An Ode to Miller Lite

One of the many humiliations that arrive in your 30s is the grudging recognition that a parent was right about something. For some people, their parents were right about a financial decision they recommended, or a romantic relationship they disapproved of. My dad was right about a 96-calorie American lager produced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“It’s hard to get in trouble drinking Miller Lite,” was my father’s advice, dispensed repeatedly throughout my young adulthood—usually after he’d spied me carefully tipping an over-hopped beer out of a florid can and into a stupidly shaped glass. For years, I wrote off his wisdom as the curmudgeonly philosophy of a man too stubborn to join the Craft Beer Revolution. Why would anyone still drink mass-produced piss water when you could stock your fridge with $21 four-packs made with love and genius by regional artisans? It was like watching a black-and-white boob tube in the age of 4K flatscreens.

In my 20s, I turned enjoying craft beer—and booze in general—into a minor hobby. I stood in long lines to buy limited releases from various “gypsy brewers.” I nursed recurring obsessions with Monastrell wines from Jumilla. I hunted down vintage bourbon; National Distillers–era Old Grand-Dad was a particular fixation.

In retrospect, I can see that this was something of a defense mechanism. After growing up working-class, I went to college and then graduate school at fancy private institutions, which put me in constant contact with people who had family money, or were simply from hipper places than I am. You may have a trust fund and come from a stock of people who “summer,” I reasoned, but I’ll be damned if you know more about food or alcohol than I do. I viewed drinking decent tipple as part of what it meant to be civilized. To some extent, I still believe that. But now I also believe that most of the time, it’s Miller Time.

The conversion happened slowly. It began with a search for a beer that I could drink while watching Monday Night Football, but that also wouldn’t leave me feeling grimy when I woke up to teach my 8 a.m. class. As I entered my third decade of life, I’d found that microbrews, with their high alcohol content, made me feel a bit suboptimal the next day, even when I consumed only one or two. Before long, my Miller Mondays made me realize that this 4.2 percent ABV “macro-lager” had many applications I had not previously considered: It was a treat for mowing the lawn. It prevented me from getting too drunk at weddings. It could be reliably consumed during a hot-afternoon cookout without requiring me to take a nap. This small pleasure was even cheap! At my local bottle shop, a sixer of tall boys rings out at $7.49.

The problem with craft beer is how easily it can make you, as my dad says, “get in trouble.” One double IPA is not enough, but two is one-half too many. Two sours is one-half too few, but three is instant heartburn. Boozy imperial stouts are best consumed in eight-ounce increments, but they tend to come in 22-ounce bombers. The math doesn’t math. Miller Lite, by contrast, is an honest beer. If you find yourself Miller Lite drunk, most likely the issue is not that you shouldn’t have had that last beer; you shouldn’t have had those last four.

Miller Lite is not a great beer. It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness. Miller Lite does not demand your attention. It does not slap you in the face with flavor; in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any flavor at all. Gun to my head, I’d say it vaguely recalls … sandwich bread? Frozen corn? Off-brand Cheerios, maybe? The tasting notes provided by the Miller Brewing Company include such descriptors as “light to medium body,” “clean,” and “crisp,” all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that “you will notice it in your mouth.” A review on the brew-rating website Beeradvocate notes that Miller “is a beer best observed in bunches”—a beverage whose most favorable quality is quantity.

This is a beer that provides you with absolutely nothing to think about. It offers a break from the quest to find novel gustatory experience that has come to substitute for culture among much of the American professional class. To drink Miller Lite is to declare that you are a well-adjusted adult—that you do not require excitement at every juncture, that you are capable of sitting with your thoughts, that you have the patience and strength of character to build a buzz slowly.

by Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Pinterest via
[ed. 100%. Lite is the archetypal go anywhere beer. Always remembered for bringing the concept of "light" (as in "less calories"), into the public consciousness. Interestingly, where I live, you can only find it in 16oz 12 packs; regular 12oz cans only come in cases (no 6 packs). Not sure of the message there...]

Fender Demands Builders Stop Making Stratocaster-Style Guitars

Following on from its legal victory regarding the Stratocaster trademark in March, a law firm claiming to represent Fender Musical Instruments Corporation has reportedly sent cease and desist orders to a variety of guitar makers demanding they stop producing instruments that use the Stratocaster design.

Back in 2009, Fender lost a high-profile US case when the brand attempted to file trademarks for the Stratocaster, Telecaster and P-Bass body shapes. At the time the filing was protested by a group of other guitar makers, who ultimately succeeded in having the trademarks cancelled.

In the years since, it was widely assumed that this defeat – following on from Gibson’s 2005 loss in a lawsuit against PRS in 2005 – gave other builders the freedom to use classic body shapes, provided that they didn’t infringe on things like headstock shape.

However, Gibson’s protracted but ultimately successful battle against Dean Guitars over the Flying V body shape showed that the big brands still have the ability to win these cases in the right circumstances. [...]

The Fender ruling, crucially, was NOT a trademark dispute – Fender and Gibson have both lost trademark cases on their body shapes in the EU in years past – but sought to reframe the Strat’s body shape as an artistic work, subject to copyright, instead.

by Josh Gardner, Guitar.com |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/uncredited
[ed. Idiots. How to destroy decades of history, goodwill, and brand loyalty in one letter. See also: Is this the beginning of the end for the S-style? (Music Radar).]

Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose

VF Corporation started as Vanity Fair Mills. Bras and underwear. They paid $762 million for a company called Blue Bell and picked up JanSport in the deal. That acquisition made them the largest publicly traded clothing company in the world.

Then they went shopping.

In 2000, they bought The North Face. Same year, they bought Eastpak. In 2004, Kipling. In 2007, Eagle Creek. By the time they were done, VF Corporation controlled an estimated 55% of the US backpack market.

More than half. One company.

Every time you stood in a store in the 2010s and compared a JanSport to a North Face to an Eastpak, you were comparing three labels owned by the same parent corporation. Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.

Competition is what kept these brands honest when they were independent. If JanSport built a shitty bag in 1985, you walked across the aisle and bought an Eastpak instead. That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above: hit the margin target.

The easiest way to hit a margin target is to make everything a little worse, across the board, all at once.

What they changed

Denier count is the most measurable indicator of fabric durability. It measures fiber thickness. A bag made with 1000-denier Cordura nylon can survive years of daily use. Drop that to 600-denier polyester and you have a bag that looks identical on the shelf and lasts half as long.

Denier counts dropped across VF Corp's backpack lines.

YKK makes the best zippers on earth. They're Japanese, they cost more per unit, and brands that care about longevity use them because a zipper failure kills a bag faster than fabric wear. On VF Corp's lower-tier models, YKK hardware got swapped for generic alternatives. A few cents saved per unit across millions of bags.

Stitching density went down. More stitches per inch means stronger seams. Fewer stitches means faster production. When you're running millions of units through factories in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, shaving seconds off each seam saves serious money. It also creates failure points at every spot where the bag takes stress. Strap junctions. Zipper terminations. The bottom panel.

None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.

Someone in the industry pushed back on an earlier version of this piece with a fair point: VF Corp's brands still operate with their own design teams and their own headquarters. The brands aren't literally merged. And the premium tiers within North Face and JanSport still use quality materials. The Summit Series from TNF still has Cordura. You can still find a JanSport with YKK zippers if you know where to look.

All of that is true. But it actually makes the argument worse, not better.

The fact that VF Corp kept the premium tiers intact while degrading the entry-level and mid-range products means this was a deliberate segmentation strategy. They still make the good version. They just also sell a garbage version under the same trusted name, in the same stores, to the people who don't know the difference. The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo.

Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.

The warranty is doing the same thing

JanSport still advertises a lifetime warranty. It sounds like a company that stands behind its product.

Go try to use it.

You ship the bag back at your own expense. That runs $12 to $25 depending on size and where you live. You wait three to six weeks. That's the current turnaround per JanSport's own warranty page. Then they evaluate the damage.

"Normal wear and tear" isn't covered. Only "defects in materials and workmanship." Think about what that means for a bag engineered to last two years. When it starts falling apart at eighteen months, that failure can be classified as the product reaching its expected lifetime, not as a defect. The warranty language is structurally designed to exclude the exact type of failure the product is now built to have.

People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.

The warranty used to be legendary. JanSport used to be the brand people cited when they talked about companies that actually stood behind their stuff. That reputation still exists in people's memories. The warranty now runs on that leftover trust.

One person told me they called about getting a zipper replaced on a JanSport from the late 90s. They were told it was normal wear and tear. They tried tailors, got quoted $50 to $100 for a new zipper. They looked at buying a new JanSport and saw how far the quality had fallen. They ended up buying a used backpack at a thrift store for four dollars.

Ten to twenty used bags for the price of one new one that'll fall apart. That's where we're at.

by Keyana Sapp, Worse on Purpose | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. See also: Your Dinner Got Worse On Purpose (WoP):]

***

A truck pulls into the alley behind two restaurants. Same truck, same hand cart, same flats of frozen jalapeño poppers walking through two different kitchen doors that share a back wall. Two different menus, two different price-points… the exact same food supplies.

The truck is Sysco. They deliver to more than 400,000 of the ~749,000 restaurants in America. Roughly one in every two. The steak and eggs at a diner in the Texas Panhandle and the steak and eggs at a breakfast joint in northern Maine taste functionally identical because they came off the same pallet at the same distribution center, processed against the same private-label spec, on the same line, by people who never knew which restaurant the boxes were headed to.

This is what the system was built to produce. The same dinner, served to 400,000 different rooms, by people who think they are running their own restaurants.

The truck stops everywhere

Sysco does not just feed independent restaurants. They feed hospitals, federal prisons, military bases, public schools, and the food service companies that supply the cafeterias of the United States Capitol. Fiscal year 2025 closed at $81.4 billion in net sales. The customer count sits at roughly 730,000 across 10 countries, with 337 distribution centers and around 1,719 employed drivers.

The thing people should understand is what those numbers do at the supplier layer. When Sysco moves a spec on a chicken breast, the spec moves on the plate of a restaurant-goer, a public school kid and a federal prisoner in the same week. When Sysco strikes a single supplier deal for frozen seafood, the cafeteria at the United States Congress and the chow line at the Bureau of Prisons end up with the same case from the same boat. [...]

The clam chowder in a New England diner and the clam chowder in a Florida diner come out of the same Sysco can. The biscuits at a Tennessee breakfast joint and the biscuits at a Wisconsin one come from the same frozen case. Regional cuisine, the kind that used to be the reason people drove to a particular restaurant in a particular town, requires regional ingredients and regional suppliers and a chef with the leverage to source both. As Frerick put it, “every independent diner becomes an off-brand Denny's."

Among line cooks, the saying is simpler. “When a Sysco truck pulls up to the loading dock, the kitchen has stopped trying.”

Worried About War’s Impact, Bond Investors Push Rates to Highest Level Since 2007

Bond markets convulsed on Tuesday, pushing the rates on U.S. Treasuries to levels not seen since the global financial crisis nearly 20 years ago, as investors grew increasingly anxious about rising inflation because of the war in Iran.

The yield on the 30-year Treasury note rose to 5.18 percent on Tuesday, on course to close at its highest level since 2007. Bond yields move inversely to prices.

The rising rates, which are pushing up borrowing costs for governments, homeowners and businesses, could be a critical pressure point for the Trump administration as it continues to pursue its campaign against Iran, which has pushed up oil prices worldwide.

The last time President Trump faced such turmoil in the Treasury market was after he announced in April last year that he would raise tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner. The steepening rates were cited as a primary reason that Mr. Trump later backed down from many of his most draconian proposals.

This time, investors across the world are becoming increasingly concerned about the fallout from the monthslong conflict in the Middle East, where, despite a cease-fire between the United States and Iran, efforts to find a lasting peace deal have stalled. [...]

Bond investors around the world are focused on the continued blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping lane that before the war had funneled roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply, predominantly to Asia and some parts of Europe.

In the United States, the impact of higher oil prices was reflected in a series of inflation reports last week showing consumer and producer prices both rising at their fastest pace in several years.

Another factor weighing on the Treasury market is last weekend’s summit between Mr. Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping. Investors’ hopes that the much anticipated meeting would result in China’s help with ending the war in Iran were dashed.

“I think there is just a lot of fear out there right now and a collective hesitancy to step in front of the sell-off,” said Vail Hartman, a U.S. rates strategist at BMO Capital Markets, noting concerns that yields could continue to move higher.

Unlike during last year’s tariff turmoil, Mr. Trump appears less willing to back down over Iran, analysts say. The economy is otherwise in good shape, underpinned by the growth of artificial intelligence and blockbuster corporate profits. The stock market has risen for seven consecutive weeks, hitting record highs along the way.

But the climbing Treasury yields could complicate Mr. Trump’s other economic priorities, like jump-starting the stalled housing market.

The 10-year Treasury yield, which underpins borrowing costs for mortgages, has also surged higher since the start of the war with Iran.

That yield has risen roughly three-quarters of a percentage point since the war began, to 4.67 percent, its highest level since the start of 2025. The average 30-year mortgage rate has risen to 6.36 percent from below 6 percent before the war, according to data from the housing agency Freddie Mac.

Some of the increasing Treasury yields are driven by anticipation that the Fed will potentially need to raise the short-dated interest rates it controls to try to slow inflation. These expectation are increasing even with the appointment of the new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, whom Mr. Trump picked with hopes of lowering rates.

Before the war began, investors had expected the Fed to cut rates at least half a percentage point by January. Now, they have lowered those expectations to a quarter-point rise, based on prices in interest rate futures markets.

“There is a feeling that this is going to get worse before it gets better,” said Joseph Purtell, a portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman, adding that the market is “pricing in some kind of premium for that uncertainty.”

by Joe Rennison, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Getty via

[ed. The bond market might be cautious but don't see that in equities.]

Bridge Rapid Replacement System

Concrete is a technology... Ultra-high-performance concrete — UHPC — runs eighteen to thirty-five thousand psi, ten times the strength of the mix in American bridges today, tensile strength twice normal, chloride permeability under ten percent, freeze-thaw shrug. Machine-made sand concrete replaces river sand with precision-crushed aggregate engineered at the grain level and saved one Chinese province $3.19 billion on a single bridge program. Concrete-filled steel tubular arch systems — CFST — now span six hundred meters across Chinese canyons. Prefabricated modular bridge spans are stockpiled in fields next to the bridges they will one day replace, ready to be craned in when the live span is hit. Six bridges in seventy-two hours. The Iranians did this last week. The Chinese can do it at greater span than anyone has ever done it. 

Go ahead. Name an American cement company. The sentence doesn’t end. That’s the sentence-ending sentence. The country that cannot pour its own concrete is the United States of America. Meanwhile six Iranian railway bridges went down and came back up in seventy-two hours. The method is called the Bridge Rapid Replacement System. In 2019 somebody sat in Tehran and said what if they bomb the bridges, and somebody else said we should put another bridge next to every bridge, and somebody else said yes, and they did it. Six times. In concrete... 

Meanwhile in Guizhou there is a canyon and a bridge across the canyon, six hundred twenty-five meters of concrete, lifted into place with a hoisting system that did not exist fifteen years ago. The Chinese hold every world record for arch bridge span. Every single one. The seminary cannot pour a sidewalk in Baltimore that doesn’t crack in four years. The seminary had a harbor bridge in Baltimore and a ship bumped it and the bridge fell in the water. The seminary watched the ship coming for an hour.

via:

How American Camouflage Conquered the World

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard—once famous for building aircraft carriers, now better known for creative studios—a company called Crye Precision is one of the biggest tenants. Its footprint in the building is 100,000 square feet. Inside its gigantic warehouse space, rows of whirring sewing machines are stitching together garments made out of the most popular, renowned, and confusing textile of our time: MultiCam.

MultiCam is so ubiquitous that you can buy a camping chair or baby carrier in the camouflage pattern. Arc’teryx and Outdoor Research make jackets in MultiCam. Perhaps most importantly, you may see this iteration of camo on police officers, SWAT teams, ICE agents, or your average January 6 rioter.

For its influence, the pattern has earned a place in MoMA’s permanent collection, a thrill to the Cooper Union art students who created it. “They gave us a lifetime membership, which is cool,” says Gregg Thompson, who was still in graduate school in 1999 when a Cooper Union alumnus, Caleb Crye, reached out to him about a collaboration. “We always had an interest in all things military,” says Thompson. “It’s boy stuff—monster trucks and that kind of thing.”

In 2001, Crye Precision (then known as Crye Associates) got its first military assignment: to make a prototype of a new kind of helmet. While the company was making it, 9/11 happened. With the announcement of the so-called War on Terror, Crye Precision took on a new challenge: camouflage. In all their exploratory research conversations with soldiers, Crye and Thompson learned that the US camouflage situation didn’t work. Soldiers were frequently wearing mismatched camo, which made them stand out on the battlefield as opposed to blending in. “When guys deploy, they’re wearing desert uniforms with woodland body armor,” Thompson explains. What if, they thought, there was one camouflage pattern that could work almost anywhere? It could be a “75 percent solution to environments in general,” Thompson says.

There are a few ways to make a camouflage pattern work in multiple environments. One is to make sure it has the right number of colors. “Three would not be enough; 12 would be too many, because they would just get lost,” Thompson says. He thinks seven is the sweet spot. These colors—greens and browns and beiges—all need to have warm overtones. “Most things in nature have some level of warmth in them,” he says. “Even a building—it came from stone and likely grew a little bit of green stuff on it. Very few things remain cold.” Also very important for a camo pattern is that it should have a lot of highlights, lowlights, gradients, and fades; no two outfits should be identical. As Thompson notes: “If you have all of your guys kind of looking the same, then as soon as you spot one guy, you can very easily pick out the rest, right?”

The design students didn’t start out in the field or on a hunting range. “You start in your Adobe suite, right?” Thompson says. “ Go right in digitally, create it, print it, make uniforms out of it. Tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak.” It was a lot of guesswork. There wasn’t really a reliable measurement for testing the effectiveness of camo. “ The human eye and the user and the guy in the field know what’s good or bad, but to make that be a test that you could replicate across different forces would be very, very hard,” Thompson says.

And yet, Crye Precision was pretty sure it had found something special. In the early 2000s, they presented their concept for multi-environment camo to the United States military. Crye made it clear that they intended to patent this pattern, an early design of which was called Scorpion. In 2004 they did, and christened it MultiCam. Around that same time, when the military had an open call for submissions for a new Army camo, Crye proposed MultiCam. It was rejected.

Instead, the US Army announced that it had designed its own version of an all-purpose camouflage pattern that could blend in with most environments. It was called Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP)—a digital, pixelated pattern that looked as if someone had uploaded an image of camouflage in really low resolution. When UCP was widely adopted throughout the Army in 2005, it became, in the words of costume historian and journalist Charles McFarlane, “one of the most dunked-on camo patterns of all time.” Kit Parker, a Harvard professor and Army reservist who served in Afghanistan in 2009, was wearing UCP. “We were getting shot at by these Chechen snipers from a long way away,” he told journalist Ilya Marritz. “It was like I had a road flare duct-taped on my forehead.”

The only soldiers who could essentially opt out of wearing UCP were members of the US Special Operations Forces. Elite teams like Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and the Green Berets get a little more wiggle room when it comes to their clothing. “Every unit, whether conventional or special, has what’s called a tactical standard operating procedure, or blue book,” a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne tells me. The blue book will outline the “third-party items you’re allowed to wear.” For Special Forces, “they’re usually pretty lenient.” He says he has a buddy in special ops who wears sneakers, and he has heard of someone who wears Vans high-tops.

As such, Special Forces were the perfect audience for MultiCam. This cutting-edge camo started being worn by some of the most elite soldiers in the United States military, many of whom had met Thompson and Crye during the duo’s many trips to Fort Benning. “Those are the people who have the ability to make their own decisions,” says Thompson, “and are also maybe a little more open to some of the crazy stuff.” Crye started to produce runs of their camo, selling their own MultiCam products in the early days of e-commerce and also licensing the pattern.

Around this time, the culture of the Special Forces started to change. Before the War on Terror, elite teams were small and secretive; very few members of the military knew what they were doing. “Look at photos of the first Special Forces units going into Afghanistan in 2001,” says McFarlane. “They look like a suburban dad on a fishing trip.” As the number of special operators grew, the whole Army could see them fast-roping down from helicopters, breaking down doors, storming houses of suspected terrorists—often in MultiCam. Same with the popular video game Call of Duty and movies like Zero Dark 30, American Sniper, and Act of Valor (which featured active-duty Navy SEALs). In a confusing and unpopular war, stories of Special Operators offered rare victories the United States military could claim.

Special Forces started to develop a new image in the popular imagination, says McFarlane: “Dudes with huge beards and long hair and just totally ripped and just wearing lots of technical gear.” Because Special Forces were so admired and idolized, regular infantry soldiers would buy MultiCam backpacks or accessories to emulate them. Everyone wanted to wear MultiCam—not only to cosplay but also to get away from the ugly digital UCP pattern. Including, eventually, the US Army itself.

Although UCP was deployed to American troops all over the world, it became increasingly associated with Iraq: a hated, unsuccessful pattern for a hated, unsuccessful war. In 2010, when the Obama administration was trying to distance itself from Iraq, the military was instructed to get rid of the UCP pattern. And so, to quickly supply a troop surge in Afghanistan, it turned to the most readily available replacement camo: MultiCam.

Even though the US military called its pattern OEFCP (Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern), it was MultiCam from Crye Precision, bought in bulk when roughly 100,000 members of the conventional forces were deployed to Afghanistan. Then, in 2014, the Army announced that its in-house camo team had finally developed a new pattern: Operational Camouflage Pattern, or OCP. As McFarlane believes: OCP is “basically MultiCam without the branding.” If you view two swaths side by side, you can see that OCP is ever so slightly more brown. There’s a reason they look so similar: Both are inspired by Scorpion, the original pattern that Crye presented to the US government.

In a few niche corners of the internet, debate still simmers over whether Crye had the right to trademark MultiCam or whether the Army had the right to make its own version. Truly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that, because of this whole saga, some version of MultiCam or OCP or Scorpion is everywhere. The militaries of Australia, Georgia, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, Malta, and France all wear variants of MultiCam uniforms—some specifically customized by Crye Precision. Soldiers fighting for both Russia and Ukraine do, too; they don colored armbands to tell who is on what side. Even the Taliban wear MultiCam. In January 2026, the Minnesota National Guard wore bright yellow vests over their camouflage in part “to help distinguish them from other agencies in similar uniforms.”

MultiCam has trickled down from Special Forces to all kinds of law enforcement: American SWAT teams, municipal police, teams within the FBI, US Marshals, Drug Enforcement, and Border Patrol all dress like Bradley Cooper in American Sniper. ICE also wears a mixture of civilian clothes and MultiCam, and in January, Crye Precision was awarded a nearly $40,000 contract to provide cold-weather gear for Border Patrol in Maine. Although there have been a number of camo companies attempting to rival MultiCam’s ubiquity (notably the impressionist looking A-Tacs and the animalistic Kryptek), none of them seem to hold a candle. “ I think the fact of the matter is, there’s been no other pattern that’s proven,” Thompson says proudly. [...]

It’s easy to lampoon these trend followers, who it’s assumed (perhaps falsely) have never gone hunting and don't even know a member of the armed forces. What right do they have to MultiCam? The truth is, they might have the most authentic claim: It was made in Brooklyn by art school grads, after all.

by Avery Trufelman, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Kyle Berger

[ed. Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern. Seriously. Lol.]

The Perfect Commuter Bike?

[ed. Not an endorsement.]

Commuter bikes don’t come with the same constraints many other bikes do. Mountain bikes must glide gracefully through all sorts of abusive terrain; road bikes need to mix high performance with enough comfort to let riders stay in the saddle for hours on end. All a commuter bike needs to do is comfortably and reliably get you from A to B on typical roads with minimal fuss.

So it’s been surprising how rarely the commuter bikes I’ve tested have gotten it right. At the low end of the price scale, as you’d expect, the required compromises have a big impact on the experience. The high end addresses those shortcomings, but at prices comparable to high-end bikes from specialized categories. I’ve never encountered something in the middle of the two: affordable, with no compromises.

But I may have just found my ideal commuter bike: the Velotric Discover 3. It’s comfortable, it has a great combination of components, and it comes in at just under $2,000.

Upgrades all around

Velotric’s first entry in this line, the Discover 1, marked a promising start for the company. While it was definitely in the “compromises needed” category, the shortcomings were relatively minor and carefully chosen. Since then, the company has expanded considerably, introduced many new models, started working with local dealers in the US, and moved a bit upmarket.

The third iteration of the Discover illustrates the upmarket move. It costs nearly twice as much as the original Discover, but you get a lot for that price. The hub motor is gone, replaced by a mid-frame motor produced under contract for Velotric.

While it still has a cadence sensor you can select through a menu, the Discover uses a torque sensor by default, providing far more integration with your pedaling. Cadence sensors simply register when the pedals are spinning; a torque sensor registers how much force you’re applying to the cranks. The latter makes the electric assist feel more like just that: an assist for your legs rather than a replacement for effort.

Switching to the cadence sensor triggers a warning that it will drain the battery faster, which makes sense: You can gently spin the pedals in a gear meant for climbing hills while the electric motor does all the work. I quickly switched back to the torque sensor for pleasant spring-time riding, but I can see where the cadence sensor might make sense once the full heat of summer starts.

Of course, you could always just use the throttle. More on that below. [...]

True class

US law defines three classes of e-bike. Class 1 provides an assist for up to 20 miles an hour (32 km/hr), but you must be pedaling to activate it. Class 2 is similar but adds a throttle that also cuts out at the same maximum speed. Class 3 e-bikes offer an assist to 28 mph (45 km/hr) but do not allow a throttle. The accepted classes are a patchwork, making it difficult to design a single bike for the US market.

Nearly every manufacturer focused on the US market has settled on a compromise that’s probably not technically legal: They enable switching to Class 3 in software but still provide a hardware throttle. The throttle simply cuts out at the lower max speed of Class 2. The assist it provides is also somewhat anemic; I could generally accelerate away from a full stop much faster by mashing the pedals a bit.

Velotric has provided a simple software solution. If the bike is set to Class 1 or Class 3, the throttle is disabled. While this may seem like a blindingly obvious way to do things, it’s rare enough that I initially thought I had been shipped a bike with a defective throttle.

The assist provided by the throttle is a bit weak; I could generally accelerate from a full stop faster by mashing the pedals down with the assist set to high. If you want to cruise around using the throttle to avoid the effort of pedaling, you’re better off activating the cadence sensor and then casually spinning the pedals with the chain in a large gear ring. That will get you to the max speed faster than waiting for the throttle to take you there.

Customize your ride

In general, Velotric offers exceptional customization options. You can adjust the speed of any assist level up to its legal maximum. So if you live in an area with low speed limits, you can set Class 1’s assist to max out at 15 mph while leaving the remaining ones untouched. Or if you’re worried you’re not getting enough exercise, you can set the throttle to cut out at 10 mph while leaving Class 2’s 20 mph assist maximum untouched.

This is actually useful because Velotric includes a dedicated button for switching classes on the controller. On most bikes, changing classes requires a trip to a phone application or diving through menus that require you to pull over. Thanks to the button, you simply adjust the class to your current needs. I would set it to Class 1 when sharing space on a heavily trafficked bike path, then switch to Class 3 to match the traffic speeds on suburban streets.

Anything that makes it easier to change classes will obviously also make it easy for riders to switch into a class that may not be appropriate for the conditions. Of course, this sort of rider is more likely to set the bike to Class 3 and keep it there.

by John Timmer, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: John Timmer

[ed. As noted, this isn't an endorsement. But for someone in the market for a good ebike (which I am, kind of... off and on) there's a lot of good information here on things to consider.]

Into the Maw

When Barack Obama took office, he faced the biggest combination of crisis and opportunity that any incoming president had since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1932 the Great Depression had ravaged the country and was only getting worse. Even as he prepared to move into the White House, a fresh wave of banking panic swept through the nation, and it was clear that if Roosevelt was to save American democracy, he needed to put forward a sweeping set of reforms, which is exactly what he did via two major rounds of policy initiatives in 1933 and 1935.

In 2008, Obama faced a similar crisis: The economy was in free fall, and the financial system was gripped by panic. Unemployment had not yet come anywhere close to Depression levels, but like FDR, Obama had the opportunity—even the mandate—to enact far-reaching reforms. Unfortunately, he did not use this opportunity. Faced with a shattering economic breakdown, Obama and his key advisers largely sought to restore the wobbly precrisis status quo, inaugurating a decade of economic stagnation and dislocation that culminated in the election of Donald Trump.

The story of Obama’s missed opportunity to fix the rot in the American economy is frequently noted by the left, but it is also the subject of two recent books written mainly by Obama administration insiders—A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions, by Reed Hundt, who worked on Obama’s transition team, and Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons, by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Henry Paulson (the former Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO who served as George W. Bush’s treasury secretary). The former is a brutal and devastating indictment of Obama’s strategic missteps as he confronted the crisis, while the latter attempts an apologia for the Bush-Obama crisis management strategy that inadvertently confirms Hundt’s key points. What both books show is that Obama and his administration burned up most of their political capital rescuing the banks from a crisis caused by their own mistakes, and they offer us a warning about doing the same thing again as we face yet another potentially disastrous recession.

As the winds of financial crisis gathered strength in late 2007, the key question faced by both policy-makers and those in the banking industry was what should be done about the supposedly too-big-to-fail firms. Several keystone institutions—the gigantic insurer AIG, the megabank Citigroup, the investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and many of the other big Wall Street players—were heavily invested in mortgage-backed securities that turned out to be stuffed with the financial equivalent of toxic waste, and it was clear that, left to their own fate, they would implode.

Worse, the wholesale funding market—the unregulated “shadow banking” system that provided the daily credit flows on which the whole global financial system depended—was experiencing a kind of bank run, and financiers could no longer get the loans necessary for their daily operations. Savvier firms like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase had already shorted (or made bets against) the housing market and so were able to defend themselves against a disaster centered there—but if any of the other big players went down, they were all too aware that they would likely go, too. After all, the counterparty for many of those shorts was the now-ailing AIG. If it failed, it would take down Goldman and probably most of the rest of Wall Street as well, since they were all so intertwined. Thus, without some kind of government rescue, the entire financial system would collapse.

Yet even if everyone agreed on the necessity of a rescue, there was much less agreement on the form it should take. This was the question that the economic advisers for both the president and the president-elect were grappling with in the last months of 2008. One option, which Paulson favored, was simply to buy up toxic mortgages in order to get them off the banks’ balance sheets. A more compelling option was the one favored by Timothy Geithner, then head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and soon to be Obama’s treasury secretary: He recommended “capital injections,” in which the government bought a whole bunch of bank stock—in other words, a partial nationalization—that would help strengthen the banks’ balance sheets and thus stabilize the financial system. The banks could then lend against the government’s fresh capital and further fortify themselves with more good assets to offset the bad ones.

For those financial companies in dire straits, the government would also have the option to simply buy them outright should their collapse threaten financial stability. The Federal Reserve had broad powers to buy up failing firms by declaring an emergency under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. In “unusual and exigent circumstances,” the Fed could use its money-creating authority to simply purchase a failing company. Once owned by the government, a problem firm could be prevented from going bankrupt, and there would be time to examine its books and either fix it up or isolate it from the rest of the market and let it collapse.

Paulson opposed Geithner’s plan on ideological grounds, saying that it was “socialistic” and “sounded un-American.” But as the crisis gathered strength and it became clear that asset purchases would not be enough to save the system, the “socialistic” options won out. In early September, Paulson directed the Treasury Department to take control of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (already partly backed by the state anyway), which were then teetering on the brink of collapse. A worried Bush informed Paulson that “we have to make it clear that what we are doing now is transitory, because otherwise it looks like nationalization.” But this caveat never came to pass; to this day, Fannie and Freddie are still owned by the government (and incidentally have turned a steady profit since 2012).

But Paulson refused to do the same thing for Lehman Brothers, which was nearing collapse a couple of weeks later. As Hundt writes, he maneuvered to prevent a Fed rescue and instructed the company to declare bankruptcy, thereby setting the stage for the largest bankruptcy in American history. This instantly caused market panic and put AIG on the brink of failure as well. As the markets tanked, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke threw caution to the wind, declared a Section 13(3) emergency, and rushed in with an $85 billion loan in return for almost 80 percent of AIG’s stock—making good old Uncle Sam the owner of the world’s largest insurance company. [...]

Regardless of whether the government should have purchased Lehman Brothers too, the issue with the bailouts of AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac was that they were wildly unpopular—but not because people were worried about the government becoming “socialistic.” What infuriated them was the unfairness: AIG blew itself up making stupid bets, and now the government was leaping to its rescue with $85 billion (later increased to $180 billion). And yet the Bush administration did little about the company’s executives, who had played such a crucial role in wrecking the American economy in the first place. Meanwhile, the people suffering from their atrocious decisions were not similarly bailed out; they continued to see their jobs disappear, their homes foreclosed on, and their pension funds devastated.

Paulson recognized this growing outrage, and so he turned to the Democratic-controlled Congress for additional powers and money—$700 billion in all—thereby pinning “the tail of responsibility on the Democratic donkey,” as Hundt puts it. The bill, to create something called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), was voted down by Congress the first time, but with Obama’s support as president-elect and more oversight and structural controls built into it, TARP passed the House and Senate the second time around, thus making it “the first and most significant decision” of Obama’s presidency, Hundt writes: one in which he “let Paulson pick his presidential priority” and “chose bank bailouts—euphemistically, stabilizing finance—as his top strategic goal.” [...]

Once in office, Obama only doubled down on Paulson’s agenda, nominating Geithner as his treasury secretary and turning the foreclosure policy over to him. The TARP bill included a sweeping grant of authority and an unspecified appropriation to pursue foreclosure relief—meaning interest rate reductions, payment reschedulings, principal reductions, and “other similar modifications.” Obama previously promised to pursue “cramdown,” a policy that would have allowed homeowners to write down their mortgage to the home’s assessed value during bankruptcy proceedings. But since real homeowner relief would have harmed the banks (by reducing the value of their mortgage assets), Geithner refused to include principal reductions in his foreclosure plan and made the program such a Kafkaesque nightmare that few participated in it. Those who did found themselves at the mercy of mortgage servicers who had direct financial incentives to foreclose, and that is exactly what they did: They proceeded to trick thousands of homeowners into foreclosure. While more and more Americans lost their homes, Geithner quietly and successfully lobbied Congress to stop cramdown altogether. Through it all, Obama did nothing—just as he did nothing when Geithner disobeyed a direct order to draw up plans to wind down Citigroup.

In Hundt’s interviews with administration officials, the logic of this choice is discussed explicitly. “The only problem was that there was $750 billion of negative equity in housing—the amount that mortgages exceeded the value of the houses,” says Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee. “For sure the banks couldn’t take $750 billion of losses and for sure the government wasn’t willing to give $750 billion in subsidies to underwater homeowners, to say nothing of the anger it would engender among non-underwater homeowners.” Christina Romer, the head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, puts that figure higher but comes to a similar conclusion. “There was about $1 trillion of negative equity,” she tells Hundt, “and getting rid of it would have helped increase consumer spending and heal the economy. But for the government to just absorb it would have been very expensive.”

Thus, since the banks couldn’t handle these losses and the government was unwilling to do so, the Obama team decided to quietly shove them onto homeowners. This choice would result in about 10 million families being forced out of their homes through foreclosure or some other process—roughly one out of every six homeowners. These foreclosed properties would then become economic time bombs, since abandoned houses damage neighborhoods and the value of adjacent homes. The political side effects were also disastrous. As Hundt writes, “In swing states affected severely by the housing market downturn, the reduction of mortgage credit supply had five times the negative effect on votes for the presidential candidate of the incumbent party than the increase in the unemployment rate.” Eventually, Rust Belt states were the hardest hit. “Chicago had the highest rate of negative equity among large markets,” he writes. “The surrounding states proved fertile territory for Donald Trump’s campaign.” [...]

Obama’s advisers often explained many of his choices by invoking legal constraints, but there was no technical or legal reason that a more just and thoroughgoing overhaul of the financial sector, coupled with support for homeowners and the rest of the American people, couldn’t be done. The administration could have insisted that any financial company receiving government support must fire its top management, ban all bonus payments, end dividends and share buybacks, and break itself up into smaller pieces—and that any company that refused would be left to fend for itself. The Fed could also have nationalized any company whose failure posed the risk of taking down too many others with it, as it did with AIG. Directly owned companies could then have been restructured, their bad debts written off, and sold once they were sound again. This would have purged the bad debt from the system, allowed the Obama administration to actually help underwater homeowners, and reduced the power of the banking lobby, which hamstrung the administration in Congress at every turn. Hell, the government could have even hung on to some of the banks to give to the US Postal Service to set up a public option for banking.

Politics would have been an obstacle to this plan but not an insurmountable one. Obama could have insisted on stringent conditions for the TARP bill, given the fact that Democrats were providing most of the votes for its passage. “We could have forced more mortgage relief. We could have imposed tighter conditions on dividends or executive compensation,” Goolsbee admits to Hundt. Failing that, Obama could have simply bided his time until he took office. Bernanke at the Fed was a bigger obstacle, given that his term was to last until 2010, but Fed chairs are still susceptible to political pressure. For example, Obama could have threatened to publicly attack Bernanke’s policy if he didn’t go along—especially his backdoor lending programs, which he was very keen on keeping quiet. Obama could have driven the big banks into bankruptcy and forced the Fed to take action. Most obviously, he could have appointed reformers to the Federal Reserve’s governing board. Instead, he left two Fed seats open for the critical first year of his administration and renominated Bernanke when his term was up.

In all likelihood, the government would have ended up owning a good portion of the American financial system for a time, though it’s worth noting that then-FDIC head Sheila Bair dismisses the fears of a nationalization-induced panic. “I didn’t believe in a domino effect,” she tells Hundt. “If you have a controlled failure, the markets will adjust.” Whatever the case, while the Republican right would have howled bloody murder—just as it did over every Obama policy—the rest of the US electorate almost certainly would have been satisfied, so long as the bankers were made to pay and regular folks got a cut of the bailout money. And the financial system would have been much more stable and far safer in the end. What happened instead was a hideously unfair and economically disastrous mess. Obama spent most of his considerable political capital on defending a cabal of corrupt, rotten financiers who very nearly ruined the world economy. His party alienated millions of voters, who felt abandoned and betrayed by the Democrats, which ended up costing them thousands of seats in state and local government. Thus, when the 2016 presidential election rolled around, Obama’s successor could not even beat a tawdry game-show demagogue.

by Ryan Cooper, The Nation |  Read more:

Image: Mandel Ngan/Getty

[ed. Worth a revisit, I think, with the stock market continuing to hit new records every other week (for no obvious reasons). Incredibly, many people have forgotten the details and/or never really understood the cause and effect nature of bad policy decisions during the 2008 banking "crisis" (Chernobyl meltdown would be a more apt description). The fundamental issue being of course "moral hazard" ie., when institutions (and individuals) are encouraged to take excessive risks because there are no consequences - in this case, because the government will bail your ass out when things go south (too big to fail). This attitude now infects nearly every part of the economy not just banks: from hedge funds, to tech companies, healthcare, ag, -  nearly every major corporate sector. So this precedent has now become institutionalized. The first tell was when Obama nominated Larry Summers to be his treasury secretary, but the most egregious example has to be Hank Paulson's arrogant one-page request/demand that Congress approve... what, $700 billion? $900 billion? in bank bail-out money immediately, with no strings attached. Various versions of TARP then followed, mortgage holders got shafted, massive bonuses continued across Wall Street using taxpayer money, and almost no one was criminally charged. The Federal Reserve which is supposed to focus on two main responsibilities - fighting inflation and promoting job growth, now has a third unstated mission: propping up the stock market. So the system is now much worse than it was prevously. But, by virtue of carefully crafted post-presidential narratives emphasizing empathy, stability and technical proficiency, Obama is now considered an elder statesman who did the best he could.]

Change in Private-Sector Jobs Since December, 2023

Healthcare and Social Assistance have added nearly 1.8 million private-sector jobs in the US since the end of 2023 while all of other industries combined have lost 127,800 jobs.
Source:

[ed. We all know about the jobs boom in data center construction, but it appears to be a blip in the overall big picture. With an increasingly aging population, more AI-related job losses, a dysfuctional if not entirely broken healthcare system (and Congress), etc. Human support industries will likely be the bedrock of whatever economy exists/persists going forward.]

920 Pounds of Leverage

An F-35 fighter contains 920 pounds of rare earth minerals. A Virginia-class submarine needs 9,200. An Arleigh Burke destroyer requires 5,200. Strip those magnets, actuators, and critical inputs out of the supply chain, and the most advanced military on earth grinds to a halt. The country that processes nearly all of them is China.

That uncomfortable fact sits behind almost every headline coming out of the Iran war and the conflict over critical resources. According to Jim Puplava, who has been arguing since 2020 that we are living through another commodity supercycle, the conflict in the Middle East is not an isolated flare-up, but part of a broader contest over the chokepoints that determine who can build, fuel, and arm the modern economy.

The War Beneath the War

Puplava points to a striking asymmetry exposed by the fighting: Tehran can produce roughly 100 ballistic missiles a month, while the United States manufactures only six interceptors in the same period. Each Tomahawk, THAAD, and Patriot fired costs millions of dollars and depends on materials refined almost exclusively in China.

That math has not been lost on Beijing. Some analysts now suspect China is content to watch the Iran conflict drag on, since every interceptor launched over Tel Aviv is one fewer available for a future contest over Taiwan. “In a kinetic conflict, the side that controls the magnets controls the missiles,” Puplava says. Replenishing the stockpile, by most estimates, will take years.

The Periodic Table as Statecraft

China’s grip did not happen by accident. While the West chased software and asset-light business models, Beijing built the gritty back end of the modern economy: mines, smelters, refineries, magnet factories.

Puplava argues that Western elites suffer from what he calls “physical illiteracy,” the conceit that we have built a weightless digital civilization. In reality, a green grid requires 400 percent more copper and 2,000 percent more lithium than the fossil fuel system it would replace. Semiconductors, electric vehicles, AI servers, data centers, and precision weapons all run on the same short list of elements.

Beijing has begun pulling the lever. In 2024 and 2025, China placed export restrictions on gallium, germanium, antimony, tungsten, and high-grade magnets, citing military end-use concerns. Gallium and germanium feed high-speed semiconductors and night vision optics. The magnets show up in F-35s, Columbia-class submarines, drones, and sonar arrays.

“We’ve traded energy dependence on the Middle East for a more rigid mineral dependence on the People’s Republic of China,” Puplava says. Even mines reopened on American soil, such as Mountain Pass in California, still ship their concentrates to China for processing. [...]

The New Great Game

Rudyard Kipling called the nineteenth-century rivalry between Britain and Russia the Great Game. Its twenty-first-century version is being played out in the Lithium Triangle of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, the cobalt corridors of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the long highways of China’s Belt and Road. Beijing offers infrastructure in exchange for exclusive commodity agreements. American counteroffers, freighted with labor and environmental conditions, often lose the bidding.

Iran fits the same map. The Strait of Hormuz remains the world’s most important energy chokepoint, yet the conflict is accelerating the very transition that favors China. Disruption in oil markets pushes buyers toward EVs and batteries, sectors where Chinese firms make some of the cheapest and best products on the planet. Beijing has even managed to pose as a responsible mediator while Washington escalates militarily. As Puplava puts it: “In the twentieth century, it was about blue-water navies protecting oil lanes. The twenty-first century looks to be about deep-earth diplomacy.”

by Financial Sense |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Possibly true, but this feels like it was written by an AI. Who's Jim Puplava (who's most notable credentials seem to be that he's "been arguing since 2020 that we are living through another commodity supercycle")?]

Why Almost Everyone Loses—Except a Few Sharks—on Prediction Markets

John Pederson, 33, couldn’t work. The former Outback Steakhouse line cook was recovering from a car crash and running out of money. Kalshi, the prediction market, promised a quick way to fix that. He took out a variable-interest loan and started betting.

At first, it worked. Pederson turned about $2,000 into close to $8,000 by betting on daily snowfall totals in Detroit, where he lives. He parlayed that into $41,000 by trading on sports, using a strategy he developed with the help of AI, according to a Wall Street Journal review of his account records.

Then he placed his most audacious bet yet: All $41,000 that a celebrity would say a particular word on TV. He lost it all.

Pederson isn’t alone in walking away empty-handed from the bet-on-anything markets, which cover sports, celebrities, news and more.

Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket advertise themselves as life-changing tools for regular people—implying everyone has a fair chance to score. “I was about to be unable to pay my rent, but I got two years of rent through Kalshi’s predictions,” gushed one woman in a Kalshi ad on TikTok.

 
But for most users the reality is nothing like that.

Instead, casual traders are bleeding cash while a small number of sophisticated pros—including trading firms with access to vast streams of data—eat their lunch, according to a Journal analysis of platform data and interviews with traders.

 
On Polymarket, the Journal found, 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts. That means less than 2,000 accounts netted a total of nearly half a billion dollars. The Journal analyzed 1.6 million Polymarket accounts that have traded since November 2022. There are at least 2.3 million total accounts on the site. [...]

Casual traders “have no chance. Systematically,” said Michael Boss, a former professional poker player and a statistician by training. On Kalshi, Boss places 60 trades a minute and modifies his bids and asks 30 times a second.

by By Neil Mehta, Katherine Long and Caitlin Ostroff, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: Alexandra Citrin-Safadi/WSJ?iStock

[ed. No chance unless they're insiders with special access to some form of classified information. Like... maybe, half of Washington, DC.]

Stratos Data Center Gets Initial Approval

[ed. Can't be true, right? Well... from what I can tell, it's some kind of phased development (Stratos project) starting with a 40,000 acre 'data center campus" in Box Elder County, Utah. Local residents aren't happy. See: Massive Box Elder County data center could increase Utah’s carbon emissions by 50%; and, Hundreds cry out as Box Elder commissioners wave in massive data center (Utah News Dispatch). Excerpts below:]

The angry crowd’s jeers outweighed the voices of commissioners and guests, especially when they spoke about water rights and the county’s tax revenue prospects stemming from the project. Many in the audience asked to allow presenters to be heard, but shouts prevailed throughout the meeting.

No one was escorted out, but instead commissioners left the room and broadcast their quick vote on a screen available to the public.

“Cowards,” some in the audience yelled. Others repeatedly shouted “people over profit.”

The resolutions were required by state law to allow the Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, to move forward with the Stratos project. MIDA, an entity created by the Utah Legislature to advance economic development with a military focus, needed local consent since the data center would be located on private land without zoning regulations. [...]

The data center campus sponsored by Kevin O’Leary, a celebrity investor featured in the reality TV hit “Shark Tank,” is set to house its own natural gas plant to supply 9 gigawatts of energy to self-sustain the center, more than double what the entire state consumes in a year. That power generation will be isolated from the grid Utahns share, so it wouldn’t have any effect on utility rates, developers say.

Developers are also planning on using a closed-loop system to cool their equipment, using privately-owned water rights that are unsuitable for drinking or irrigation. But, without a definitive environmental study, the public remains skeptical. [...]

‘We can’t build anything in this country anymore’

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said on Thursday, during his monthly news conference broadcast by PBS Utah, that at the rate in which machine learning and artificial intelligence is changing, building data centers has become a national security issue.

“We have an obligation, I think every state has an obligation, when it comes to this space, to allow for these types of data centers to be built in their states,” Cox said. “We have to do this. We can’t just say ‘no’ and shut the doors and go home and let China win this, this technology race, so that just can’t be an option.”

Data centers can’t be installed everywhere, and the government should be careful with its resources, but this site may be able to fulfill environmental standards and won’t be someone’s nextdoor neighbor, Cox said.

“If you can’t put this here, then we can’t put them anywhere,” Cox said.

He also fiercely disputed that the approval process has been rushed.

“I’m so tired of our country taking years to get stuff done. It’s the dumbest thing ever. We think that taking time makes things better or safer, it absolutely does not,” he said. “You get a chance to give your feedback, and then decisions get made. That’s how we have to do stuff in this country and in this state.”

The state denies many requests because of feedback, but it can’t say no to everything, Cox said.

“We’ve let the people against virtually everything, destroy our country, destroy our industrial base, destroy our mining base, destroy our housing base, because we can’t build anything in this country anymore,” he said. “And those days are over. We’re done with that.”

Going For Broke

Not long ago, the national debt was a scandal. Economists said it would wreck the financial system. Voters stewed. A 1990 poll found that 76 percent of Americans regarded the deficit as “a very serious problem calling for immediate action.” Presidential candidates ran against it; the 1992 race was a referendum on different belt-tightening proposals. At the time, the debt was around $4 trillion.

Now it’s over $31 trillion, bigger than our entire economy. Here’s what that means: If the federal government were to demand, for an entire year, that all workers hand over 100 percent of their wages, that all landlords hand over 100 percent of their rents, that all investors hand over 100 percent of their capital returns and that all corporations hand over 100 percent of their profits, then at the end of that nightmarish year, the government would still be in debt.

That’s not healthy. The United States hasn’t held this much debt since World War II. And it’s still growing, fast.

Yet neither voters nor politicians seem worried, my colleague Tony Romm writes. Both parties keep cutting taxes, even as aging Americans receive more money from Medicare and Social Security. Lawmakers keep spending more on the military. And the Treasury must make debt interest payments so huge that they exceed the annual cost of Medicare.

Our views on the debt, clearly, have changed. Why?

by Evan Gorelick, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times

[ed. Probably a couple of reasons: 1) the attitude that "I'll be gone soon and it'll be somebody else's problem" (so why not get while the getting's good); and 2) most people don't have a firm grasp on how the economy works or the ability to internalize long-term risks (climate change being another example). Maybe a third reason, too: that AI will fix everything. From the story by Tony Romm referenced above:]

***

The root of the problem is well-documented and widely known. U.S. debt has soared in recent years because of a mismatch between federal spending and tax revenue, one complicated by a rapidly aging population, which has driven up costs across government.

For economists, the fear is that these conditions are inching the United States toward a fiscal crisis, one in which its debt is so great that the country can’t easily afford to pay the rising interest on it. But their warnings have long gone unheeded in Washington, calcifying the strains on the government’s balance sheet in ways that President Trump’s agenda is expected to exacerbate.

Despite winning a congressional majority, Republicans have cut little in spending over the past year. With the few savings they did achieve, they put that money toward offsetting a fraction of the cost of Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, which are still expected to add more than $4 trillion to the debt in the coming years.

***

[ed. See also: Ray Dalio's interview with Ross Douthat posted here yesterday.]

Interview: Interesting Times

A Legendary Investor on How to Prevent America’s Coming ‘Heart Attack’

I feel that lately we’ve been having an “end of the American empire” moment.

In part, I think it’s the stalemated war in Iran. In part, it’s the strain that Donald Trump is putting on American alliances. And in part, I think, it’s a sense that our biggest rival, China, is sitting back, biding its time, and waiting for the collapse.

My guest this week has been on this beat for a while now, and he has a grand theory of history that predicts that America is headed for a fall. He’s kind of an unlikely Cassandra.

Ray Dalio built one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Bridgewater Associates, from the ground up. But these days, he mostly wants to talk about our imperial decadence, and whether there’s anything we can do to pull the American empire back from the brink. [...]

Douthat: So people say. So you’re someone who spent your career making bets, and a substantial number of them have paid off over the last few decades. Lately, you have been arguing that the United States of America is maybe not such a good bet at the moment.

So if someone is looking at America right now, trying to decide, let’s say, whether to bet on the American empire as a dominant force in the 21st century, what are the big forces or factors that they should be looking at?

Dalio: I’d correct that. I’m not saying that America is a bad bet or a good bet. I’m just describing what’s going on. And what I learned through my roughly 50 years of investing is that many things that are important that happened to me didn’t happen in my lifetime before, but happened many times in history.

So I learned to study the last 500 years of history to find what caused the rises and declines of reserve currencies, their empires, and so on. And you see a pattern over and over again. There is such a thing as a big cycle, and the big cycle starts when there are new orders.

There are three types of orders. There’s a monetary order, a domestic political order, and an international world order. These are three big forces that evolve.

So on the first force, as we look at that monetary order, there’s a debt cycle. When debts rise relative to incomes, and debt service payments rise relative to incomes. For countries, for individuals —— That squeezes out spending. That’s a problem.

For example, the United States now spends about $7 trillion. It takes in about $5 trillion, so it spends about 40 percent more than it takes in. It’s been running those deficits for a while, so it has a debt that’s about six times its income, the amount that it takes in.
And you can see throughout history that that produces problems. It’s a very simple thing: The debts for a country work the same as the debts for an individual or a company — except the government can print money. [...]

But what that does is it also devalues money. So that’s the mechanics. That’s why there’s a long-term debt cycle, as well as short-term debt cycles and money cycles and economic cycles that take us from one recession to an overheating to another recession.

Related to that is the domestic political and social cycle that relates to the money part. And when you have very large wealth and values differences, big gaps in those ——

Douthat: Meaning, between rich and poor?

Dalio: Between rich and poor, and those with different values. And you get to the point where there are irreconcilable differences. Then you have political conflicts that are such that the system is at risk.

OK. I think we have the first cycle going on. I think we have the second cycle going on — the political left and right and their irreconcilable differences. We can get into those.

Douthat: How does the international aspect factor in?

Dalio: And then international is the same thing. Following a war, there is a dominant power, and the dominant power creates the new world order. The order means the system.

So that began in 1945.

Douthat: For us. The United States was the dominant power establishing that system.

Dalio: That’s right. And it established a system, which was largely modeled after the United States system in that it was meant to be representative. The United Nations, for example, was a multilateral world order. And so all different countries would operate and there was supposed to be a rule-based system.

But the problem with that is, without enforcement, it’s not going to be an effective system. It was an idealistic system and it was a beautiful system while it lasted, but we no longer have a multilateral rule-based system.

We have what existed prior to 1945 through most of history, and now you’re going to have geopolitical disagreements, such as even what is existing with Iran.

How are those disagreements resolved? You don’t take it to the World Court and get a verdict and get it enforced. It’s power that rules. [...]

Douthat: And again, just to emphasize what is distinctive about this moment relative to the past few decades, it’s the strength of the alignment on the other side?

Dalio: It’s the relative strength, and the breakdown of that order. In addition, there are big debtor-creditor relationships that enter into it. For example, when the United States runs large deficits, it has to borrow money. And that is very risky during periods of conflict. So are interdependencies.

In other words, in this world of greater risk, then you have to have self-sufficiency. Because history has taught us that you can be cut off. Either side can be cut off. [...]

Douthat: As an investor myself, I do want the investment advice. But as a pundit, a columnist — whatever I am — who’s trying to describe or anticipate reality, even accepting that we can’t know for sure, if there are these lessons from history, if there are these cycles that repeat, and we’re headed for a kind of bottoming out or reset, that maybe we bounce back from it, but I’m just trying to get a sense of what you think life looks like at the bottom of the cycle and whether it is a stagnation and a persistent unhappiness, or is it more like crisis and clashes in the streets kind of thing? Because the ’70s versus the ’30s seem like different examples. That’s all.

Dalio: I’ll give you my concerns. I think we have these big issues — the money issue, the political social issue domestically, and the international geopolitical issues. As I look at the clock, we’re going to come into the midterm elections and I think that the Republicans will probably lose the House. I think from that point on, you’re going to see an intensification of political and social conflict that’ll take place in that period, particularly between that election and the presidential election in 2028.

I worry that those can be irreconcilable differences. I don’t know how they will go down. I don’t know how the respect for rules and law and order and whatever will keep law and order.

I am concerned about, but I’m not predicting, broader-based violence. You could have broader-based violence. There are more guns in the United States than people [...]

Douthat: Tell me how you think the debt picture and the political and social picture interact, because it seems like if you ask people what they’re divided about right now, they don’t say interest payments on the national debt. They have a much longer list of things they’re divided about.

I’m just curious: Interest payments go up, they crowd out other forms of investment. What is the economic force that interacts with social disarray here?

Dalio: They’re divided about who has what money and who gets it, which is very much related to the deficit.

I wrote my most recent book to explain how it works with 35 examples. It was called “How Countries Go Broke.” And I’ve been speaking to top levels of both the Democratic and the Republican Parties, and everybody agrees on those mechanics.

When I go down and I say to them, you’ve got to get to 3 percent of G.D.P. deficit through some mix of raising taxes, cutting spending and controlling interest rates — because that’s how you have to do it mechanically.

Then they say, Ray, you don’t understand, in order to be elected, I have to make at least one of two promises: “I will not raise your taxes” and “I will not cut your benefits.”

What the country’s divided on is, let’s say, the multibillionaire class and those who are struggling financially, the left and the right and populism, and so on — and that has a money component. So the deficits and the money part is a very big part of the social conflict part.

Douthat: So you’re talking to politicians about this, and they give you this spiel about how we can’t raise taxes and we can’t cut spending, I think the follow-up that they would say is that people experience those things as threats to opportunity or equality. That people who rely on Medicare and Social Security think this is the guarantee of equality, and people who rely on low taxes to build a business think this is the guarantee of opportunity.

If you are trying to sell those people on cutting deficits to 3 percent of G.D.P., what do you tell them you’re saving them from?

Dalio: You’re saving them from a financial crisis.

Douthat: And what happens in a financial crisis in the U.S.? What does that look like?

Dalio: The financial crisis will mean that the capacity to spend will be very limited. In other words, you can’t afford military expenses and social expenses, and so on. You’ll be very constrained. And because the demand won’t meet up with the supply, you’ll have interest rates going up, which will curtail borrowing, will hurt markets, and so on. And that will lead to the central banks trying to balance that by printing money, which will also devalue the money and create a stagflation kind of environment. [...]

It is like the plaque building up. It’s like you saying, “I haven’t had a heart attack yet.”

Douthat: “I feel OK.”

Dalio: And I can say: OK, I understand you haven’t had a heart attack yet. Can I show you the M.R.I. of this plaque building up in your system? And can you understand what I’m saying about that plaque, that you will have a heart attack if that plaque then starts to get there? Can you understand that? Can you understand where the numbers are, and where you are? Look, it’s your life. It’s your choices. Ask yourself, “Is that right or is that wrong?” That’s what you need to do for your own well-being.

Douthat: In your story, it sounds like if you combine that diagnosis with your sense — and my sense — of how the American political system currently works, that you’re going to get at least a mild version of the heart attack before you get change.

You said at the outset, you weren’t really betting against America, in spite of my podcaster’s framing. Are you optimistic that we could have, I guess you could call it, a minor heart attack and recover?

Dalio: I think we’re going to come into a period of greater disorder as there’s a confluence between the monetary part; the domestic, social and political part, where there’s irreconcilable differences; and the international world order part.

I would say then, I should bring in two other factors. One of them is acts of nature through history ——

Douthat: Pandemics.

Dalio: Droughts, floods and pandemics. And if you take what most people think about what’s happening to climate, it’s not a movement toward improvement, it’s a movement toward worsening. And then technology and A.I. [...]

We have to talk about technology and A.I. as it enters into this picture because it plays a role. And it does so in three ways. It can be a tremendous productivity enhancing result that can help to mitigate maybe a number of the debt problems — perhaps. We can get into this. I don’t think it’s going to come across at that speed. [...]

The second effect of that A.I. is it is now creating enormous wealth gaps. Those who are the beneficiaries of it are approaching “Who will be the first trillionaire?” The wealth gap thing has increased at great amounts, and it will replace a lot of jobs. So that’s No. 2 as a factor. Those gaps are an issue however we deal with them. They will have to be dealt with, and that’s going to become probably a political question, but that’s an issue.

And then No. 3 is that the technologies themselves can be used for harm — a lot of power. It could be used by other countries. It can be used by those who want to inflict harm. It could be used by those who want to steal money. It can be used for harm. [...]

For all these forces, these five forces, over the next five years it’ll be like going through a time warp. There will be huge changes over the next five years, with all of these forces coming together. And on the other side of that, it’ll be almost unrecognizable. It’ll be very different, and it’ll be a period of great change and great turbulence. [...]

Douthat: ... I guess what I’m interested in is, in your account of the rise and fall of empires — Spanish Empire, British Empire, the Dutch mini empire, and so on — you don’t have these case studies of a great power going through this cycle, hitting what you think of as the bottom, and then bouncing back and having another run. Or do you?

Because, look, as Americans, that’s our goal. If someone buys into your narrative, they would say: OK, but history isn’t determinist. We can make choices and we can have ourselves another cycle. Right?

Dalio: Yes. I think that’s possible, but here’s what has to happen — and history would suggest it: Plato talked about this cycle ——

Douthat: Yes.

Dalio: In “The Republic.” And he talked about the democracy and the problems with the democracy because the people don’t vote for what is good for them and the strength. About 60 percent of the American people have below a sixth-grade reading level, and there’s a problem with productivity, and so on. And they vote and they determine a lot.

The question is: How in a democracy can that happen? His view is that’s when you have, ideally, the benevolent despot — somebody who is going to take control, be strong and give for the country. In a sense, bring people together.

However that happens, what you need is a strong leader of the middle who recognizes essentially that the partisanship and the conflict is going to be a problem, but has the strength to get people and everything working in a way that it needs to work so that there can be a debt restructuring of some form, there can be an improvement in our education system, there can be the structural changes in efficiency.

by Ross Douthat and Ray Dalio, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: New York Times
[ed. If there's one benefit to having Trump in office (and only one that I can think of) it's that he's shown how fragile and ricketty our democratic system has become over the last fifty years. I'm beginning to think it might be time for a new approach. Not on board with Plato's "benevolent despot" idea, but some form of modified socialism, or maybe a Professional Managerial Board (grounded in the Constitution, and composed of experts in every field making scientific, economic, social, and other decisions), or something else altogether, idk. Because whatever we have now is not working.]