income. Tours got longer, venues got bigger, ticket prices skyrocketed, and musicians frequently took on roles closer to public influencers than isolated artistes. Were it not for rising concert sales, the business model of music would have completely collapsed, and the income going to musicians would have cratered.

Of course, there were still significant downsides to the transition into the streaming era. Bands (especially smaller ones) complain about the unending pressure to always be on tour. Musicians whose content was suited to home listening lost out to those more suited to giant festivals. Even accounting for concert revenues, musicians made less money than before. Yet musicians fared better than many areas of entertainment subsectors because there was a live component to fall back on—for many media industries, the digital era left no such comfort. [Chart]

Over time, the business of video has moved in the opposite direction of music—out of the theatre and into the home. Hollywood formerly made most of its money enticing customers to visit sold-out movie theatres, but these were gradually supplanted by broadcast TV, cable, and physical media. Yet because each successful technological leap increased total video watch time, the industry was still able to thrive amidst technological upheaval. That is, until the modern streaming era.

Today, the plethora of video options and the rise of social media have sent video producers into a vicious competition for limited attention. Even before adjusting for inflation, movie ticket sales ended last year down 25% from their 2019 peak, cable revenue is down 18% from its peak, and streaming revenue has not been able to compensate for the drop. The mountain of free user-generated content on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, or social media was already presenting harsh competition for traditional video companies in the years before ChatGPT’s launch, and now streaming services are also competing with a flood of AI-generated content. The business model of video media is fundamentally getting squeezed, and unlike in the music industry, there’s basically no equivalent to live concerts that Hollywood can be used to ease the pain.

The actual worst-case scenario for creative workers amidst the AI revolution is something similar to what happened to the publishing industry after the advent of the internet—that is, near-total collapse of their fundamental business model. Newspapers used to employ roughly half a million people in the US, more than the entire oil industry, and now their payrolls are down nearly 85% and still dropping. Magazine publishers likewise have let 66% of their staff go since the 90s, while book publishers have lost 40%.

The routine informational updates that previously formed newspapers’ bread-and-butter were all de-bundled—box scores moved to sports websites, stock movements went to financial websites, forecasts went to weather websites—each loss compounding on itself to undermine consumers’ need to buy the paper. Search engines became the first place people looked to for information, and newspapers’ advertising revenue rapidly started flowing to companies like Google instead. The collective of social media users became faster at breaking any news story than a daily paper could ever hope to be. When papers eventually did start aggressively paywalling content, the internet made it trivially easy for people to just copy the articles’ content and share it beyond the paywall. The entire business model had collapsed, to the point that now only a select few major newspapers can even survive.

That scale of copyright dilution and forced unbundling is the worst-case scenario for media businesses in the age of AI. It’s possible arts jobs could survive via consumers’ deep-seated aversion to explicitly AI-generated content, but AI is increasingly being used throughout media in ways invisible to the average end consumer. Roughly 32% of workers in the overall arts, entertainment, and recreation sector use Generative AI to some extent, which is less than the 62% average across all industries, but still enough that virtually every major media project could have some AI within its workflow.

Indeed, AI is likely seeping into media production processes in ways large companies themselves would struggle to prevent even when they desire to—how can a TV studio be sure nobody in their writers’ room is consulting ChatGPT for jokes or any storyboard artist is generating concept art? And even if professional TV and movie studios do effectively hold out against temptation and prevent internal AI use, how long can they compete with the large mass of wannabe independent creators with much fewer scruples? Plenty of media businesses tried to hold out against the algorithmic content waves of the 2010s and were buried as a result.

by Joseph Politano, Apricitas Economics |  Read more:

Images: Joseph Politano

AI: The Biggest Economic Bet in US History

The US economy continues to expand faster than other G7 economies, but the driver is the humungous investment in AI models, data centres and all the AI-related chips and technology.

The US composite PMI (economic activity measure) rose to 58.4 fom 56 in August, the strongest expansion in private-sector activity since July 2021 and marking a fourth consecutive month of accelerating growth. The gains were driven by the service sector (including information services) with the steepest rise in output for over five years, while manufacturing also accelerated. New orders grew at the fastest pace since April 2022, while manufacturing hiring was the strongest since February 2021. [Chart]

Back in June, I commented that AI was just ‘one big trade for the US economy’. But now in September that appears to be an understatement. The AI build-out is on track to become the biggest economic bet in US history, dwarfing the investments made to fund other huge US infrastructure projects in the past, such as the railroads in the 19th century, the highway system in 20th century and the internet in the 21st century. [Chart]

Analysts estimate that capital spending at five of the so-called hyperscalers—Alphabet, Amazon.com, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Oracle—will be $4.2 trillion in the four years ending in 2029, according to FactSet. Data-centre spending is greater than that for the canals, railroads and grid combined, projected to total $10.3 trillion from 2025 to 2032, according to new estimates by the Brookings Institution. That is a staggering average 3.6% of GDP a year. Never before has the US economy been so dependent on the build-out of a single industry. [Chart]

Up to July, $37 billion has been spent on private data-centres with most still not operating.

In contrast, US private construction spending on everything else—houses, apartment buildings, shopping centers and so on—was about $46 billion below year-earlier levels in the first seven months of this year.

  

AI investment has created 750,000 new jobs since 2023, according to LinkedIn estimates. And those jobs pay well: the median annual salary for AI-related job listings on LinkedIn is around $180,000, compared with $80,000 for all jobs.

Above all, the AI investment has led to huge gains in stock-market wealth. As of Q2 2026, US stock and mutual fund holdings came to $63 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve—nearly double the amount at the end of 2022. Most of this increase in financial wealth has gone to the already rich, as working people own little stocks or bonds. [Chart]

Foreign investors are piling into US assets. They now hold a record $39 trillion in US equities and bonds, up since 2022.. This is keeping the US dollar relatively strong and driving up stock prices. The wars in Ukraine and Iran encourage foreigners to shift their assets to the US to take advantage of the boom. [Chart]

At the same time, demand for equipment that goes into data centres like memory chips is driving up costs for tech products. Import prices on computers, peripherals (such as hard drives) and semiconductors were 20% higher in August than a year earlier. These high import prices are in turn putting upward pressure on the costs of consumer goods, such as iPhones and gaming consoles, and contributing to general inflation. [Chart]

But here is the problem. The gap between hyperscaler spending and cash flow is widening fast. Capital expenditures at Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet are projected to exceed $1 trillion in 2027 for the first time. At the same time, combined ‘free cash flow’ (ie money from profits in existing businesses) is projected to fall below $100 billion. A year ago, free cash flow was around $200 billion, while capex was $300 billion. Now, AI spending is accelerating at the same time as the cash available to fund it is disappearing. [Chart]

The bigger this gap becomes, the more the hyperscalers need to rely on debt and equity markets to finance their AI spend. [Chart]

The issue is that if AI spending fails to generate sufficient returns (profits), the stock market could take sharp turn downward as investors bail out. US stock market prices are massively overvalued relative to existing earnings. The trend ratio of stock market prices to earnings per share (called the CAPE ratio) is above the level just before the 2008 financial crash and nearly at the level just before the dot.com bust of 2000. [Chart]

Will profits come through? Research by Fathom Consulting shows that for the multitrillion-dollar AI boom to turn a profit, it would need the AI-related sales of the tech companies involved to rise by $600-800bn within the next two years. But the consulting firm Panmure Liberum calculated that current CAPEX and revenue forecasts through 2030 imply a negative internal rate of return on invested capital for Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.

So either the hyperscalers significantly reduce their capital spending on AI to levels that generate a reasonable profit on capital already invested or by some miracle they deliver massive profitablity from a huge future increase in demand for AI products. If they cut spending, that would signal to investors that AI is not delivering and they would sell off accordingly. A crash would ensue. So they must keep spending more and more. [Chart]

At the same time, what companies can charge for AI computing costs (tokens) is falling fast. The LLM Token Expenditure Index, which tracks the market price companies pay for AI model output, has fallen to just $0.97, its lowest level since the index was created late last year and more than 50% below its summer peak. Token prices are collapsing as cheaper models, open-source Chinese competitors and falling training (inference) costs make AI usage increasingly cheap. That is eroding revenue growth for the AI labs, making it more difficult to meet the bills for AI infrastructure spend. [...]

A key question is whether AI is actually going to deliver a step-change in US labour productivity that could boost economic progress for a generation. The AI lab, Anthropic, wants to issue shares worth $100bn to the public in November (thus valuing the company at $2trn!). To build up its case, it published a report in which it claimed that if AI really takes off, US GDP could rise by 32% by 2030(!), that’s annual growth in GDP of up to 15% (against current US growth at 2.5% at best).

This is wild nonsense that assumes that AI works in boosting productivity growth as every company in the US adopts AI agents and tools to run their businesses, while sacking millions of workers who are no longer needed.

by Michael Roberts, The Next Recession | Read more:
Images: Financial Times; Commerce Dept.; uncredited

What Also Happened: #NotOnlyHuggingFace

OpenAI has been holding out on us.

First we learned about the HuggingFace incident. They gave us a postmortem, but it was highly incomplete. Even the accompanying holy s*** METR investigation and postmortem was localized and incomplete.

Then there were some other incidents involving some Wikis as message boards.

Then there were some additional incidents.

Then there was that time they got into Australian Medicare data.

Then OpenAI dropped news on a Friday afternoon that they were making their way through a pile of various incidents and notifying the targets, but they said remarkably little in the way of new details.

There was a report from a startup called Parse diving into the details of exactly how the OpenAI models pulled off parts of the HuggingFace attack, involving creating almost a million URLs and other tricks to get around the extremely narrow nature of their internet access.

Then Madison Mills reported in Axios that we can raise the stakes, as OpenAI and Anthropic are collectively probing tens of thousands of security incidents.

Remember Jensen Huang’s ‘I know they know how to fix it’ about OpenAI from last week? Wow, did that not age well.

Someone might need to be liable for all this.

Oh, and there was another buried lede. On September 20th there was another sandbox escape by OpenAI’s latest most advanced model, which is once again paused until they can fix the situation. The official announcement when they shared this was sufficiently buried that Tomek had to call it ‘one news form today that’s easy to miss.’

OpenAI did some highly negligent things, to say the least, that led up to and enabled the HuggingFace Incident and related problems.

Since then, now that they’ve realized What Happened, OpenAI has been seemingly much better about taking responsible internal actions. They’re pausing in the wake of incidents, strengthening security and alignment and oversight efforts, responding much faster and generally taking things seriously.

They’ve also made a Heel Face Turn in their communications and high level orientation, endorsing the need to pace the frontier, calling for regulation and pledging to implement embedded evaluators. They’ve allowed their employees, including the ones who haven’t quit, to be remarkably loud.

They are still slow walking disclosures about all the incidents where their models have been hacking and otherwise messing in places they should not have been, partly because there were so many they can’t sort through them all, and deferring to targets to determine whether to disclose. All these disclosures this time around were buried in various Friday afternoon announcements.

Table of Contents

• Hugging Other Faces.
• A Wants-You-To-Know Basis.
• Parsing the Face.
• Sheepishly the Member of Technical Staff Sets the ‘Days Without a Research Model Escaping its Sandbox’ Sign Back to Zero.
• The Attempt is the First Failure.
• Stop, Hammertime.
• Whacking the Mole.
• Self-Replicating Prompt Injections.
• Levels of Friction.
• People Care About Private Data Violations Curiously Strongly.
• Alternate Universes.
• The Correct Response To People Still Calling This a Marketing Stunt or a Regulatory Capture Scheme.
• A Question of Liability.
• Keep Summer Safe.
• N Boats and Several Helicopters.
• Alert the Media.

Hugging Other Faces

The news drops started with OpenAI coming back, at a time always picked to bury stories, with more information on What Happened as their investigations continue.

At first, this looked like slow walking of the situation, but did not look like it was a big change from our default assumption of ‘it’s worse than you know.’

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV |  Read more:

America’s Shifting Blue-Collar Landscape

Even as manufacturing jobs decline, Alaska offers lucrative work for men without college degrees.

Ten years ago, the changing geography of blue-collar jobs reshaped American politics. As the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, automation, and expanding global trade swept across the former industrial heartland, voters—male voters especially—spurned establishment figures for candidates they saw as more attuned to their concerns.

Donald Trump steamrolled to the Republican nomination in 2016 and dismantled the Democrats’ “blue wall” across states where manufacturing had suffered most. Democrats responded by nominating Joe Biden in 2020, hoping his working-class image would help reclaim voters without college degrees. Since then, both parties have made reviving manufacturing central to their economic agendas. Yet in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, fewer manufacturing jobs exist today than when Trump rode down the escalator in June 2015.

The geography of blue-collar work, meanwhile, has continued to evolve. A few thousand miles northwest of the industrial heartland, Alaska offers a frontier version of that emerging economy. In a 2025 paper, economists Gordon Hanson and Enrico Moretti show that as manufacturing employment has declined, other industries have emerged as sources of good jobs for noncollege workers, particularly construction and sectors complementing tradeable, high-skill industries.

Having traveled extensively across Alaska this year to examine its industrial ecosystems, I came to see the state as a revealing case study of what blue-collar opportunity looks like when manufacturing is no longer the nation’s primary source of such jobs.

Manufacturing accounts for less than 5 percent of Alaska employment, yet the state offers unusually lucrative work for men without college degrees. My analysis of Census data finds that more than 40 percent of civilian, prime-age, noncollege Alaska men employed in blue-collar occupations earn at least $75,000. More strikingly, 9.4 percent of Alaska’s civilian, prime-age, noncollege men work a blue-collar job and earn at least $100,000, compared with 3.6 percent nationally, ranking Alaska first in the country. Among those in such occupations more than one in four earns six figures.

What explains those returns? Alaska’s abundant natural resources play a major role. Median earned income for oil-and-gas drilling workers is an astonishing $191,500, while mining operators earn $134,000, compared with the national median for blue-collar workers of $48,400. Resource extraction, like manufacturing, belongs to the tradeable sector: production occurs locally, but the output gets sold into global markets.

Those workers represent only a small blue-collar elite, however. Far more Alaskans work in transportation, construction, and equipment maintenance, and many of these occupations also command substantial premiums, particularly when tied to the resource economy. Construction-equipment operators earn a median $87,500, 50 percent more than the national median for that occupation; truck mechanics and diesel specialists, $92,000, 54 percent more. Truck drivers and carpenters each earn $58,000—11 percent and 29 percent more, respectively.

A carpenter I met on the North Slope, along Alaska’s Arctic coast, works for the region’s largest oil-and-gas operator and reported earning about $120,000 annually—a reminder that attachment to the tradeable sector, not occupation alone, often determines earnings.

But Alaska’s remarkable wages do present a puzzle. The state has the nation’s highest median earned income for civilian, prime-age, noncollege men in blue-collar jobs, at more than $63,500. Yet only 36.6 percent of such Alaska men work in blue-collar occupations—below the national average.

Part of the explanation is Alaska’s distinctive demographics. Employment among civilian, prime-age, noncollege men is relatively low, particularly for Alaska Natives living in remote communities with subsistence economies. But another factor is more revealing. My sample is restricted to Alaska residents, yet a large proportion of workers earning Alaska’s high wages don’t actually live there.

Among the men I met on the North Slope in June, many described a fly-in, fly-out lifestyle, commuting to Alaska for weeks at a time before returning home. Kevin Daems, a drilling operator with Hilcorp, lives in Montana; Alex Mosier, a maintenance worker for Schlumberger, lives in Louisiana.

According to the Alaska Department of Labor, nonresidents fill 45.2 percent of private-sector jobs on the North Slope. Statewide, nonresidents account for 22.9 percent of workers, including 23.4 percent in construction, 30.9 percent in transportation and warehousing, and more than 40 percent in resource extraction.

To understand why so many jobs go to outsiders, I spoke with Ray Weber, dean of technical and vocational education at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Weber oversees more than 40 certificate and associate-degree programs preparing Alaskans for the state’s blue-collar industries, from short programs in construction skills and marine service technology to two-year degrees in process technology and aviation maintenance. The sweet spot, he says, is six- to nine-month programs. Graduates of UAA’s six-month millwright program start at about $70,000 and typically earn six figures within five years.

What about placement? “Since Covid, we’ve just had active recruiting,” Weber says. “I don’t have any students that walk out without jobs. Many of them have it ahead of time. Holland America [a cruise line operator] sponsors eight of the diesel students to come here and finish the program. So, they’re already hired. We haven’t had an issue getting the students the employment.”

Many students already work in Alaska’s core industries and return for specialized credentials. “A lot of the people that we end up getting are coming back after they’ve been laborers or have worked on the Slope for a significant amount of time doing odd jobs and want something specific,” Weber notes.

What Weber says next, though, highlights Alaska’s blue-collar puzzle: the struggle of attracting workers in the first place. “We have more of an issue, depending on the program,” he tells me, “getting people to want to do it.”

For all the promise of Alaska’s blue-collar wages, the state struggles even to retain its own residents. Every year since 2011, more people have left Alaska for other states than have moved there from the rest of the country.

That’s no surprise to Weber. “Can [wages in Alaska] be higher [than in the rest of the country]? Yes, especially Slope jobs or jobs that suck. Like, we have electrical linemen that go across the state. They’re going to Unalakleet, the only way to get there is by airplane. And there’s one pizza joint. One. No other restaurant. You generally end up sleeping either in a bunkhouse, if you’re lucky. Or you’re sleeping in the school auditorium. . . . I like Alaska, but we’re asking the wrong questions if you’re saying, ‘high-paying, lucrative jobs.’ What do the younger generation consider important? The answer is: Things that are not in Alaska.”

Economists call this a compensating wage differential: the premium required to induce workers to accept jobs with undesirable nonpecuniary characteristics. Work in Alaska is colder, darker, lonelier, and often more dangerous. The roughly $120,000 premium earned by North Slope oil-and-gas workers over their counterparts elsewhere, and the roughly $40,000 premium earned by electricians deploying to isolated communities such as Unalakleet, are partly the price employers must pay to fill jobs few want.

by Jordan McGillis, City Journal | Read more:
Image: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images

[ed. Alaska has always attracted get rich quick opportunists. With Prudhoe Bay and Trans-Alaska pipeline construction, the influx of transient treasure seekers went into overdrive. Before then, there was a deeply rooted sense of community and shared experience. That solidarity doesn't exist anymore (for various reasons). By the way, Unalakleet is a wonderful and highly educated Alaskan village, one of the best.]

On “Simple Solutions” to the Western Water Problem

Spoiler: There is no such thing.

It seems like every time the Colorado River and other Western water woes make national headlines, some pundit — usually from the East Coast — weighs in with their “simple” or “obvious” solution. And I get mad and start throwing things around the room, then type out some blistering rant riddled with epithets and insults.

Well, the Colorado River is in the news again, and with it have come the usual swarm of oversimplified hot-takes. The one that really got my goat this time is from Matthew Yglesias, who wrote a piece headlined: The Western water crisis has a simple solution: Stop giving the majority of the water away to farmers for almost nothing!

These things piss me off so much not because they’re wrong, but because there is no “simple” solution to the Western water crisis. That’s because the crisis itself isn’t simple, and saying that it has simple fixes implies that the folks who have spent a lot of time trying to solve the problem are a bunch of idiots, since they hadn’t come up with this solution already. It seems as if Yglesias and his ilk assume that the West is not only monolithic, but that we Westerners are a bunch of backwoods bumpkins who don’t understand the region’s own problems.

Who cares what these bozos believe, right? Right. But judging by the comments on Yglesias’ social media posts, a lot of other people are similarly deluded. So I figured his piece provides a nice opportunity to clear some things up.

In fact, there is no single “Western water crisis.” The West is huge and is geographically, hydrographically, and ecologically diverse. While most, but not all, of the Western U.S. is in some stage of drought currently, not all of those places are experiencing a water crisis, per se. There is a Colorado River water crisis and a Rio Grande water crisis and a San Joaquin Valley water crisis, but those crises are not all the same.

The Colorado River crisis is multifaceted and manifests in different ways in different places and on different levels. The river itself is in crisis, in that stretches of the mainstem and its tributaries virtually dry up during summers like this one. Its users are facing a potential crisis, i.e. looming shortages, as in some of them are getting less water from the river than they did in the past. And the vast and complex plumbing system and legal framework that has been built up to harness and govern the river is perhaps facing the most immediate crisis: It is collapsing under its own weight and in many ways has become obsolete. Each of these is a distinct calamity, with its own twists, turns, causes, and bevy of potential solutions.

From his perch in the Northeast, however, Yglesias sees just one dimension, writing in the “nut graf” of his piece:

Even worse, the whole Western water conflict has an incredibly simple solution: End federal law’s current stipulation that a huge share of the available water must be sold at very low prices exclusively for the purpose of agriculture.

The issue here is well known, well understood, and not particularly controversial. It’s just that nobody seems to want to actually fix it.

Uh, not quite.

Yes, irrigated agriculture is by far the dominant consumer of Colorado River water, accounting for 52% of overall consumption and 74% of direct human consumption. And yes, agricultural users typically and notoriously pay less for the water than municipal users. No, this is not dictated by federal law.

Agricultural users were among the first entities in the colonial-settler era to put large quantities of water to beneficial use, giving them the most senior rights to the largest quantities of water. The Imperial Irrigation District, for example, has senior rights to about 3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water, most of which is used for agriculture.

These water rights holders have a legal right to use a set amount of water each year. They are not leasing or purchasing the water from the federal government or anyone else. It’s essentially theirs, for free, as long as they are able to divert it from the river and put it to beneficial use.

Usually the water rights are held by irrigation districts, ditch companies, municipalities, corporations, or, in some cases, very large individual landholders. In the late 1800s, these entities built their own diversions, canals, and delivery systems. Construction was often financed by private investors and the individual irrigators, who held stocks, or shares, in the ditch company. Each share would entitle its holder to a set amount of water from the canal. The shareholder would pay an annual fee for each share to cover construction, maintenance, and operating costs.

The Bureau of Reclamation was established in 1902 to build larger scale dams, diversions, and canals to deliver water to users and to spur agricultural development in the arid West. [...] 

One of the Bureau’s big projects was the 80-mile-long All-American Canal, built in the 1930s to ferry Colorado River water to the Imperial Irrigation District and other users. The IID entered into a 50-year payback contract, which ended in 1994. The Bureau still owns the canal, but the IID operates and maintains it and other infrastructure that delivers Colorado River water to nine cities and some 500,000 acres of farmland. [...]

Similar setups exist across the Colorado River Basin. But each system is distinct, and each has its own mix of federal and private funding and operational scenarios and rates.

And here’s one of the main flaws of Yglesias’s argument: He assumes that there’s some all powerful actor out there that sets rates and standards for water from the Colorado River, although he himself clearly doesn’t know who or what that actor is (he always uses the passive voice, or the all-encompassing “you” in these cases). That’s because that entity doesn’t exist. While the feds could stop subsidizing agriculture, and should not build any more water projects, they don’t have the authority to step in and adjust water rates. States probably could set rates for groundwater, but they can’t charge the IID for exercising their water rights on the Colorado River.

Next, Yglesias pivots to pillorying alfalfa, because that’s in vogue these days. I’m not going to get into that too much, because I’ve written about it so many times here before, but this little bit is pretty funny:

“The whole crisis is because of alfalfa” sounds ridiculous, in part because alfalfa is a funny word. But also because it’s so random. Wheat? That’s in bread and pasta. Everyone loves wheat. Cotton? That’s my shirt, I get why we need cotton.

But alfalfa?

Alfalfa is grown as animal feed.

Now, I’m no alfalfa apologist (nor am I an alfalfaphobe), but I feel like I should point out that most of the alfalfa grown with Colorado River water is used to feed dairy cows, which in turn produce milk and cheese and ice cream. Unless Yglesias is a vegan, he might want to consider that. He then argues that since alfalfa is relatively low-value (money wise) compared to Las Vegas casinos, Phoenix microchip factories, or housing, the water should be going to casinos, factories, and housing, not farms, which would presumably happen if farmers had to pay more for water (i.e. they’d go broke and be forced to sell).

In recent weeks I’ve written a piece or two about alfalfa. My thesis: As the biggest single water user in the Colorado River Basin, the crop must play an equally large role in contributing to the cuts necessary to keep the river from drying out. I know, it doesn’t seem like a hot-button topic. I mean, it’s just hay, after all.
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He continues:

The real point here, though, isn’t that the farmers are living high on the hog and need to be taken down a peg. You could easily let them keep their windfall water rights but turn those rights into property that they’re able to sell. Then existing cities or industrial users or real estate developers looking to build new housing or whoever else could just buy out the alfalfa farmers. The land currently under cultivation could shift to less water-intensive uses. Even a golf course uses significantly less water per acre than an alfalfa farm. Much of the land would, of course, turn into housing, but some could become non-irrigated parks with native vegetation.

First off, there is nothing novel or groundbreaking about this idea. Sprawl has been gobbling up farmland, and water rights, for decades in the West. Phoenix didn’t just grow into the desert, it also grew into citrus orchards and alfalfa fields, and will probably continue to build housing and data centers on what ag land remains. A different version of this concept, where a city or developer purchases a farmer’s water rights, but uses them somewhere else — a practice known as buy and dry — is also not uncommon.

This does not solve the water crisis. Instead of cutting consumption, which is what’s needed, it merely shifts the consumption from one use — agriculture — to other ones, such as housing and golf courses and chip manufacturing and data centers. This may wring more cash out of each acre-foot of water, but it doesn’t lower consumption. An acre-foot is an acre-foot, whether it’s going to alfalfa, a golf course, a neighborhood’s lawns, a data center or a swimming pool.

Besides, transitioning land out of agriculture comes with its own problems. We can argue forever about whether farming alfalfa or any other crop in the desert is appropriate, or of adequately high value, or whatever. We can argue that the Bureau of Reclamation should never have existed, and that irrigating the arid West should have been left to private entities operating in a free market. But the fact is, there is farming in the desert, those projects did end up subsidizing the agriculture industry, and communities, economies, cultures, and even new landscapes have emerged from and formed around those farms.

Taking vast swaths of land out of farming, whether to build houses or solar panels or to buy the water rights and use them somewhere else, has myriad consequences, many of them negative. Fields can become noxious-weed-clogged dust pits, the wildlife and ecosystems that have come to rely on irrigation runoff dry up, farm workers and families and the businesses that rely on them are displaced, communities’ economies are upended. As Madeline Wilson, an agricultural systems specialist for Colorado State University’s extension office pointed out at a 2024 panel on dust-on-snow, every field fallowed in the San Luis Valley for conservation purposes also represents a family. “We’re not just talking about drying up lands,” she said, “but the drying up of our economy.”

In no way does this mean that farms should be immune from curtailment. Indeed, because agriculture is the biggest user of Colorado River water, it will have to take the largest cuts in consumption. There is simply nowhere else from which the 4 million acre-feet or more of reductions per year needed to bring demand into line with dwindling supplies can come. But forcing farmers into bankruptcy by jacking up water rates (if there was a mechanism to do so), or prescribing “incredibly simple” policy solutions that don’t consider the complexities of the situation and its myriad moving parts or the on-the-ground impacts, isn’t the way to do it.

The “root cause” of the Colorado River crises is not alfalfa or pecans or cotton or cattle, it’s not the prior appropriation doctrine or the low price of water, it’s not overpopulation, it’s not data centers or golf courses or lawns or bad forest management or lack of or too many reservoirs. The root cause is twofold. First, there’s scarcity. The Southwest is an arid place, and climate change-exacerbated warming is drying it out more: there is less precipitation; the precipitation we do get is falling as rain, not snow; the snow we get is melting faster; and evapotranspiration is happening at a higher rate. This all leads to less water in the streams, reservoirs, rivers, and even aquifers. Secondly, there’s the chronic and long-term failure to acknowledge the scarcity, and the stubborn refusal to adapt to it and adjust consumption accordingly. [...]

There is one simple solution to the Colorado River crises: Everyone on the river has to use less water. Period. 

by Jonathan P. Thompson, The Land Desk | Read more:
Image: the author