How To Make Superbabies

Working in the field of genetics is a bizarre experience. No one seems to be interested in the most interesting applications of their research.

We’ve spent the better part of the last two decades unravelling exactly how the human genome works and which specific letter changes in our DNA affect things like diabetes risk or college graduation rates. Our knowledge has advanced to the point where, if we had a safe and reliable means of modifying genes in embryos, we could literally create superbabies. Children that would live multiple decades longer than their non-engineered peers, have the raw intellectual horsepower to do Nobel prize worthy scientific research, and very rarely suffer from depression or other mental health disorders.

The scientific establishment, however, seems to not have gotten the memo. If you suggest we engineer the genes of future generations to make their lives better, they will often make some frightened noises, mention “ethical issues” without ever clarifying what they mean, or abruptly change the subject. It’s as if humanity invented electricity and decided the only interesting thing to do with it was make washing machines.

I didn’t understand just how dysfunctional things were until I attended a conference on polygenic embryo screening in late 2023. I remember sitting through three days of talks at a hotel in Boston, watching prominent tenured professors in the field of genetics take turns misrepresenting their own data and denouncing attempts to make children healthier through genetic screening. It is difficult to convey the actual level of insanity if you haven’t seen it yourself.

As a direct consequence, there is low-hanging fruit absolutely everywhere. You can literally do novel groundbreaking research on germline engineering as an internet weirdo with an obsession and sufficient time on your hands. The scientific establishment is too busy with their washing machines to think about light bulbs or computers.

This blog post is the culmination of a few months of research by myself and my cofounder into the lightbulbs and computers of genetics: how to do large scale, heritable editing of the human genome to improve everything from diabetes risk to intelligence. I will summarize the current state of our knowledge and lay out a technical roadmap examining how the remaining barriers might be overcome.

We’ll begin with the topic of the insane conference in Boston; embryo selection.

by Gene Smith, Less Wrong |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Response/critiques here: Statistical Challenges with Making Super IQ babies]

via:

What We're Fighting For

[ed. Or more to the point, what we're fighting against - the Rot Economy, as the author terms it (also known as enshittification).]

A great deal of what I write feels like narrating the end of the world — watching as the growth-at-all-costs, hyper-financialized Rot Economy seemingly tarnishes every corner of our digital lives. My core frustration isn't just how shitty things have gotten, but how said shittiness has become so profitable for so many companies. (...)

The business of making our shit worse to increase revenue growth year-over-year is booming. The products you use every day are more confusing and frustrating to use because everything must grow, which means that product decisions are now driven, in many cases, by companies trying to make you do something rather than do something for you, which in turn means that basic product quality — things like "usability" or "functionality" — are secondary considerations.

 

It’s why your Facebook newsfeed doesn’t show you posts from friends and family, but is happy to bombard you with AI-generated images of weirdly shiny-faced old people celebrating their birthday alone, replete with a heartstring-tugging caption. It’s why whenever you search for something — not just on Google, but anywhere — the keywords you provide aren’t treated as an explicit instruction of something you want to see, but randomly disregarded with no rhyme or reason.

We do not "use" the computer — we negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do, because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align with the user.

Too often when you open an app you start bargaining with the company behind it — like a popup from Dropbox saying you could save money switching to an annual plan, securing annual recurring revenue and locking you into something it hopes you'll forget. Tech companies have the perseverance and desperate hunger for your money of a timeshare salesman, and they’re not sorry.

And that’s assuming it even loads. We’re all familiar with the tense moment where you open Microsoft Teams and hope that it doesn't crash, or that your audio or video works. We live in a constant state of digital micro-aggressions, and as I wrote last year, it's everywhere — banking apps that now have "helpful assistants" that get in the way of, well, banking, pop-ups during online shopping that promise discounts in exchange for our emails and phone numbers so they can spam us, notifications from apps that are built to push us to interact further rather (like Instagram's "someone just posted a comment on someone else's post" notifications), or the emails we get from Amazon about an order shipping that don't include any of the actual information about the purchase — a product decision allegedly made to stop Google from scraping your emails and selling that info to other parties, which is Amazon's business, not Google's.

Yet my — and I'd imagine your — frustration isn't borne of a hatred of technology, or a dislike of the internet, or a lack of appreciation of what it can do, but the sense that all of this was once better, and that these companies have turned impeding our use of the computer into an incredibly profitable business.

So much of the pushback I get in my work — and the pushback I've seen toward others — is that I "hate" technology, when I'd like argue that my profound disgust is borne of a great love of technology, and a deep awareness of the positive effects it's had on my life. I do not turn on my computer every day wanting to be annoyed, and I don't imagine any of you do either. We're not logging onto whatever social networks we're on because we are ready to be pissed off. If anything, we'd love to be delighted by the people we chose to connect with and the content we consume, and want to simply go about our business without a litany of microaggressions created by growth-desperation and a lack of responsibility toward the user. (...)

The problem is that we, as a society, still act like technology is some distinct thing separate from our real lives, and that in turn “technology” is some sort of hobbyist pursuit. Mainstream media outlets have a technology section, with technology reporters that are hired to cover “the technology industry,” optimizing not for any understanding or experience in using technology, but 30,000 foot view of “what the computer people are doing.”

This may have made more sense 20 years ago — though I’d add that back in 2008 you had multiple national newspapers with technology columnists, and computers were already an integral part of our working and personal lives — but in the year 2025 is a fundamental failure of modern media. Every single person you meet in every single part of your life likely interfaces with technology as much as if not more than they do with other people in the real world, and the technology coverage they read in their newspaper or online doesn’t represent that. It’s why a relatively modest software update for Android or Windows earns vastly more column inches than the fact that Google, a product that we all use, doesn’t really work anymore.

As a result, it’s worth considering that billions of people actually really like what technology does for them, and in turn are extremely frustrated with what technology does to them.

The problem is that modern tech media has become oriented around companies and trends rather than the actual experience of a person living in reality. Generative AI would never have been any kind of “movement” or “industry” if the media had approached it from the perspective of a consumer and said “okay, sure, but what does this actually do?” and the same goes for both the metaverse and cryptocurrency. (...)

Worse still, regular people are also furious at the state of software, and are fully aware that they’re being conned. The tech media continually frames the “growing distrust” of the tech industry as some result of political or social change or a cumulation of scandals, rather than the big, unspoken scandal called “how the tech industry made things worse in the pursuit of growth,” and the greater scandal of exactly how much contempt tech regularly treats their customers with.

And more importantly, regular people feel like they’re being gaslit by the tech media. I am regularly told that people are glad to have *someone* say simple things like “hey the apps you use that feel like they’re fucking with you? They are actually doing that!” with regularity. The feedback I regularly receive is that there are too many articles about technology that seem fundamentally disconnected from reality, or at the very least disconnected from the people at the receiving end of the product.

by Ed Zitron, Where's Your Ed At |  Read more:

Image: uncredited/via

[ed. Also known as enshittification. Unfortunately, it looks like there's no turning back, we're all junkies now, forced to accept whatever bad product is around because there's no alternative. See also: As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders (Ars Technica).]

Sesame: Eerily Realistic AI Voice Demo

In late 2013, the Spike Jonze film Her imagined a future where people would form emotional connections with AI voice assistants. Nearly 12 years later, that fictional premise has veered closer to reality with the release of a new conversational voice model from AI startup Sesame that has left many users both fascinated and unnerved.

"I tried the demo, and it was genuinely startling how human it felt," wrote one Hacker News user who tested the system. "I'm almost a bit worried I will start feeling emotionally attached to a voice assistant with this level of human-like sound."

In late February, Sesame released a demo for the company's new Conversational Speech Model (CSM) that appears to cross over what many consider the "uncanny valley" of AI-generated speech, with some testers reporting emotional connections to the male or female voice assistant ("Miles" and "Maya").

In our own evaluation, we spoke with the male voice for about 28 minutes, talking about life in general and how it decides what is "right" or "wrong" based on its training data. The synthesized voice was expressive and dynamic, imitating breath sounds, chuckles, interruptions, and even sometimes stumbling over words and correcting itself. These imperfections are intentional.

"At Sesame, our goal is to achieve 'voice presence'—the magical quality that makes spoken interactions feel real, understood, and valued," writes the company in a blog post. "We are creating conversational partners that do not just process requests; they engage in genuine dialogue that builds confidence and trust over time. In doing so, we hope to realize the untapped potential of voice as the ultimate interface for instruction and understanding." (...)

Browsing reactions to Sesame found online, we found many users expressing astonishment at its realism. "I've been into AI since I was a child, but this is the first time I've experienced something that made me definitively feel like we had arrived," wrote one Reddit user. "I'm sure it's not beating any benchmarks, or meeting any common definition of AGI, but this is the first time I've had a real genuine conversation with something I felt was real." Many other Reddit threads express similar feelings of surprise, with commenters saying it's "jaw-dropping" or "mind-blowing."

While that sounds like a bunch of hyperbole at first glance, not everyone finds the Sesame experience pleasant. Mark Hachman, a senior editor at PCWorld, wrote about being deeply unsettled by his interaction with the Sesame voice AI. "Fifteen minutes after 'hanging up' with Sesame's new 'lifelike' AI, and I'm still freaked out," Hachman reported. He described how the AI's voice and conversational style eerily resembled an old friend he had dated in high school.

Gavin Purcell, co-host of the AI for Humans podcast, posted an example video on Reddit where the human pretends to be an embezzler and argues with a boss. It's so dynamic that it's difficult to tell who the human is and which one is the AI model. Judging by our own demo, it's entirely capable of what you see in the video.

by Benji Edwards, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: : Moor Studio via Getty Images
[ed. Been hearing about this, and...wow. Pretty realistic (and just getting started). Give it a try (here).]

America Is Pushing Its Workers Into Homelessness

At 10 p.m., a hospital technician pulls into a Walmart parking lot. Her four kids — one still nursing — are packed into the back of her Toyota. She tells them it’s an adventure, but she’s terrified someone will call the police: “Inadequate housing” is enough to lose your children. She stays awake for hours, lavender scrubs folded in the trunk, listening for footsteps, any sign of trouble. Her shift starts soon. She’ll walk into the hospital exhausted, pretending everything is fine.

Across the country, men and women sleep in their vehicles night after night and then head to work the next morning. Others scrape together enough for a week in a motel, knowing one missed paycheck could leave them on the street.

These people are not on the fringes of society. They are the workers America depends on. The very phrase “working homeless” should be a contradiction, an impossibility in a nation that claims hard work leads to stability. And yet, their homelessness is not only pervasive but also persistently overlooked — excluded from official counts, ignored by policymakers, treated as an anomaly rather than a disaster unfolding in plain sight.

Today, the threat of homelessness is most acute not in the poorest regions of the country, but in the richest, fastest-growing ones. In places like these, a low-wage job is homelessness waiting to happen.

For an increasing share of the nation’s work force, a mix of soaring rents, low wages and inadequate tenant protections have forced them into a brutal cycle of insecurity in which housing is unaffordable, unstable or entirely out of reach. A recent study analyzing the 2010 census found that nearly half of people experiencing homelessness while staying in shelters, and about 40 percent of those living outdoors or in other makeshift conditions, had formal employment. But that’s only part of the picture. These numbers don’t capture the full scale of working homelessness in America: the many who lack a home but never enter a shelter or who wind up on the streets.

I’ve spent the past six years reporting on men and women who work in grocery stores, nursing homes, day care centers and restaurants. They prepare food, stock shelves, deliver packages and care for the sick and elderly. And at the end of the day, they return not to homes but to parking lots, shelters, the crowded apartments of friends or relatives and squalid extended-stay hotel rooms.

America has been experiencing what economists described as a historically tight labor market, with a national unemployment rate of just 4 percent. And all the while, homelessness has soared to the highest level on record.

What good is low unemployment when workers are a paycheck away from homelessness?

A few statistics succinctly capture why this catastrophe is unfolding: Today there isn’t a single state, city or county in the United States where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a median-priced two-bedroom apartment. An astounding 12.1 million low-income renter households are “severely cost burdened,” spending at least half of their earnings on rent and utilities. Since 1985, rent prices have exceeded income gains by 325 percent.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the average “housing wage” required to afford a modest two-bedroom rental home across the country is $32.11, while nearly 52 million American workers earn less than $15 an hour. And if you’re disabled and receive S.S.I., it’s even worse: Those payments are currently capped at $967 a month nationwide, and there is hardly anywhere in the country where this form of fixed income is enough to afford the average rent.

But it’s not just that wages are too low; it’s that work has become more precarious than ever. Even for those earning above the minimum wage, job security has eroded in ways that make stable housing increasingly out of reach.

This results in a devastating pattern: As cities gentrify and become “revitalized,” the nurses, teachers, janitors and child care providers who keep them running are being systematically priced out. Unlike in earlier periods of widespread immiseration, such as the recession of 2008, what we’re witnessing today is a crisis born less of poverty than of prosperity. These workers aren’t “falling” into homelessness. They’re being pushed. They’re the casualties not of a failing economy but of one that’s thriving — just not for them.

And yet, even as this calamity deepens, many families remain invisible, existing in a kind of shadow realm: deprived of a home, but neither counted nor recognized by the federal government as “homeless.”

More and more workers now face volatile schedules, unreliable hours and a lack of benefits such as sick leave. The rise of “just in time” scheduling means employees don’t know how many hours they’ll get week to week, making it impossible to budget for rent. Entire industries have been gigified, leaving ride-share drivers, warehouse workers and temp nurses working without benefits, protections or reliable pay. Even full-time jobs in retail and health care — once seen as dependable — are increasingly contracted out, turned into part-time roles or made contingent on meeting ever-shifting quotas.

For millions of Americans, the greatest threat isn’t that they’ll lose their jobs. It’s that the job will never pay enough, never provide enough hours, never offer enough stability to keep them housed. (...)

This exclusion was by design. In the 1980s, as mass homelessness surged across the United States, the Reagan administration made a concerted effort to shape public perception of the crisis. Officials downplayed its severity while muddying its root causes. Federal funding for research on homelessness was steered almost exclusively toward studies that emphasized mental illness and addiction, diverting attention from structural forces — gutted funding for low-income housing, a shredded safety net. Framing homelessness as a result of personal failings didn’t just make it easier to dismiss; it was also less politically threatening. It obscured the socioeconomic roots of the crisis and shifted blame onto its victims. And it worked: By the late 1980s, at least one survey showed that many Americans attributed homelessness to drugs or unwillingness to work. Nobody mentioned housing.

Over the decades, this narrow, distorted view persisted, embedding itself in the federal government’s annual homeless census. Before something can be counted, it must be defined — and one way the United States has “reduced” homelessness is by defining entire groups of the homeless population out of existence. Advocates have long decried the census’ deliberately circumscribed definition: only those in shelters or visible on the streets are tallied. As a result, a relatively small but conspicuous fraction of the total homeless population has come to stand, in the public imagination, for homelessness itself. Everyone else has been written out of the story. They literally don’t count.

The gap between what we see and what’s really happening is vast. Recent research suggests that the true number of people experiencing homelessness — factoring in those living in cars or motel rooms, or doubled up with others — is at least six times as high as official counts. As bad as the reported numbers are, the reality is far worse. The tents are just the tip of the iceberg, the most glaring sign of a far more entrenched crisis.

This willful blindness has caused incalculable harm, locking millions of families and individuals out of vital assistance. But it’s done more than that. How we count and define homelessness dictates how we respond to it. A distorted view of the problem has led to responses that are inadequate at best and cruelly counterproductive at worst. (...)

Because when work no longer provides stability, when wages are too low and rents are too high, when millions of people are one medical bill, one missed paycheck, one rent hike away from losing their homes — who, exactly, is safe?

by Brian Goldstone, New York Times | Read more:
Image: Derek Miller Hurtado
[ed. Wait until Medicaid gets gutted (it's coming), and all the federal workers currently being dismissed are suddenly unable to pay their bills. The homelessness problem in America is going to explode.] 

Good Advice

We Really Are Entering a New Age of Romanticism

An update on the war against algorithms and technocratic manipulation

Two hundred years ago, people got fed up with algorithms. And they went to war against them.

That’s a prototype for what we need today. And we will get it.

Buckle up, my friends, it will happen again! That’s because people now see the sterility and human waste created by a culture of brutal algorithms—imposed by a consortium of billionaires operating without accountability or constraint.

The backlash is already underway, and will gain momentum with each passing year—maybe even with each passing month.

This is the new Age of Romanticism that I predicted more than a year ago.

Since I made this bold forecast, several other thinkers have joined with me. This is no longer a hypothesis—it’s an actual movement.

Here are some of the participants:

• Ross Barkan has taken a leading role in defining the New Romanticism. He wrote about it in The Guardian shortly after my essay was published. Barkan shares my sense that it represents an inevitable backlash to overreaching tech, but he adds several new twists drawn from his own experience on the media frontlines. He revisited the subject a few days ago, in a smart assessment of how this emerging worldview is reflected in a wide range of trends and attitudes.

• Dr. Anjan Chatterjee followed up a few months later with his article “The New Romantics” in Psychology Today. “Like two centuries years ago, an unlikely group of people are converging to combine science, nature, art, and aesthetics,” he declares. They are committed to the “ideas that nature can be restorative and the arts can be transformative.”

• Megha Lillywhite offered her endorsement in January in an essay entitled “Rx: Romanticism.” She sees this new attitude as a valuable way of dealing with pressing problems “without devolving into the simplistic dichotomy of bipartisan politics. It addresses a “longing for the human” in an age of degrading and manipulative digital technology.

• Campbell Frank Scribner added to the conversation one week later with his article “Romanticism and the Soul of Learning.” He also see Romanticism as a pathway out of current deadlocks in society. He believes that conservatives have typically opposed Romanticist worldviews, but argues that this might be the time they reconsider allegiances—especially when educating the next generation.

• Kate Alexander released a video on the momentum building for a resurgent Romanticism in December. And it got almost a half million views. So clearly this is more than a fringe attitude among demented Substackers. (...)

For a quick summary (with views both pro and con), you can consult an update on the “Hopeful Romantics” published a week ago by the Wisdom of Crowds substack. (...)

In the old days, movie villains were mobsters or crime syndicates. Nowadays they are tech innovators. This kind of shift in the popular imagination does not happen by chance.

Now let’s revisit the (even older) history.

Back in the 1700s, ruthless algorithms had a different name. They called them Rationalism—and the whole Western world was under the sway of the Age of Reason. But like today’s algorithms, the new systems of the Rationalists attempted to replace human wisdom and experience with intrusive and inflexible operating rules.

It didn’t work.

“This rationalistic philosophy, which had been expected to solve all the problems, had failed to rescue society from either despotism and poverty,” explains Edmund Wilson in his masterful study To the Finland Station.

“The mechanical inventions of which it had been expected that they would vastly improve the lot of humanity were obviously making many people miserable,” he continues.

(By the way, it’s no coincidence that recent tech overreach has been accompanied by a New Rationalism, championed by crypto swindler Sam Bankman-Fried and his many fellow travelers. But that subject deserves a whole article of its own….Now let’s return to history.)

The Rationalists of the 1700s (and today) put their faith in three things—and they all backfired.

(1) The most obvious failure was the attempt to impose rational rules on the political system. This led to the French Revolution, which soon collapsed in terrible bloodshed, and resulted in the dictatorship of Napoleon.

Millions of people died because the dominant algorithms didn’t work.

(2) The second obsession of the Rationalists in the 1700s was the total systematization of all knowledge. (Does that sound familiar?)

They didn’t have ChatGPT back then. But they did the best they could with the immense efforts of the French Encyclopedists and German taxonomists.

Everything got classified, codified, quantified, named, and placed on a chart. Foucault later mocked this as an “archeology of human sciences.”

That’s because this way of understanding the world failed to grasp anything that evolved or grew or changed or lived. Like the tech-gone-wild ethos of the current day, the messy human element was removed from the Rationalist systems.

(3) But the Rationalists of the 1700s made one more mistake—and it reminds us again of our current situation. They let a brutal technocracy destroy people’s lives—driven by dreams of profit maximization, and ignoring the human cost.

It wasn’t called Silicon Valley back then. The name given to the technocracy in the 1700s was the Industrial Revolution.

We don’t fully grasp the horrors of the factory sweat shops today—because the Romanticists worked on fixing the problems of industrialism in the 1820s and 1830s. This new generation of artists, humanists, and compassionate critics of the technocracy passed laws against child labor, unsafe working conditions, abusive hours, and other exploitative practices.

In other words, the Romanticists replaced the algorithm with humanist values. Rationalism on its own would never do that.

I want to emphasize this next point—so I am putting it in boldface.

The last age of Romanticism did not destroy the technology—it merely prevented technocrats from abusing people in their pursuit of profits.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

No Good Deed Should Go Unpunished

When Victor Wembanyama swapped jerseys with a young fan after the San Antonio Spurs’ 96-87 win over the Brooklyn Nets at the Barclays Center on Dec. 27, it created a viral image that delighted the internet.

What’s followed has turned a sweet interaction into a hotly debated issue that reached New York’s Supreme Court.

Here’s what we know about the situation.

How did the jersey swap happen?

The five-year-old boy, who was wearing a tiny Spurs Wembanyama jersey, and his father attended the game with a sign that read “Victor Wembanyama will you swap jerseys with me?” After the game, they were invited onto the court where the swap was carried out in front of cameras, with the boy getting Wembanyama’s game-worn City Edition top and the 7-foot-3 Wembanyama getting the comically small replica.

What happened to the game-used jersey after it was given to the boy?

On Jan. 14, it was announced the jersey would be a featured item in the Goldin 100 auction opening on Jan. 22, with a starting bid of $10,000. This sparked a public backlash. Many people who found the original interaction so endearing felt it was distasteful to cash in on the gifted jersey so quickly. However, those who defended the move pointed out that the jersey would likely bring in a significant amount of money for the family and potentially have a life-changing impact for the child.

What did Wembanyama think of his jersey going to auction?

The day after the auction was announced, Wemby quote tweeted the news and added a crying emoji. So he didn’t seem pleased by the decision.

What did the seller think of the sale?

On Monday, after the auction had concluded, Frankie Desideri Sr., the father of the boy who swapped jerseys with Wembanyama, filed a lawsuit for a temporary restraining order against Goldin Auctions through the New York State Supreme Court to stop the sale, as first reported by Cllct. In the documents Desideri filed, he said that “multiple attempts to withdrawal from auction (sic)” were made. He also said Goldin used images of him and his son to promote the auction “despite clear, prior instructions that no images be attached to the sale,” which caused “widespread exposure and emotional harm” as a result of “public scrutiny and harassment” that led to his son suffering “severe emotional distress, avoiding basketball games and believing his favorite player dislikes him after he posted about the sale also.” Desideri said it was the use of their images that prompted him to revoke consent to the auction prior to it concluding. In addition, the filing said the jersey was gifted to the boy, making him sole owner of it and that “under New York law, contracts involving minors are voidable at the discretion of the legal guardian.”

In Goldin’s court filings in response, the company said Desideri contacted Goldin two days after the swap took place and “voluntarily and without solicitation” entered into a consignment agreement to auction the jersey. It also accused Desideri of “experiencing seller’s remorse.” The filing went on to say the jersey was “sold, paid for, and shipped to the buyer” before Goldin was made aware of the suit. It also contended the company should not be subject to New York law since it is based in New Jersey.

by Brooks Peck, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: X

[ed. Poor kid (and Wembanyama). Just props in another loser's money-making scam. Also not buying the "life-changing" blah blah blah...if they have enough money for courtside seats the kid will never see a dime.]  

PEPFAR Report

On January 24, when the State Department announced a stop-work order on most foreign assistance, PEPFAR clinics shuttered. After two weeks of intense bipartisan lobbying, the State Department issued waivers intended to allow some PEPFAR programs to continue, but since PEPFAR contracts with USAID for drug orders and other functions, USAID closures have left PEPFAR services paused. This tug-of-war put PEPFAR back in the national spotlight, and it became clear that many Americans have a lot of questions about PEPFAR:

• What does PEPFAR do?
• Who, specifically, does PEPFAR help?
• How much does PEPFAR cost?
• How do we know whether PEPFAR is working?
• Why is America doing HIV/AIDS work in the first place?

Many people are rightly skeptical of the eye-popping claim that PEPFAR saved 25 million lives, mainly women and children, on a budget of $6.5 billion a year—only 0.08% of the federal budget. We found, with some caveats, that these claims are generally accurate: the budget is correct for how much America spends, and we find evidence for 7.5–30 million lives saved by PEPFAR between 2004 and 2018. Our best estimate is 19 million lives saved in that time period.

So what is PEPFAR? President George W. Bush created the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2004. PEPFAR is run by the US Department of State and is overseen by the US Global AIDS Coordinator, a Senate-confirmed role reporting directly to the Secretary of State. About half of PEPFAR’s funding is spent on providing antiretroviral drugs to people with HIV, which both extend their lives and almost always prevent them from transmitting HIV to others. (...)

The President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) provides funding to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS in low- and middle-income countries. For the first twenty years of its history, it was popular and bipartisan, the shining jewel of US aid programs. But right now, many PEPFAR programs are paused, clinics are shuttered, and the upcoming reauthorization fight looks uncertain. The State Department, which administers PEPFAR, says the program has saved 25 million lives. We are an independent team of journalists, academics, and technologists who decided to investigate whether that was true.

Our key findings:

• PEPFAR has saved between 7.5 and 30 million lives, at a cost between $1,500 and $10,000 per life saved. The US government is willing to spend at least a thousand times this much to save an American life.

• In Africa, unlike in the United States, HIV/AIDS primarily affects women and children. One of the main goals of PEPFAR is to prevent “vertical transmission”, where a pregnant mother with HIV passes on her infection to her baby in utero or during delivery. PEPFAR has prevented at least 5.5 million babies from being born with HIV.

• The number of people who die of HIV/AIDS each year has been declining since 2004–the year PEPFAR began operation. PEPFAR is a major reason for this decline.

• PEPFAR helped decrease the cost of first-line HIV medications from $1000 a month to only $60 a year ($5 a month). Because of the declining cost of medications, PEPFAR is more cost-effective each year, and is doing more and more on a budget that has been declining in real dollars since 2009.

• PEPFAR also offers post-exposure prophylaxis to nurses, rape victims, and others exposed to HIV, and pre-exposure prophylaxis, medications that prevent contracting HIV, to women whose husbands have HIV and other at-risk populations.

• Over time, PEPFAR is handing off its responsibilities to the governments of the countries we’re helping, but it will take decades if we want to defeat HIV/AIDS and years if we want to not destroy the good works we have already done.

• PEPFAR is a well-audited program. The audits we spot-checked showed 0 to 2% rates of undocumented program expenses. This compares extremely favorably to other government programs: the Medicare fraud rate, for instance, is reportedly 5-10%.

• Controlling HIV/AIDS abroad keeps Americans safe from HIV/AIDS at home. The federal government spends $29 billion annually on medical care for Americans with HIV and AIDS, not counting insurance company spending: six billion for PEPFAR is a good deal.

PEPFAR advances American interests: the program is popular, appreciated, widely known, and helps us compete with China, prevent terrorism, and win allies in Africa and beyond.

by Kelsey Piper, Leah Libresco Sargeant, Colin Aitken and others, PEPFAR Report |  Read more:

Image: Our World In Data

[ed. If there's one benefit to be gained from all the blundering and idiotic 'cost cutting' this administration is currently engaged in, it's that people are becoming more aware of all the good and essential things our government does, which go unnoticed most of the time. PEPFAR Impact Counter tries to estimate the number of people affected by its closure, and says that 13,854 adults and 1,474 infants have already died from this policy. What about everything else? Here's one perspective:]

"I’m really pessimistic about all this. I think the main effect will be saving ~1% of the budget at the cost of causing so much chaos and misery for government employees that everybody who can get a job in the private sector leaves and we’re left with an extremely low-quality government workforce. I freely admit that DEI also did this, I just think that two rounds of decimating state capacity and purging high-IQ civil servants is worse than one round. In fact, this is what really gets me - both parties are careening towards destruction in their own way, there’s no real third option (...)

Probably nothing catastrophic happens for the first few years of this. The cuts to clinical research mean we get fewer medications. The cuts to environmental funding mean some species go extinct. The cuts to anti-scam regulators means more people get scammed. But the average person has no idea how much medical progress we’re making, or how many species go extinct, or how many people get scammed in an average year. Maybe there will be some studies trying to count this stuff, but studies are noisy and can always be dismissed if you disagree. So lots of bad stuff will happen, and all the conservatives will think “Haha, nothing happened, I told you every attempt ever to make things better or dry a single human tear has always been fake liberal NGO slush fund grifts”.

Or maybe one newsworthy thing will happen - a plane will fall out of the sky in a way easily linked to DOGE cuts (and not DEI?), or the tariffs will cause a recession, and then all the liberals will say “Haha, we told you that any attempt to reduce government or cut red tape or leave even the tiniest space for human freedom/progress has always been sadistic doomed attempts to loot the public square and give it to billionaires!” They’re already saying this! Everyone is just going to get more and more sure that their particular form of careening to destruction is great and that we can focus entirely on beating up on the other party, and we will never get anyone who cares about good policy ever again.

Probably this isn’t true, and I shouldn’t even say it because everyone else is already too doomy. You’d be surprised how many basically sane people I’ve heard expressing worries they’ll being put in camps (not even illegal immigrants or some other at-risk group!), or that Elon Musk sending people emails asking them what they’re doing is a form of fascism. I try to remind myself that if there had only ever been half as much government funding as there is now, I wouldn’t be outraged and demand that we bring it up to exactly the current level (and, once it was at the current level, become unoutraged and stop worrying). The current level is a random compromise between people who wanted more and people who wanted less, with no particular moral significance. This thought process helps, but I think that even in that situation one could justify a few really good programs like PEPFAR on their own terms (ie if it didn’t exist, I would be outraged until it did), and I still think that changing the size of government should be done through legal rather than illegal means, competently rather than incompetently, and honestly rather than lying about every single thing you do all the time."

New Transportation Options in Sugar Land

There once was a sugar plantation where cane fields stretched as far as the eye could see, and enslaved people—primarily African Americans—toiled away in the heat. In time, the plantation grew into a factory called Imperial Sugar, which grew into a city that was aptly named Sugar Land. Over the next few decades, Sugar Land grew beyond recognition. Master-planned neighborhoods sprouted, and as cars became popular in the 1970s, highways expanded to connect these neighborhoods—and also splinter them. In 1970, just over 3,000 people called Sugar Land home. In 2020, that number had skyrocketed to 110,000.

Sugar Land is located just southwest of Houston; today, it is the sixth-fastest growing city in the U.S., and it is running out of space. With only 4% of land left to build on, the city is looking for innovative transportation solutions—and looking up for answers.

Over the past year, Sugar Land has set in motion three big initiatives—one of them is a community microtransit service, the other two involve aerial solutions. Earlier this year, the city partnered with Wisk Aero, a company that has spent the past 14 years developing electric, self-flying taxis, also known as vertical take-off and landing (VTOL).

The pilot would allow residents to hop on an air taxi (from, say, downtown Sugar Land) and fly to a designated vertiport in a fraction of the time it would take them to drive. Mitchell Davies, deputy director of aviation at the Sugar Land Regional Airport, says the airport has identified potential locations for a so-called Vertiport and is working closely with Wisk Aero and the Federal Aviation Administration to conduct an airspace study. The Vertiport should become operational “by the end of the decade or sooner,” he says.

More recently, the city announced that it is studying the possibility of bringing an “autonomous elevated cable and rail mobility system” that would glide above its streets. The system, which is operated by a provider of urban mobility systems called Swyft Cities, can best be described as an on-demand gondola—a bit like Uber, except instead of a car, it’s a cabin that slides by to pick you up and drop you off at your desired location, with no stops in between. An engineering schematic study is currently underway to examine the potential for the gondola system, including potential locations. It is expected to be completed later this year.

When highways won’t do

The story of Sugar Land is the story of so many American cities, particularly in regions where the car is still king. Melanie Beaman, transportation and mobility manager at the City of Sugar Land, says that traffic in the region is expected to increase by 40-60% by 2045, and if the I-10 debacle in Houston is any indication, building more lanes won’t free up more space, it will simply attract more cars. “You’ll end up erasing the city with this big, huge mega-freeway,” she says.

To come up with solutions, the city conducted a yearslong study that culminated in a 163-page Mobility Master Plan. After interviewing close to 2,000 residents, they outlined plans to develop a safe streets program, to allocate more room for people to walk and bike, as well accommodate those who use wheelchairs and strollers. They also laid out their goal to position Sugar Land as an innovative mobility leader. “City leadership has told us to be bold in what we do with transportation,” says Beaman. “We’re told to be trailblazers and not be afraid to take risks.”

by Elissaveta M. Brandon, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Wisk Aero, Whoosh Hold LP

"Bad government is the natural product of rule by those who believe government is bad." 

~Thomas Frank

[ed. I'll be gone for a few days.]

Analysis is Not "Opinion"

One big thing the legacy media gets wrong

Today’s post is inspired by a recent chat I had with Paul Krugman. Paul, who just left the New York Times and started blogging full-time at his Substack, explained why he abandoned the country’s most prestigious newspaper:

Columns are…a very restrictive form. You get about…800 words…and you have to write for an audience that is coming at you from a standing start…At this point…there's now at the Times three levels of editing. Before it ever goes to the copy editor, there's an editor who makes much more substantial edits than…ever before…[There’s] a lot more editing and then a layer of editing above that, which got very intrusive in the last year…So the column became…a quite unpleasant experience…And I said, well, I need some way to have longer form thoughts and an occasional chart. And so I had a newsletter at the Times, which was far more constrained than blogging…but kind of kept me going. And then in September of last year…they…eliminated the newsletter. So…you would hate, uh, the job I had this past year….I came to hate it as well…[Y]ou know, maybe…what they were doing made sense in terms of the Times as [business] objectives. I don't know…[B]ut it was, it was intolerable…from my point of view.

This really reminded of my post from last year, about why Substack writers have an advantage over op-ed writers who work for major publications. In that post, I argued that editors subtract more value than they add to the op-ed writing process, by preventing op-ed writers from developing their own distinctive voice, their own loyal audience, and their own organizational skills.

Paul brings up another important constraint that editors place on op-ed writers — they add cumbersome time and effort to the process of writing articles. One of the reasons I left Bloomberg Opinion was that they added an extra layer to the approval process for each article, which greatly increased the time between when I would pitch an article and when the article would get published. This cumbersome process was intended to make sure that only relevant op-eds got published, but it ended up having the exact opposite effect — by the time I or any other Bloomberg Opinion writer was able to publish a post about some current event, the topic had usually already gotten stale and the discussion had moved on.

But in fact, I think the problem with how legacy publications handle op-eds goes much deeper than the editorial process. Thinking about it more, I’m now dissatisfied with the post I wrote last year — it’s not just “editors vs. no editors”. The problem is about how legacy publications think about “op-ed writing” in general.

Opinion vs. analysis

In the world of newspapers — and of online publications like Bloomberg that evolved from newspapers and which hire many of their employees from newspapers — the typical distinction is between fact and opinion. This is a conceptual distinction that every child learns about in school — facts are things you can prove with evidence, while opinions are value judgements that aren’t necessarily based on facts. “Taylor Swift is a popular singer” is a fact, while “Taylor Swift is the world’s best pop star” is an opinion.

At newspapers or online legacy publications, reporters are supposed to give you the facts, while op-ed columnists give you their opinions about the facts. In fact, as Wikipedia notes, the New York Times created this system in the 1970s, building on earlier forms of writing: (...)

Newspapers draw a stark distinction between news and opinion. These are typically managed separately, by different sets of editors (called “desks”), and writers that do one kind of writing rarely do the other kind. At Bloomberg, news and opinion are two different divisions of the company.

But the hoary distinction between fact and opinion, enshrined in the organization of legacy publications, leaves out a crucial third kind of writing that’s in very high demand: analysis.

Consider a forecast about the future, such as “Democrats will win the 2026 midterm elections.” This isn’t a fact, because it can’t be proven or disproven with currently available data. And although people might colloquially call it an “opinion”, it’s not a subjective value judgement either — it’s based on facts, even though it’s not a fact itself. A forecast is a third kind of thing.

Another example of a third thing is an assessment — a more complex type of prediction. For example, consider the statement “Russia now has the upper hand in the Ukraine war.” That’s not a fact, because “upper hand” isn’t precisely defined — there’s no universally agreed-upon measure of who has the upper hand in a war, and reasonable people can disagree as to the proper measure. But it’s not an opinion either, because there’s no value judgement involved.

Other examples are theories (e.g. “Wars happen because of scarce economic resources”) and recommendations (e.g. “If you want to win a war, you should secure your supply chains”). These are based on facts, but they themselves are not facts.

Forecasts, assessments, and theories are all part of a category called analysis. Some people casually refer to analysis as “opinion” — if you say “Democrats will win the midterms”, they might say “Well that’s just, like, your opinion, man!”. But discerning people recognize that there is a salient, useful distinction between value judgements and reasoned interpretations of facts. The way people argue about the two things is fundamentally different — to argue about opinions, you typically have to make an emotional appeal, while arguing about analysis can be done using logic and reason alone.

There are plenty of analysts out there in the world, for whom providing analysis — forecasts, assessments, theories, and recommendations — is their primary job. There are stock analysts, business analysts, intelligence analysts, and many more. They all have opinions, and these often motivate them personally and influence their work, but producing opinions is not their primary job — the more dispassionate and objective they are, the better of a job they’ll do.

Now here’s the thing — news readers want analysis. They don’t want to just read the reporting from the Associated Press or some investigative journalists and then have to put it all together and decide what it all means. They want writers to explain those facts, to identify the salient implications, to make predictions, and to recommend courses of action.

Analysis is most of what I do at this blog. As I always say, I think of myself as basically an open-source version of a CIA analyst. Instead of agents in the field, I gather my facts from reporters, research papers, and other publicly available sources on the internet. I then analyze those facts and try to synthesize them into a short, comprehensible story. Instead of writing my reports for my bosses higher up in an organization, I release them to you, the public.

There’s a huge demand for what I do, and that demand is only increasing. As people’s information diet has become bigger and more complex, they’re in desperate need of people to make sense of it all. Some people come to my blog to hear me rail against totalitarianism or extol the virtues of progress, but I think most of my audience just wants me to explain what’s going on and tell them what they can do about it. They usually resonate with my opinions, but what they really want is my analysis.

Should opinion sections be about opinions?

Currently, at legacy publications like the New York Times and Bloomberg, the newsrooms do a bit of that analysis. Look at any news article, and it won’t simply be a list of quotes and numbers and events — there will be some amount of explanation there. And in recent years, news have begun to do longer, more complex features that blend more analysis into their reporting. But most of their analysis comes from their “opinion” sections. Generally speaking, reporters still just try to report the facts; forecasts, assessments, theories, and recommendations are the domain of op-eds.

And yet in my experience at Bloomberg — and from what I see at the New York Times and other legacy publications — the editors who run opinion desks still think the primary job of their writers is to dispense opinions. At Bloomberg I was always pushed to make my writing more subjective and politicized — I had to have a “take”, to distinguish myself from reporters. If you read the New York Times’ stable of regular opinion columnists — Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kristof, David Brooks, Jamelle Bouie, Thomas Friedman, and so on — their weekly columns are chiefly polemics with a bit of analysis thrown in. 

This ends up holding those writers back. It certainly held me back when I was writing for Bloomberg. And more importantly, the focus on the opinion section as being fundamentally about opinion rather than analysis ends up holding legacy publications back, and opening the way for platforms like Substack to steal their thunder.

There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, opinion becomes tiresome fairly quickly. The modern world of social media is absolutely chock full of political shouters, aggressively denouncing each other and shoving every possible ideology into your face. Sure, it’s nice to be able to read some writers who do that more eloquently than the average X poster or TikTok video, but ultimately it just adds to the maelstrom. Right now, when the country is exhaustedly struggling to put a decade of social unrest behind it, the constant flood of opinion seems even more intrusive; dispassionate analysis provides something of a refuge.

Another reason is that readers are inherently distrustful of opinion. A polemicist is selling you something, and usually is trying to recruit you for an ideological team; that bias makes them a little bit suspicious as a source off ideas.

And opinion is in some sense cheap — after all, everyone has an opinion. In my experience, people at legacy publications tend to look at op-ed writers with a mix of envy and contempt — envy because it’s a much more glamorous job than reporting, and contempt because there’s a sense that the glamour is undeserved. After all, what makes Tom Friedman’s opinions, or Maureen Dowd’s, more valuable than those of the average reporter?

Within legacy publications, there’s a tendency to treat op-ed writers as tawdry entertainers rather than as respected analysts. Inevitably, they are marketed as such, and encouraged to fill that role. I always felt that Bloomberg was pushing me to be a rhetorical gladiator rather than a wonk; the NYT certainly pushed Krugman in that direction, especially in more recent years. This didn’t do either of us any favors.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Steve Johnson on Unsplash

What Can House Republicans Cut Instead of Medicaid? Not Much.

[ed. If people think the homeless problem is bad now, just wait...]

The House passed a budget resolution Tuesday night after the speaker, Mike Johnson, persuaded several Republican lawmakers, including those who have expressed reservations about possible Medicaid cuts, to support the bill.

In theory, the budget, which kicks off the process of passing an extension of tax cuts passed in 2017 and up to $2 trillion in cuts meant to partly offset them, could become law without significant cuts to Medicaid. But it won’t be easy.

That process has a few more steps: For one, the Senate has to adopt this budget resolution. Then both houses of Congress will also need to write and pass legislation that follows its instructions.

The budget resolution itself is silent on whether Congress cuts Medicaid, which provides health coverage to 72 million poor and disabled Americans. But it instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the program, to cut spending by $880 billion over the next decade. If the committee can’t save at least that much, the entire effort could be imperiled because of the special process Congress is using to avoid a Senate filibuster.

It’s not so simple as finding the cuts elsewhere. The special process, known as budget reconciliation, means Republicans will have to find all $880 billion from within the committee’s jurisdiction. That leaves them with fewer options than one might think.

Below, a list of those options. (These numbers are not exact; they are informal or outdated estimates. Before a reconciliation bill passes, they would all get an official evaluation from the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s scorekeeper.)

Option 1: Cut Medicare instead

If Republicans want to avoid major cuts to Medicaid, the largest pot of available money is in the other big government health insurance program: Medicare.

But Republicans face an even tighter political bind when it comes to Medicare than they do with Medicaid. President Trump has said repeatedly that he does not wish to cut Medicare. And most House Republicans have made a similar pledge. “Social Security and Medicare is off the books now,” President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said during last year’s State of the Union address, drawing a standing ovation from nearly every Republican present.

Mr. Trump said last week in a Fox News interview that Medicaid wouldn’t be “touched” either. But his record shows he has been much more open to Medicaid cuts than to Medicare reductions.

Option 2: Cut everything else the committee oversees

Even if the committee cuts everything that’s not health care to $0, it will still be more than $600 billion short.

The committee could also save around $200 billion by eliminating the Children’s Health Insurance Program, but that option has not been raised by the budget committee or anyone in House leadership.

Option 3: Consider options that aren’t exactly cuts, even if they don’t add up to $880 billion

There are some creative options that would allow the committee to find budget savings without having to cut spending it oversees. A document circulated earlier this year by the budget committee included a few such ideas.

Overturn regulations that require carmakers to raise fuel efficiency standards and reduce automobile emissions (~$110 billion). Repealing this rule would save the government money without making direct budget cuts by reducing spending on tax credits for people who buy electric cars and increasing gas tax revenue.

Auction portions of the airwaves to telecommunications companies (~$70 billion). The committee periodically passes legislation to sell the rights to transmit signals over specific bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, but the Defense Department tends to object to selling too much.

Speed up permitting for energy extraction (~$7 billion). Some of these options might run afoul of the special budget process rules. A staff member for the Senate, known as the parliamentarian, would have to rule on their suitability if the final legislation comes up for a vote there.

Option 4: Cut Medicaid after all

Even if all of these cuts, revenues and rule cancellations from outside health care can pass muster, the committee will still be left with hundreds of billions of dollars to cut to hit its goal. Mathematically, the budget committee’s instructions mean the committee would need to make major cuts to either Medicare, Medicaid or both.

Congressional leadership has been signaling that Medicaid has been the main focus.

“$880 billion is a lot of money, and even if only $600 billion is coming from health care, you have to go beyond tiny tinkering on the margins,” said Marc Goldwein, a senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group that supports deficit reduction.

And several experts advising the committee say Medicaid policy changes are wise. “There’s more than enough in wasteful, inappropriate spending to get meaningful savings from the program,” said Brian Blase, the president of the right-leaning Paragon Health Institute, who was a White House economics official in the first Trump administration.

Some leading options for Medicaid cuts are below. The first few may be less politically fraught for vulnerable lawmakers, but would save less money. The last two would save more, but would have a much larger impact on the program as a result. (...)

Conclusion: Health care is where the dollars are

The committee just doesn’t have enough other places to find the money. If the budget resolution is going to become public policy, it will require legislation that cuts health programs. Almost a trillion dollars is a lot of money, even in federal budget terms, and health care is where the money is.

If the committee can’t find $880 billion, the entire reconciliation process — including the extension of tax cuts — will collapse.

by Margot Sanger-Katz and Alicia Parlapiano, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kenny Holston
[ed. Pretty simple, even for low information voters. More tax cuts for the rich (over the next 10 years) funded by cuts in Medicaid and/or Medicare and other healthcare services. Oh... and raising the country's debt limit by $4 trillion dollars. Pretty straightforward. See also: House Passes G.O.P. Budget Teeing Up Enormous Tax and Spending Cuts (NYT):]

"The blueprint sets the contours for the legislation that House Republicans will now turn to writing. It puts a $4.5 trillion upper limit on the size of any tax cuts over the next 10 years, but does not dictate which taxes should be reduced, a complex and politically tricky question of its own that could take months to sort out.

It also calls for slashing $2 trillion in spending over the same period, without specifying which programs should be cut, though top Republicans have targeted Medicaid and food aid programs for poor Americans. And it directs increases of about $300 billion for border enforcement and defense programs, alongside a $4 trillion increase in the debt limit.

Even if they are able to cover the full $4.5 trillion, Republican tax writers have been agonizing over what they can squeeze into the bill. Much of the tax revenue will be consumed by simply continuing the tax policies that Republicans put into place in 2017, which expire at the end of the year.

Extending the 2017 tax law will cost roughly $4 trillion over a decade, while several other desperately desired business tax breaks will eat up another couple of hundred billion."

Chad Hagen, How to Peer Through a Wormhole
via:

Lady Day

via:

US Sides With Russia, North Korea, and Iran

U.S. votes against U.N. resolution condemning Russia for Ukraine war (MSN)

The United States voted with Russia, North Korea, Iran and 14 other Moscow-friendly countries Monday against a U.N. resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for the return of Ukrainian territory. (...)

Oleksandr, 40, a Ukrainian army officer who runs intelligence operations in Russia’s Kursk region and whose brigade is now among those battling North Korean forces fighting for Russia, said he was stunned to see Washington aligned with Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang.

“Sometimes it feels like we are living in a postapocalyptic sci-fi novel,” he said...

Image: © Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. Let that sink in for a while, patriots. You are the company you keep. Even the token conservative columnist at the NY Times calls it America’s Most Shameful Vote Ever at the U.N. If you're skeptical about all this foreign aid we're providing around the world (which among other things helps prop up U.S. Agricultural and Military/Instustrial industries) See also:]

***

"Seventy-five years of U.S. foreign assistance has produced more fiction than fact when it comes to how American tax dollars are being spent around the world.

In the interest of providing taxpayers with information about the value of their federal investment in this regard, it might be helpful to look at some of the top myths surrounding foreign aid, and how these myths compare with reality.

Myth #1: America spends too much on foreign aid

Opinion polls consistently report that Americans believe foreign aid is in the range of 25 percent of the federal budget. When asked how much it should be, they say about 10 percent. In fact, at $39.2 billion for fiscal year 2019, foreign assistance is less than 1 percent of the federal budget."  ~ What every American should know about US foreign aid (Brookings Institute).

Doge Pound Demolition Crew

On President Donald Trump’s authority alone, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been unleashed on federal agencies. Employees from Musk’s companies and those of his allies, as well as young staffers he’s recruited, are wresting authority from career workers and commandeering computer systems.

While some have been public about their involvement, others have attempted to keep their roles secret, scrubbing LinkedIn pages and other sources of data. With little information from the White House, ProPublica is attempting to document who is involved and what they are doing. 

None of the people identified responded to requests for comment.

by Avi Asher-Schapiro, Christopher Bing, Annie Waldman, Brett Murphy, Andy Kroll, Justin Elliott, Kirsten Berg, Sebastian Rotella, Alex Mierjeski, Pratheek Rebala and Al Shaw, ProPublica |

Read more:  Elon Musk's Demolition Crew

[ed. Their parents must be so proud (and their grandparents rolling in their graves). What really gets me is the careless and almost gleeful cruelty they bring to destroying people's lives. Every one would have made a "Good Nazi" back in the day. If you know any of these folks you might ask how their new jobs are going. Making new friends? Next on deck: Social Security (and don't think for a minute it's not in their sights. They're already priming the pump.):]

Source: Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew. "Bad government is the natural product of rule by those who believe government is bad." Read more: here and here.