On Adversarial Capitalism

I’ve lately been writing a series on modern capitalism. You can read these other blog posts for additional musings on the topic:

• Most Businesses Don’t Work That Way – on the mistaken view of being the customer vs the product – and how businesses really make money
• Artisanal Slop Bowls as the Next Abstraction of Capitalism – how modern capitalism leads to the creation of new and improved version of goods/businesses that superficially, seem to be superior in all ways, but in fact, are without many critical but illegible components.
• How an Efficient Market Feels from the Inside – how even in an efficient market, there are still good and bad deals to be had.
• Why I Talk About Utopia, Not Politics – on the idea of living a happy enriched life in times of material abundance

We are now in a period of capitalism that I call adversarial capitalism. By this I mean: market interactions increasingly feel like traps. You’re not just buying a product—you’re entering a hostile game rigged to extract as much value from you as possible.

A few experiences you may relate to:

• I bought a banana from the store. I was prompted to tip 20, 25, or 30% on my purchase.
• I went to get a haircut. Booking online cost $6 more and also asked me to prepay my tip. [Would I get worse service if I didn’t tip in advance…?]
• I went to a jazz club. Despite already buying an expensive ticket, I was told I needed to order at least $20 of food or drink—and literally handing them a $20 bill wouldn’t count, as it didn’t include tip or tax.
• I looked into buying a new Garmin watch, only to be told by Garmin fans I should avoid the brand now—they recently introduced a subscription model. For now, the good features are still included with the watch purchase, but soon enough, those will be behind the paywall.
• I bought a plane ticket and had to avoid clicking on eight different things that wanted to overcharge me. I couldn’t sit beside my girlfriend without paying a large seat selection fee. No food, no baggage included.
• I realized that the bike GPS I bought four years ago no longer gives turn-by-turn directions because it’s no longer compatible with the mapping software.
• I had to buy a new computer because the battery in mine wasn’t replaceable and had worn down.
• I rented a car and couldn’t avoid paying an exorbitant toll-processing fee. They gave me the car with what looked like 55% of a tank. If I returned it with less, I’d be charged a huge fee. If I returned it with more, I’d be giving them free gas. It’s difficult to return it with the same amount, given you need to drive from the gas station to the drop-off and there’s no precise way to measure it.
• I bought tickets to a concert the moment they went on sale, only for the “face value” price to go down 50% one month later – because the tickets were dynamically priced.
• I used an Uber gift card, and once it was applied to my account, my Uber prices were higher.
• I went to a highly rated restaurant (per Google Maps) and thought it wasn’t very good. When I went to pay, I was told they’d reduce my bill by 25% if I left a 5-star Google Maps review before leaving. I now understand the reviews.

Adversarial capitalism is when most transactions feel like an assault on your will. Nearly everything entices you with a low upfront price, then uses every possible trick to extract more from you before the transaction ends. Systems are designed to exploit your cognitive limitations, time constraints, and moments of inattention.

It’s not just about hidden fees. It’s that each additional fee often feels unreasonable. The rental company doesn’t just charge more for gas, they punish you for not refueling, at an exorbitant rate. They want you to skip the gas, because that’s how they make money. The “service fee” for buying a concert ticket online is wildly higher than a service fee ought to be.

The reason adversarial capitalism exists is simple.

Businesses are ruthlessly efficient and want to grow. Humans are incredibly price-sensitive. If one business avoids hidden fees, it’s outcompeted by another that offers a lower upfront cost, with more adversarial fees later. This exploits the gap between consumers’ sensitivity to headline prices and their awareness of total cost. Once one firm in a market adopts this pricing model, others are pressured to follow. It becomes a race to the bottom of the price tag, and a race to the top of the hidden fees.

The thing is: once businesses learn the techniques of adversarial capitalism and it gets accepted by consumers, there is no going back — it is a super weapon that is too powerful to ignore once discovered.

by Daniel Frank, Frankly Speaking |  Read more:

[ed. Many great essays on his blog, and substack (not not Talmud) to keep one busy for awhile. See also: Daniel-isms: 50 Ideas for Life I Repeatedly Share (Part 1); and 50 Ideas for Life I Repeatedly Share (part 2). Also, here's a couple more: the loss of magic: why Bob Dylan can’t write great songs anymore; and, Notes on Taiwan.]

Iran War: US Strikes Kharg Island, Deploys More Marines Even as Administration Shows Desperation

Trump Administration officials besides Trump are starting to behave erratically, a sign the fact that the Iran war is not developing necessarily to US advantage is beginning to penetrate their embubblement and belief in American superiority. However, the reality that the US has put the global economy at risk of a potential depression and is on track to having its military largely if not entirely run out of the Middle East is still likely beyond what key figures in the Administration can accept, cognitively and practically. Admittedly, it seems likely that some, perhaps many, top members of the armed services are better able to grasp what is happening and could help Administration leaders work through what will come at an epic shock. [ed. if they were interested in listening.]

Today we will focus on the kinetic war.

The US is still trying to project the false impression that it has escalatory dominance via attacking Kharg Island, which is on the northern end of the Persian Gulf and a major processing/production center for Iran’s oil exports. Keep in mind that none other than Ukraine war diehard hawk, Keith Kellogg, had told Fox News that the US could still end the war quickly and easily by taking Kharg island, since per him, it accounted for 80% to 90% of Iran’s oil exports. A mere look at a map shows what a batshit idea this was; we had assumed that this was messaging directed at chumps, intended to convey that the US was far from bereft of options. But apparently this Administration is of the “No idea is too misguided to be rejected” school of operation.

Even so, the Administration had to admit that it hit only “military” targets and did not touch oil infrastructure. Team Trump has worked out that attacking any Iranian oil facilities would lead Iran to bomb oil infrastructure all over the Middle East. [...]

Now to Bloomberg’s Kharg Island report. Notice that the headline at the story proper (via the link from the current banner headline), Trump Strikes Iran’s Kharg Oil Hub and Urges Reopening of Hormuz, has not been updated to reflect Iran’s saber-rattling back. From its body:

The US struck military sites on Kharg Island, from which Iran exports almost all its oil, for the first time overnight, upping the ante in a Middle East war that’s raged for more than two weeks and shows little sign of easing.

President Donald Trump said military facilities on the Persian Gulf island had been “obliterated,” adding that he chose not to hit oil infrastructure “for reasons of decency.” He threatened to do just that should Iran “do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz.”

Iran reacted on Saturday morning by warning it will target American-linked oil and energy facilities in the Middle East if its own petroleum infrastructure is attacked. Iranian media said all oil-industry workers on the island, which sits about 25 kilometers (16 miles) off the mainland, are safe and unharmed.

Readers no doubt took note of Trump’s admission against interest in using the word “obliterated”. Or was he trying to signal, as with the pre-agreed strike on Fordow, that this attack was meant to be performative and it was time for Iran to back off, having made its point? I doubt it but it is hard to fathom what Trump thinks he is doing, aside from desperately needing to convey that he and only he is driving events.

However, Kharg Island may not be as essential to Iran’s oil exports as the Administration’s messaging posits:

Larry Johnson gives a long form takedown in Trump’s Kharg Island Fantasy… All Bark, No Bite. Key sections:

Late on Friday Donald Trump claimed in a social media post that military facilities on Kharg Island were targeted. Read his Truth carefully:

Trump is deep into fantasy land. Yes, I think he has lost touch with reality. He admits that the oil terminals were not attacked, just some unidentified military targets…

If you don’t know it now, only one of Iran’s 5 operational oil export terminals is located on Kharg Island. According to data from the international company Kepler, the amount of oil loaded from the tanks installed on Kharg increased by 1.5 times in the past month. This suggests that Iran, by quickly emptying Kharg’s tanks, was prepared for this attack.

If Iran’s oil terminal on Kharg had been destroyed, Iran would have launched missiles at identified the oil terminals in all the countries bordering the Persian Gulf. Here’s the list:

Saudi Arabia
Ras Tanura: The largest marine oil loading center in the world; capacity: 6 million barrels per day.

Ras Al-Ju’aymah: The second most important terminal; capacity 3 to 3.6 million barrels per day.

United Arab Emirates
Fujairah: Has multiple docks and is the largest fueling center in the region.

Jebel Ali: Site for crude oil and petrochemical exports.

Qatar
Ras Laffan: The largest LNG export facility in the world.

Kuwait
Mina Al-Ahmadi: Central crude oil export terminal with deep docks and high capacity.

Bahrain
Sitra Terminal: Exports refined…

There are a couple of ways to look at this. Perhaps Trump’s lie about devastating Kharg Island is the start of his PR campaign to gaslight the American public into believing Iran is defeated, which would allow Trump to declare victory and start withdrawing US forces. That’s one possibility. Alternatively, he really believes the lie and is convinced that this latest strike will convince the Iranians to surrender.

Having said that, it is not impossible that some sort of barmy scheme is in motion:

Perhaps the clever Israeli plan is if the US loses enough men in trying to take Kharg Island, it will commit to sending even more troops and treasure into this burn pit? From the Wall Street Journal in More Marines and Warships Head to Middle East as Hormuz Mission Intensifies:

The Pentagon is moving additional Marines and warships to the Middle East, as Iran steps up its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. prepares to escort tankers through the waterway.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved a request from U.S. Central Command, responsible for American forces in the Middle East, for an element of an amphibious-ready group and attached Marine expeditionary unit to head to the region, according to U.S. officials...

An amphibious-ready group is a fast-response unit used to conduct sea-based amphibious assaults, humanitarian aid missions and special operations. The group’s embarked Marine expeditionary unit includes more than 2,000 Marines.

In addition to the Marine unit, the Pentagon is also weighing Centcom’s request for two additional destroyers to help escort commercial ships through the strait, one of the officials said.

The New York Times reported:

About 2,500 Marines aboard as many as three warships are heading to the Middle East from the Indo-Pacific region, as Iran increases its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz, two U.S. officials said.

Now this new attempts at escalation may appear confident. Contrast this with signs of Administration officials, other than Trump, looking as if they are coming unglued. The triggers seem to be continued pounding by Iran. Larry Johnson maintains, forcefully, that the refueler that crashed in Iraq, resulting in six deaths, was the result of a strike. Shortly after that (as we will show below), Iran dropped what is purported to be a 2,000 pound bomb on the US base in Saudi Arabia. We have accounts that military and five more refuelers were severely damaged. Note more missiles may have gotten through than the one carrying the 2,000 pound munition.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Images: Bloomberg; WSJ; X, TS

[ed. Israel (Netanyahu) is on a killing spree in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and who knows where else, using American weaponry and hoping to suck the US and other countries into expanded escalation... and we've been dumb and arrogant enough to jump right in. See also: Iran has not asked for ceasefire and sees no reason for talks with US, Iranian minister says (BBC).]

Sam Altman and OpenAI Under Fire

It’s finally happening. Altman’s bad behavior is catching up to him.

The board fired Altman, once AI’s golden boy, in November 2023 not because AGI had been achieved (that still hasn’t happened) but because he was “not consistently candid,” just like they said.

And, now at long last, the world sees what the board saw, and what I saw (and what Karen Hao saw): having someone running a company with that much power to affect the world who is not consistently candid is not a good idea.

As I warned in August of 2024, questionable character in a man this powerful is dangerous:

Altman’s two-faced “I support Dario” but am also negotiating behind his back and open to surveillance two-step was, for many people, the last straw. Millions of people, literally, are angry; many feel betrayed. Nobody wishes to be surveilled.

In reality, Altman was never really all that interested in AI for the “benefit of humanity.” Mostly he was interested in Sam. And money, and deals. A whole lot of people have finally put that all together.

Here’s OpenAI’s head of robotics, just now:

Zoe Hitzig had resigned just a few weeks earlier, over a different set of issues that also reflected poorly on Altman’s character:

And all this was entirely predictable. Altman is bad news. It was always just a matter of time before people started realizing how serious the consequences might be.

History will judge those who stay at his company. Anyone who wants to work on LLMs can work elsewhere. Anyone who wants to use LLMs should go elsewhere.

by Gary Marcus, On AI |  Read more:

Images: The Guardian; X; NY Times

[ed. For those not paying attention, after DOD tried and failed to strong-arm Anthropic into giving them carte blanche to do anything they wanted with Anthropic's AI model Claude (then subsequently designating them a "supply chain risk"), OpenAI (and Microsoft) immediately stepped into the breach and cut a deal, the details of which are still not fully known. On its face however they appear to give DOD everything it wanted from Anthropic: mass surveilance and fully autonomous (ie. no humans involved) operational capabilities. Altman is the head of OpenAI and its ChatGPT model.

See also: The Rage at OpenAI Has Grown So Immense That There Are Entire Protests Against It (Futurism):

OpenAI has faced protests on and off for years. But after its CEO Sam Altman announced a new deal with the Department of Defense over how its AI systems would be deployed across the military on Friday, it’s being barraged with an intensity of backlash that the company has never seen.

Droves of loyal ChatGPT users declared they were jumping shipping to Claude, whose maker Anthropic had pointedly refused to cut a deal with the Pentagon that gives it unrestricted access to its AI system — even in the face of government threats to seize the company’s tech. Claude quickly surged to the top of the app store, supplanting OpenAI’s chatbot. Uninstalls of the ChatGPT app spiked by nearly 300 percent.

***

Also this: Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism (Guardian):

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is on track to lose $14bn this year. Its market share is collapsing, and its own CEO, Sam Altman, has admitted it “screwed up” an element of the product. All it takes to accelerate that decline is 10 seconds of your time...

Here’s what triggered it. Early this year, the news broke that OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, donated $25m to Maga Inc, Donald Trump’s biggest Super Pac. This made him Trump’s largest donor of the last cycle. When Wired asked him to explain, Brockman said his donations were in service of OpenAI’s mission to benefit “humanity.”

Let me tell you what that mission looks like in practice. Employees of ICE – the agency that was involved in the killing of two people in Minneapolis in January – have used a screening tool powered by ChatGPT. The same company behind your friendly chatbot is helping the government decide who to hire for deportation raids.

And it’s not stopping there. Brockman also helped launch a $125m lobbying initiative, a Super Pac, to make sure no state can regulate AI. It’s attacking any politician who tries to pass safety laws. It wants Trump, and only Trump, to write the rules for the most powerful technology on earth. Every month, subscription money from users around the world flows to a company that is embedding itself in the repressive infrastructure of the Trump administration. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business strategy.

Things got even worse last week. When the Trump administration demanded that AI companies give the Pentagon unrestricted access to their technology – including for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons – Anthropic, the company behind ChatGPT’s main competitor, Claude, refused.

The retaliation was swift and extraordinary. Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic’s technology. Secretary of war Pete Hegseth declared the company a “supply-chain risk to national security”, a designation normally reserved for Chinese firms such as Huawei. He announced that anyone who does business with the US military is barred from working with Anthropic. This is essentially a corporate death sentence, for the crime of refusing to help build killer robots.

And what did OpenAI do? That same Friday night, while his competitor was taking a principled stance, Sam Altman quietly signed a deal with the Pentagon to take Anthropic’s place.

***

[ed. From the comments section in Marcus' post:

Shanni Bee: 

Great. Amen.

But what remains unsaid (...even by you, Mr. Marcus, from what I've seen, which is surprising) is that Anthropic are not good guys. The whole "ethical AI company" thing is nothing but vibes. Sure, Anthropic (rightly) stood up to DoW in this case, but they still have a massive contract with Palantir (pretty much one of the worst companies on earth). Colonel Claude is complicit in bombings of Iran & Venezuela + Gaza GENOCIDE.

...Or maybe with the (admittedly BS) "supply chain risk" designation, Anthropic no longer does business with Palantir? That would be great for everyone (including them).

Either way, there is NO ethical AI company. People need to stop giving Anthropic flowers for doing the right thing in this one case while completely ignoring their complicity w/ Palantir & in documented war crimes.

Gary Marcus

indeed, i have a sequel planned about that, working title “There are no heroes in commercial AI” or something like that

***

[ed. Finally, there's this little coda from Zvi Mowshowitz's DWAtV that puts everything in perspective:

It’s really annoying trying to convince people that if you have a struggle for the future against superintelligent things that You Lose. But hey, keep trying, whatever works.

Ab Homine Deus: To the "Superintelligence isn't real and can't hurt you" crowd. Let's say you're right and human intelligence is some kind of cosmic speed limit (LOL). So AI plateaus something like 190 IQ. What do you think a million instances of that collaborating together looks like?

Arthur B.: At 10,000x the speed

Noah Smith: This is the real point. AI is superintelligent because it can think like a human AND have all the superpowers of a computer at the same time...

Timothy B. Lee: I'm not a doomer but it's still surreal to tell incredulous normies "yes, a significant number of prominent experts really do believe that superintelligent AI is on the verge of killing everyone."

Noah Smith: Yes. Regular people don't yet realize that AI people think they're building something that will destroy the human race.

Basically, about half of AI researchers are optimists, while the other half are intentionally building something they think could easily lead to their own death, the death of their children and families and friends, and the death of their entire species.

[ed. Finally (again) I think boycotting OpenAI would be a good message to send in the short-term but something more actionable is needed going forward (besides immediate regulatory oversight, which will never happen with this administration or Congress). Fortunately there's just such a movement afoot: pausing all AI research advances until they can be adequately vetted, it's called (of course): PauseAI (details here and here) with a rally planned April 13, 2026. Please consider joining or participating.]

[ed. Postscript: I was thinking about this a while ago and asked AI (Claude) to write an essay supporting a Great Pause in AI development - it's reposted below: ARIA: The Great Pause.]

The Sucker

On a Thursday evening in September, I excused myself from the family dinner table and slipped into my bedroom. I didn’t want my kids to see what I was about to do.

With the door locked behind me, I pulled out my phone and downloaded the DraftKings betting app. I felt a certain thrill as I typed in my debit-card information and deposited $500. The first game of the NFL season was a few minutes away. Anything seemed possible.

I am not, by temperament, a gambling man. As a suburban dad with four kids, a mortgage, and a minivan, I’m more likely to be found wrestling a toddler into a car seat than scouring moneylines or consulting betting touts. And as a practicing Mormon, I am prohibited from indulging in games of chance. Besides, I had always thought of gambling as a waste of time. This makes me an outlier among my generational peers: Since 2018, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports, and roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook.

When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.

This spiritual loophole intrigued me. But for the sake of my soul, I decided I’d better consult a higher ecclesiastical authority than The Atlantic’s masthead.

A few days later, I sat across from my bishop, explaining the experiment and watching a look of pastoral concern come over his face. After some consideration, he said (a bit tentatively, if I’m being honest), “I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong.” He grasped the difference between gambling with my own money and using my employer’s for research purposes. But he had also seen too many lives wrecked by vice to let me leave without a warning. He told me stories he’d heard about upstanding family men who had let an initially modest gambling habit ruin them, and a cautionary tale about a churchgoing lawyer who developed an unhealthy curiosity about sex work after handling a prostitution case and wound up devastating his family.

I promised the bishop that I would steer clear of slippery slopes. “This will really just be a journalistic exercise,” I assured him.

Fifteen minutes before kickoff, I scrolled through the available wagers on DraftKings in wide-eyed bewilderment. Struggling to make sense of the terminology—Profit boosts? Alternative spreads?—I punched in bets almost at random. I bet that the Eagles would beat the Cowboys by at least nine points, based on the sophisticated premise that the Eagles had won the previous Super Bowl and the Cowboys had not. I placed a bet that Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts would throw for more than 200 yards, and wagered on something called a “same-game parlay” that would pay out if both Hurts and running back Saquon Barkley scored touchdowns.

Then, after tucking in my kids for the night, I turned on the TV in our bedroom and settled in next to my wife, Annie.

Watching the game was unexpectedly stressful. Toggling among my five different bets—monitoring their progress, weighing live “cash out” options—left me feeling harried and sweaty. Four seconds into the game, I got a taste of the capriciousness of the enterprise when the Eagles’ best defender inexplicably spit on the Cowboys’ quarterback and got himself ejected. Had the Eagles’ chances of beating the spread, and my chances at winning $75, just been expectorated away?

Ever since the advent of sports, humans have found ways to lose money gambling on them.

But the experience was also strangely mesmerizing. For 200 bucks, I had purchased an artificial rooting interest in a game I had no reason to care about. I kept watching even after a weather delay pushed it late into the night, scrolling frenetically next to my sleeping wife in search of angles to exploit with late-game bets. Most of my bets ended up losing, but the long-shot Hurts-Barkley parlay hit, and when the game ended, I calculated that I was up $20.

The next morning, I proudly shared the news with Annie, who high-fived me and immediately began to fantasize about how we would spend my winnings for the season. Could we replace our dying KitchenAid mixer? Remodel the kitchen pantry? Like so many wives before her, she had looked upon my foray into sports gambling with a bemused air of exasperation; now she was seeing a potential upside.

I laughed at her sudden enthusiasm—but I was starting to get ideas myself. I had made $20 on my very first night of gambling. Scale up the wager sizes, multiply across all 272 games in the NFL season, throw in some NBA and college football, and I stood to make—what, $10,000? $20,000? More?

I knew, of course, that I wouldn’t win every bet. But I didn’t see the harm in dreaming. As Annie and I traded home-improvement fantasies, I tried my best not to dwell on the last thing the bishop had said to me: “Be careful.” 

Practically overnight, we took an ancient vice—long regarded as soul-rotting and civilizationally ruinous—put it on everyone’s phone, and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather. What could possibly go wrong? [...]

Week Two

Total gambled: $376.00
Down $58.15

If I was going to do this, I decided, I would need a gambling guru—someone to talk me through the basics of sound sports betting (if such a thing existed) and teach me best practices.

The obvious choice was Nate Silver, America’s most famous statistics nerd. Silver first made a name for himself as the founder of 538, an election-forecasting website that accurately predicted the winner of all 50 states in the 2012 presidential campaign. A few years ago, Silver, citing a midlife crisis and political fatigue, discarded the pundit suits, threw on a baseball cap, and started writing more about gambling. He launched a newsletter full of sophisticated sports-betting models and wrote a book about the psychology of successful gamblers. He estimates that he has netted in the “mid–six figures” over the course of his gambling life. If anyone could turn me into a respectable bettor, I figured, it was him.

Before our first call, I sheepishly sent Silver my week-one bet slips. After that first triumphant game, things had gone downhill. Scrolling through DraftKings’ offerings, I had turned into a little kid at a carnival, emptying my parents’ wallet into any ring toss or high striker that caught my eye. I’d taken fliers on games without doing any research, and placed live bets on whatever ESPN happened to be showing when I turned on the TV. On Saturday afternoon, while casually watching a random college-football game with my brother, I bet $10 that the point total wouldn’t go over 52.5, lost, tried to make my money back with a new bet that it wouldn’t go over 61.5, and lost that one too. Of the 14 wagers I’d placed in my first week, I’d won three.

Silver pulled up my slips when we got on the phone, and began to audibly react as he scrolled:

“Okay …”

“Oh.”

“Oh no.” He started laughing.

Is it possible to be emasculated by Nate Silver? Apparently, yes.

Perhaps sensing my humiliation, he tried to soften his assessment. “Look, the nice way to put it is that you’re betting like a recreational bettor.” I took this as a withering insult.

Silver laid out some basic realities of the sports-betting economy. The books effectively charge you about 4.5 percent for every bet you place, he explained, which means it isn’t enough to win 50.1 percent of the time; you have to win 52.5 percent of your bets just to break even, and that’s before taxes. My most obvious mistake, he said, was that I was using only DraftKings. To find edges, I would need to shop for lines across at least three or four books every week.

He gave me other tips, too: Avoid “prop bets” on individual players (Josh Allen to rush for more than 50 yards) and multi-leg parlays, which pay out only if every outcome hits (the Chiefs cover the spread, the Ravens win, and the Chargers score more than 24 points). Props and parlays are how sportsbooks generate most of their profits. “They’re suckers’ bets,” Silver said, which made sense, given that I had already placed several of them.

Live betting—placing wagers in the middle of games—was also a bad idea, he told me, because it leads to gambling based on emotion more than logic. Also, televised games are broadcast on a delay, which means the sportsbooks can adjust lines before you even see what has happened on the field. You are, in effect, betting against people who live 20 seconds in the future.

To guard against emotional betting, Silver suggested a Tuesday-morning ritual: I should sit in a quiet place, study the lines for that week’s games, gather information on injury reports and weather forecasts, and then place $100 bets on the six or seven games I liked best.

Before we hung up, I asked Silver what kind of profit would make it a successful season for me.

He seemed confused by the question. “If you make one penny, that would be better than 98 percent of people over an entire season,” Silver answered, as if this were obvious.

I was taken aback. Hadn’t Silver himself made hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling? Yes, he said, but that was mostly from poker tournaments. Sports betting was a game of razor-thin margins and microscopic edges. NFL football was among the hardest sports to win money on—the lines were too sharp, the teams too evenly matched. Silver told me that, even with his quantish models and prognosticatory brilliance, he would consider it cause to celebrate if he broke even on the season.

by McKay Coppins, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: Tyler Comrie/Getty

[ed. See also: The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed (DS).]

12 Revelations About the PGA Tour's (Still Uncertain) Future

Although nothing concrete was announced regarding the future on Wednesday from PGA Tour headquarters, new CEO Brian Rolapp spent the majority of his inaugural Players Championship press conference signaling that the way things are will no longer be how they will be. Perhaps just as importantly, he signaled how. Here are the 12 revelations from Rolapp's remarks and what it means for the tour's future.

The PGA Tour is splitting in two

As Golf Digest reported earlier this year, the tour’s Future Competitions Committee is deep in discussions on creating a two-track competition system. Rolapp said the first track is expected to double the current eight signature events to 16 tournaments, alongside the four majors, the Players and the postseason. Running from late January to early September, the schedule will span 21 to 26 competitions. The second track will function as a promotion-and-relegation tool, with events spread across the calendar year and into the fall. This system does not replace the Korn Ferry Tour and other PGA Tour feeder circuits, which remain intact.

"We are evaluating the role of promotion and relegation across our competitive model," Rolapp said. "We are further strengthening our merit-based system and leaning into what makes professional golf so compelling: players earning their way to the top, with every event having greater meaning."

One of the recurring talking points of Rolapp's tenure has been “scarcity,” widely interpreted in the industry as the elimination of events. As Golf Digest has learned, the endangered events will likely be repositioned to the second track rather than cut entirely. The system essentially formalizes what has effectively been a two-tier structure for years.

The non-answer answer on rollback

At last year’s Tour Championship, Rolapp acknowledged he was still getting up to speed on the USGA and R&A's proposed golf ball rollback. On Wednesday, he made clear neither he nor the tour is ready to take a position.

"I think this is clearly a complex issue," Rolapp said. "From what I can tell, it comes down to two questions: Is distance a problem, and should it be addressed—[that’s] question No. 1. Question No. 2, does the current rule being proposed accomplish that? I've spoken with players, I've spoken with the governing bodies, I've spoken with golf ball manufacturers, I've spoken to fans. What's clear to me is that everybody has an opinion, and those opinions are clearly not consistent on either question.

“As far as our players, I know they're hitting prototypes. I hear all different things. Some are impacted; some that expected to be impacted are not. So as far as the PGA Tour is concerned, we have not taken a position. When we get comfortable with the rule and the data, we'll make a decision."

It's a diplomatic answer—but it's hardly an endorsement of the USGA/R&A proposal. Most of Rolapp's membership, sponsored by OEMs, opposes rollback, and picking that fight while bigger battles loom would be an unusual opening move.

Bigger cities returning to the schedule

As previously reported, the tour is pushing to place events in larger metropolitan areas. "The PGA Tour competes in only four of the top 10 largest U.S. media markets," Rolapp said. "That is an opportunity. We are evaluating markets like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston, and many others, places where there is strong fan demand for our sport and a chance to reach new fans." [...]

No more limited fields, no cut events

One of the signature event series’ most persistent criticisms—from fans, media and players alike—has been its small-field, no-cut format, which drew unflattering comparisons to LIV Golf. Rolapp said the new top tier will feature more players and a cut.

"Our best events will have larger fields. Ideally, we are targeting something closer to 120-player fields with a cut," Rolapp said. "That consistently matters. It helps fans know who they will see and showcases who they want to see—the most competitive players. It helps partners know what they're investing in, and it helps players better understand the competitive landscape in their schedules, all while embracing meritocracy."

In a related note …

Sponsor exemptions may be on the outs

Another source of fan frustration—one that cuts against the meritocracy ethos Rolapp keeps invoking—is the sponsor’s exemption system, along with the politics surrounding it. Rolapp appears to recognize the tension.

"It is my opinion we need a better competitive model because we should be delivering fields to the sponsors," he said. "We shouldn't make them work hard to put together a field. We're delivering them something, and they're supporting that. I think we need to be better partners in that. I also have an appreciation for the fact that professional golfers are independent contractors. So their level of job security is in some part tied to the exemptions they have earned. It's a balance. Those are all discussions we're having with the committee—to provide for those things but also deliver the purest competition that fans want."

A strong opener

As Golf Digest reported in January, the Hawaii swing is in danger of being cut. Rolapp said the tour wants to open its season out west with a finish shown on network television in prime time at an iconic venue. Perhaps Kapalua qualifies as "iconic," yet one possibility, sources told Golf Digest, is hosting the season opener at Torrey Pines.

Reunification with LIV is not a priority

Even before Rolapp arrived, the tour had quietly narrowed its reintegration focus to three players: Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka. Koepka has since returned, and DeChambeau's LIV contract expires this year. As for the others, or any broader rapprochement with LIV, Rolapp expressed no interest.

"My brief is to make the PGA Tour better," he said. "I'm open to whatever makes the PGA Tour better—better for fans, better for our members. That's what I'm focused on, and that's where I put all my efforts."

The tour may have a media-rights fight ahead

The tour's current media-rights deal runs until 2030. But it was negotiated in a pre-LIV world with a different competitive picture, and it predates the two-tier structure now being assembled. There is also the not-so-small matter of the NFL, which appears poised to re-enter the market aggressively and early, potentially swallowing up dollars networks might have been ready to spend on golf. Rolapp, who came from the NFL, spoke candidly about what that landscape could mean.

"I've read the same reports you have—that they would like to go to the media market earlier. The U.S. media rights market is $30 billion. The NFL currently accounts for $12 billion of that. They have made their public intentions clear; they would like to double that," Rolapp said. "So if you start doing that math and you're anyone other than the National Football League, you ask yourself: Next time I go to market, how do I make sure I have the most compelling product so that we can compete in what is a very complicated media ecosystem that's changing all the time? You see fans changing their habits—television versus streaming. You see the companies and the economics of the industry changing. So it's a very dynamic time in media.

"If you are in the sports business, it behooves you to put your house in order as much as possible. That is a significant part of the work that the Future Competition Committee is doing, and it's one of the reasons why it's so important."

Thinking outside the U.S.

While the PGA Tour schedule will remain mostly American based, Rolapp said that having an international presence is important as well. He acknowledged the benefits of the strategic alliance with the DP World Tour, and the notion that certain segments of the calendar would provide opportunities for international exposure.

“No, you should not think about this as purely in the confines of the United States. I think the bulk of our events will be, just because of the nature of the tour and the realities of our business. But we do want to do more internationally.

“I think in the fall, in other parts of the calendar, are great places to lean into that. I think you'll see parts of our schedule that will have an international component to it, even in the summer. So it is very much on our mind. We have not gotten to it in our committee work because we're sort of concentrating on the core of our schedule. But it is very much high on the agenda.

Don't expect a new schedule for 2027

There had been hope in the industry that changes would arrive as soon as next year. Last month at the Genesis Invitational, Tiger Woods moved to temper those expectations. Rolapp echoed the sentiment. Expect some adjustments in 2027—not a wholesale transformation.

"Once decisions have been made and finalized, changes will be implemented through a rolling approach," Rolapp said. "As Tiger has said recently, some elements could be addressed sooner for next season, with more significant change likely implemented for the 2028 season, pending the necessary work with our partners and other operational considerations.

"This is a complex process with many constituencies impacted. We will continue to move with urgency, but we are focused on getting it right."

by Joel Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Orlando Ramirez, Tracy Wilcox

[ed. As a former NFL exec responsible for handling media businesses including digital media, NFL Network, advertising sales, NFL sponsorships, NFL media assets, television contracts, and digital media rights you can probably figure out where this guy is coming from. Might be good for growing the game, but is it good for golf? See also: Players 2026: Behind the scenes of the PGA Tour's renewed pursuit of major status for the Players (this week). ]

Strait of Hormuz

Satellite view of the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway between Iran and Oman that links the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes.

Image: Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025/Getty Images

via: CNN Updates - Iran's attacks on a key oil route.

[ed. Pretty tight quarters.]

Insider Trading Is Going to Get People Killed

War markets are a national-security threat.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not, it’s safe to assume, a devoted Polymarket user. If he had been, the Iranian leader might still be alive. Hours before Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was reduced to rubble last week, an account under the username “magamyman” bet about $20,000 that the supreme leader would no longer be in power by the end of March. Polymarket placed the odds at just 14 percent, netting “magamyman” a profit of more than $120,000.

Everyone knew that an attack might be in the works—some American aircraft carriers had already been deployed to the Middle East weeks ago—but the Iranian government was caught off guard by the timing. Although the ayatollah surely was aware of the risks to his life, he presumably did not know that he would be targeted on this particular Saturday morning. Yet on Polymarket, plenty of warning signs pointed to an impending attack. The day before, 150 users bet at least $1,000 that the United States would strike Iran within the next 24 hours, according to a New York Times analysis. Until then, few people on the platform were betting that kind of money on an immediate attack.

Maybe all of this sounds eerily familiar. In January, someone on Polymarket made a series of suspiciously well-timed bets right before the U.S. attacked a foreign country and deposed its leader. By the time Nicolás Maduro was extracted from Venezuela and flown to New York, the user had pocketed more than $400,000. Perhaps this trader and the Iran bettors who are now flush with cash simply had the luck of a lifetime—the gambling equivalent of making a half-court shot. Or maybe they knew what was happening ahead of time and flipped it for easy money. We simply do not know.

Polymarket traders swap crypto, not cash, and conceal their identities through the blockchain. Even so, investigations into insider trading are already under way: Last month, Israel charged a military reservist for allegedly using classified information to make unspecified bets on Polymarket.

The platform forbids illegal activity, which includes insider trading in the U.S. But with a few taps on a smartphone, anyone with privileged knowledge can now make a quick buck (or a hundred thousand). Polymarket and other prediction markets—the sanitized, industry-favored term for sites that let you wager on just about anything—have been dogged by accusations of insider trading in markets of all flavors. How did a Polymarket user know that Lady Gaga, Cardi B, and Ricky Martin would make surprise appearances during the Super Bowl halftime show, but that Drake and Travis Scott wouldn’t? Shady bets on war are even stranger and more disturbing. They risk unleashing an entirely new kind of national-security threat. The U.S. caught a break: The Venezuela and Iran strikes were not thwarted by insider traders whose bets could have prompted swift retaliation. The next time, we may not be so lucky. [...]

Any insiders who put money down on impending war may not have thought that they were giving anything away. An anonymous bet that reeks of insider trading is not always easy to spot in the moment. After the suspicious Polymarket bets on the Venezuela raid, the site’s forecast placed the odds that Maduro would be ousted at roughly 10 percent. Even if Maduro and his team had been glued to Polymarket, it’s hard to imagine that such long odds would have compelled him to flee in the middle of the night. And even with so many people betting last Friday on an imminent strike in Iran, Polymarket forecasted only a 26 percent chance, at most, of an attack the next day. What’s the signal, and what’s the noise?

In both cases, someone adept at parsing prediction markets could have known that something was up. “It’s possible to spot these bets ahead of time,” Rajiv Sethi, a Barnard College economist who studies prediction markets, told me. There are some telltale behaviors that could help distinguish a military contractor betting off a state secret from a college student mindlessly scrolling on his phone after one too many cans of Celsius. Someone who’s using a newly created account to wager a lot of money against the conventional wisdom is probably the former, not the latter. And spotting these kinds of suspicious bettors is only getting easier. The prediction-market boom has created a cottage industry of tools that instantaneously flag potential insider trading—not for legal purposes but so that you, too, can profit off what the select few already know.

Unlike Kalshi, the other big prediction-market platform, Polymarket can be used in the U.S. only through a virtual private network, or VPN. In effect, the site is able to skirt regulations that require tracking the identities of its customers and reporting shady bets to the government. In some ways, insider trading seems to be the whole point: “What’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market,” Shayne Coplan, the company’s 27-year-old CEO, said in an interview last year. (Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.)

Consider if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had paid the monthly fee for a service that flagged relevant activity on Polymarket two hours before the strike. The supreme leader might not have hosted in-person meetings with his top advisers where they were easy targets for missiles. [...]

Maybe this all sounds far-fetched, but it shouldn’t. “Any advance notice to an adversary is problematic,” Alex Goldenberg, a fellow at the Rutgers Miller Center who has written about war markets, told me. “And these predictive markets, as they stand, are designed to leak out this information.” In all likelihood, he added, intelligence agencies across the world are already paying attention to Polymarket. Last year, the military’s bulletin for intelligence professionals published an article advocating for the armed forces to integrate data from Polymarket to “more fully anticipate national security threats.” After all, the Pentagon already has some experience with prediction markets. During the War on Terror, DARPA toyed with creating what it billed the “Policy Analysis Market,” a site that would let anonymous traders bet on world events to forecast terrorist attacks and coups. (Democrats in Congress revolted, and the site was quickly canned.)

Now every adversary and terrorist group in the world can easily access war markets that are far more advanced than what the DOD ginned up two decades ago. What makes Polymarket’s entrance into warfare so troubling is not just potential insider trading from users like “magamyman.” If governments are eyeing Polymarket for signs of an impending attack, they can also be led astray. A government or another sophisticated actor wouldn’t need to spend much money to massively swing the Polymarket odds on whether a Gulf state will imminently strike Iran—breeding panic and paranoia. More fundamentally, prediction markets risk warping the basic incentives of war, Goldenberg said. He gave the example of a Ukrainian military commander making less than $1,000 a month, who could place bets that go against his own military’s objective. “Maybe you choose to retreat a day early because you can double, triple, or quadruple your money and then send that back to your family,” he said.

by Saahil Desai, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Matteo Giuseppe Pani/The Atlantic
[ed. For other examples, see also: Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day (ACX). Also: How to Prevent Insider Trading on Trump’s Wars (New Yorker); and, America Is Slow-Walking Into a Polymarket Disaster (Atlantic).]

The Sluishuis

The Sluishuis (Dutch for 'sluice house') is an apartment building in IJburg, a neighbourhood on artificial islands in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The building, which opened on 13 July 2022, was designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, an architecture firm based in Copenhagen and New York City, in collaboration with Rotterdam-based Barcode Architects.

The Sluishuis is a sustainable building, with solar panels installed on the roof providing the energy for the lighting and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning in the complex. Its courtyard has a publicly accessible jetty where boats can moor...

The Sluishuis has 442 apartment units; 369 of them, mainly in the middle segment, are for renting and the rest are on sale. The size of the residential units ranges from 40 to 180 square metres (430 to 1,940 sq ft). Around the entire building is a publicly accessible jetty where there is space for 34 houseboats. The Sluishuis is built over the water of the IJ, allowing boats to moor at a dock of the complex. The unusual shape makes the building appear to float above the water.

via: Wikipedia

Image: Hay Kranen

The China Vibe Shift

A year ago came what, for lack of a better term, we dubbed the DeepSeek moment. That was followed fairly quickly by the curious migration of “TikTok refugees” to Xiaohongshu, and not long after that by the first conversations Jeremy Goldkorn and I had about what felt like a changing American — or even Western — mood toward China.

Today, freshly back from Switzerland after covering the World Economic Forum (where the chatter was, not surprisingly, fixated on Trump’s covetous pronouncements on Greenland and Mark Carney’s “rupture” speech), with Keir Starmer now in Beijing to continue talks about restoring some version of the UK–China “Golden Age,” it feels like a decent moment to look back and ask what, if anything, all of that amounted to.

Jeremy and I recorded a podcast episode in which we tried to describe something we were both sensing in the early months of 2025 but couldn’t quite pin down. It wasn’t a policy shift, or even a clear change in opinion. It was more atmospheric than that — a change in tone, in default assumptions, in the emotional register through which China was being discussed in Western discourse. We eventually settled, somewhat sheepishly, on calling it a “vibe shift.” (Less sheepishly, we reconvened in November to gloat about how we’d gotten that right!)

The phrase was imprecise and was intended to convey imprecision. But it did seem to capture something real. Multiple polls have since borne it out, and the feeling has only grown stronger. What’s become clearer to me, looking back, is how that shift relates to a larger argument I’ve been making for some time now — what I called the “Great Reckoning” in a piece I published in The Ideas Letter.

The two are not the same thing. The vibe shift is not the reckoning I’m looking for. But it may be making one more possible.

The change I’m describing is not a sudden outbreak of admiration for China, nor a reversal of long-standing concerns about human rights, political repression, or democracy (though admittedly I’ve seen some of that in some quarters). Those issues remain very much part of the picture. What’s changing is something more basic: the set of assumptions that have long structured how China is interpreted in Western public life.

For years, a relatively stable narrative did a lot of work. China’s successes were provisional; its failures were fundamental. Growth would eventually give way to crisis. Political liberalization was assumed to be inevitable, even if perpetually deferred. Moral condemnation often stood in for empirical assessment. China could be criticized without being fully understood, because history, it was assumed, would take care of the rest.

That narrative hasn’t exactly been replaced. One only has to look at how eagerly some commentators declared Party rule “brittle” following the purges of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, or how quickly far-fetched rumors were embraced, to see that the old habits die hard.

But the narrative has lost much of its force, mainly because the U.S. — Gaza to Greenland — no longer commands the moral authority it once assumed. Increasingly, when I hear it, it sounds less like analysis and more like reassurance. I know I’m not alone in this.

You can see this erosion in small but telling ways: in the growing reluctance to predict imminent collapse; in the uneasy acknowledgment that China is capable of building complex systems at scale; in the fact that younger audiences, and people closer to technology, manufacturing, or logistics, are less willing to treat China as a purely derivative or temporary phenomenon.

None of this amounts to endorsement. But it does suggest a loosening of reflexes.

A year of small shocks

The past year offered no shortage of moments that helped crystallize this shift.

The emergence of DeepSeek was only one of them. The reaction it provoked wasn’t really about a single large language model. It was about the dawning realization that China was not merely following at the technological frontier, but participating in shaping it. That realization sat awkwardly with long-standing assumptions about where innovation could — and could not — come from.

Then there was the strange but revealing episode of Western “TikTok refugees” making their way onto Xiaohongshu. Tens of thousands of users encountered a Chinese social media environment directly, without mediation by think tanks, policy papers, or cable news. The result wasn’t mass admiration so much as something more disarming: familiarity. China appeared less opaque, less exotic, and therefore harder to keep at a safe analytical distance. (In a strange coda to that episode a year on — not something I’ve looked into too closely, but from what I’m hearing — people are once again abandoning TikTok for Chinese apps, TikTok being under new and apparently very censorship-happy American management).

Around the same time, a steady trickle of firsthand accounts — from executives, engineers, investors, and travelers — described a China that didn’t fit neatly into prevailing narratives. Infrastructure that worked. Manufacturing ecosystems that functioned smoothly. A sense of momentum that was hard to reconcile with predictions of stagnation or decay.

Some of this material was shallow. A fair amount of the so-called “China-pilled” content circulating online is overwrought, unserious, or plainly wrong. I don’t endorse it. But even that excess is revealing. It suggests that people are groping, sometimes awkwardly, for ways to make sense of realities that just don’t fit the narrative they’ve been sold.

One of the stranger — and more amusing — expressions of this moment was described in a recent Wired piece by Zeyi Yang, who is always worth reading. Yang wrote about the sudden popularity of memes in which Americans announce that they are in “a very Chinese time” of their lives: drinking hot water (which I do endorse), wearing slippers in the house, posting videos of themselves eating dim sum, sporting vaguely Chinese-coded streetwear, or joking about “Chinamaxxing.”

The joke, as Yang notes, is not really about China, and certainly not about Chinese people. It’s a projection — a way of gesturing at something Americans feel they’ve lost.

The meme works precisely because it’s unserious. No one is actually becoming Chinese. But the impulse behind it is telling. China, in this memified version, functions less as a real place than as a symbolic contrast: a stand-in for competence, momentum, coherence, or simply “things getting done,” set against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure, normalized dysfunction, and institutional paralysis at home.

That selectivity is the point. The meme is disposable, ironic, and easily reversed. It allows people to flirt with an alternative without committing to understanding it. In that sense, it’s less a sign of admiration than of dissatisfaction — a sideways commentary on American malaise, filtered through a half-ironic orientalist lens.

I wouldn’t read too much into it. But I wouldn’t dismiss it either. Cultural detritus often reflects shifts in mood before more formal discourse catches up.

The reckoning beneath the surface

This is where the connection to the “Great Reckoning” comes in — and where it’s easy to sound more portentous than necessary.

The reckoning I have in mind isn’t really about China. It’s about us. More specifically, it’s about a long-standing Western habit of assuming that modern outcomes — wealth, tech sophistication, state capacity — are inseparable from Western political forms. When things don’t line up that way, the tendency has been to assume something must be temporary, distorted, or unsustainable.

China’s rise has been awkward for that story. Not because it offers the West some appealing alternative model — I don’t think it does — but because it keeps producing results that are hard to dismiss without contortions. Over time, this has encouraged a set of coping strategies: predictions of imminent collapse, confident talk of inevitable convergence, and a habit of substituting moral judgment for careful description.

For a while, that worked. Or at least it postponed the need for a harder conversation...

That’s what I mean by the vibe shift. Not that people have settled on a new story, but that the old one is starting to creak loudly enough to be noticed.

In that sense, the shift is preparatory. It doesn’t tell us what to think next. It just makes it harder to keep thinking the same way.

by Kaiser Y. Kuo, Sinica | Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I've got nothing against China, it's just doing what any superpower would do, looking out for its interests, expanding its sphere of influence for economic and security reasons, and attempting to preserve its history, culture and political system. See also: The Civilization Trap (Sinica). And, in case you missed it, Why Everyone Is Suddenly in a ‘Very Chinese Time’ in Their Lives (Wired). Oh, and this: China's power grid investments to surge to record $574 billion in 2026-2030. Maybe people are just envious that China is investing in its future, while the US self-destructs and spends $ trillions on military weapons and war mongering.]

Suno: The AI Music Race is Over

Video: Rick Beato

[ed. See also: The Truth About AI Music (Rowland's newsletter).]

For someone as profoundly unmusical as me, AI music generators are quite magical. I can barely sing a note, but in a few seconds I can make an entire track in any genre on any topic I want – like this soul song about Sky camera operator Phil Hooper. You can dismiss this as pure silliness for an audience of about five, but to me that’s the point! Thanks to AI, I get a little bit of musical joy that otherwise is completely out of reach.

Yet, as ever with technology, removing friction comes with a cost, and in this case the cost is a tsunami of musical spam. The stats on AI music are mind-boggling. In 2015, the entire US music industry made around 57,000 songs. Today, 60,000 AI tracks are uploaded to Deezer (aka French Spotify) *every single day* - that’s 21m a year, and this thing is just getting going.

The real problem isn’t the tracks, however, but the behaviour around them, because AI music is being used to try and steal from streamers (and by extension every legitimate musician on the site). Deezer estimate that 85% of listens to AI music are fraudulent – that is, made by bots set to stream the songs over and over in order to siphon royalties from the common pool. 

[ed. Do check out the soul song example mentioned above (with this accompanying video). Pretty scary... and sad.]

Clawed

How to Commit Corporate Murder

I.

A little more than a decade ago, I sat with my father and watched him die. Six months prior, he had been a vigorous man, stronger than I am today, faster and more resilient on a bike than most 20-somethings. Then one day he got heart surgery and he was never the same. His soul had been sucked out of him, the life gone from his eyes. He had moments of vivacity, when my father came back into his aging body, but these became rarer with time. His coherence faded, his voice grew quieter.

He spent those six months in and out of the hospital. And then on his last day he went into hospice. That day he barely uttered any words at all. In the final hours of his life, my father was practically already dead. He laid on the hospital bed. His breathing gradually slowed and became less audible. Eventually you could barely hear him at all, save for the eerie death rattle, a product of a body no longer able even to swallow. A body that cannot swallow also cannot eat or drink, and in that sense it has already thrown in the towel.

My mother and I exchanged knowing glances, but we never said the obvious nor asked any questions on both of our minds. We knew there would not be much longer. There was nothing to say or ask that would furnish any useful information; inquiry, at that stage, can only inflict pain.

I spoke with him, more than once, in private. I held his hand and tried to say goodbye. My mother came back into the room, and all three of us held hands. Eventually a machine declared with a long beep that he had crossed some line, though it was an invisible one for the humans in the room. My father died in the late afternoon of December 26, 2014.

A few days and eleven years later, on December 30, 2025, my son was born. I have watched death as it happens, and I have watched birth. What I learned is that neither are discrete events. They are both processes, things that unfold. Birth is a series of awakenings, and death is a series of sleepenings. My son will take years to be born, and my father took six months to die. Some people spend decades dying.

II.

At some point during my lifetime—I am not sure when—the American republic as we know it began to die. Like most natural deaths, the causes are numerous and interwoven. No one incident, emergency, attack, president, political party, law, idea, person, corporation, technology, mistake, betrayal, failure, misconception, or foreign adversary “caused” death to begin, though all those things and more contributed. I don’t know where we are in the death process, but I know we are in the hospice room. I’ve known it for a while, though I have sometimes been in denial, as all mourners are wont to do. I don’t like to talk about it; I am at the stage where talking about it usually only inflicts pain.

Unfortunately, however, I cannot carry out my job as a writer today with the level of analytic rigor you expect from me without acknowledging that we are sitting in hospice. It is increasingly difficult to honestly discuss the developments of frontier AI, and what kind of futures we should aim to build, without acknowledging our place at the deathbed of the republic as we know it. Except there is no convenient machine to decide for us that the patient has died. We just have to sit and watch.

Our republic has died and been reborn again more than once in America’s history. America has had multiple “foundings.” Perhaps we are on the verge of another rebirth of the American republic, another chapter in America’s continual reinvention of itself. I hope so. But it may be that we have no more virtue or wisdom to fuel such a founding, and that it is better to think of ourselves as transitioning gradually into an era of post-republic American statecraft and policymaking. I do not pretend to know.

I am now going to write about a skirmish between an AI company and the U.S. government. I don’t want to sound hyperbolic about it. The death I am describing has been going on for most of my life. The incident I am going to write about now took place last week, and it may even be halfway satisfyingly resolved within a day.

I am not saying this incident “caused” any sort of republican death, nor am I saying it “ushered in a new era.” If this event contributed anything, it simply made the ongoing death more obvious and less deniable for me personally. I consider the events of the last week a kind of death rattle of the old republic, the outward expression of a body that has thrown in the towel.

by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. More excerpts below. See also: Why the Pentagon Wants to Destroy Anthropic (NYT), Ezra Klein interviews Dean Ball (with a follow-up essay: The Future We Feared is Already Here). And, for a more comprehensive assessment of what the AI community thinks: Anthropic Officially, Arbitrarily and Capriciously Designated a Supply Chain Risk (DWAtV).]

***

"... Except the notion of “passing a law” is increasingly a joke in contemporary America. If you are serious about the outcome in question, “passing a law” is no longer Plan A; the dynamic is more like “well of course, one day, we’ll get a law passed, but since we actually care about doing this sometime soon, as opposed to in 15 years, we’ll accomplish our objective through [some other procedure or legal vehicle].” With this, governance has become more and more informal and ad hoc, power more dependent on the executive (whose incentive is to jam every goal he has through his existing power in as little time as possible, since he only has the length of his term guaranteed to him), and the policy vehicles in question more and more unsuited to the circumstances of their deployment, or the objectives they are being deployed to accomplish." [...]

... DoW insisted that the only reasonable path forward is for contracts to permit “all lawful use” (a simplistic notion not consistent with the common contractual restrictions discussed above), and has further threatened to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk. This is a power reserved exclusively for firms controlled by foreign adversary interests, such as Huawei, and usually means that the designated firm cannot be used by any military contractor in their fulfillment of any military contract.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth has gone even further, saying he would prevent all military contractors from having “any commercial relations” with Anthropic. He almost surely lacks this power, but a plain reading of this would suggest that Anthropic would not be able to use any cloud computing nor purchase chips of its own (since all relevant companies do business with the military), and that several of Anthropic’s largest investors (Nvidia, Google, and Amazon) would be forced to divest. Essentially, the United States Secretary of War announced his intention to commit corporate murder. The fact that his shot is unlikely to be lethal (only very bloody) does not change the message sent to every investor and corporation in America: do business on our terms, or we will end your business.

This strikes at a core principle of the American republic, one that has traditionally been especially dear to conservatives: private property. Suppose, for example, that the military approached Google and said “we would like to purchase individualized worldwide Google search data to do with whatever we want, and if you object, we will designate you a supply chain risk.” I don’t think they are going to do that, but there is no difference in principle between this and the message DoW is sending. There is no such thing as private property. If we need to use it for national security, we simply will. The government won’t quite “steal” it from you—they’ll compensate you—but you cannot set the terms, and you cannot simply exit from the transaction, lest you be deemed a “supply chain risk,” not to mention have the other litany of policy obstacles the government can throw at you.

This threat will now hover over anyone who does business with the government, not just in the sense that you may be deemed a supply chain risk but also in the sense that any piece of technology you use could be as well. Though Chinese AI providers like DeepSeek have not been labeled supply chain risks (yes, really; this government says Anthropic, an American company whose services it used in military strikes as recently as this past weekend, is more of a threat than a Chinese firm linked to the Chinese military), that implicit threat was always there.

***

[ed. One more thing. The guy who created this whole stupid dispute? Not Hegseth, he doesn't know shit about shit. It's former disgraced Uber manager: Emil Michael. A real piece of work (so of course, he fits right in.] 

The Plastic Surgeon Summit

We’re in a plastic surgery “renaissance period.”

Dr. Yannis Alexandrides: It is busier than ever. There’s a remarkable year-on-year demand increase that we see in surgical procedures, especially for the face, but also for the body. This is a trend that we have seen through the pandemic, but it has accelerated the last year.

Dr. Akshay Sanan: I think plastic surgery is in a renaissance period right now because of people publicly talking about it. Plastic surgery is now part of your wellness armamentarium. People used to flex what gym they went to, that they had a trainer, and now plastic surgery is part of that flex. People love to rock that they had their eyes done or their face and neck done or their body done. It’s just part of the cultural shift that we’re seeing.

Dr. Jason Champagne: This is where social media comes into play, camera phones and Zoom meetings. You see yourself from all these different angles nowadays that maybe you didn’t notice in the past.

Dr. Emily Hu: I find it very generational: Those who grew up in the social media era with a lot of sharing and openness are also very open about telling their friends [about the work they’ve had done].

Sanan: There’s a shift in consumer or patient habits. More people in their late 30s, early 40s, they’re choosing surgery earlier to age gracefully instead of waiting until things are advanced. They’re like, “I’m not going to wait until it drops down further. I just want to be hot in my 40s.”

Dr. John Diaz: It used to be that not everyone had access to a plastic surgeon. That was reserved within the realm of the elite. Well, not anymore. I have celebrities, executives, and business owners come in — but also teachers and waiters. There’s this democratization of attractiveness.

Dr. Paul Afrooz: Patients are very educated these days. They know what they’re looking for, they know what realistic results are, and they have the ability to do a lot of background research and understand who does things at an elite level. [...]

Let’s get into it: Why are we talking so much about facelifts this year?

Diaz: Facelifts have absolutely exploded for a few reasons. A lot of women see celebrities and influencers suddenly looking incredible, and they want to know how. Think about Kris Jenner — she had a huge impact when her pictures came out. And now it’s brought awareness to the fact that we have the technology to be able to take a young-looking woman and make her look better with surgery, without making her look fake. That was a real challenge 20 years ago.

Alexandrides: Kris Jenner was a very hot topic the last few months. Definitely a lot of the patients I see here take her as, let’s say, a model on how they want to look, because she looks fresh, but she doesn’t look pulled. She looks younger, and she looks happy, and you cannot see the scars, at least not in these pictures that we see.

Hu: I can’t tell you how many of my patients are like, “Yeah, my mom had a facelift. She was so scary. I’m never doing a facelift.” I mean, that was their response because they see their mom all bruised and scary looking.

Dr. Mark Murphy: Facelifts historically had a stereotypical “plastic surgery” look. Now people have realized, “I can look like myself 15 years ago and not have to look like a circus freak for it.” It’s become very digestible for patients. Social media is a huge driver behind it. Well, that, and the techniques are better.

So what’s actually new or changing about facelifts?

Dr. Mark Mani: We call it the golden age of facelift surgery. It’s primarily because of the success of the deep plane facelift.

Dr. David Shafer: There’s nothing new about [the deep plane facelift] as a procedure. It’s just very sophisticated marketing that’s being done now, and there are refinements to the procedures. But it’s not some plastic surgeon who’s marketing it now as some magic procedure that he came up with that nobody else does.

Mani: [A version of] the first deep plane lifts was performed in the late 1960s by a surgeon named Tord Skoog in Sweden [though the name came later]. I have his textbook and can show you results that would stand up to the best deep plane surgeons today. It’s not the procedure, it’s the surgeon, and facelift surgery, among all surgeries in plastic surgery, is an art form.

Afrooz: A surgeon named Sam Hamra — he just passed, but a wonderful human being, an extraordinary thinker, an extraordinary surgeon — first coined the phrase “deep plane facelift” in a 1990 paper and laid out some building blocks of the procedure. Just like everything else in plastic surgery, we stand on the giants before us.

Dr. Michael Stein: There are two main facelift techniques: deep plane and SMAS plication. The deep plane facelift is where you cut the layer under the skin called the SMAS, dissect underneath it, and tighten it in addition to the skin. In the SMAS facelift, instead of cutting and elevating the SMAS, you suture it to itself to tighten it from over top.

Dr. Amir Karam: The majority of surgeons, up until recently, have been doing the traditional SMAS technique, which is more or less horizontally pulling the face sideways, and that was leading to a very unnatural look.

Mani: I was the surgeon who wrote the most-read facelift academic article that convinced other surgeons to do deep plane facelifts. It was an article in Aesthetic Surgery Journal in 2016, where I detailed the specific anatomic reasons that deep plane is better.

Stein: The people who only do deep plane facelifts say they have a more longitudinal result, and vice versa. But the truth is, a good result is a good result. It depends more on the surgeon versus technique. A good facelift is a good facelift.

Facelifts aren’t done evolving.

Karam: The consumer is driving surgeons to create better and better results. So there’s been a massive increase in interest for surgeons to level up their strategies surgically and learn new techniques that are not new but new to them.

Afrooz: Even my facelift today is better than my facelift was one year ago. When you hone in on one thing as your career, you’re just constantly looking for ways to improve. It’s the cumulative effect of small subtleties over time and practice that you notice nuanced improvements to your results. One might assume that a deep plane facelift in one surgeon’s hands is the same as it is in another’s, but I’m here to tell you that it’s very much not the same.

Dr. Daniel Gould: There are new layers that we’re adding into the surgery. We’re recognizing the importance of the mid-face and volume position there. I’m recognizing adding fat to the mouth and the areas around the mouth, the chin, because all these areas have been neglected. We are now nailing all the low-hanging fruit: We’re nailing the neck, we’re nailing the face, we’re nailing the temple and the brows. Now it’s time to move forward and continue to innovate and push the limits of what we can really do in facial rejuvenation.

Mani: What I’ve developed is called the scarless lift, and it’s basically a deep plane facelift without a scar in front of the ear, with an endoscope. The endoscopic procedure involves a hidden incision within the hair, a short one behind the ear, and sometimes one under the chin. I still do about 60% open [non-endoscopic], but a good percentage of my facelifts are scarless endoscopic. The results are more beautiful because you don’t have to worry about the scar, and the vectors of lifting are better.

Alexandrides: I don’t think this will be now, “OK, let’s forget about facelifts, let’s move to something else.” What will probably happen is that people will discover intricate little different techniques and say, “You have the facelift that is done like that.” I have patients who ask me very technical questions: How do you design your scar around your ear?

Stein: Facelift surgery has survived the test of time. Every year there are new machines designed to tighten skin, and for some patients with mild laxity, they may see nice results. The truth is though, if you have jowls or droopy skin of the face and neck, the only thing that’s really going to give you the best bang for your buck and directly address your laxity is a facelift.

by Bustle Editors, Bustle |  Read more:

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