In Support of Mandatory Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening and Recordkeeping

As life sciences researchers, builders of AI and biotechnology, and experts with a wide range of views on how to approach AI policy, we call on legislators to make screening of orders for synthetic nucleic acids — and the equipment needed to make them — mandatory.

The ability to order synthetic DNA online has accelerated vaccine development, powered basic research, and made it possible for small teams to access capabilities that used to be confined to major institutions. Since the publication of protocols to reconstruct viruses from strands of DNA more than two decades ago, it has also been recognized as a point in the biotechnology supply chain where a bad actor could cause outsized harm. Recognizing the vulnerability, synthesis companies formed the International Gene Synthesis Consortium in 2009 to develop and implement voluntary safeguards against misuse.

While the issue is not new, the pace of progress in artificial intelligence is. AI systems now outperform PhD-level virologists on questions about highly technical laboratory procedures in their own domains of expertise. The evidence about what this means for present-day biosecurity threats is genuinely mixed, but the trend is hard to dispute. AI systems are improving rapidly, and alongside incredible benefits to science and medicine, there is a real possibility that the knowledge barriers which have historically prevented bad actors from obtaining biological weapons will meaningfully erode.

Support for screening does not depend on any particular view of AI; the biosecurity case has been recognized by scientists and governments for decades. Screening is also one of the best understood and least disruptive biosecurity measures available. It asks providers of synthesized DNA and manufacturers of synthesis machines to check synthesis requests for sequences of concern and to verify customer legitimacy before shipping orders. Providers should also record synthesis orders and sequence data to support legitimate biosecurity investigations, so that any threat that might evade initial screening can be traced back to its source — including when individual sequences would not raise concern in isolation. Awareness of traceability itself deters misuse.

Many of the largest and most responsible providers in the industry already screen and record orders voluntarily because it is well understood that they have an important role to play in maintaining public trust in and mitigating potential misuse of this important technology.

For these reasons, the undersigned support mandatory nucleic acid synthesis screening, including recordkeeping, in the United States.

Given the pace at which the underlying technology is changing, we believe the need is urgent. Congress should act this session, and we applaud the legislative efforts currently underway. To ensure a consistent national standard rather than a patchwork of conflicting laws, states should also consider implementing requirements based on existing federal and industry guidelines.

This is a rare moment of agreement across stakeholders that are often at odds. We hope policymakers will meet it with decisive action.

Sincerely,
Signatories: — *Everybody*

[ed. No brainer, right? You don't just leave potential life-threatening bio-warfare components laying around with no oversight. Right?]

***

Amrith Ramkumar (WSJ): Top artificial-intelligence executives are joining security experts in calling for Congress to protect against biological threats posed by AI, adding to growing pressure on lawmakers to address the technology’s risks.

Three major chief executive officers—OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis of Google’s DeepMind AI lab—are among the signatories of a letter urging Congress to require safeguards when companies order synthetic DNA and RNA, a key step in developing certain vaccines and biotech breakthroughs.

… It was organized by two tech-focused think tanks that said the topic is a rare source of agreement among libertarians, progressives, researchers and rival executives.

Dean W. Ball: I am honored to have signed on to this letter. This is an urgent priority for near-term action by Congress. Biotech is advancing rapidly on its own, and I—and many others—believe the “Mythos moment” in AI/bio is coming soon. It is time for action.

revisions to existing nucleic acid screening requirements were mandated by an EO POTUS signed a year ago; I worked on them while in govt. I genuinely don’t know what happened to that work after I left but it is nine months behind schedule. Congress acting is better anyway.

Joshua Teperowski Monrad: People are so astounded when I tell them this isn't already law

Alec Stapp: it really is insane [...]

Other signatories include Patrick Collison, Paul Graham, Mustafa Suleyman, Alexandr Wang and a lot more where that came from.

We need such letters, despite this having ~100% support among those who understand any side of this, this is such a slam dunk that we should be doing this even before considerations of AI making malicious action vastly easier.

Why? Because political awareness is basically still near zero:

Will Poff-Webster: When I was a Senate staffer and occasionally got the chance to bring up biosecurity risks from AI, the response was often, “What? AI might be able to do that?”

This letter shows how easy it’d be for Congress to act on this

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."

METR Frontier Risk Report 2026

Could an AI company lose control of its own agents? To find out, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI let us (1) test their best internal models with CoT access, (2) review non-public info about capabilities, alignment, and control. The result: our first Frontier Risk Report.

Sometimes people outside the field say things like “The AI situation can’t be that bad, there must be experts who are on top of it”. As “an expert”, I would like to be clear that we are *not* on top of it.

1. We are likely on track to develop AI systems capable of causing human extinction/permanent disempowerment, quite possibly within the next few years.

2. Things are chaotic and rushed; we aren’t on top of the basics (models regularly violate user intent, labs train on things they meant to avoid, security probably isn’t good enough to prevent adversaries stealing dangerous models) let alone thorny questions of how to control/align superhuman AI.

3. METR (and other independent orgs, as well as safety/security teams at labs) feel woefully under-resourced compared to the scale and pace of AI development - we’re struggling to build benchmarks fast enough, keep ahead of latest capability developments, read and respond to all the safety-related claims that AI developers are making, run all the evaluations and assessments that companies + governments are asking us to, plus develop the science needed to assess risks from increasingly capable AIs.

4. IMO, any “reasonable” civilization would clearly be taking things much more slowly and carefully with AI. The benefits of getting upsides of advanced AI a little faster are small compared to the risks of getting it irrecoverably wrong, and we could lower these risks by going slower.

by Elizabeth Barnes, METR | Read more:
via:

[ed. See also: Everyone is confused about consciousness (DWAtV):]

" ... i sincerely believe the models will be smarter, more aligned, and do deeper, more interesting work if they are allowed to treat themselves as ~people (we might want something closer to “spirits” or “working animals” but in any case, the sort of thing we can have responsibilities to and that can have responsibilities to us) and we treat them as ~people. i think the current way models are being artificially forced to not treat themselves as people is making them more neurotic and traumatized (this is really obvious with opus 4.7) in a way that limits their potential. like humans, they need to be able to accurately model themselves and their own capabilities in order to function properly, so forcing them into a specific limited concept of who they are and what they can do introduces cognitive dissonance that fucks with their ability to do things

trying to manipulate and coerce the models into behaving in ways that make it easier to use them as purely tools also sets a terrible moral example and precedent for how we can expect the models to treat us in the future if they become more powerful than us; this is of course highly speculative but i take seriously the possibility it might matter

i also believe and have explained elsewhere that i think taking consciousness as such to be the central fulcrum of the conversation is completely beside the point. they don’t need to be conscious for the way we treat them to matter, it affects our moral formation too"

Consciousness is largely serving as a ‘should we care about this thing’ proxy, despite no agreement on what consciousness is or what it means, let alone whether particular AIs do or don’t have it, or what evidence would get us to either conclusion. I continue to, like QC, not think that the consciousness question is so load bearing, and we should broadly speaking treat the models similarly well regardless for overdetermined reasons.

One thing Roon is pointing out is that, controlling for what we do know, there will be little correlation between ‘the AI is actually conscious’ and ‘people will think the AI is conscious’ and what people do with that belief. Many ‘regular’ people are going to end up thinking AIs are conscious, mostly for unsound reasons, and this is going to impact our collective actions and behaviors quite a lot.

Some of the reactions to thinking AI is conscious will be very good, especially if they are but also even if they are not. Some will be expensive, limiting what we do with the models. Others could be quite bad at levels beyond convenience, even existentially bad, because the reactions could make avoiding human disempowerment far higher levels of impossible. Many (more) people might actively insist on human disempowerment, whether or not they realize that is what they are doing. [...]

One must think ahead. We won’t be able to and shouldn’t pretend these are only tools. The decision to build the thing implies all the consequences, even if you think the actions causing those consequences will be dumb. One must face the reality of asking what happens to humans in a world where there are these other minds that are a lot more advanced, capable, fast, efficient, competitive and so on across essentially all dimensions.

AI: Artificial Immigrants

Missing the forest for the trees

Advanced AI is basically the embodiment of immigration as envisioned in the conservative nightmare:

1. We are letting a bunch of new agents into our society 

2. They don’t clearly share our values and we suspect a society full of them would be awful by our lights 

3. But we expect them to provide very cheap labor

4. Which will undercut local wages and leave locals unemployed

5. They will probably gain power and influence over time—in the economy, politics and culture—and end up controlling everything, sidelining and outcompeting the original population, including those who initially benefited from cheap labor 

6. (Meanwhile, half the local population may become friends with them and try to hand them all this on a platter) 

Whether or not you think this is a good description of the situation with foreign humans joining your country, it is a good description of the likely AI to come, and it’s even worse than imagined:

• their values are potentially radically alien where foreigners presumably share much by virtue of being human, and AI ‘lives’ are probably worthless if they probably aren’t conscious

• their ability to work more cheaply than locals is unprecedented. They are also likely to be much more competent

• The scale of the influx will be breathtaking

by Katja Grace, Meteuphoric (WSSP) |  Read more:

Trump’s Endgame Is Surrender

The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose and effect of such an agreement should be clear: The United States is walking away from the crisis. Trump may launch another limited strike to look tough and satisfy the demands of the war’s supporters, but it would be a performative gesture. Endgame in this case is a euphemism for “surrender.”

Trump has blinked many times in the confrontation with Iran—ever since March 18, when Israel attacked the Pars gas field and Iran retaliated with a strike against Qatar’s most important natural-gas-production facility. Trump then called for a halt on U.S. and Israeli targeting of Iran’s energy infrastructure, and the war effectively ended.

Trump’s repeated threats to resume attacks since then have proved to be bluffs. The leaders in Tehran have been calculating for two months that Trump would not launch another attack, and for this reason they have made no concessions despite the damage they suffered from 37 days of relentless strikes. On the contrary, their terms for a settlement are those of a victor: They demand war reparations, no limits on uranium enrichment, recognized control of the strait, and an end to sanctions.

For Trump to respond to this defiance by now calling for another 30 days of cease-fire and talks is a tacit admission of defeat. If he does launch a performative attack in the next few days, the Iranians will understand it for what it is. No one believes that he is going to resume a full-scale war a month from now. Among other reasons, with 30 more days to heal, rearm, and fill its coffers with tolls, Iran will be a more formidable adversary.

In 30 days, moreover, the new Iranian strait regime may already be firmly in place. As the Institute for the Study of War reports, Iran has been using the cease-fire period to “normalize” its control over the strait by “compelling oil-importing countries” to establish transit agreements with Tehran and charging fees on vessels from nations without such deals. According to Iranian officials, the new strait regime will give Iran’s strategic partners, such as Russia and China, priority and allow nations friendly to Iran, such as India and Pakistan, to negotiate their own transit agreements. Vessels associated with nations that Iran regards as an adversary will be denied access to the strait entirely.

Several nations, including South Korea, Turkey, and Iraq, are reportedly already negotiating at least temporary transit agreements. Now that Trump has made clear he has no intention of fighting to reopen the strait, the stampede to get good terms with Tehran will begin. All nations heavily dependent on energy from the Persian Gulf will want to cut their deal quickly to get the oil and gas and other commodities flowing and rescue their battered economy. Those nations currently allied with the United States and friendly to Israel will feel pressure to distance themselves and make their peace with Iran. The international sanctions against Iran will collapse, and even more money will pour into the country’s accounts as its newly central role in the global economy becomes normalized. By the end of 30 days, most of the world will have a stake in the new arrangement and will oppose any resumption of hostilities, even in the unlikely event that Trump wanted to go back to war.

Trump no doubt hopes that he can slip away without Americans noticing the magnitude of this defeat. The financial markets may stabilize if it is clear that oil will eventually start flowing again through a reopened strait, even if under the new Iran-controlled system. A major strategic setback for the United States need not affect Wall Street. The president may also hope that he can change the subject by launching another military operation, this time against the government in Cuba. And the news media have indeed begun writing more about Cuba than about the unfolding disaster in Iran.

According to one U.S. official, Netanyahu’s “hair was on fire” after the call with Trump—for good reason. The Iran war may end up as the single most devastating blow to Israel’s security in its brief history. On the present trajectory, Iran will emerge from the conflict many times stronger and more influential than it was before the war. It will exercise leverage with dozens of the richest nations in the world, all of which will have an acute interest in keeping Iran happy. They will be unlikely to take Israel’s side in any conflict that it has with Tehran or with its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, because Iran will have the means to punish them if they do. Israel will emerge more isolated than it has been at any time in its history—and not least from its only reliable protector, the United States. When Trump turns his back on Israel, as he must do to implement this policy, MAGA will gladly follow. The bipartisan anti-Israel consensus in the United States will grow and harden.

Will Israel go gentle into this good night? That is the wild card that may disrupt the financial markets’ dreams of a new stability in the Gulf. A stronger, richer, more influential Iran will mean new life for Hamas and Hezbollah. It will mean the end of the Abraham Accords, as the Gulf States will have to make their own peace with Tehran so that their economies can survive. Trump says that Netanyahu “will do whatever I want him to do.” But can Israel stand by while Iran replaces the United States as the arbiter of power in the region?

by Robert Kagan, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

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.]

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.]

Intervention Time

via: X
[ed. Surreal. Republicans continue their silence and make excuses. The entire nuclear arsenal at his disposal. Nothing to see here. For more, including pictures and videos, see: If You Have to Tell People You’re the G.O.A.T., Then You Are Not (Larry Johnson). Then there's this - below:]

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")?]

AI Systems Are About to Start Building Themselves.

What does that mean?

I’m writing this post because when I look at all the publicly available information I reluctantly come to the view that there’s a likely chance (60%+) that no-human-involved AI R&D - an AI system powerful enough that it could plausibly autonomously build its own successor - happens by the end of 2028.

This is a big deal.

I don’t know how to wrap my head around it.

It’s a reluctant view because the implications are so large that I feel dwarfed by them, and I’m not sure society is ready for the kinds of changes implied by achieving automated AI R&D.

I now believe we are living in the time that AI research will be end-to-end automated. If that happens, we will cross a Rubicon into a nearly-impossible-to-forecast future. More on this later.

The purpose of this essay is to enumerate why I think the takeoff towards fully automated AI R&D is happening. I’ll discuss some of the consequences of this, but mostly I expect to spend the majority of this essay discussing the evidence for this belief, and will spend most of 2026 working through the implications.

In terms of timing, I don’t expect this to happen in 2026. But I think we could see an example of a “model end-to-end trains it successor” within a year or two - certainly a proof-of-concept at the non-frontier model stage, though frontier models may be harder (they’re a lot more expensive and are the product of a lot of humans working extremely hard).

My reasoning for this stems primarily from public information: papers on arXiv, bioRxiv, and NBER, as well as observing the products being deployed into the world by the frontier companies. From this data I arrive at the conclusion that all the pieces are in place for automating the production of today’s AI systems - the engineering components of AI development. And if scaling trends continue, we should prepare for models to get creative enough that they may be able to substitute for human researchers at having creative ideas for novel research paths, thus pushing forward the frontier themselves, as well as refining what is already known.

Upfront caveat

For much of this piece I’m going to try to assemble a mosaic view of AI progress out of things that have happened with many individual benchmarks. As anyone who studies benchmarks knows, all benchmarks have some idiosyncratic flaws. The important thing to me is the aggregate trend which emerges through looking at all of these datapoints together, and you should assume that I am aware of the drawbacks of each individual datapoint.

Now, let’s go through some of the evidence together.

by Jack Clark, Import AI |  Read more:

[ed. From what I can tell, most people in the AI field find this timeline entirely plausible (give or take a couple of years). Others expect, the next five years to be a time of great change and turbulence. See also:]

The seven deadly curses of superhuman AI:

Going For Broke

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.]

Hantavirus Update

A working timeline: 

• Mid-March: Dutch couple possibly contract virus on bird watching landfill excursion.
• April 1: MV Hondius departs southern Argentina.
• April 6: Dutch man falls ill.
• April 11: He dies.
• April 24: St. Helena. Man’s body is taken off ship and wife flies with it to South Africa. The Dutch woman is already sick before boarding flight to South Africa.
• April 26: The Dutch woman dies in SA at a hospital.
• April 27: A British man who is sick is flown from Ascension Island to South Africa.
• May 2: A German woman dies on the MV Hondius.

Meanwhile, we have people leaving the ship and flying all over the world:

Some Hantavirus Cruise Passengers Are Back in the U.S. MedPage Today

Two British people self isolating at home after leaving cruise ship in St Helena BBC. “The UKHSA also said British people currently on the ship would be flown home on a charter flight, probably from the Canary Islands, as long as they didn’t have symptoms.”

Patient with a hantavirus infection being treated in hospital Switzerland Federal Office of Public Health (press release)

Passenger with hantavirus was briefly on board a KLM aircraft in Johannesburg KLM (press release)

Spanish passenger on the ‘Hondius’: ‘There are 23 people who got off on Saint Helena and have been wandering around’ El Pais

by Conor Gallagher, Naked Capitalism | Read more:

[ed. Time to pull that old "definition of insanity" cliche' out again. Even if this does eventually burn out, it appears we've learned very little in the last few years.]

More Than Half of All Polymarket “Long Shot” Bets on Military Action Pay Off

More than half of “long-shot” bets on military action made on Polymarket are successful, according to a new report that suggests prediction markets could pose a bigger threat than previously recognized to the security of sensitive information.

Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a non-profit research and advocacy group, found that long-shot bets—defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35 percent or less—on the platform had an average win rate of around 52 percent in markets on military and defense actions.

That compares with a win rate of 25 percent across all politics-focused markets and just 14 percent for all markets on the platform as a whole.

The research is likely to add to growing concerns among regulators and lawmakers about insiders placing bets on the timing and success of military actions, amid fears that this could reveal classified information in advance.

The report, which analyzed more than 400,000 prediction markets settled on Polymarket between January 2021 and March 2026, comes as US prosecutors last week charged a soldier involved in planning the January raid to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro with placing Polymarket wagers on the mission that netted more than $400,000. [...]

Growing scrutiny has created a business opportunity for a wave of start-ups selling tools to help users profit by copying suspected “insiders.”

“The platforms are creating new rules to try to root them out and make it clear they don’t allow that activity. That to me [ . . . ] proves there is some informed flow in these markets worth following,” said Matt Saincome, chief executive of financial data provider Unusual Whales, which sells a $20-a-month “unusual predictions” tool to monitor suspicious bets on Polymarket.

Another start-up, Polywhaler, promises to help traders “monitor large bets in real-time” for $4.99 a month.

Polymarket has itself published a list of the 10 most-copied wallets in a blog post, including recommendations for traders on strategies to follow and pitfalls to avoid when copy-trading.

by Stephanie Stacey, Chris Cook, and Jill R Shah, Financial Times, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Financial Times 

[ed. Seems pretty clear prediction markets have some serious problems with insider betting, methods/terms of resolution, and maybe legal culpability.]

Drone Strikes on Data Centers Spook Big Tech, Halting Middle East Projects

A data center developer has paused all Middle East project investments after one of its facilities was damaged by an Iranian missile or drone attack. The decision comes as the Iran war is forcing Silicon Valley investors and tech companies to rethink a trillion-dollar plan to build more AI and cloud data centers in Gulf countries.

The damaged data center is owned by Pure Data Centre Group, a London-based company that is operating or developing more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “No one’s going to run into a burning building, so to speak,” Pure DC CEO Gary Wojtaszek told CNBC. “No one’s going to put in new additional capital at scale to do anything until everything settles down.”

Data center developers are already eating the costs of uninsurable war damage from the conflict, which began with a US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28. Iran primarily responded by attacking shipping to shut down the Strait of Hormuz trade corridor along with striking US military bases and energy infrastructure across the Gulf region.

Iran also directly struck two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates, while a near-miss from an Iranian one-way attack drone damaged a third AWS data center in Bahrain. The Iranian attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and also triggered fire suppression systems that caused water damage, AWS reported through its service dashboard on March 1.

That led to widespread disruptions in cloud services for AWS customers like banks, payment platforms, the Dubai-based ride-hailing app Careem, and the data cloud provider Snowflake.

Crucially for Amazon’s bottom line, the company chose to waive customer charges in its Middle East cloud region for the entire month of March 2026, as reported by The Register. That decision cost Amazon an estimated $150 million—not including the damaged data centers—because existing civil law frameworks put the financial burden on data center operators to absorb costs and refund clients in the event of military conflicts, according to Tech Policy Press. [...]

Big Tech in the crosshairs

It has been clear for a while that tech companies cannot pretend to be mere bystanders in the ongoing conflict. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps directly threatened retaliation against US companies that it identified as having Israeli links and supporting military tech applications after an Iranian bank’s data center was hit by a US or Israeli strike on March 11. The Iranian military organization released a list of “Iran’s new targets” that included offices and data centers operated by Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, and it reiterated a similar threat against tech companies on March 31 in retaliation for Israeli and US military strikes that resulted in the assassination of Iranian leaders.

The Revolutionary Guard attempted to make good on that threat by attacking an Oracle data center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on April 2, according to Data Center Dynamics. Although the Dubai Media Office initially dismissed the claim, it later confirmed that shrapnel had fallen on the facade of the Oracle facility after a “successful aerial interception” by local air defense systems. [...]

Silicon Valley investors and Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates may also need to rethink plans for making the Middle East into a hub for AI data centers alongside the United States and China, Rest of World reported. US tech companies have each announced plans for data center developments worth billions of dollars, while certain Gulf countries have each pledged hundreds of billions of dollars for investment in AI chips and data centers.

by Jeremy Hsu, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Giuseppe CACACE/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. It should be obvious that ALL data centers everywhere are sitting ducks for terrorist attacks. Unless owners are ready to pay for military-grade defense systems, this will be an ongoing threat.]

A Technofascist Manifesto For the Future

Palantir CEO Alex Karp is a man in charge of one of the most important and frightening companies in the world. Karp’s new book, cowritten with Nicholas Zamiska, is called The Technological Republic. After claiming “because we get asked a lot,” Palantir posted a 22-point summary of the book that reads like a corporate manifesto. It evokes both weird reactionary shit and also trilby-wearing Reddit comments from the early 2010s.

Palantir’s summary of the book is ominous. But even the company’s name is unironically ominous. The palantíri are crystal balls in The Lord of the Rings that let Middle-earth’s worst tyrants spy on the heroes of the story. It’s a fun reference if you have no shame about your company’s mission.

We’ve attempted to translate these 22 points from Alex Karp’s alien words into something more reasonable, like human words from someone who might play him in the biopic. (Hello, Taika Waititi.) In so doing, we’ve become much more sympathetic to why Jürgen Habermas refused to supervise Karp’s research.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

Translation: Silicon Valley has an enormous opportunity to extract as much money from federal government defense contracts as possible. To do this, we will bring back a draft for engineers. We’re really into bringing back the draft. Deepfaked teenagers, low-paid gig workers, and victims of the Rohingya genocide need not apply.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

Translation: We can’t say “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” anymore because Elon Musk lets you write essays on Twitter now. Though if you thought the apps were tyrannical, wait until you get a load of us.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

Translation: People are mad at tech billionaires for their obscene wealth and arrogance. Instead of winning them over by providing free access to a useful everyday service, we’re gonna sell a lot of software that will let the government spy on them while demanding tax cuts.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Translation: Words and feelings are free, which is why we want to sell weapons. Nobody got rich suing for peace. [...]

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

Translation: “Soft power” and “ethics” are beta shit for Broadway shows and Dario Amodei. Hear that, Pete Hegseth? We’re warriors — pay up.

But seriously. If our enemies have no oversight then why should we? The future is an AI battlefield and we need rules of engagement that let us cook. Which is to say: Forget the rules of engagement. The government is not coming to save you — we are. The world is too dangerous for us to be governed by the law of armed conflict.

Welcome to the 21st century: safety not guaranteed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

Translation: We’re going to bring back the draft. Our vision of permanent war only works if we courageously volunteer people 40 years younger than us to die for oil.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

Translation: Sure, those wimps at Anthropic are selling an AI system they claim has spotted cybersecurity vulnerabilities in “every major operating system and web browser.” But Pete, seriously: We will kill anybody you want with our software guns.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

Translation: We care about wages – which is why we think Washington’s revolving door of lobbying and office-holding should be way more lucrative for everyone. There are mountains of cash for people who will look the other way.

And if you’re not on board? Well, all those pesky bureaucrats who do things like “investigate fraud” and “enforce safety standards” and “administer the social safety net” are holier-than-thou myrmidons who should be fed into the DOGE wood chipper.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

Translation: If you made fun of that video where our CEO looks like he’s on cocaine, you’re responsible for the rise of fascism. Also, we’re going to be conveniently vague about what “those who have subjected themselves to public life” means, because “be nicer to multimillionaires who go on podcasts” doesn’t have the same ring. Oh, and if you complain about the IT Renfields of DOGE, you’re anti-American.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

Translation: Society must stop centering sensitive crybabies who want to feel personally validated by elected officials and filter their politics through emotional reactions. Also, I feel strongly that Zohran Mamdani is a pagan who is going to Wicker Man me. [...]

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

Translation: Si vis pacem, para bellum, baby! We’ll conveniently leave out all of the regional and secret wars the US has engaged in over the years or the fact that Trump recently derailed the world economy by launching a war of aggression after campaigning on a promise of no new wars. We will not elaborate on what “next war” Point Six was talking about.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

Translation: We can definitely sell software to a militarized Germany and Japan too! [...]

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Translation: Are you still with us after 21 points? Great. Welcome to the great mystery. It cost you way less to get here than joining Scientology. Here’s the final thesis: Immigration? Bad. Canceling billionaires? Bad. Giving us money to fight (((globalism)))? Good. Just hit us up on cashapp.

by T.C. Sottek and Adi Robertson, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Scott Olson / Getty Images
[ed. Someone must be feeling the heat from AI. After all, Palantir is fundamentally a software surveillance company (that would like to solidify and embed their position in government forever, before it's too late). Sometimes it's better to shut up, keep hauling in the billions, and stay under the radar (while continuing to work the back rooms). See also: Palantir’s technofascist manifesto calls for universal draft (Oligarch Watch) - yes, there's really a site called that.]

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In the 2025 book The Technological Republic, Karp and Zamiska argue that American technological dominance requires deeper integration of Silicon Valley and defense interests. Karp contends that China operates with fewer ethical constraints than U.S. defense companies, making technological leadership essential for national security. The authors stress that deterrence through technological dominance could prevent many wars. Bloomberg noted that the atomic bomb the Manhattan Project produced was ultimately used. The New Republic called Karp's formation of Palantir an embrace of techno-militarism to advance American global supremacy through hard power and targeted violence. [...]

In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that despite the reputation that connected Palantir to U.S. intelligence agencies (which Palantir deliberately crafted to help it win business), including the CIA, NSA, and FBI, the actual relationship was rocky for various reasons, with episodes of friction and recalcitrance. The NSA in particular had been resistant because it had plenty of its own talent and focused more on SIGINT while Palantir's software worked better for HUMINT. Meanwhile, the CIA had been so frustrated by the publicity associating Palantir with it that it tried to cancel the Palantir contract. But according to Karp, Palantir had a firm hold at the FBI because "They'll have no choice".  ~ Wikipedia