The Public Lands Rule Is Gone

What the BLM's Public Lands Rule was, why the Trump administration killed it, and what it means for the 245 million acres we all own.

On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management officially rescinded the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule—better known as the Public Lands Rule. The change takes effect June 11. The administration had been signaling this move since last spring, but this week made it final, and it landed alongside a separate proposed rule weakening grazing oversight on 155 million acres of Western land.

I haven’t previously written about the Public Lands Rule, in large part because, frankly, it’s very much an in-the-weeds policy story and tough to make interesting. But that doesn’t mean the rule was not important or that this week’s decision won’t have downstream impacts. The PLR was a sincere attempt to put conservation on equal footing with drilling, mining, and grazing in how the BLM makes decisions about the 245 million acres it manages—roughly one in ten acres in the United States. That the administration moved so aggressively to kill even that modest reset tells you something about where its priorities lie.

Here’s what you need to know.

What was the Public Lands Rule, exactly?

For most of the BLM’s modern history, “multiple use” in practice meant that drilling, grazing, and mining got to sit with the adults when decisions were made, while conservation was relegated to the kids’ table, typically alongside recreation. The Public Lands Rule, finalized in May 2024, was meant to fix that. It directed the BLM to protect the most intact landscapes, restore degraded habitat, and use science and Indigenous knowledge as the foundation for management decisions. Most consequentially, it made conservation an official use of public lands—meaning a tribe, a rancher, or a conservation organization could hold a restoration lease on a piece of ground the same way an oil company leases it for drilling. That’s what was really at stake. Not a land grab, but a seat at the table.

Who made the rule?

The Biden-era BLM, led by director Tracy Stone-Manning, finalized it in May 2024 after a lengthy public process. The comment period generated 215,000 remarks, and the overwhelming majority were in favor. The rule wasn’t a new policy invention so much as a course correction. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 already requires the BLM to manage lands for “multiple use and sustained yield” to benefit current and future generations. After decades of drift toward extraction as the default, the Public Lands Rule was the agency trying to follow the law Congress wrote nearly 50 years ago.

What was the case for rescinding it according to the current administration?

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued the rule was “unnecessary” and could block access to hundreds of thousands of acres, hurting energy producers, miners, and ranchers. The administration began the rescission process last spring. A 60-day public comment period followed—and the results were striking. Roughly 98% of more than 61,000 commenters opposed rescission, including members of Congress, former BLM officials, Tribal representatives, ranchers, hunters, and local elected leaders. The administration proceeded anyway.

What does the rescission mean in practice?

Picture the Owyhee Canyonlands in southwestern Idaho—one of the most intact desert ecosystems left in North America, home to bighorn sheep, golden eagles, and some of the wildest river country in the lower 48. Under the Public Lands Rule, a conservation organization or Tribal nation could have held a restoration lease there, giving those values a formal foothold in BLM planning. That mechanism is now gone.

More broadly: 81% of BLM lands are open to oil and gas drilling. About 60% are grazed by livestock. Just 14% are designated for lasting conservation. The rule was meant to start bending those numbers toward balance. Instead, the thumb goes back on the extraction side of the scale.

OK, so how big a deal is this?

The Public Lands Rule was only 16 months old when the administration moved to kill it. Its most important provisions—like conservation leasing—hadn’t yet been fully tested. So the rescission prevents future progress more than it reverses present gains. That’s actually a useful way to understand the administration’s broader strategy: move fast enough that the seeds for a different future, one guided by long-term stewardship principles, never get a chance to take root.

The rescission is significant—but it’s also one item in a very long list, and that context matters. Since January 2025, the administration has fired or pushed out thousands of Interior Department and Forest Service employees. It has proposed cutting public lands agency budgets by more than a third. It issued an executive order making mining the "primary land use" across all public lands where legally allowable—ahead of recreation, wildlife, watersheds, cultural sites, everything. It opened sensitive Arctic habitat to drilling, moved to strip mineral protections from the Boundary Waters watershed in Minnesota, and declared a state of “emergency” on nearly 60% of national forest lands to fast-track commercial logging.

The Public Lands Rule rescission is the headline this week. But the pattern is the real story.

by Christopher Keyes, Re:Public | Read more:
Image: Daniel Halseth/Unsplash
[ed. Public lands (and the public's access to them) are under assault in this administration. See also: The Sellout of the Crazies (Re:Public):]

***

"At the end of a dirt road along the northeastern edge of Montana’s Crazy Mountains, a simple sign warns visitors they are now entering private property.

For fifth-generation Montanan Brad Wilson, the notice marks a defeat with implications far beyond the Crazies.

“The fate of our public lands and our rights are in jeopardy right now,” Wilson told Floodlight.

Wilson is a former sheriff’s deputy and lifelong hunter. For most of his life, he has lived in the jagged shadows of the Crazy Mountains—their snow-capped peaks and twisting valleys watched him grow from a boy herding sheep on his grandfather’s ranch to a grey-haired hunter tracking elk herds across their remote slopes.

“The loss of this access means a lot to me and everybody else,” he said beside the gate, looking down and hiding the wet corners of his eyes.

The road beyond the gate next to Wilson leads into what was, for more than a century, one of two historic public trails into the east side of the Crazies. The U.S. Forest Service relinquished the public’s access to the trail early last year as part of a land swap with the Yellowstone Club—an exclusive mountaintop retreat for the megarich located 100 miles away in Big Sky.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me to give this up,” said Wilson.

For many Montanans, the swap has come to symbolize the growing influence of wealthy private interests spreading across America’s public lands and provides a glimpse of what could come under the Trump administration. [...]

Perhaps nowhere in the country is the fight over public lands—and the big-moneyed interests pulling the strings—more on display right now than in Montana’s Crazy Mountains.

“This is a really simple issue,” said Andrew Posewitz, a Montana public lands advocate and the son of a renowned conservationist. “The public had some really good land and some really good access in the Crazy Mountains. Some really rich people decided they liked the Crazy Mountains a lot … And now the public doesn’t have that access.”

Every American—not just Montanans—should care, he warned.

“Because it is very much a harbinger of potentially what could come.”

V.I.P. Snorkel

When Kash Patel visited Hawa‘ii last summer, the FBI took pains to note the director was not on vacation, highlighting his walking tour of the bureau’s Honolulu field office and meetings with local law enforcement.

Left out of the FBI’s news releases was an exclusive excursion that Patel took days later when he participated in what government officials described as a “VIP snorkel” around the USS Arizona in an outing coordinated by the military. The sunken battleship entombs more than 900 sailors and Marines at Pearl Harbor.

The swim, revealed in government emails obtained by The Associated Press, comes to light amid criticism of Patel’s use of the FBI plane and his global travel, which have blurred professional responsibilities with leisure activities. The FBI did not disclose the snorkeling session or that Patel had returned to Hawai‘i for two days after his initial stopover on the island.

“It fits a pattern of Director Patel getting tangled up in unseemly distractions — this time at a site commemorating the second deadliest attack in U.S. history — instead of staying laser-focused on keeping Americans safe,” said Stacey Young, who founded Justice Connection, a network of former federal prosecutors and agents who advocate for the Department of Justice’s independence.

With few exceptions, snorkeling and diving are off-limits around the USS Arizona. The battleship, now a military cemetery reachable only by boat, has stood as one of the nation’s most hallowed sites since Japan bombed and sank it in 1941. Marine archaeologists and crews from the National Park Service make occasional dives at the memorial to survey the condition of the wreck. Other dives have been conducted to inter the remains of Arizona survivors who wanted to rest eternally with their former shipmates. [...]

Patel’s excursion was in August as he spent two days in Hawai‘i on his return to the United States from official visits to Australia and New Zealand. On his way to those countries, he stopped in Hawai‘i to visit the Honolulu field office. An FBI spokesman did not answer questions about the snorkeling session.

The FBI said in a statement that top regional commanders hosted Patel at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam “as they commonly do with US government officials on official travel.” The Pearl Harbor visit, the spokesman said, “was part of the Director’s public national security engagements last August with counterparts in New Zealand, Australia, our Honolulu Field Office, and the Department of War.” [...]

Beyond the snorkeling excursion, it is not clear what else Patel did during his second stop in Hawai‘i.

Flight tracking data for the Gulfstream G550 typically used by the FBI director show the jet remained on the island two nights during that stay before flying on to Las Vegas, Patel’s adopted hometown. The jet has a published range of about 7,700 miles (12,391 kilometers), meaning the plane would have needed to refuel somewhere between New Zealand and Washington.

The snorkeling session happened one day after Patel stopped in Wellington to open the FBI’s first standalone office in New Zealand. The visit sparked controversy after the AP revealed that Patel had gifted that country’s police and spy bosses inoperable 3D-printed replica pistols that were illegal to possess under local gun laws.

by Jim Mustian, Eric Tucker and Michael Biesecker, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Mengshin Lin/2024
[ed. Another Ka$h sighting, which seem to occur just about everywhere except at FBI headquarters. More bad tourist behavior (see below). He's lucky someone didn't throw a rock at his head.]

The Perfect Commuter Bike?

[ed. Not an endorsement.]

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

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

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

Upgrades all around

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

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

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

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

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

True class

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

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

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

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

Customize your ride

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

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

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

by John Timmer, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: John Timmer

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

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.]

Why Airlines Are Always Going Bankrupt

How aviation companies (fail to) make a profit

It might not be the most important story in the world right now, as our species takes its first halting steps into a brave new world of technological power whose contours are still to us mysterious and weighted with fearful portent, but lately I’ve been spending a good bit of time reading about the death of Spirit Airlines. Spirit, for those lucky enough to have never flown on one of its planes—I have a few memories of terrible Spirit flights from New York to Miami in my teenage years—is, or rather was, one of the ten or so largest airlines in the United States, and, after its more popular rival Southwest, the most prominent of the budget airlines. (JetBlue is somewhat larger, but can’t be considered a “true” budget airline.) And, for the last few years, Spirit had been hurtling toward insolvency.

Spirit had last turned a profit in 2019; things turned disastrously bad with the COVID pandemic in 2020—as was the case for every other airline—but whereas larger flyers generally recovered, things went from bad to worse for Spirit. Corporate leadership pursued a merger with JetBlue, but this was blocked by a federal judge. And so in November 2024, Spirit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; then it filed again, less than a year later, in August 2025. But these filings did little to save Spirit. There was talk of liquidating the company. The Trump administration raised the prospect of a capital injection that would leave the federal government with a 90 percent stake in the airline (the first time in American history that the federal government has owned a passenger airline outright), but the talks collapsed, and so in early May 2026 Spirit announced that it was shutting down for good.

The collapse of Spirit was unique in that in its death throes it managed to solicit a bailout offer from the U.S. government; but it was not unique among its fellow airlines in going broke. Airlines are a bad business: a really, really bad business. The International Air Transport Association, the trade body of the global airline industry, has documented for years that airlines as a sector destroy investor value in the aggregate. The IATA’s 2026 outlook, looking forward to a quite strong year—this was before the Iran war broke out and oil prices surged—projected an average return on invested capital of 6.8 percent, against a weighted average cost of capital of 8.2 percent. As the IATA’s report said, “the airline industry collectively does not generate earnings that cover its cost of capital.” This has been the case for a long time. From its deregulation in 1978 to the end of 2025, the airline industry has cumulatively lost money: its net profit over those 47 years sits at negative $37 billion.

Given these grim economics, you won’t be surprised to hear that airlines have a bad habit of going insolvent. This includes many of the most famous names in the history of aviation. Pan Am, long the unofficial flag carrier of the United States, ceased operations in 1991; Eastern Air Lines liquidated the same year; TWA, the carrier of Howard Hughes, was absorbed into American Airlines after a third bankruptcy filing in 2001; Braniff died in 1982. And those are only the most famous names; countless aviation startups have come and gone. (Have you ever heard of Trump Shuttle?) Even airlines with the backing of a national government go bankrupt all the time: Alitalia, Italy’s flag carrier, reported only a single year of profit since its founding in 1946 and was saved countless times by the Italian government before ultimately ceasing operations in 2021. Even those airlines that survive for long periods of time are perpetually in financial distress. Between 1978 and 2005, more than 160 airlines filed for bankruptcy; virtually every major U.S. carrier other than Southwest has been to bankruptcy court at least once. In September 2005, every one of the four largest American airlines—United, Delta, Northwest, and US Airways—was operating simultaneously under Chapter 11 protection.

This is very strange. There’s not really a conventional economic explanation for an industry whose long-term equilibrium is losing money: an industry that, on a purely economic level, should not exist. Warren Buffett once called the airline industry a “bottomless pit” for investor capital. “Indeed,” he wrote, “if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.”

So why is the airline business so remarkably bad?

One answer is that airlines are particularly vulnerable to shocks. There are so many potential risks with air travel that practically anything going wrong will have some effect. The September 11th attacks, for example, had a huge effect on air travel; so did the surging oil prices of the 2000s, the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting recession, the 2020 pandemic, and now the volatility in oil prices surrounding the Iran war. Whenever a major shock occurs you tend to see a huge wave of airline bankruptcies.

But airlines obviously aren’t the only type of business in the world that’s vulnerable to shocks. Hotels, for instance, are heavily exposed to recessions, terrorism, and pandemics; their costs are heavily front-loaded into the property, just as an airline’s costs are loaded into the plane; and yet the hotel industry doesn’t go through synchronized waves of bankruptcy each time a shock hits. Shocks might explain why airlines tip over the edge into restructuring or liquidation; but they don’t really explain why they’re so vulnerable in the first place, or why the airline sector—uniquely among all major industries—is unable to generate profit in the aggregate.

And we don’t see the same structural unprofitability in any of the other companies of the aviation ecosystem: engine and avionics manufacturers, for example, do totally fine; so do the service suppliers that sell into airlines.

Maybe, then, the answer is that airlines specifically are just poorly managed. This was the dominant view in the 2000s and 2010s: legacy full-service carriers were chronic money-losers; budget airlines, like Southwest and Ryanair, were much more profitable; and so in the future air travel would bifurcate into budget aviation for the masses and Emirates-style luxury travel for the few. But the budget airlines don’t look so good anymore. Spirit was a flagship budget airline and has now been liquidated; JetBlue and Frontier, two budget or semi-budget competitors, are also at risk of bankruptcy; even Southwest, the most durable and iconic of the low-cost carriers, has been unable to make a profit since the pandemic and is now fending off an activist challenge from the hedge fund Elliott Management. So the budget strategy clearly wasn’t a solution to the airline industry’s problems.

So explanations that cite shocks or bad management either explain too much or too little. If it’s just vulnerability to shocks, why don’t other industries have such huge bankruptcy waves? And if it’s bad management, why has no airline in the long history of aviation figured out a replicable solution to running the business profitably?

I’d like to suggest that the problem with the airline industry is much deeper than people seem to think. Losing money in the aggregate is a feature, not a bug, of a competitive airline industry. The airline sector, for reasons that go into the essential nature of the industry, cannot reach a profitable competitive equilibrium. This is not because airlines are vulnerable to shocks or because they’re poorly managed. The airline industry itself can either be profitable, or it can be competitive: but it can’t really be both.

To understand why, we have to learn a little bit about game theory.

by David Oks, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Mike Kelley from “Life Cycles” series
[ed. Interesting thesis. I'd never have imagined the industry as being systemically unprofitable given ticket prices and all the add-on charges. Or, at least wildly profitable during certain periods to compensate for the occasional downdrafts.]

We Absolutely Do Know That Waymos Are Safer Than Human Drivers

In a recent article in Bloomberg, David Zipper argued that “We Still Don’t Know if Robotaxis Are Safer Than Human Drivers.” Big if true! In fact, I’d been under the impression that Waymos are not only safer than humans, the evidence to date suggests that they are staggeringly safer, with somewhere between an 80% to 90% lower risk of serious crashes.

“We don’t know” sounds like a modest claim, but in this case, where it refers to something that we do in fact know about an effect size that is extremely large, it’s a really big claim.

It’s also completely wrong. The article drags its audience into the author’s preferred state of epistemic helplessness by dancing around the data rather than explaining it. And Zipper got many of the numbers wrong; in some cases, I suspect, as a consequence of a math error.

There are things we still don’t know about Waymo crashes. But we know far, far more than Zipper pretends. I want to go through his full argument and make it clear why that’s the case.

***

In many places, Zipper’s piece relied entirely on equivocation between “robotaxis” — that is, any self-driving car — and Waymos. Obviously, not all autonomous vehicle startups are doing a good job. Most of them have nowhere near the mileage on the road to say confidently how well they work.

But fortunately, no city official has to decide whether to allow “robotaxis” in full generality. Instead, the decision cities actually have to make is whether to allow or disallow Waymo, in particular.

Fortunately, there is a lot of data available about Waymo, in particular. If the thing you want to do is to help policymakers make good decisions, you would want to discuss the safety record of Waymos, the specific cars that the policymakers are considering allowing on their roads.

Imagine someone writing “we don’t know if airplanes are safe — some people say that crashes are extremely rare, and others say that crashes happen every week.” And when you investigate this claim further, you learn that what’s going on is that commercial aviation crashes are extremely rare, while general aviation crashes — small personal planes, including ones you can build in your garage — are quite common.

It’s good to know that the plane that you built in your garage is quite dangerous. It would still be extremely irresponsible to present an issue with a one-engine Cessna as an issue with the Boeing 737 and write “we don’t know whether airplanes are safe — the aviation industry insists they are, but my cousin’s plane crashed just three months ago.”

The safety gap between, for example, Cruise and Waymo is not as large as the safety gap between commercial and general aviation, but collapsing them into a single category sows confusion and moves the conversation away from the decision policymakers actually face: Should they allow Waymo in their cities?

Zipper’s first specific argument against the safety of self-driving cars is that while they do make safer decisions than humans in many contexts, “self-driven cars make mistakes that humans would not, such as plowing into floodwater or driving through an active crime scene where police have their guns drawn.” The obvious next question is: Which of these happens more frequently? How does the rate of self-driving cars doing something dangerous a human wouldn’t compare to the rate of doing something safe a human wouldn’t?

This obvious question went unasked because the answer would make the rest of Bloomberg’s piece pointless. As I’ll explain below, Waymo’s self-driving cars put people in harm’s way something like 80% to 90% less often than humans for a wide range of possible ways of measuring “harm’s way.”

by Kelsey Piper, The Argument |  Read more:

Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
[ed. I'd take one any time (if reasonably priced), and expect to see them everywhere soon. See also: I Was Promised Flying Self Driving Cars (Zvi):]

***

A Tesla Model S drove itself from Los Angeles to New York with zero disengagements. Full reverse cannonball run.

Mike P: I don’t mean to say this in a way that discredits what they’ve done, but ngl, this stuff isn’t even surprising to me anymore like ya, makes total sense. I went from Philly to Raleigh NC to Tennessee and back to Philly and the only thing I had to do was re park the car at 2 charging stops when the car parked in the wrong place.

Tesla did the thing

There’s still a difference between full self-driving (FSD) that can take you across the country, and the point when you can sleep while it drives.

A Waymo moving 17mph hits the breaks instantly upon seeing a child step in front of it from a blind spot, hits the child at 6mph and dialed 911. If a human had been driving, the child would likely have been struck at 14mph and be dead.

What did some headlines call this, of course?

TechCrunch: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

Samuel Hammond: A more accurate headline would be “Waymo saves child’s life thanks to superhuman reaction time”

This was another good time to notice that almost all the AI Safety people are strongly in favor of Waymo and self-driving cars.

Rob Miles: Seems worthwhile for people to hear AI Safety people saying: No, self driving cars are not the problem, they have the potential to be much safer than human drivers, and in this instance it seems like a human driver would have done a much worse job than the robot

The Secret History of Wakanda

The history of Wakanda is not, of course, an African history; it’s a history of Europe, and of Europe’s fantasies about Africa.

This hidden kingdom is first attested in Book V, Chapter VIII of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, on the ‘countries on the other side of Africa.’ As Pliny ventures further from the known world of the Mediterranean, and into the depths of Africa, the peoples he describes are drawn with a lighter and lighter brush. He can’t quite say what these people are, but only what they lack. Nightmares live here, in the hot voids of the world: [...]

But then, after this list of fantastic degenerations, we meet something different. Pliny describes a kind of African Utopia:

At the centre of the region of Æthiopia we may find the source of the Nile, guarded by a kingdom called Vicindaria, so called for its many conquests. The Vicindariæ are ruled by their philosophers; and if Pelagon of Rhodes is to be believed their libraries contain all that can be known in the useful crafts. Among their marvels are flying chariots, drawn by certain spinning serpents; fine silks that protect the body like armour; trees bearing glowing fruit with which they light their houses; and great towers made of brass and iron. Their cities are arranged in circles, like those of the Etruscans; at the centre of each stands a library which is also a temple to their God and his son. In all their affairs they are orderly and virtuous; solemn are their laws and just are their judges, and all men live in amity with one another. The Vicindariæ are the ancestors of the the Egyptians and the Numidians, and by some accounts, the fathers of all men. But Pelagon says that they have withdrawn from their troublesome children, have no intercourse with the peoples of the world, and no longer set off on voyages over the oceans or to the Moon; preferring to perfect their knowledge in seclusion, their kingdom can not be found by foreigners.

Where did this idea come from? And how did Pliny appear to describe helicopters, skyscrapers, and the electric lightbulb? Pelagon of Rhodes was a Greek geographer of the second century BC; frustratingly, one of our only surviving sources for his works is Pliny himself. Maybe the story stretches back further; maybe the Greeks had nursed this legend of a distant, magical kingdom for centuries. It’s been suggested that the army of Memmon in Arctinus Milesius’ lost Aethiopis might have some relation to the myth; so too might the Homeric gods’ repeated habit of flying off to visit Ethiopia. We will probably never know.

We do know that in Pliny’s time, Vicindaria was widely believed to be real. Sixteen years before the Natural History was published, the emperor Nero sent a praetorian expedition down the White Nile, to find its source and establish relations between Rome and Vicindaria, for future trade and possible conquest. Seneca, as Nero’s tutor, had commissioned the voyage, and he reports its findings in his Natural Questions:

There we found not towers of bronze or wondrous libraries, but only marshes, the limit of which even the natives did not know, and no one else could hope to know, so completely was the river entangled with vegetable growth, so impassable the waters by foot, or even by boat, since the muddy overgrown marsh would bear only a small boat containing one person.

Nero’s expedition may have reached present-day Uganda: the furthest Roman legions ever travelled into equatorial Africa. Europeans made no further efforts to contact the hidden kingdom of Vicindaria for another thousand years.

This is not to say that the story was forgotten. Pliny’s account was reproduced in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville; among early medieval writers the most significant part of the narrative was the reference to ‘their God and his son.’ Centuries before Christ, these people were Christian. In 687 AD, the heresiarch Caelestius of Aquitaine was burned for insisting that Christ had been born twice, once to the Vicindariae and once to the rest of the world, but that the Vicindariae, being wise, had not killed him. Small communities of Caelestians survived in the Pyrenees for another two hundred years, claiming to follow a purer, African version of Christianity, in which redemption can be achieved without blood. (They rejected the name Caelestians, and preferred to call themselves the ‘Good Whites’ instead.)

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Reality Instruction

The idea​ of a road trip organised around trials and hearings at courthouses across the US had been in my head for years. Last autumn I found myself in a position to make it a reality. I had a month. My aim was to attend as many different kinds of criminal and civil hearing in as many parts of the country as I could. Some courts post their weekly dockets online but most don’t, so there was little scope for detailed planning. A helpful clerk in Deadwood, South Dakota told me of a jury trial that was almost certain to go ahead early in my time frame (most trials are plea-bargained out), and I had to be in New Orleans for a talk three weeks later. That gave me the bare bones of an itinerary.

I left New York at the beginning of October and headed for Chicago. The day before I arrived, ICE agents conducted a raid on a South Side apartment building, with agents rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter and zip-tying children. Given the mayhem I’d seen on TV, the city was surprisingly calm. Families were out enjoying the sunshine in Millennium Park. Office workers strolled in shirtsleeves. Even the Chicago Immigration Court, my first destination, seemed oddly quiet. I had to pass through a magnetometer, but nobody asked what I was doing and there were no agents lurking in corridors to snatch deportable aliens, as had recently started happening in New York.

I’d had some misgivings about my project before setting off, mostly to do with the voyeuristic element. What I hadn’t imagined was the possibility of my presence affecting anyone but myself. It became apparent the moment I stepped inside the windowless courtroom. A dozen adults and children, all Hispanic, turned to me with looks of terror, and it dawned on me that, with my shaved head and pale skin, I must look like some ICE body snatcher. Mortified, I slid onto one of the wooden benches and tried to make myself invisible.

It was a master calendar hearing (the first stage in removal proceedings) and hybrid, with participants appearing remotely as well as in person. The judge was swearing in a Russian interpreter on speakerphone while a young couple from Kyrgyzstan appeared huddled on a screen. After some back and forth, the judge gave the couple’s attorney a date for 2028, when ‘their comments about their government’ would be assessed. The Department of Homeland Security, in the person of a young attorney in the courtroom, offered no objection.

Similar hearings followed at a clip. Some of the technicalities went over my head, but the gist was that the respondents, while admitting to being in the country illegally, were asking for asylum. Until recently, America’s conflicted attitude to immigration expressed itself in lengthy procedures that offered undocumented migrants some grounds for hope. Under Trump, judges are being pressured to dismiss cases altogether, a cynical tactic that exposes migrants to the body snatchers, and around 150 have been sacked (immigration judges are not part of the judiciary proper, but employees of the Department of Justice). Here in Chicago, both the judge and DHS lawyer appeared to be playing by the old rules, setting follow-up appearances far into the future.

The families on the benches next to me were dressed in their finest and their children sat in absolute silence. Speaking to them through an interpreter, the judge told them they’d been summoned because the government ‘thinks you shouldn’t be in the country for one reason or another’. They had a right to representation, he continued, though they would have to pay for it themselves. ‘Raise your hands if you don’t want time to look for an attorney, and just want to talk about removal from the country today.’ No hands went up and the judge set an appearance date for the following year, wishing them luck.

A woman who’d been sitting with a little boy in a braided pink suit said: ‘I just want to know. Do we have a removal order against us today?’ The judge repeated patiently that no order would be made until their next appearance.

As the room emptied out, he turned to me. ‘You’re an observer, I assume?’ I nodded, pleased by the designation, which had a reassuringly official ring. [...]

Courtroom encounters present you with just a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest. On the face of it, these particular shards didn’t add up to much, and yet I felt encouraged in my belief that courts were still places where, to adapt a phrase of Saul Bellow’s, ‘reality instruction’ was to be had. The first time I was inside a courtroom was at the Old Bailey, in my twenties. I had dropped in on a whim and found myself lost in the exploits of a Pinteresque young crook who’d got the pampered son of a Harley Street doctor into his clutches and pressured him into using his father’s money to finance a long spree of luxury shopping and drug bingeing. When asked how he’d persuaded his victim to make yet another raid on the family coffers, the young man said: ‘I speeched him, didn’t I?’ I was never good at striking up conversation with strangers – a major drawback for an aspiring writer – but I realised that here was an arena where an endless variety of characters would reveal their stories to you without your having to utter a word. [...]

I took the scenic route towards Nebraska. White wooden farmhouses among clusters of silos appeared at regular intervals, along with ivied chimneys and other tenderly preserved ruins of bygone industry. Together they conveyed a settled, agreeable way of life, one that clearly worked well for those who enjoyed it. ‘We Know Clean!’ a sign at a rest stop declared, and it was true that everything, from the curving plough-lines in the fields to the filigreed gantries on the silos, looked amazingly clean and orderly. I could see the domed sky meet the land far ahead along the road and felt as if I were driving through an enormous glass paperweight.

I stopped for the night in Omaha, a city I’d put on my itinerary largely because I had never imagined visiting it. In the morning I went to the Douglas County District Court, where a bench trial (i.e. no jury) was just starting. The structure of a state court system usually echoes that of the federal system, with trial courts, appeal courts and a supreme court. Unlike the federal courts, however, where judges are appointed by the president, state courts have a mixture of elected and locally appointed judges, who sometimes serve fixed terms, and the jurisdiction of a given court will vary from state to state. In Omaha, a witness was describing an incident from earlier that year. He’d been eating lunch when a man approached him asking for food and money. ‘I told him I wanted to relax,’ he recalled on the stand. He’d then seen the man enter several nearby businesses, including a restaurant where he set off the sprinkler system the witness had just installed. The witness called the cops. His 911 tape was played. ‘There’s like a drunk, homeless Black man keeps entering businesses here ... He set off the fire suppressants. I didn’t see any weapon, but I don’t want to get too close to the dude ... He looked all jacked up.’

The accused (I’ll call him Fletcher), dressed in orange prison scrubs, was acting as his own defence. He’d mastered some lawyerly phrases and quickly scored a point with them. ‘Objection! Did you see me pull that alarm?’

‘I did not.’

‘No further questions!’

Unfortunately, he spoiled the effect by asking again: ‘Did you see me with your own eyes pull that particular fire alarm?’

‘No, but it wasn’t pulled before you went in and it was afterwards.’

The police officer who’d responded to the 911 call took the stand. She testified that she and her partner had found Fletcher at the back of the restaurant and been met by ‘a very rude demeanour’. ‘I was advised by Mr Fletcher: “Fuck you bitch.”’

Her bodycam footage was offered into evidence.

‘Any objection, Mr Fletcher?’ the judge asked.

Fletcher produced another courtroom phrase. ‘No, I have no objection at this time.’

He was visibly intoxicated in the bodycam footage, stumbling around a patch of waste ground and swearing colourfully.

‘Hi, how are you?’ the officer greeted him, putting on latex gloves. ‘Why’d you pull the fire alarm?’

‘What am I charged with?’

‘Disorderly conduct.’

She cuffed and frisked him.

‘What did you do today, besides drink?’ she asked. She and her partner began removing and bagging the copious contents of his pockets.

‘You’ve got a lot of stuff on you!’

‘I got a pickle in there,’ he muttered.

‘You do have a pickle!’ she said, holding it up.

She then talked to the witness who’d installed the sprinkler system. ‘I didn’t go in after him,’ he told her, ‘because I don’t know what he’s got and I don’t want to get diseased or anything.’ He showed her the damage in the restaurant.

‘What a mess!’ she exclaimed. ‘This is such a nice, up-and-coming area too.’

The real issue, the man told her, wasn’t the mess but the cost of recharging the sprinkler system, around $6000. The sum surprised her, and on the basis of it – still with the same amused, motherly air – she amended the disorderly conduct charge to a felony charge of ‘criminal mischief, $5000 or more’.

The judge called a recess. After he and the prosecutor had left the courtroom, the deputy guarding Fletcher asked him about the incident. ‘I never went into the building,’ Fletcher told him. ‘I was just down by the dumpster there.’

The deputy shrugged. ‘I don’t have a dog in the race.’

‘I never was in the restaurant, period.’

The judge returned, and now it was Fletcher’s turn to question the officer.

‘Your probable cause to detain me was disorderly conduct,’ he began. For a moment he seemed to be laying the ground for a procedural point about the charge being amended, but he quickly lost his thread and began spinning out random Perry Mason phrases – ‘Did you or did you not? ... Yes or no? ... Let me rephrase ...’ Changing tack, he offered to pay restitution for any damage he’d caused rather than go to prison, while again protesting that he hadn’t been in the restaurant. The judge stopped him, pointing out that he couldn’t testify while he was also questioning a witness, and asked whether he wanted to take the stand. He didn’t, and the state gave its closing arguments. Fletcher began talking again, more frantically now, but the judge cut him off.

‘Sir, you already made your closing statement. The court finds that the state’s witnesses are credible. I am going to find you guilty.’

A sentencing hearing was scheduled, and Fletcher was led away, loudly demanding a restitution hearing.

As I stood up to leave, the judge came over and asked if I had ‘any investment in the case’. ‘Just an observer,’ I replied. He nodded affably. It was unusual for defendants to act pro se, he said, and it always presented challenges. He’d originally set bond at $200, keeping it deliberately low, but Fletcher hadn’t paid. ‘He’s been having trouble in jail,’ he said, adding gloomily: ‘He’s a danger to himself.’ He and the prosecutor were both Black, and I wondered what they’d made of the witness’s barely disguised bigotry.

by James Lasdun, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: David Golbitz, Omaha Daily Record

Electric Training Wheels

Two hours into a road trip in my Tesla, I start to get twitchy. By that point, the battery in my 2019 Model 3 has dipped to an uncomfortably low percentage. If I can’t reach the next plug, I’m in trouble. This is the kind of problem that Ram’s electric pickup truck is intended to solve. When the range starts to dwindle, the truck automatically fires up a hidden gas engine that refills the giant battery. The “electric” vehicle keeps on chugging down the highway, hour after hour; pit stops are once again decided by the need for bathroom breaks rather than battery range.

The Ram 1500 REV, set to debut later this year, is what’s called an “extended-range electric vehicle,” or EREV. In essence, it is an electric vehicle that burns gas. There’s nothing revolutionary about a half-gas, half-electric car, of course. Hybrids have been a mainstay in the United States since the Toyota Prius broke through two decades ago, and automakers have released more efficient plug-in hybrids—allowing drivers to charge up for about 30 miles of electric driving, just enough to accomplish daily errands without fossil fuels. An extended-range EV is a different kind of beast. The engine burns gasoline for the sole purpose of replenishing the battery—it never actually pushes the wheels.

The technology is not exactly new: BMW sold a more primitive extended-range EV in the U.S. during the mid-2010s. But now these souped-up hybrids are set to go mainstream. EREVs are the car industry’s new hope for quieting the doubts of American drivers who are wary of going electric. In the Ram, the battery can run for about 150 miles of electric driving, and the whole setup delivers enough range to travel nearly 700 miles between stops. EREVs are the car industry’s new hope for quieting the doubts of American drivers who are wary of going electric. “It takes away the range anxiety,” Jeremy Michalek, the director of the Vehicle Electrification Group at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. “When you want to go on a long trip, you can still put liquid fuel in it and continue to drive for longer distances.” But for all the upside, gas-burning electric cars are not quite the future that we were promised. Just last year, the Ram truck was slated to be fully electric, with no gas engine to be found. Ford recently killed the electric F-150 pickup truck and is now promising to bring it back as—you guessed it—an EREV.

These new hybrids are the latest sign that the electric revolution has not exactly gone according to plan. Sales of EVs, true electric vehicles, had been growing slowly in the United States, but they’ve slid in the past six months, plagued by high prices and attacks from the Trump administration. Automakers have responded by canceling and delaying new EV models. Last month, for example, Honda announced that it would halt the development of three new EVs; a few days later, Volvo said it would discontinue its affordable electric SUV, citing “shifting market conditions.” Other car companies, having invested billions into building EVs, are trying to find new ways to persuade Americans to take a chance on big batteries and electric motors. That’s where extended-range EVs come in.

By throwing in a backup generator, the car industry hopes that it can finally appeal to pickup drivers, who have been especially resistant to going electric. Of the 16 EREVs that are set to hit the market within the next three years, all are trucks or SUVs. “For American brands at the moment, I think it’s an admission that maybe, especially for big trucks and SUVs, EVs can’t deliver the type of utility and the performance that their customers demand,” Joseph Yoon, a consumer-insights analyst at the car-buying site Edmunds, told me. Indeed, electrifying the full-size American pickup truck has proved to be a particularly tough problem. Because these vehicles are so big and heavy, electric versions need colossal batteries to move them. That raises the price, and drivers are still sometimes left with subpar performance: Towing a boat or trailer severely dings their battery range. [...]

However, the curse of any hybrid is compromise. EREVs aren’t likely to solve the biggest reason Americans are not going electric: cost. Though Ram has yet to announce the price of its new extended-range pickup truck, Car and Driver estimates that the vehicle will run at least $60,000. Ram’s gas-powered truck, meanwhile, starts at $42,000. The price difference is partly because an extended-range EV still has a big, expensive battery in addition to carrying around a gas engine with its thousands of chugging belts and spinning gears. That leads to other downsides. EREVs require plenty of upkeep, unlike fully electric cars that have just a few dozen moving parts. In the six and a half years that I’ve owned my Tesla, I’ve done basically nothing but replace the tires and the small backup battery.

The problem that these buzzy new hybrids do solve isn’t as relevant as you might think. For those who aren’t doing any heavy-duty driving—which includes lots of American pickup-truck owners—range anxiety is a vanishing concern. New electric cars can now run for 300 or even 400 miles a charge, which is more than enough to pull off a road trip without having to make lots of extra stops. High-speed charging is also getting more common and more reliable: Tesla now has more than 3,000 Supercharger stations in the United States, and competitors such as IONNA and EVgo have accelerated the previously slow pace of installing new plugs. (The Trump administration tried to freeze billions in federal funding for EV charging, but courts have ruled against that move.)

Two things are clear about electric vehicles: They are far cleaner in the long run, and people who buy them typically don’t return to gas. Perhaps extended-range EVs are the training wheels that hesitant drivers need, providing the benefits of electric cars—instantaneous torque, quiet driving, fewer planet-killing carbon emissions—alongside the comfort of knowing there’s a gas station at every freeway exit. Seen another way, though, a built-in backup generator is poised to prolong the inevitable transition to true electric cars... Considering that vehicles tend to stay on the road for a decade or more, these trucks are likely to be still burning fossil fuels deep into the 2040s. Any driver who buys an EREV to go mostly electric is one who could have gone fully electric and never picked up a gas pump again.

by Andrew Moseman, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Alisa Gao

Airports Are Too Safe: The Case Against Checkpoint Screening

If you take a plane in New York City, you must first perform a series of rituals. You set aside any liquids you possess, then you remove your shoes. You place your laptop and sometimes your phone into a plastic bin. You take off your belt and sometimes your shoes and place them into a plastic bin as well. You enter a machine that sees through your clothes. Only then may you board your plane.

If you take the subway in New York City, you swipe a card at a faregate and walk onto the train.

Put another way, airports have ‘checkpoint screening’: systematic inspection of every passenger and their belongings before boarding. Subways and rail stations do not.

Once we start thinking about this asymmetry, the stranger it seems. LaGuardia Airport hosted 32.8 million passengers in 2025, which averages roughly to 90,000 per day. Meanwhile, Penn Station processes more than 600,000 riders per day. Despite the fact that Penn Station has more than six times the number of passengers, no one verifies their identity, checks their bags, asks what liquids they are carrying, nor inspects their belts and footwear.

It’s not as if terrorist attacks on railways are unheard of. Madrid’s commuter trains were bombed in 2004, the London Underground in 2005, and Mumbai’s suburban railway in 2006, causing hundreds of deaths. And yet none of these now feature checkpoint screening. Indeed, the absence of checkpoints is regarded as a merit of rail and a demerit of air; there is no debate over just how many hours before one’s trip one should arrive at a rail station. Meanwhile, the USA’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employs over 56,000 people and spends more than $11 billion per year ensuring that no one boards an airplane with an unexamined shampoo bottle.

The asymmetry is so familiar that it barely registers as a choice. It feels like a law of nature: air travellers are screened but rail travellers are not. But it is a choice we’ve made, and the fact of that choice permits only two conclusions: either rail security is unconscionably negligent, or aviation security is irrationally excessive.

Our behaviour reveals which we actually believe.

A History of Violence

In the early days of commercial aviation there was no security at all. For a taste, watch Bullitt (1968) or Airport (1970), where it’s taken for granted that one can carry guns and bombs through terminals, onto the tarmac, or into aircraft without any mechanism for authorities to stop it, or even notice.

Those portrayals fall squarely within the so-called Golden Age of Hijacking, which began in 1961 when Antulio Ortiz, a passenger on a flight from Miami to Key West, threatened the pilot with a gun and demanded to be flown to Cuba. His was the first of 159 hijackings over the next ten years. After a 1972 incident where hijackers threatened to crash a plane into a nuclear reactor, in January 1973 the Federal Aviation Administration finally mandated that every passenger and their carry-on bag be inspected for weapons. Metal detectors appeared at airports that year.

The 1973 system had a clear purpose: prevent hijackers from bringing weapons aboard. Metal detectors caught guns and knives and, in principle, explosives carried by passengers, while X-ray machines did the same for carry-on luggage. This physical system to deal with hijacking complemented the social system, which was to cooperate. Acting on the theory that hijackers wanted hostages, not corpses, the doctrine for crew and passengers alike was to comply rather than resist. Going along with demands bought time for negotiation, which generally ended with surrender, or with the hijackers escaping the plane and being apprehended elsewhere without loss of life to those aboard the airplane.

This system, of metal detectors, X-ray machines, and cooperative passengers, persisted largely unchanged for nearly three decades. It was imperfect, but it addressed a real problem, and it worked reasonably well.

This was the model that the 9/11 attackers exploited. They carried box cutters on board the plane, which were seen as tools rather than weapons and as such were permitted. Once aboard, they relied on passengers and crew behaving passively. Lack of resistance meant they were able to carry out their attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Notably, Flight 93 did not carry out such an attack, because the passengers did resist. Having learned, via Airphone, that other captured flights were being deliberately crashed, the passengers on that plane understood their only chance of survival was to fight back. They attempted to overpower their captors, who destroyed the plane rather than lose control of it.

That shift on Flight 93, from compliance to resistance, has turned out to be a permanent psychological change. Richard Reid, the ‘shoe’ bomber, was subdued by passengers and crew in 2001. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the ‘underwear’ bomber, was subdued by passengers and crew in 2009. In both cases, everyone else on the plane understood that the right move was to restrain the hijacker rather than submit to his demands. This means that one of the two vulnerabilities the 9/11 attackers used is now closed.

The other is closed as well. By April 2003, all commercial aircraft were required to feature hardened cockpit doors. The flight deck is now mechanically isolated from the main cabin, and will remain that way irrespective of what might happen there. To commandeer the aircraft, as the 9/11 terrorists did, now requires breaching that barrier. At a cost of $12,000 to $17,000 per door, plus annual extra fuel costs of $3,000, these doors make it more-or-less impossible for the cockpit to be captured, meaning that, in the future, any attacker’s bad acts will be confined to the cabin.

This means that the specific attack vector that made 9/11 catastrophic, using aircraft as guided missiles against ground targets, is now defended against by layers that don’t depend on checkpoint performance. Cockpit doors provide physical protection. Passengers provide active resistance. The weaponization-of-aircraft scenario requires defeating both. [ed. along with the presence of air marshals].

Despite these changes, checkpoint screening has become ever more elaborate in the post-9/11 era. After Reid’s failed shoe bombing in 2001, passengers were required to remove their shoes for X-ray inspection. After a foiled liquid-explosives plot in 2006, liquids were restricted to containers of 100 millilitres or less. After Abdulmutallab’s failed underwear bombing in 2009, full-body scanners were deployed. Each measure was a reaction to a specific plot. Each remains in place decades later, despite none of these measures having ever demonstrably prevented a subsequent attack.

Indeed the evidence that checkpoint screening catches any threat is weak. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security red-teamed its own screening and found that screeners failed to detect threat items in 67 of 70 tests: a failure rate of 95%. We’re told things are better now, but I’m not aware of any subsequent published test, so there’s no public evidence to support the claim.

So if the 9/11-style vulnerability has been addressed by hardened cockpit doors and changed passenger psychology, what is the marginal security value of the vast post-9/11 checkpoint expansion? The 1973 system screened for guns and knives; perhaps that still serves a purpose. But the layers added since—shoe scanning, liquid restrictions, body scanners—what are they for? [...]

We maintain a regime whose costs are staggering (over $11 billion annually in direct federal spending in the USA, plus equivalent per-capita amounts in other nations, plus hundreds of millions of passenger-hours in queues globally) and whose marginal benefits are undemonstrated.

Let me pause to acknowledge a counter-argument: perhaps aviation checkpoint screening deters terrorists, who shift their attacks to softer targets like rail. The Madrid, London, and Mumbai bombings might be evidence of successful deterrence, with subsequent displacement. But if checkpoint screening merely displaces attacks from aviation to rail, the net security benefit is zero; we’ve spent billions and wasted millions of hours to move the threat from one set of passengers to another… implicitly, a set of passengers we think less deserving of our protection.

And the fundamental point remains: whether those rail attacks were sui generis or displaced from harder targets, they killed hundreds, yet we didn’t impose checkpoints. We revealed our preference.

The Security Ratchet

If that revealed preference is for the rail model of security, why doesn’t aviation security move in that direction?

The reason for the air vs. rail distinction is a separate asymmetry among political incentives. An official who maintains excessive security incurs no blame for doing things the way they have always been done. Passengers may grumble, but passengers always grumble. Conversely, an official who loosens security would incur heavy blame in the event of an attack, regardless of whether the loosened measures would have prevented it.

Put another way, any official who changes the system must first incur costs of time, attention, and effort. If things go well, they receive no benefit in return, because no one notices; but if things go poorly, the disbenefit they receive would be massive.

This incentive structure produces a ratchet. Security measures accumulate, but almost never recede. After the shoe-bomb plot, we started removing shoes. After the liquid explosives plot, we restricted liquids. After the underwear-bomb plot, we deployed full-body scanners. Each measure responds to a specific plot, but none is ever removed, at least not without a technological excuse. The only significant rollback in two decades came in July 2025, when the TSA eliminated the shoe-removal requirement… but only because new scanning technology could inspect footwear while still on people’s feet, not because anyone concluded the requirement was unnecessary.

There’s a strong tell that the system understands that checkpoint screening is theatre, namely TSA PreCheck.

by Andrew Miller, Changing Lanes |  Read more:

Image: Alist, Denver Airport Security Lines, 2008, Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
[ed. Finally, a voice of reason, no doubt shared by millions. I'd also add another reason for the asymmetry we see between air and rail travel: just the psychological aversion to falling (in a damaged aircraft) vs. smashing into something or being blown up. Nobody every said humans are totally rational.]

Seeing Like a Sedan

Waymos and Cybercabs see the world through very different sensors. Which technology wins out will determine the future of self-driving vehicles.

Picture a fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. The city is experiencing a sudden rainstorm, common there in October. Along a wet and darkened city street drive two robotaxis. Each has passengers. Neither has a driver.

Both cars drive themselves, but they perceive the world very differently.

 

One robotaxi is a Waymo. From its roof, a mounted lidar rig spins continuously, sending out laser pulses that bounce back from the road, the storefronts, and other vehicles, while radar signals emanate from its bumpers and side panels. The Waymo uses these sensors to generate a detailed 3D model of its surroundings, detecting pedestrians and cars that human drivers might struggle to see.

In the next lane is a Tesla Cybercab, operating in unsupervised full self-driving mode. It has no lidar and no radar, just eight cameras housed in pockets of glass. The car processes these video feeds through a neural network, identifying objects, estimating their dimensions, and planning its path accordingly.

This scenario is only partially imaginary. Waymo already operates, in limited fashion, in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Phoenix, with announced plans to operate in many more cities. Tesla Motors launched an Austin pilot of its robotaxi business in June 2025, albeit using Model Y vehicles with safety monitors rather than the still-in-development Cybercab. The outcome of their competition will tell us much about the future of urban transportation.

The engineers who built the earliest automated driving systems would find the Waymo unsurprising. For nearly two decades after the first automated vehicles emerged, a consensus prevailed: To operate safely, an AV required redundant sensing modalities. Cameras, lidar, and radar each had weaknesses, but they could compensate for each other. That consensus is why those engineers would find the Cybercab so remarkable. In 2016, Tesla broke with orthodoxy by embracing the idea that autonomy could ultimately be solved with vision and compute and without lidar — a philosophical stance it later embodied in its full vision-only system. What humans can do with their eyeballs and a brain, the firm reasoned, a car must also be able to do with sufficient cameras and compute. If a human can drive without lidar, so, too, can an AV… or so Tesla asserts.

This philosophical disagreement will shortly play out before our eyes in the form of a massive contest between AVs that rely on multiple sensing modalities — lidar, radar, cameras — and AVs that rely on cameras and compute alone.

The stakes of this contest are enormous. The global taxi and ride-hailing market was valued at approximately $243 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $640 billion by 2032. In the United States alone, people take over 3.6 billion ride-hailing trips annually. Converting even a fraction of this market to AVs represents a multibillion-dollar opportunity. Serving just the American market, at maturity, will require millions of vehicles.

Given the scale involved, the cost of each vehicle matters. The figures are commercially sensitive, but it is certainly true that cameras are cheaper than lidar. If Tesla’s bet pays off, building a Cybercab will cost a fraction of what it will take to build a Waymo. Which vision wins out has profound implications for how quickly each company will be able to put vehicles into service, as well as for how quickly robotaxi service can scale to bring its benefits to ordinary consumers across the United States and beyond.

by Andrew Miller, Asterisk |  Read more:

Image: Jared Nangle

[ed. via DWAtV:]

***

A relevant thing about Elon Musk is that, while he has a lot of technical expertise and can accomplish a lot of seemingly impossible tasks, he also just says things.

For example, here’s another thing he just said this week, in a trick he’s pulled several times without delivering, where the prediction market is at 12% but that seems rather high to me:

NewsWire: Elon Musk offers to pay TSA workers' salaries amid government shutdown.

Just saying things, and announcing with confidence he will do things he probably cannot do, is central to his strategy of then yelling at people to sleep on floors until they manage to do it, which occasionally works to at least some extent. Elon Musk may plausibly start such a project, but the chances he achieves the goals he is stating are very low.

Announce periodically you are going to the moon and stars, and if one time you end up with SpaceX, it’s still a win. It’s worked for him quite well, so far.

Carving Up Big Bend

 

A massive border wall expansion is underway (Washington Post/Archive Today)

TERLINGUA, Texas — The Trump administration is building hundreds of miles of border wall through iconic national parks, public lands and ecologically sensitive wilderness, empowered by provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill that provided $46.5 billion in funding and a 2005 law that waived dozens of environmental rules for border security projects. [...]

The aggressive pace — three new miles of wall a week — has alarmed advocates and national parks staff who say the construction will destroy pristine country, threaten endangered species, and cut off access to sacred Indigenous and archaeological sites. And it has sparked an unusual degree of bipartisan pushback, with sheriffs, conservative county judges, environmentalists and Texas state lawmakers lobbying Trump officials to change course. [...]

The Department of Homeland Security has issued waivers under the 2005 REAL ID Act, allowing the department to disregard the wall’s impact on plants and animals normally protected by the Endangered Species Act. The project is exempted from the National Environmental Policy Act — a sweeping law that mandates an extensive review of a federal action’s potential impacts and public consultation that can take years...

Sorting through complicated legal and property ownership issues slowed down border wall construction in Texas during the first Trump administration. But the federal government is now skipping meetings with local officials and landowners and awarding contracts to out-of-state firms. Last month, the Army Corps of Engineers sent packets to Texas landowners along the wall’s path containing maps showing the land they planned to take. The proposed construction could include anything from ground sensors and infrared cameras to 30-foot steel bollards affixed with floodlights and gravel roads for Border Patrol vehicles — and often all of the above.

Big Bend National Park has emerged as a political flash point in the new expansion, with many landowners and conservationists describing a border wall as an unnecessary encroachment from big government seizing one of the last vestiges of unspoiled freedom and frontier.

by Arelis R. Hernández, Jake Spring, John Muyskens and Thomas Simonetti, Washington Post | Read more:
Images: YouTube/WaPo

[ed. Of all the national parks in the lower 48 Big Bend is the one I'd most like to visit. Beautiful and rugged, and not overly ruined by tourism (yet) or walls (yet). More great pictures in the article. If you've seen the movie Fandango (with Kevin Costner) you know the area. Then there's Marfa (a small nearby arts community) and Terlingua (ref: Jerry Jeff Walker's Viva Terlingua). And, a night sky that's been documented as the darkest in the country (floodlights will do wonders for that). I guess it's ok to just ignore every law on the books and outright take people's property against their will in this administration.]

Dick Griffith: Alaskan Adventurer Dies At 98

Roman Dial’s first encounter with Dick Griffith at the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic pretty much encapsulated the spirit of the man Dial called the “grandfather of modern Alaskan adventure.”

Griffith invited the 21-year-old Dial, who was traveling without a tent, to bunk with him while rain fell in Hope at the onset of the inaugural race. And then the white-haired Griffith proceeded to beat virtually the entire field of racers — most of whom were 30 years his junior — to the finish line in Homer.

Griffith, who died earlier this month at age 98, was a prodigious adventurer with a sharp wit who fostered a growing community of fellow explorers who shared his yearning for the Alaska outdoors.

Dial was one of the many acolytes who took Griffith’s outdoors ethos and applied it to his own adventures across the state.

“Someone once told me once that the outdoor adventure scene is like this big tapestry that we all add on to,” Dial said. “And where somebody else is sort of woven in something, we pick up and kind of riff on that. And he added a really big band to that tapestry, and then the rest of us are just sort of picking up where he left off.”

On that first meeting at the race in 1982, Dial and the other Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic competitors got a sense of Griffith’s humor as well. In a story that is now Alaska outdoors lore, Griffith pulled a surprise move at the race’s first river crossing, grabbing an inflatable vinyl raft out of his pack and leaving the field in his rear view.

“You young guys may be fast, but you eat too much and don’t know nothin’,” Dial recalls Griffith quipping as he pushed off.

“Old age and treachery beats youth and skill every time.”

In those years, Griffith may have been known for his old age as much as anything. But it didn’t take long for the 50-something racing against a much younger crowd to make a mark.

Kathy Sarns was a teenager when she first met Griffith in the early 1980s, and the topic of the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic came up.

“He says, ‘You want to do that race? I think a girl could do that race,’ ” Sarns recalls. “And I’m thinking, ‘Who is this old guy?’ And then he says, ‘If you want to do the race, give me a call. I’ll take you.’ ”

Sarns took up Griffith on the offer and in 1984, she and her friend Diane Catsam became the first women to complete the race.

Sarns said the adventures “fed his soul,” and were infectious for those who watched Griffith and joined him along the way.

“He motivated and inspired so many people by what he was doing,” Sarns said. “It’s like, well if he can do that, then I guess I could do this.”

By the time Dial and Sarns had met Griffith, he had already established a resume for exploring that was likely unmatched in the state.

In the late 1950s, Griffith walked 500 miles from Kaktovik to Anaktuvuk Pass, passing through the Brooks Range. Later he went from Kaktovik to Kotzebue in what is believed to be the first documented traverse of the range.

In total, Griffith logged over 10,000 miles in the Alaska and Canadian Arctic. He raced the 210-mile Iditaski multiple times.

Starting in his 60s, Griffith made annual trips north to tackle a 4,000-mile route from Unalakleet to Hudson Bay in northeastern Canada. At age 73, he completed the journey.

“The reason he did a lot of trips by himself is because nobody could keep up,” Dial said. [...]

John Lapkass was introduced to Griffith through Barney, a friend with whom Lapkass shared outdoor adventures.

Like many, Lapkass connected with Griffith’s wry sense of humor. Griffith would write “Stolen from Dick Griffith” on all of his gear, often accompanied by his address.

In Alaska, Griffith basically pioneered rafting as a form of getting deep into the Alaska backcountry.

Anchorage’s Luc Mehl has himself explored large swaths of the state in a packraft. An outdoors educator and author, Mehl met Griffith over the years at the barbecues he hosted leading up to the Alaska Wilderness Classic.

Although he didn’t embark on any adventures with Griffith, Mehl was amazed at how much accomplished well into his 80s.

“There are people in these sports that show the rest of us what’s possible,” Mehl said. “It would be dangerous if everybody just tried what Dick did. But there is huge value in inspiration. Just to know it’s a possibility is pretty damn special.” [...]

Many of those adventures were done mostly anonymously as a course of habit with friends, some only finding out after the fact what Griffith had accomplished.

“He had the heart of an explorer,” Clark said. “Dick’s exploring 40 years ago would have been with the pure motivation of finding out if he could get from here to there.”

by Chris Bieri, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Images: Bob Hallinen/Kathy Sarns
[ed. I didn't realize Dick had died, he was the kind of guy you'd never imagine succumbing to mortality. Walked alone across most of Alaska. Father of pack rafting. Never carried a gun or bear spray (it wasn't invented back then). A type of Alaskan I call TOBs (tough old bastards). I've known a few. My father-in-law was one (doctor, polar bear hunter, bush pilot - flew from Anchorage to Little Diomede Island in the Bering Straits each spring to visit friends); my former supervisor and eventual rehire during the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Lee Glenn (world class bear researcher, had four wisdom teeth chiseled out and removed without novocaine because he didn't like drugs); and others, like Dick Proenneke, and our former governor Jay Hammond. TOBs. They were what made Alaska - Alaska. I can just imagine what they'd think of todays influencers, hype artists, podcasters, and fake reality stars who need to document every mental fart for attention. Or folks like these: Oregon tourist couple files lawsuit over dogsled crash in Fairbanks (AK Beacon).]