The Last Great Wilderness

Ping-pong sponges, ‘black smokers’ and floating somethings: the secrets of the deep sea.

If you want to follow in the footsteps of the great explorers, forget the moon and Mars: the ocean floor is where the real action is. The deep ocean, the part that’s deeper than 200 metres, covers about 66% of the Earth’s surface. Most of it has never been surveyed in detail. Even less has been seen up close. If the current rate of observation continues, a complete visual survey of the ocean floor will take about 5m years. [...]

The deep ocean is the largest ecosystem on Earth. It is also in many ways the most extreme, home to crushing pressures, extremes of heat and cold, and a near total absence of sunlight. Animals inhabiting this midnight world tend to be equally extreme. It is a menagerie that abounds in superlatives: the largest, the oldest, the blackest, the most luminous. But those are only the ones we know about. Most of the animals dwelling in the benthos, the true deep, remain unknown to science. Virtually every scientific expedition to reach this zone of darkness returns with new species in tow. In the past year, scientists have discovered more than 1,100 new marine species. Among them are a ghost shark (not really a shark), a ping-pong ball sponge (which does look like a cluster of ping-pong balls), a number of luridly coloured worms and a floating something that resembles a tiny jet plane made out of pale pink jelly, and which scientists have not yet been able fit into any of the primary categories of animal life. [...]

For over 50 years, would-be industrialists and entrepreneurs have floated the idea of mining the ocean floor, but without much happening in practice. But in our search for new sources of metals needed for batteries and microchips, we may now be on the cusp of destroying the world’s largest – and strangest – ecosystem before we get a chance to understand it.

by Jacob Mikanowski, The Guardian | Read more:

Images: Jim Maragos/AP; Nekton Ocean Census/Schmidt Ocean Institute

You Can Make Free Money on Polymarket. If You Know Math.

Betting is fundamentally about risk: You might win or you might lose. But what if you could always win?

Enter prediction markets, sites that let users bet on pretty much anything. Most of those users lose. But a savvy few have made a fortune using basic math.

Prediction sites like Polymarket and Kalshi offer many of the same markets. And usually, they post the same odds.

But sometimes the odds diverge — like in these markets about the 2028 Democratic presidential primary race.

In March, Kalshi had Gavin Newsom’s odds of winning at 29 percent, but Polymarket had them at 24 percent. These disparities are good news, if you’re gambling.

Taking both sides of the same bet is usually a wash. But not when there’s a price disparity.

In the example with Mr. Newsom, imagine you bought “Yes” on Polymarket, for 24 cents, and also “No” on Kalshi, for 71 cents.

If Mr. Newsom wins, then Polymarket owes you a dollar.

If he loses, then Kalshi owes you a dollar.

One of these bets must be a winner — so you’re guaranteed to make a dollar. But because of the disparity, you’ll only have spent 95 cents on the bets.

If this sounds like printing money, that’s because it basically is. It’s called “arbitrage,” long a favorite strategy of quantitative traders trying to juice profits from the stock market with minimal risk. You buy something at a cheap price, and simultaneously sell it at a more expensive price. It’s a win-win.

Some bettors are now using the same strategy to rake in thousands of dollars from online prediction sites. Moving quickly, they can take advantage of price gaps between exchanges like Polymarket and Kalshi, or even between the prediction sites and sports-betting sites like DraftKings and FanDuel. The wider the spread, the bigger the potential profit.

Ryan Noel, 25, has built a career arbitrage-betting (or “arbing,” as he calls it) during sports games. He regularly makes more than 1,000 arbitrage bets per week on prediction sites like Polymarket, Kalshi, Novig and ProphetX, in addition to online sportsbooks, he said.

“Software shows me the price of every sort of market at the same time,” said Mr. Noel, who started arbing in late 2023, while working as an actuary, before quitting his job last year. So far, the strategy has netted him more than $1 million, he said. “I don’t care about sports at all. I think watching sports is the most boring thing you can do with your time. I’m a mathematician.”

Math skills are essential — but so are the right tools, said Aidan Gawlowski, a Chicago-based college student who started arbing last year before coding his own software to hunt down prediction-market price discrepancies. Mr. Noel buys software from OddsJam, Pick the Odds and Bookie Beats that tracks price changes across thousands of markets, flagging the possible arbitrage.

“I figured out that there was this opportunity,” said Mr. Gawlowski, 21, who said he started betting when he was 14. “You’re mathematically guaranteed to make money.”

Some moneymaking opportunities last longer than others. The arbitrage with Mr. Newsom? It existed, unexploited, for weeks. During that period, you could’ve bought “Yes” on Polymarket and “No” on Kalshi, for a roughly 3 percent profit. (The probability spread of around five percentage points, minus Kalshi’s transaction fee.)

But there are a couple of reasons that opportunity was an anomaly. For one, the market doesn’t resolve for two years. That’s a long time to tie up money you could invest elsewhere, said Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School at Penn. There’s also additional risk that some bets carry more than others: What if the election gets weird, and the sites don’t agree on what defines a Newsom nomination? Then, you might lose both sides of your bet.

That was enough to deter Mr. Noel and Mr. Gawlowski, who spend most of their time arbing on sports. There are loads of sites that let users bet on sports, meaning more chances for price discrepancies. And during games, odds must constantly update to keep up with live developments. That process takes time, which can translate into arbitrage opportunities.

“You can make a significant amount of money on a big N.B.A. day,” Mr. Gawlowski said. During sports games, Mr. Noel’s price-tracking programs catch an arbitrage opportunity every minute or so, he said.

These discrepancies often emerge when casual users, betting based on vibes, move a market just a hair out of alignment. Then arb bettors pounce, and their actions end up evening the odds across the sites again.

Taking advantage of these short-lived opportunities is hard enough for you and me. But the window is closing even for bettors like Mr. Noel and Mr. Gawlowski, as big financial institutions get in on the action with automated bots that can trade faster than any human. [...]

“Back in 2022, these arbitrage opportunities would last 30 seconds,” said Alex Llewellyn, 36, a professional sports bettor. “These days I execute bets in two to five seconds. And instead of 8 percent arbs, you generally see 4 to 5 percent.” [...]

Prediction sites, awash in Wall Street money and bots, are heading toward the same fate as other major financial markets. One-tenth of the top one percent of accounts on Polymarket rake in more than two-thirds of the profits, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.

“You’re not betting against Joe Schmo anymore,” said Alex Monahan, the founder of OddsJam. “You’re betting against a quant firm with infinitely better technology than you.”

by Evan Gorelick and Katherine Chui, NY Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Forget the opioid crisis - so yesterday. These days everybody's got a gambling addiction. Here's a different form of arbitrage: Net Gain (NYT):]

***

For the first game of the N.B.A. finals, my friends and I went to a bar offering a deal that seemed too good to be true: If the Knicks won, the bar would cover every customer’s tab, up to $100.

As tipoff approached, young people variously clad in starched button-downs and Brunson jerseys galloped from nearby Midtown offices for a chance at free booze. The line snaked around the block, and the bouncer made a show of blocking the front entrance. People screeched at one another. My buddy, already inside, shooed me in through a side door. (I heard someone whine, “Why does he get to go in?”)

Three hours later, when the Knicks overcame a 14-point deficit to take down the Spurs, strangers in the crowd were hugging and high-fiving. Outside, a passing garbage truck honked its horn in celebration. The entire city seemed to be shouting with joy. And at the Jeffrey, which bills itself as a neighborhood spot for “craft beer, cocktails and bites,” 726 beers, 385 cocktails and 175 smash burgers were on the house.

Over the hedge

When someone hands you a freebie, by all means: Take it. But you and I both know there ain’t no such thing as a truly free lunch. So while downing drinks, I kept asking myself whose money I was taking.

Turns out, it belonged to Kalshi users who’d bet on San Antonio — in other words, deadbeats and turncoats who had it coming. (Kidding! Kind of.) Before the game, the bar’s owner, a 50-year-old corporate lawyer, had used the prediction market to bet $5,000 on the Knicks. Since the Spurs were the favorites, that position netted him around $8,000 when New York prevailed — enough to cover nearly everything the crowd had consumed. If the Knicks had lost, the bar would’ve been out the $5,000, but it could have covered its losses with all those drinks and smashburgers. (Plus the free publicity — you’re welcome.)

Jumping Jacks For Clicks

There’s been a lot of discussion this month about what it takes to be heard as a musician in 2026. Eliza McLamb’s article on digital marketing agency Chaotic Good went viral, drawing commentary from musicians about the wider implications of their “fake fans” marketing strategy. Hiroki Tanaka’s Reddit post about his album’s failed PR campaign was picked up by Stereogum, stimulating further debate. We’re about to embark on our own DIY PR campaign for our forthcoming album and it’s hard to know what, if anything, will make anyone actually listen to it. The PR landscape for musicians has changed radically in recent years, how should artists approach music marketing in 2026?

Fandom as contagion

When Eliza McLamb heard this interview with the founders of Chaotic Good Projects on Billboard, she was shocked to discover that an artist and track she thought was her own “perfect, beautiful little secret” actually came from them as a part of a “narrative campaign”.

“I thought this was the kind of thing that was only deployed in service of mass-market, commercial pop... But [Chaotic Good’s] roster runs deep, far past the predictable internet sensations one could expect... Geese and Cameron Winter, but also Dijon and Mk.gee. Laufey and Wet Leg. Oklou and Jane Remover.”

Chaotic Good works by, in their own words, “controlling the discourse”.

“I think in the past, let’s say like a label and a management team do a great job. They get their artists on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J or something like that. Then they post it and then they kind of wait for the comments […] what we do at Chaotic and with our management clients is, the second SNL drops at midnight, you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.”

Chaotic Good doesn’t just share content, it creates accounts to respond to that content and simulate trends, which will ideally snowball into real, organic users jumping on the trend and amplifying it. They’re simulating until the simulation becomes real.

It’s different from the traditional method of “the waterfall” release and media saturation. Share music incrementally over a long period of time through as many channels as possible, get articles written, pay for plays, do tours, be omnipresent. But people aren’t using traditional media to find music anymore, they use social media. And they don’t even watch the content themselves, they read the comments to gauge the value of something. Chaotic Good point this out in their interview:

“I think most people see a video or see something about an album that came out and it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”

In behavioural psychology this is known as social proof. Part of what made Eliza McLamb’s article go viral is the way it exposes how our behaviour is manipulated by the marketing machine. We know about propaganda but for some reason assume social media is immune to this kind of manipulation. We think we’re interacting with real people online, people we subconsciously infer guidance from, but we’re not. Much of what we see has been infiltrated by external agents to shape a particular opinion.

However, the underlying issue is not just the fact that the opinions we thought were our own have been subtly shaped by an expensive machine, it’s that if artists today can’t afford to pay for that expensive machine, no one will hear their music.

The False Promise Of The Social Media Democracy

Once upon a time there was a social media platform called MySpace. It gave everyone their own web page connected to other MySpace users. They could customize it to look however they wanted, people could comment, and send messages to each other. There were no ads. There was no algorithm. Just the free flow of information.

Many bands in the ‘00s blew up because of MySpace. Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Calvin Harris, to name a few. Our very own Chris Black’s previous band Katsen landed record deals through MySpace. The early days of social media are responsible for the persistent myth of going viral then making lots of money. The two halves of that equation have never been more disconnected.

MySpace succumbed to algorithm-driven platforms and the gatekeeping emerged again, this time with the tech titans controlling the interactions between musicians and fans. I remember discovering for the first time that even though we had a few hundred followers on Facebook, they wouldn’t see our posts unless we paid to “boost” them. That was just the beginning.

As the algorithms evolved, the content that rose to the top was not just the most liked and shared but the most consistently and frequently posted. To be seen on social media one has to spend hours, daily, posting and engaging in other people’s content. Most artists don’t want that job and moreover, don’t have the capacity. Kamola Atajanova of Tape Wounds articulates it perfectly in their response to the Chaotic Good furore:

“Not every artist is built for social media. Not every artist wants to make their life into a performance. Some people are better at writing songs than posting clips. Some people’s work comes from privacy, patience, or introspection. That should not make them less valid. But this system does make them less visible. It filters them out before the music even has a chance. So when people say “it’s just marketing,” what they really mean is: this is the cost of entry now. And that’s exactly what makes it feel so hostile. Not everyone can afford that cost. Not financially, not creatively, not psychologically.”

Hiroki Tanaka’s candid Reddit post about the failure of his “by the book” album PR campaign sparked a wave of recognition across the music world. After two decades in music and awards with his previous band he decided to release his solo album, his “last hurrah”, with management, a label, and a professional PR campaign. He even started a TikTok account posting show videos, behind the scenes and goofy memes all around managing a job and family life.

Tanaka watched the release arrive after eight months of promotion to little more than “a weak trickle” of attention. For most musicians, Tanaka’s story didn’t feel exceptional, it felt familiar.

“I was told, under no uncertain terms, that my lack of a social media presence and streaming metrics meant that certain media outlets that had reviewed my work (highly, I might add) in the past could no longer spend money on paying a writer and editor to review my work… I would have preferred if they had said they didn’t like my album. Being rejected because of my metrics is a slap in the face for art.”

Social media has become the driving force behind a release, and while it is accessible to anyone, there’s actually a huge price to pay in both time and mental health. The volume of content required to feed it is beyond most musicians, who are generally holding down full time jobs to survive. The underlying purpose of all this extra content is to feed a machine, and it doesn’t feel good dedicating your precious little free time to feeding a machine.

Jumping Jacks For Clicks

Soon after reading Tanaka’s post, we got an email from YouTube Creators prompting us to “Get Creative With Goals” on our livestreams.

They’re encouraging us to “set goals that encourage your community to collaborate,” and suggest celebrating those goals by “doing something unexpected – whether that’s jumping jacks, making up a song, or playing a prank.”

Yes, you read that correctly. YouTube is telling artists that the path to success involves performing arbitrary physical tasks to generate engagement.

It’s sad how often life imitates an episode of Black Mirror these days but this is almost exactly the scenario in season seven’s episode “Common People”. A man who needs money for an enshittified service ends up performing increasingly degrading stunts on a streaming platform for money. What was meant as dystopian satire has become platform policy. [...]

What Comes Next?

We may be reaching an inflection point. As McLamb notes, the more ubiquitous manufactured virality becomes, the more artists will resist it entirely, pulling back from streaming and social media in favour of hyper-local, scene-based growth. A return to the tangible, the real, the unmediated.

While this sounds good in theory, it’s probably not going to work for unusual artists in small towns. They’d have to go to a city to have more of a chance of finding their people, and with the cost of living, moving to a city isn’t possible for everyone. By the time I left London in 2009 all the artists I knew were leaving, it just wasn’t sustainable anymore.

The problem is systemic. Musicians don’t typically make a living from their music. This means their time is diverted to day jobs. Their dwindling leisure time is necessary for making and performing music. There isn’t time to also produce a volume of “content” for social media. On top of that the mental health cost of interacting with addictive apps as a performing monkey is not appetising. This creates a class system in the music industry. There are those who can afford to pay to be heard and those who can’t. And those who can’t are either paying with their souls, or they’re opting out altogether and not being heard at all.

by Battery Operated Orchestra and Brigitte Rose, Bandmade |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/YouTube 

[ed. Works for some, not for others. Which, I guess is the point. The algorithm is selecting for a certain type of musician - not necessarily the best. That YouTube email really says everything you need to know about their business model, doesn't it?]

Bad Lunch

April 1999, one o’clock in the afternoon. I was cooking on the 150-foot motor yacht The Rental Cow when Megan, our chief stewardess, swooped into the galley to tell me our guests were displeased with their lunch.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. A petite, blond Australian who often made bawdy jokes, she didn’t wear her usual smile. Instead she looked slightly frightened, which told me this was no ordinary complaint. Our two guests were paying $30,000 a day to sit on the top decks and take in the Mediterranean views. Like every set of guests on board that yacht, this couple needed the food to be perfectly suited to their tastes, which caused me hours of nail-biting anxiety as I sent up plate after plate, taking note of what they devoured or ignored.

It was the midpoint of their sixteen-day trip. Ten of their friends had departed that morning, and we expected ten more to arrive in a few hours.

“Should I go up?” I asked.

Megan nodded, and I threw off my apron and scaled the stairs two at a time. We were tied to a dock in Saint-Tropez, a coastal city in the south of France known for its beaches and fancy nightclubs frequented by celebrities.

Our guests, Mr. and Mrs. J., were seated on the upper aft deck, murmuring to one another over untouched plates of sweet potato gnocchi. Mrs. J. was statuesque, with pale skin and red-orange hair that fell like a cape over her shoulders. She looked like a hippie version of Nicole Kidman. Mr. J. was a silver-haired music-industry executive who exuded wealthy chic with his funky sunglasses and pastel, high-water slacks.

Mrs. J. smiled at me: a cold curl of the lips. Then she launched in, explaining she was disappointed—not just in her lunch but in me.

“We’re paying a lot of money to rent this yacht,” she said, enunciating like royalty with a Los Angeles accent. “We’ve had a terrific go of it until now, don’t you think? All week long your food has been exquisite. This should have been the easiest lunch, not the most disgusting. Why didn’t you just come talk to us?”

By now I had my hands behind my back, my body bent toward her in a gesture of contrition. Thankfully she kept talking, so I didn’t have to speak. At one point Mr. J. held his hand out flat in the air as though pushing Mrs. J.’s argument down—a gesture she appeared familiar with, as she cinched her lips.

“Let’s do a reset,” Mr. J. said. “How about you clear these plates? My wife mentioned she’d be happy with a simple green salad: lettuce, tomatoes, carrots—”

“GREEN ONION,” she interjected.

Mr. J. ignored her. “I’ll have a plate of prosciutto and some of your homemade baguette. And a small dish of your mustard dressing. Do you think you can handle that?”

It was not a question. He’d spoken breezily, but there was enough of an edge in his voice to serve as a warning. Despite all the special handling I’d provided that week—ninety hours of catering to their every culinary need—I was not forgiven. 

Once upon a time, in another life, I had sat on a green shag carpet as close as possible to the television to watch The Love Boat, a show about crew members on a cruise ship with a revolving roster of celebrity guest stars. I especially loved the unflappably cheerful cruise director, Julie McCoy. Another show I watched religiously growing up was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, hosted by nasal-voiced Brit Robin Leach, who escorted viewers through the properties of the extravagantly wealthy.

At the time, my family lived in rural Washington State, in a double-wide trailer on a crabgrass lot. We’d never been flush with money, but after my parents’ divorce, my mother would agonize each month about where to spend her meager funds: on gas and electric bills or groceries? She hunched over her checkbook, lips puckered with worry. We lived in a perpetual state of panic over having zero dollars. The fear had a metallic scent that lingered in my nose long after I climbed into bed. For a while we had food stamps in the drawer, but my mother was too ashamed to use them. That she could choose not to indicates a certain degree of financial stability, but a child doesn’t distinguish between being cash poor and being unable to pay the rent. And even with grandparents volunteering to purchase school clothes, I marinated like a pickle in that atmosphere of scarcity, walking a thin line between my hunger to consume and my management of that hunger, always thinking of the costs.

My mother didn’t like to cook, so I learned my way around the kitchen. As a kid who did not have enough healthy food to eat, I literally dreamed of shopping trips like the ones I took to buy food for the yacht, filling multiple carts with expensive items and paying for it all with my employers’ gold credit card.

I’d become a ship’s cook almost by accident. On a break from college in my early twenties, I was traveling in France and took a job as a deckhand on a 128-year-old Spanish brigantine that made trips back and forth across the English Channel. I endured a lot of teasing from the mostly British sailors—working-class Brits really know how to twist the knife—but my tears gave way to laughter as I developed a thick skin to go with my sea legs.

The food on board was standard English fare: hunks of roasted meat and potatoes served with reconstituted gravy granules. I thought constantly about improvements I could make. Though I had no formal training, I had little doubt I could produce nourishing and delicious meals—part bravado and part the result of a lifelong curiosity about food that had compelled me to experiment with recipes growing up. I volunteered to help in the galley, peeling potatoes or scrubbing pans. Before dinner one night I asked the cook if she would mind if I deglazed the roasting pans with sherry to bring flavor to the gravy. “Knock yourself out,” she said. I added salt to the stockpot of boiling potatoes. When the captain noticed a small improvement in the food, the cook said, “Don’t look at me, it’s her,” and the captain suggested I report for galley duty. The cook much preferred working on the decks anyway. Before long I was providing meals for a dozen or more people a day.

I became romantically entangled with a sailor aboard that ship, and we soon left to try to find work as a team: He would captain commercial sailing yachts, and I would be his cook and sidekick. The romance ultimately fizzled, but it served as a springboard into a previously unimaginable career. As the ships grew fancier and the guests more demanding, cooking interesting and creative meals day after day required an engagement akin to a spiritual practice. The repetitive motion of knife through vegetables soothed me. I wrote lists of ingredients for wine-braised chicken legs or chocolate crinkle cookies. When we moored in a harbor, I would talk my way into commercial kitchens, explaining I was a self-taught cook who worked aboard a yacht, and could I ask the chef about his favorite dishes? They always allowed me in for a few hours.

About four years into my maritime career, I took six months off to attend a French-themed culinary school, hoping the expected salary increase would be enough to recoup the money I’d spent on tuition. Everyone in the marine industry said that charter yachts rented by the super-wealthy were where the crews made the biggest money.

I’d been aboard The Rental Cow for three months by the time Mr. and Mrs. J. arrived. It wasn’t the most beautiful in the fleet of charters available on the Mediterranean that summer. Though at first glance she looked like the other boats, with her high bow and sleek lines, a second look revealed cracks in the paint and chips in the varnish. Our economy-minded boss outfitted the decks with Pottery Barn furnishings, while the more state-of-the-art yachts we moored beside displayed Balinese wicker. Some of the biggest vessels had Ming dynasty rugs and helicopter pads and charged upwards of $500,000 a week. Our main draw was our relative affordability. Depending on which week of summer it was, we charged between $25,000 and $35,000 a day. The rental contract recommended guests leave a minimum 8 percent gratuity for the crew. Some left far more, and the crew celebrated wildly. Others stiffed us.

Our captain, Brian, was a mild-mannered, mostly ineffectual leader. Lance, our first mate, picked up the slack with his endless enthusiasm and charm. He understood the importance of the food to our guests’ experience and checked in with me frequently to see if I needed anything. Lance’s wife, a therapist, served a dual role as both deckhand and empathetic listener for other crew members. The other deckhand was an Italian with prior experience as a restaurateur, and after finishing his other duties, he donned dress whites and served meals or even stepped into the galley to help with my endless prep.

I’d come to think of being a chef on a yacht as a kind of psycho-spiritual quest, like Homer’s Odyssey, only instead of tumultuous seas and six-headed monsters, our challenges were wealthy clients who arrived by private jet with Louis Vuitton purses on their arms. True to form, I strove to please them all. People with money intimidated me, so when guests were arrogant or snobby, I pictured them as patients in a hospital and myself as the doctor assigned to their care. This imaginative leap inoculated me against the class differences and boosted my confidence that I could diagnose their needs. [...]

One afternoon Lena, our second stewardess, spied Mrs. J. at the back of the main saloon, making small dots on the window with a tube of lipstick. Lena went around the yacht studying the mirrors and windows and finding similar marks. Apparently Mrs. J. was testing the proficiency of the housekeeping staff as well.

“She’s smart,” Lena said, in her French accent. “Some of the marks are hard to find.” To make one, she said, Mrs. J. must have climbed up on the counter in the master cabin.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I replied.

“They’re all the same,” Lena said, placing her hands on her small hips. “Trying to get their money’s worth.”

by Mishele Maron, The Sun |  Read more:
Image: © Dominique Philippe Bonnet

That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.

In hindsight I’ll say: I always thought going crazy would be more exciting—roaming the street in a bathrobe, shouting at fruit. Instead I spent a weary season of my life saying representative. Speaking words and numbers to robots. Speaking them again more clearly, waiting, getting disconnected, finally reaching a person but the wrong person, repeating my story, would I mind one more brief hold. May my children never see the emails I sent, or the unhinged delirium with which I pressed 1 for agent.

I was tempted to bury the whole cretinous ordeal, except that I’d looked behind the curtain and vowed to document what I’d seen.

It all began last July, here in San Francisco. I’d been driving to my brother’s house, going about 40 mph, when my family’s newish Ford Escape simply froze: The steering wheel locked, and the power brakes died. I could neither steer the car nor stop it.

I jabbed at the “Power” button while trying to jerk the wheel free—no luck. Glancing ahead, I saw that the road curved to the left a few hundred yards up. I was going to sail off Bayshore Boulevard and over an embankment. I reached for the door handle.

What followed instead was pure anticlimactic luck: Ten feet before the curve in the road, the car drifted to a stop. Vibrating with relief, I clicked on the hazards and my story began.

That afternoon, with the distracted confidence of a man covered by warranty, I had the car towed to our mechanic. (I first tried driving one more time—cautiously—lest the malfunction was a fluke. Within 10 minutes, it happened again.)

“We can see from the computer codes that there was a problem,” the guy told me a few days later. “But we can’t identify the problem.”

Then he asked if I’d like to come pick up the car.

“Won’t it just happen again?” I asked.

“Might,” he said. “Might not.”

I said that sounded like a subpar approach to driving and asked if he might try again to find the problem.

“Look”—annoyed sigh—“we’re not going to just go searching all over the vehicle for it.”

This was in fact a perfect description of what I thought he should do, but there was no persuading him. I took the car to a different mechanic. A third mechanic took a look. When everyone told me the same thing, it started looking like time to replace the car, per the warranty. I called the Ford Customer Relationship Center.

Pinging my way through the phone tree, I was eventually connected with someone named Pamela—my case agent. She absorbed my tale, gave me her extension, and said she’d call back the next day.

Days passed with no calls, nor would she answer mine. I tried to find someone else at Ford and got transferred back to Pamela’s line. By chance—it was all always chance—I finally got connected to someone with substantive information: Unless our vehicle’s malfunction could be replicated and thus identified, the warranty wouldn’t apply.

“But nobody can replicate the malfunction,” I said.

“I understand your frustration.”

Over the days ahead, and then weeks, and then more weeks, I got pulled into a corner of modern existence that you are, of course, familiar with. You know it from dealing with your own car company, or insurance company, or health-care network, or internet provider, or utility provider, or streaming service, or passport office, or DMV, or, or, or. My calls began getting lost, or transferred laterally to someone who needed the story of a previous repair all over again. In time, I could predict the emotional contours of every conversation: the burst of scripted empathy, the endless routing, the promise of finally reaching a manager who—CLICK. Once, I was told that Ford had been emailing me updates; it turned out they’d somehow conjured up an email address for me that bore no relationship to my real one. Weirdly, many of the customer-service and dealership workers I spoke with seemed to forget the whole premise and suggested I resume driving the car.

“Would you put your kids in it?” I’d ask. They were aghast. Not if the steering freezes up!

As consuming as this experience was, I rarely talked about it. It was too banal and tedious to inflict on family or friends. I didn’t even like thinking about it myself. When the time came to plunge into the next round of calls or emails, I’d slip into a self-protective fugue state and silently power through.

Then, one night at a party, a friend mentioned something about a battle with an airline. Immediately she attempted to change the subject.

“It’s boring,” she said. “Disregard.”

On the contrary, I told her, I needed to hear every detail. Tentatively at first, she told me about a family trip to Sweden that had been scuttled by COVID. What followed was a protracted war involving denied airline refunds, unusable vouchers, expired vouchers, and more. Other guests from the party began drifting over. One recounted a recent Verizon nightmare. Another had endured Kafkaesque tech support from Sonos. The stories kept coming: gym-quitting labyrinths, Airbnb hijinks, illogical conversations with the permitting office, confounding interactions with the IRS. People spoke of not just the money lost but the hours, the sanity, the basic sense that sense can prevail.

Taken separately, these hassles and indignities were funny anecdotes. Together, they suggested something unreckoned with. And everyone agreed: It was all somehow getting worse. In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years.

I decided to de-fugue and start paying attention. Was the impenetrability of these contact centers actually deliberate? (Buying a new product or service sure is seamless.) Why do we so often feel like everything’s broken? And why does it feel more and more like this brokenness is breaking us?

Turns out there's a word for it.

by Chris Colin, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Timo Lenzen
[ed. I was trying to explain the concept of friction to a friend recently and he just didn't get it. But once you understand it, you see it everywhere. Other examples not mentioned in this article: impenetrable user agreements continually being updated to make sure administrative processes like appeals, refunds, lawsuits etc. are nearly impossible to pursue; Right to Repair issues where anything from from John Deere tractors to automobile software, to mobile phones, to printers, etc. (the list goes on and on) that require specific parts only available from the company you purchased the product from (despite available substitutes). Conversely, a whole new universe of companies and apps have been created to remove friction (think Stripe, Venmo, Uber, Doordash, etc. etc. etc). So of course, the Trump administration has been actively trying to kill the one agency that's supposed to protect the public -  the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPB). They haven't been able to completely eliminate it yet (despite significant DOGE downsizing) so instead they've made it useless for its intended purpose and decided to weaponize it to advance the administration's anti-woke agenda.]

‘Clean, Beautiful’ Coal Industry Gets $700m Bailout

Trump uses wartime powers to dole out $700m to ‘clean, beautiful’ coal (The Guardian)

Donald Trump is using wartime presidential authority to hand $700m to coal-fired power plants in the US, the latest move by the president to bolster what he called “clean, beautiful coal”, despite it being the dirtiest of fossil fuels.

“Today, we’re taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal,” he said at a press conference on Thursday. [...]

In the past year, the Trump administration has doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to the coal industry, signed orders forcing ratepayers to pay extra for ageing plants to stay open, and dismantled environmental rules that limit toxins from coal leaching into Americans’ shared air and water.

The administration’s attempts to provide a cuddly rebranding to coal have even extended to creating a new mascot with giant eyes, called Coalie, and gushing social media posts that include an image of a lump of coal wearing sunglasses as if it were on the TV show Love Island.

“You’re not allowed to say ‘coal’ within the Trump administration unless it’s preceded by the words ‘clean, beautiful’,” Trump said on Thursday. “Complicates our life, but it’s good.” [...]

Trump’s attempts to revive the coal industry, while at the same time seeking to stymie the rapid growth of clean energy such as solar and wind, have so far floundered. The number of people working in coal has declined by more than 90% in the past century, with more people now working in Waffle Houses across the US than in coal.

US coal production is currently less than half of what it was in 2008, with coal recently declining as both a fuel for electricity and as an input for manufacturing materials such as iron and steel. Cheap, abundant gas has helped displace coal from power grids with even cheaper renewable energy also now taking off in the US despite the administration’s efforts to kill it off.

“What’s next, a taxpayer bailout to build new phone booths?” said Kit Kennedy, a senior climate campaigner at the Natural Resources Defense Council, of the new round of support for coal. “This is going to mean higher bills and dirtier air. What a waste.”

by Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
[ed. One picture = thousand words. The stupidity never ends. In other news of the stupid, henchman Hegseth gets bad reviews for his speech commemorating D-Day:]

***

"Speaking in north-west France on Saturday to mark the 82nd anniversary of the D-day landings, Hegseth seized on the moment marking the wartime liberation of Europe to reiterate the US administration’s longstanding attack on European immigration policies.

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies,” Hegseth told those gathered at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer.

“Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” he said."

The remarks were swiftly condemned on social media. The English historian, author and television presenter Simon Schama described them as a “special kind of loathsomeness: a blend of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity and comically ludicrous self-importance”.

Schama added: “As if the little people’s rage against immigration somehow is superior to the war against the 3rd Reich and entitles this comic book nobody to lecture the actual heroes.”

Betting on Humans

What to do about AI & jobs.

Now, the great majority of people—whether they are “blue collar” or “white collar” laborers—spend their working hours orchestrating machines of various kinds: some to transform knowledge or bits, and others to transform atoms. Yet just a few decades ago, it would have been impossible to understand what it is that most people today call “work.”

Today, a relatively small group of technologists is starting to see the world through the lens of another fundamental discovery: deep learning, the approach to AI that has enabled machines to think and undergirded substantively all major advancements in AI over the past decade. And like their forebears at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, these technologists are building new machines, uniquely enabled by the insights and abstractions furnished from the new science. Some believe new types of labor will emerge, concentrated on the orchestration of machines, or the tasks that remain best suited to the human touch. Others believe this time is different, and that human labor will soon be permanently obsolete.

We do not pretend to know the definitive answers. What we do know is that much of this future remains to be written, in no small part by the policy choices we make today. And what we hope to offer is a roadmap for how politicians and policymakers might bet on human agency under stark uncertainty.

Futures Not Yet Written

There are two fundamental stories one can tell about the impact of artificial intelligence on human labor. One is the pessimistic version: most of us are like the people in the early Industrial Revolution who could not learn to adapt or were stuck as mere cogs in factories. Very few of us, if any, will learn to orchestrate machines at a higher level of abstraction, and neither will we learn to invent new machines, since the artificial intelligence systems will soon exceed humans in their capacity for invention and discovery. That view is one of historical discontinuity: replacing knowledge work strikes deeper at the human uniqueness that has kept us employed than replacing various kinds of cognitive and manual labor has in the past.

The other story is optimistic: just like those early conductors and inventors of machines, we will continue our long human legacy of finding yet more to occupy our time, yet more activity that other humans find valuable. There is much more of this than we can possibly realize, because our collective imagination is bounded, yet our collective wants are limitless. How barren, in retrospect, do we find the mind of the man who thought the human touch was gone simply because we had invented machines stronger, more durable, and more reliable than us at physical labor?

Both stories will probably be true at the same time, but the unfortunate reality is that nobody knows in what proportion. More unfortunately still, it will be some time until we know: the temporary disruption that would portend broad displacement would look quite similar to the creative destruction that would come with just another industrial revolution. It’s easy for policymakers who first start to grapple with the notion of advanced artificial intelligence to reflexively adopt the pessimistic view: for so long, they’ve heard the idea that AI will be important and the idea that many jobs will be lost in the same breath that coming around on the scope of AI seems to imply believing that human labor is doomed. But that would be premature, and converts must resist becoming zealots.

Here, then, is the first—and in some sense the most troubling—message for policymakers: nobody can know what is going to happen. Anyone speaking with confidence about predictions of this kind is either misunderstanding or misleading. It is not just that we do not know “the future,” in some broad sense. We also do not know the specific nature of any problems posed by AI to the labor market: we do not know what industries, age groups, levels of seniority, job types, and so on will be affected by AI automation in practice rather than in theory or in speculation. We do not know over what timeframe these still-hypothetical changes will occur.

And if AI really does profoundly upend the labor market, we still do not know what the resulting distribution of economic resources will look like. Will the AI labs profit immensely, absorbing huge swathes of economic value as many other institutions struggle to survive? Or will AI models and systems become commodified, with value accruing to the compute designers and manufacturers? Or is it some hybrid, with most firms in the economy seeing higher profits with fewer employees and, for whatever reason, not seeing a need to hire additional people to do anything? Will there be new, high-skilled jobs created that we need to retrain millions of people for? Or will there be no new jobs at all? We do not know, and we cannot know.

That is because we are still in the process of writing this future. The role of humans in future economies is not something we simply discover as it occurs. How we distribute tasks between humans and machines is largely downstream of a web of complicated economic incentives and technical features. Is the marginal unit of computing power better spent on smoothing over the jagged frontier so no role remains for humans, or for even further improving the spikes of AI capability? Does the tax system favor firms who spend the marginal payroll dollar on hiring a worker to oversee the machines or an agent to do the same? Is there a safety net to catch those hit by local disruptions to give them the room to reorient themselves, come back five years later, and fight for their place in a new economy—or do we mollify their drive with ill-placed subsidies long enough for them to grow docile and for the structures around them to calcify? All this is contingent, and when policymakers ask ‘what will happen’, they fail to see that they’re among the central live players in this question.

How should our leaders grapple with this double uncertainty of what they should want and what will happen?

by Anton Leicht and Dean W. Ball, Threading the Needle |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Spoiler alert: Zvi provides a quick (and incomplete) summary (DWAtV):] 

***

"Anton Leicht and Dean Ball team up to write about what we should do about potential job loss due to AI, from the perspective of prospective ‘de facto normal technology’ AI worlds even if they don’t call it that. They wisely say we don’t know what will happen, and that the ‘no regrets’ actions will be insufficient so solve the problem, but expect the world to stay normal enough, and humans competitive and useful enough, that we can use traditional solutions to such problems.

They start with easy wins.

1. Even footing: Equalize tax treatment of AI versus labor. Yes, please.

2. Retraining: Bolster workforce training and development. They notice they are skeptical in practice, and I am even more skeptical, but sure, we can try it.

3. Measurement: Know what is happening. Yes, of course.

Then they recommend what they call difficult bets.

4. Junior Job Subsidy.

Anton Leicht and Dean Ball: We put to you that the solution to deal with junior job losses might be to keep these jobs around by brute force for a while, so that the critically important economic incentive to explore how to use junior workers does not cease.

More specifically, we might do so by restructuring the tax code to subsidize junior employment.

Given who is saying to keep jobs around by brute force, by which they mean tax incentives, we should listen. This seems like a good use of progressive taxation, which we want to do anyway, to stack the deck in favor of hiring more young workers and those switching industries, presumably with phase outs for high earners.

This risks distortions if taken too far (e.g. dumping senior workers for subsidized junior workers, or gaming designations), the marginal value of young workers could easily fall below zero marginal product if there is no future for them, and gating to particular industries or occupations risks going into ‘picking winners and losers’ and other similar dangerous territories and opportunities for corruption and pork. The authors are well aware, and are pushing anyway.

The main solution they offer is, again, taxes. They suggest doing so via raising corporate taxes, despite this having a long track record of being highly economically damaging. You definitely need to avoid worse distortions, and you definitely do not want a ‘token tax’ as such for this reason, although a tax on compute is non-crazy. Taking a stake in frontier developers is definitely an error.

They quickly dismiss consumption taxes as having a fatal perception problem, despite them being objectively the efficient answer, because they raise prices and signaling is too important here. I found this disappointing, and there are ways to fix this and also make the tax progressive.

It would be great if humans remained fundamentally highly productive while we collectively got far wealthier due to AI, so all we needed to do was redistribution and moving the tax code around.

Alas, no, I do not expect we live in such a convenient world. At which point, we likely have bigger problems, but also employment does not get solved with basic tax code shifts. If we stay in control somehow then we could do progressive redistribution to keep food on the table and a roof over people’s heads, but the jobs will vanish, or they will be rather fully fake."

Trump Administration Continues Efforts to Dismantle Consumer Protection Agency

Consumer protection agency deletes thousands of pages as Trump administration seeks to dismantle it (The Guardian)

Last February, Trump appointed Russell Vought, White House budget director, as acting director of the CFPB. Vought was a key architect of Project 2025, which called for the abolition of the agency. He has since ordered CFPB employees to stop all work, dropped dozens of pending enforcement cases and tried to fire most of the agency’s staff, a move blocked by a federal judge in an ongoing lawsuit brought by the agency’s staff union. Recent court filings reveal agency leadership aims to reduce the agency’s headcount from 1,174 to 556. [...]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to enforce federal consumer financial law, promote fair competition, protect people from deceptive or predatory financial products and compel companies to engage with consumers when they file complaints.

Since its inception, the bureau has returned more than $21bn to consumers through monetary compensation and canceled debts. A Democratic Senate banking committee report released this year found the Trump administration’s gutting of the bureau and moves to rescind industry regulations have already cost consumers billions in the past year.

by Amy Qin and Flávio Pessoa, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Guardian Design/Getty Images
[ed. ... and the hits keep coming. See below. Until his supporters say enough is enough, we and they will continue to get screwed. The most relevant question now is if recovery will ever be possible again. Always easier to destroy than to create (or restore). See also: Why are US consumers so angry? It’s not just high prices (Guardian).]

Sake: It’s All in the Rice

The nuanced world of Japanese sake and how to pair it with food.

If your experience with sake is limited to the warm cup at your local sushi spot, you’re missing the larger world of sake, which is as nuanced and layered as wine.

The traditional Japanese drink is brewed (not distilled) from rice, yeast, water and koji, a mold that converts the rice starch into sugar. Premium sakes might add some distilled alcohol. Sometimes other ingredients are added for flavor, but purists stick to the essentials.

“It’s quite incredible to think of the variation in flavor sake provides, given these constraints,” says Yoko Kumano, who with Kayoko Akabori owns the shop Umami Mart in Oakland, California. The pair has written a new book, “Everyday Sake.”

She also likes to remind people that sake is a food-pairing beverage.

“It is meant to be enjoyed with food — and not just sushi,” Kumano says. Umami Mart’s monthly sake club has tried pairings with cheese, pizza, French cuisine and more.

Every batch of sake — which in Japan is called nihonshu — is overseen by a toji, or master brewer, whose skill shapes the final flavor.

Here are some quick sake facts so you can sound savvy about it at a restaurant or wine store.

It begins with rice

The first step in making sake is rice polishing, or seimaibuai. Each grain’s outer layers are milled away to reveal its starchy center. The more polished the rice, the lighter and more refined the sake; the less polished, the earthier the flavor. Sake also varies based on whether distilled alcohol is added and how it’s filtered, stored and served.

The two main families of sake are Junmai and Honjozo. Within those, you have grades like Ginjo and Daiginjo, reflecting how much the rice has been polished.

Grade names are on the label, though not necessarily the polishing ratio.

Junmai
Means “pure rice,” with no distilled alcohol added. These sakes range from light to full-bodied, and often have more umami and structure than other sakes. Think earthy, rice-forward flavors that pair beautifully with grilled meats or heartier dishes. Junmai is often served warmed or at room temperature, highlighting its comforting depth of flavor.

Honjozo
Contains a touch of distilled alcohol, which lightens the texture and enhances aroma without significantly changing the alcohol content. Smooth and versatile, it pairs with everything from tempura to sushi to teriyaki.

Ginjo
More delicate, made with rice polished down to 60% of its original size and fermented at lower temperatures. A bit of distilled alcohol may be added to enhance aroma. The flavor is often floral and fruity. Ginjo is best served chilled, and pairs well with lighter dishes like sashimi, sushi, salads and delicate seafood.

Daiginjo
The most extensively milled sakes, with at least 50% of the outer rice layers removed. The result is aromatic, delicate and often considered the highest-quality sake. Expect a higher price tag.

Nigori
Coarsely filtered, leaving some rice sediment (kasu) behind, giving it a milky appearance and slightly sweet, creamy texture. Its sweetness pairs especially well with spicy dishes.

Sparkling Sake
In recent years, sparkling sakes — some naturally carbonated, some artificially — have become popular as a festive touch to many occasions.

Nama
Kumano says Nama (unpasteurized sake) has been growing more popular, and appeals to people who like fresh, young beverages like Beaujolais Nouveau or fruity wheat beer. Make sure it’s refrigerated both at the store and at home.

Creative additions
Hirohisa Hayashi, chef-owner and sake sommelier at Hirohisa restaurant in New York City, makes different versions of plum sake each year. He steeps Washington State-grown plums in low-alcohol sake, sometimes with shiso (a minty herb) and, this year, Okinawan brown sugar.

Serving and storage tips

Ultimately, whether sake is served warmed, chilled or at room temperature is subjective. “In general, classic dry junmai sake is often said to become softer and more approachable when (slightly) warmed. On the other hand, if you warm a fragrant daiginjo, its delicate aromas and refined character can be lost,” says Hayashi.

Sake is best consumed within a year of bottling. Store it in a cool, dark place. Once opened, refrigerate and enjoy within a week. Unpasteurized sake (nama) must be refrigerated and consumed within a few days.

Finally, take a cue from Japan: Pouring for others and refilling their glasses before they’re empty is an act of hospitality and attentiveness. And don’t forget to clink glasses and say “Kanpai” (“Cheers”) before you sip.

by Katie Workman, AP |  Read more:

Image: Katie Workman

[ed. For more details, see also: Sake 101: A Beginners' Guide (Sake Hub):]

***

Koji
While the rest of the ingredients of sake are straight-forward, koji tends to trip up sake beginners. Koji, also known by its scientific name aspergillus oryzae, is a special mold. Koji helps break the rice starches into sugars to prepare for fermentation.

As important as both water and rice are for brewing sake, the sake production process can't get off the ground without koji.

The quality of koji also affects the sake's flavor profile immensely. That's why sake brewers take koji production (seigiku) itself so seriously.

The Home-Insurance Coin Flip: Nearly Half of Claims Result in Zero Payout

When disaster strikes, many Americans face a near flip-of-the-coin chance that their home insurer will pay a claim.

And the problem is getting worse. The five biggest home-insurers as a group didn’t pay out on more than 44% of claims resolved last year, forcing homeowners and renters to fund repairs out of their own pockets, an analysis by The Wall Street Journal found.

The risk that a claim will result in no payment among the group—State Farm, Allstate, Liberty Mutual, United Services Automobile Association and Farmers Insurance—shot up from 36% a decade earlier, according to the analysis.

Several factors are driving nonpayment rates higher, according to industry analysts and executives. Prime among them: Insurers are responding to a yearslong run of postpandemic losses in their home-insurance businesses by getting tougher on claims.

One way they have done this is to raise deductibles, or the amount the customer has to pay before the insurer kicks in. Some companies applied higher deductibles to specific risks such as hurricane and hail, and changed certain deductibles from a dollar value to a percentage of the value of a home. They have also set tighter criteria for claims on expensive items like roof replacements.

 
Consumers hit by rising premiums are themselves selecting higher deductibles to save money, insurers and consumer advocates say. This sets consumers up for disappointment when they put in for claims.

 
Home insurers pitch policies as a peace-of-mind financial safety net. But customers can find the apparent guarantee of compensation for disasters evaporates when they come to claim. [...]

A spokesman for USAA, whose unpaid claims ticked up to 51% from 49% a decade ago, said the Journal’s analysis was misleading because it lacks important context around why claims may be closed without payment. That includes losses below a deductible, claims not pursued by customers or claims later reopened and paid, he said. Considering those factors, fewer than 6% of USAA claims were denied, he added.

There are other drivers of the rise in claims closed without a payout. More frequent losses from disasters, in part driven by climate change and increased development in danger-prone areas, are also triggering more claims that aren’t covered by the policies, such as for flood damage, insurers say. [...]

Location has a big influence on the odds of no payment. Insurers in Florida had the highest rate of no payouts, affecting more than two in five homeowner claims in 2024, significantly higher than the 34% five-year average for the Sunshine State. Back-to-back hurricanes in 2024—Helene and Milton—likely drove up rejections as homeowners claimed for flood damage that wasn’t covered, insurers said.

The fallout from Hurricane Milton, when insurers declined payments on claims from more than 95,000 Floridian homeowners, shows the main reasons companies say no.
Heading the list: deductibles. Insurers have sharply increased the typical deductible amount in recent years, while often introducing separate—even higher—deductibles for wind and hail damage in high-risk areas.

by Jean Eaglesham and Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: WSJ

***

Steps to consider if you believe your claim has been denied unfairly include:

• Ask the insurance company for a letter setting out the reasons for the denial, and copies of their relevant documentation. Consumer group United Policyholders has a sample letter on its website.

• Collect any additional evidence you can to support your claim, such as photographs or reports from independent experts.

• File an appeal to the insurer: Instructions for doing this should be in the denial letter or policy document.

• If an appeal is denied, you can submit a complaint to your state insurance regulator.
• If you want outside help, consider asking a public adjuster or attorney if they will help fight your case. You can find a local public adjuster on The National Association of Public Insurance Adjusters website. Expect them to take a slice of any eventual payout.

The Satisfying Downfall Of Patrón

[ed. Yay. Over-hyped, overpriced, nothing special.]

Bye, Bye SI

On Friday, several of Sports Illustrated’s best and brightest writers, or what remains of them, announced they’d been laid off.

Jeff Pearlman, who made his bones as a journalist for SI when it was one of the world’s most prominent sports magazines, had his heart broken all over again.

Among those who said on social media that they’d been laid off were Stephanie Apstein, Tyler Lauletta, Kyle Koster, and Mike McDaniel. Meanwhile, Front Office Sports reported that several longtime writers — including Greg Bishop and Michael Rosenberg — were laid off as part of the latest round of cuts at SI.

This is, of course, just the latest in a long series of cuts and reorganizations for the once-proud sports media brand that now trades on its reputation to create merchandise, resorts, and mostly mediocre editorial content, sometimes aided by AI.

“As a guy who wrote for Sports Illustrated for a long time and a guy who loves Sports Illustrated, like loves, loves, loves… this stuff carves me up,” Pearlman said in a TikTok video. “And it’s one thing that they get rid of writers, they lay people off. What I hate the most is that these corporate douchebags who have taken over the magazine view it just as a name now.

“That’s all Sports Illustrated is. It’s a name. It’s something to put on cruise ships. It’s something to put on clubs. It’s something to put on popcorn. Literally, there’s a Sports Illustrated popcorn. It’s something to put on whatever you can shove that thing on. That’s what it is now. Sports Illustrated has become nothing more than a way to attract people… It’s just so disturbing.”

Pearlman then ran down the who’s-who list of prominent sports writers who once graced the magazine’s pages. [...]

Pearlman, who left SI in 2002, says he could see the writing on the wall even back then.

“I started knowing SI was in trouble, I would say, for me, a couple of things,” Pearlman said. “Number one, when they f*cked up adjusting to the internet. Big time screw-up. Number two, when they laid off all of their photographers, considering it’s literally Sports Illustrated. Number three, when they just decided to destroy their library. Like, literally take the SI library, which was awesome, and just give it away.

“And now here we sit. The last of their name writers gone. Now, basically an empty vessel for selling sh*t to idiots and for getting people to gamble away their money on sports. It sucks. It’s a dark day in sports.”

by Sean Keeley, Awful Announcing|  Read more:

Image: Sports Illustrated Resorts, Jeff Pearlman

[ed. Rolling Stone business model.]

The Way We Treat Pigs is a Sin

I consider myself a pretty good and decent guy, overall. I don’t commit crimes. I’m nice to the people I meet. I help out my friends. I take good care of my pet rabbit, and I donate lots of money to other people who take care of abandoned and sick rabbits. My politics might not always be correct or wise, but I want things like the end of poverty, the end of war, and so on.

And yet just down the highway from me, there are facilities for the mass torture of animals. In the United States, there are 73 million pigs in “concentrated animal feeding operations”, more commonly known as factory farms:

There are many horrors experienced by chickens and other animals on factory farms, but the way pigs are forced to live is probably the worst. For most of their lives, female pigs (sows) are kept in tiny cages — either “gestation crates” when they’re pregnant, or “farrowing crates” when they’re nursing. A sow will spend most of her life in one of these cages.

In a gestation crate or a farrowing crate, sows don’t have enough room to turn around — all they can do is either stand or lie down in a pile of their own feces. Imagine living your entire life in an airline seat, where you couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom or take your seatbelt off. That’s how these pigs live.

Pigs are social creatures — they exhibit “emotional contagion”, meaning that when one pig is scared or happy, other pigs start to feel the same, and they give comfort and support to other pigs who are in distress. Research suggests that they’re at least as smart as dogs, and probably smarter. But a pig in one of these crates will never get any social interaction in her entire adult life — she can’t even turn around to look at her babies.

This is torture. The pigs who are confined this way bite the bars of their cages, desperate for a freedom that will never come. They have their tails chopped off as babies (generally without anesthetic), so that they can’t chew each other’s tails in anguish. But no relief ever comes — they live out their entire lives and die in these tiny torture-cages.

I have no other word for this except “sin”. This is a sin. If there is a God, and if that God is in any way good and moral, then that God is looking down with disgust on the way my society treats pigs. I go about my daily life — hanging out with my friends, petting my rabbit, going out to eat at nice restaurants — never thinking about the horrible suffering that has engulfed the entire lives of those tens of millions of pigs. [...]

On top of the obvious and demonstrated inability of individual action to solve this problem, it’s insufficient even from a moral stance. Suppose that our society farmed human beings for food. Would simply refusing to eat human flesh be enough to absolve me of culpability? I don’t think so. I would still have a responsibility to try to abolish the evil system.

In fact, “abolish the evil system” is exactly what voters in California and some other states are trying to do. In 2018, by an almost 2-to-1 margin, California voters enacted a law called Proposition 12 that heavily restricted the sale of meat from pigs, hens, and calves that weren’t raised with a minimum amount of space. Crucially, the partial prohibition extended to meat from animals raised inhumanely in other states. This followed on the heels of a similar law in Massachusetts two years earlier.

Courts have upheld the law, but Republicans in Congress are trying to undo it from the federal level. In 2025 they proposed the Save Our Bacon Act, which would ban states from enacting animal welfare laws like the ones voters approved in California and Massachusetts. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, but this year it got incorporated into the Farm Bill, which has passed the House and is now being considered in the Senate:

Companies and industry groups have also worked with members of Congress for over a decade to introduce federal legislation to nullify laws like those in California and Massachusetts. The latest iteration is called the Save Our Bacon Act, originally proposed last year…This effort, which for years went nowhere as standalone legislation in Congress, now has a decent chance at becoming law as part of the new Farm Bill…

In late April, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Farm Bill, which included the language from the Save Our Bacon Act…It’s “really a Save Our Crate Act,” Brent Hershey, a hog farmer who opposes it, told me. “A vote for the farm bill,” he said, “is a vote to cage an animal that can’t walk or turn around.”

Lewis Bollard has a good post explaining what’s at stake. In fact, the current Farm Bill wouldn’t just reverse the recent anti-crate laws in California and Massachusetts — it would roll back much of the progress that has been made in farm animal welfare over the decade, as well as preventing any future welfare laws along similar lines:

The [Save Our Bacon] Act would stop any state or locality from regulating the sale of meat based on how it’s produced in another state. This would likely invalidate state and local bans on foie gras, crated veal, and more…It would also halt future legislative progress. Congress hasn’t passed a farm animal welfare law in decades. State laws are where reforms actually happen. The SOB Act would gut them by mandating they contain a giant loophole for out-of-state imports.

Why should Congress prevent the voters of California and Massachusetts from taking a stand against the evils of factory farming? First and foremost, it’s a case of a concentrated interest group — the pig farming lobby — making headway against a diffuse interest (voters with a conscience). In fact, if you believe the polls, a majority of the country — even a majority of those who regularly eat pork — would probably support measures like the ones in California and Massachusetts: [...]

In fact, I suspect that the American public is still in a mood to support animal welfare laws like this. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, and its supporters had to end up sneakily burying it within the much bigger Farm Bill; to me, this suggests that even the SOB Act’s proponents knew how bad it would make them look if people started paying attention.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Humane Society via Wikimedia Commons; Our World in Data; YouTube

[ed. Is anyone surprised this continues? Everything Congress does (or doesn't do) is purely transactional. The Congress/lobbyist/fundraising/election process/system is a contagion on our society (... and pigs). See also: Leadershit.]

Why Japanese Companies Do So Many Different Things

Consider Toto.

If you spend much time in American public bathrooms, or rather if you’re simply a particularly attentive patron of American public bathrooms, you’ll probably have noticed Toto’s toilets at some point or another: they’re distinguished by a quite memorable serif-font “TOTO” logo. Toto toilets aren’t quite dominant in American bathrooms, since they have healthy competition from our homegrown toilet champions American Standard and Kohler—though Toto is doing better and better as Americans start to fall in love with the bidet-toilet—but globally Toto is the world’s largest manufacturer of toilets and bidets. And in its home country of Japan, Toto is simply everywhere: 80 percent of Japanese homes contain a Toto bidet-toilet.

And if you’re a longtime Toto shareholder—maybe an investor with a particular interest in bathroom fixtures—this has been a wonderfully lucrative year for you. Toto’s stock is up 60 percent year to date; in just the last few weeks, it’s risen by 30 percent. Toto is doing better than ever: its net profit, in the first quarter of 2026, was up 230 percent year over year.

But Toto’s remarkable year doesn’t have much to do with toilets or bidets. Toto might have been founded in the 1910s to “provide a healthy and civilized way of life” through affordable toilets, and in the decades since might have become the global leader in the bathroom game. But Toto also does a lot of other things. Toto manufactures not just bidets and toilets but also bathroom tiles, prefabricated bathroom modules, faucets, modular kitchens, photocatalytic coatings for buildings, and assistive equipment for the elderly. And, most importantly, Toto has a very lucrative sideline in the fabrication of memory chips.

Since 1988, in a once-obscure corner of the company called the “advanced ceramics division,” Toto has been producing a very particular component called the electrostatic chuck, or the “e-chuck.” The e-chuck is a sort of high-precision ceramic plate, about the size of a steering wheel, that uses electrostatic force to hold a silicon wafer perfectly flat and thermally stable while memory chips are etched into it with bombardments of plasma. Making these components is extraordinarily difficult, since the ceramic body needs to have near-zero particle generation and be polished to submicron flatness: and this means that there are only a few companies in the world that are capable of manufacturing e-chucks reliably. Almost all of them—Shinko Electric, NGK, Toto, Kyocera, Sumitomo Osaka Cement, Niterra—are based in Japan.

For most of its history, the advanced ceramics division was a rounding error on Toto’s balance sheet: the money maker, as it had been since the 1910s, was the toilet and bidet business. But we’re in a new era. Demand for AI is exploding, meaning that demand for the high-bandwidth memory that AI data centers require is exploding, meaning that demand for memory chips is exploding, meaning that demand for e-chucks is exploding. And so Toto’s advanced ceramics division is suddenly the company’s largest business, generating the majority of its operating profit. Toto’s leadership, suddenly awash in AI-driven revenue, announced that they would double down by investing hundreds of millions in expanded electrostatic chuck production: the toilet company had become, quite unexpectedly, a supplier to the semiconductor supply chain.

The Toto story is a fun and interesting illustration of corporate diversification and how strange bets can pay off. But that type of diversification—a toilet company that also produces photocatalytic coating and high-precision components for semiconductors—isn’t really unique to Toto. Practically every company in Japan seems to do a thousand very different things.

Consider, for example, Kyocera, another one of the e-chuck makers. Kyocera was founded in 1959 as a producer of ceramic insulators for cathode-ray tubes; today it manufactures not only industrial ceramics but also printers, smartphones, ballpoint pens, kitchen knives, solar PV modules, lens components, industrial cutting tools, automotive camera modules, electronics components, semiconductor packaging, biocompatible tooth and joint replacements, UV-LED curing systems, LCD systems, medical products, and lab-grown gemstones. Or another e-chuck maker. Sumitomo Osaka Cement, as you might have been able to deduce from the name, produces cement and ready-mixed concrete; but it also produces optical components, measuring instruments, industrial ceramics, artificial marine reefs, cosmetics and nanoparticle materials.

And this degree of diversification extends to many of Japan’s most famous companies. Yamaha, for example, manufactures pianos, motorcycles, guitars, drums, boats, snowmobiles, ATVs, audio equipment, golf clubs, tennis rackets, home appliances, specialty metals, molding and bonding equipment for semiconductors, and industrial robots. Hitachi makes nuclear reactors, power grids, railway systems, elevators, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, medical imaging devices, data storage, IT consulting, and industrial machinery. Even a company as simple as Oji, Japan’s largest paper company, has been drawn into the production of disposable diapers, functional films, adhesives, cellulose nanofibers, and wood-based EUV photoresists; and it also operates a hotel, an airport catering business, a concert hall, and an insurance agency.

All of which is to say: Japanese companies do a lot of things.

There are, of course, other countries with companies that “do lots of things”: much of Indian economic life, for example, is defined by the sprawling activities of a few large business clans—the Adanis, the Ambanis, the Tatas, the Birlas. But India is a relatively poor country with a low level of economic specialization, and the sprawling conglomerates that dominate its economy focus on relatively simple things like cement, steel, ports, and telecommunications. Japan, by contrast, is a wealthy, developed society—by one measure, the most economically complex country in the world. What’s striking about Japanese companies is not that they do lots of different things but rather that they do them very well. There are all sorts of high-precision inputs—the e-chuck being just one example—that are produced virtually only by Japanese firms.

This is very different from how most wealthy countries operate. American firms, for example, tend to prioritize focus above all else: it would be bizarre for an American paper mill to also operate a concert hall and an airport catering business, or for American Standard or Kohler to somehow have something to do with semiconductors. Even a country like Germany, which matches Japan in its depth of high-precision firms, has nothing like Japan’s corporate diversification. Only a few large conglomerates, like Siemens, have anything approaching the lateral breadth of the Japanese firm. South Korea—whose economic system was not coincidentally modeled off the Japanese one—does have a few chaebol conglomerates, like Samsung and SK, that truly do as many things as Japanese companies. But these are economy-dominating, state-entangled megafirms, cultivated as national champions by Korean industrial policy. They look nothing like, say, Sumitomo Osaka Cement, which is hugely diversified despite being relatively small. (“Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power!”)

So why are Japanese companies like this? Why do they do so many different things? And how do they manage to do so all those different things so well?

Here is the answer I want to suggest: Japanese companies excel in lots of very different domains because it’s inherent in how they’re structured. The form of the corporation that we know and love in the United States—specialized, market-oriented, governed by shareholders—is just one form that the corporation can take; but it’s not the only way to coordinate capital and labor in a successful and profitable way. The protean corporations of Japan are best understood as a different species of thing altogether: better at some things, worse at others, but still highly adapted to their particular environment. And the things that they’re very good at turn out to be extraordinarily helpful for all sorts of things in which American companies tend to struggle.

by David Oks, Website |  Read more:

Image: uncredited