May 18, 2025: Big Bad Billionaire Bill

AKA: Medicaid Death Watch

Tonight, late on a Sunday night, the House Budget Committee passed what Republicans are calling their “Big, Beautiful Bill” to enact Trump’s agenda although it had failed on Friday when far-right Republicans voted against it, complaining it did not make deep enough cuts to social programs.

The vote tonight was a strict party line vote, with 16 Democrats voting against the measure, 17 Republicans voting for it, and 4 far right Republicans voting “present.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said there would be “minor modifications” to the measure; Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X that those changes include new work requirements for Medicaid and cuts to green energy subsidies.

And so the bill moves forward.

In The Bulwark today, Jonathan Cohn noted that Republicans are in a tearing hurry to push that Big, Beautiful Bill through Congress before most of us can get a handle on what’s in it. Just a week ago, Cohn notes, there was still no specific language in the measure. Republican leaders didn’t release the piece of the massive bill that would cut Medicaid until last Sunday night and then announced the Committee on Energy and Commerce would take it up not even a full two days later, on Tuesday, before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office could produce a detailed analysis of the cost of the proposals. The committee markup happened in a 26-hour marathon in which the parts about Medicaid happened in the middle of the night. And now, the bill moves forward in an unusual meeting late on a Sunday night. (...)

Cohn explains that Medicaid cuts are extremely unpopular, and the Republicans hope to jam those cuts through by claiming they are cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” without leaving enough time for scrutiny. Cohn points out that if they are truly interested in savings, they could turn instead to the privatized part of Medicare, Medicare Advantage. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting overpayments to Medicare Advantage when private insurers “upcode” care to place patients in a higher risk bracket, could save more than $1 trillion over the next decade.

Instead of saving money, the Big, Beautiful Bill actually blows the budget deficit wide open by extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that those extensions would cost at least $4.6 trillion over the next ten years. And while the tax cuts would go into effect immediately, the cuts to Medicaid are currently scheduled not to hit until 2029, enabling the Republicans to avoid voter fury over them in the midterms and the 2028 election. [ed. emphasis added]

The prospect of that debt explosion led Moody’s on Friday to downgrade U.S. credit for the first time since 1917, following Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. rating in 2023, and Standard & Poor’s, which did so back in 2011. “If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case,” Moody’s explained, “it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade. As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation.” (...)

The continuing Republican insistence that spending is out of control does not reflect reality. In fact, discretionary spending has fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 11% to 6.3%. What has driven rising deficits are the George W. Bush and Donald Trump tax cuts, which had added $8 trillion and $1.7 trillion, respectively, to the debt by the end of the 2023 fiscal year.

But rather than permit those tax cuts to expire— or even to roll them back— the Republicans continue to insist Americans are overtaxed. In fact, the U.S. is far below the average of the 37 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental forum of democracies with market economies, in its tax levies. According to a report by the Center for American Progress in 2023, if the U.S. taxed at the average OECD level, over ten years it would have an additional $26 trillion in revenue. If the U.S. taxed at the average of European Union nations, it would have an additional $36 trillion. (...)

So with the current Big, Beautiful Bill, we are looking at a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans to those at the top of American society. The Democratic Women’s Caucus has dubbed the measure the “Big Bad Billionaire Bill.” (...)

Speaker Johnson hopes to pass the bill through the House of Representatives by this Friday, before Memorial Day weekend.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Image: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.). Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

[ed. See also: How to Take Medicaid from Millions of Americans, in Less Than 72 Hours (The Bulwark); Who Changed and America Has Become Trump's Battered Wife (Slack Tide); and, State-by-State Data on Health Insurance Losses from Medicaid, ACA Cuts (Joint Economic Committee).

The Internet is for Extremism

Everything seems insane on the internet.

It’s 2023, and Donald Trump still dominates American political discussion. The internet is filled with wild MAGA nonsense, and if you follow politics online you’ve probably also learned what a Tankie is against your will. But it’s not just politics - everything seems insane. Influencers are doing crazier and crazier stunts to go viral. Pop culture fights happen more often and with more venom. Niche communities seem to fall into deranged niche drama more easily than ever.

To understand how Donald Trump used the internet to take over American politics - and why everything else is also going insane - we first need to understand MrBeast.

You have to go bigger

YouTuber MrBeast could fairly claim to be the biggest online content creator in the world. He’s the most-subscribed individual creator on Youtube. He has more than 290 million followers across his YouTube channels and his videos have collected more than 45 billion views. And it’s possible that no one in the world has thought as deeply about how to go viral as he has.

MrBeast has talked at length about his obsession with YouTube, producing content, and going viral. He often talks about how he’s been uploading videos since he was 11 years old, how he’s probably spent 40,000 hours discussing content creation tactics for the YouTube platform. He faked going to community college to live at home with his parents and make content 15 hours a day. He’s the kind of guy who has extremely detailed (and evidence backed) opinions about the facial expressions that go on video thumbnails, how often a video should jump cut, and what types of videos will get views. So it’s worthwhile to think about some of his earliest viral videos, what he’s making now, and what it says about the nature of virality. (...)

MrBeast was 19 and a small-time YouTuber, nowhere near a household name. He was offered the biggest sponsorship he’d ever been offered to date - 5,000 dollars - and his immediate reaction was ‘Double that and let me give it away to a random homeless person’. He ended up being right, and the video went insanely viral. He knew that the bigger the number (especially if it could break into five digits and be 10,000 dollars) the better the video would do.

The instinct to go bigger has informed virtually everything MrBeast has done since then. He soon had a new video giving away $20,000 to homeless people, then $100,000, then an actual house. He is always pushing the limits, doing bigger and wilder and more, and not just when it comes to giving away money. He’s driven through the same drive-through 1000 times straight. He spent four million dollars to enact a real life Squid Game and bought a train so he could run it off a cliff. He spent two days buried alive in a coffin and a week stranded on a raft in the middle of the ocean. He’s given away a private island a cured 1000 blind and deaf people.

The biggest and probably most knowledgeable content creator on the planet has one philosophy - if you want people to watch, push things to the extreme. And this rule doesn’t just govern YouTube videos. It governs everything we do online.

The MrBeastification of Everything

Think of a relatively normal and uncontroversial thing to be a fan of. Let’s pick hot sauce - imagine yourself as a hot sauce aficionado. If you were living 30 years ago before social media, your options were pretty limited. Maybe you’d know a couple restaurants nearby with pretty spicy food. Maybe you read an extremely niche hot sauce magazine that would publish twice a year for a tiny audience. Maybe you knew of a mail order company that sold some really hot stuff, hotter than you could get at the supermarket. But fundamentally, even as an obsessive fan, your options were pretty limited.

Today, your options are not limited. There are dedicated hot sauce forums online. There are mountains of social content analyzing hot sauce, discussing hot sauce, watching celebrities eat incredibly hot chicken wings. There’s a hot sauce subreddit with hundreds of thousands of subscribers where people have incredibly strong opinions about this topic.

We can even measure this empirically - the hottest pepper in the world today is up to 10x as hot as the world’s hottest pepper in the 1990s. And it’s also far more accessible. You can buy hotter sauces than ever before, easier than ever before, and it’s all thanks to the power of the internet. Hot sauce is undergoing MrBeastification - always pushing for hotter.

There are times where it seems like this extremism is happening to everything online. Celebrity fandoms are more extreme than ever - in fact, it’s no longer enough to be a wildly deranged stan, you must also engage in the anti-fandoms that are now common. Sorority rush has gone from a relatively understated affair to a giant social media production requiring intense planning. Our financial scams have gone from straightforward ponzi schemes to meme stocks and cryptocurrencies that border on being actual cults. Fringe beliefs in every field - economics, vaccinology, history - are flourishing. The more conspiratorial and extreme the view, the better it tends to do on the internet. Everything is being pushed to be the most extreme version of itself.

The Incentives We’re Chasing

What’s causing this? It’s the social web. There are a couple of structural ways in which the internet empowers and incentivizes extremism. (...)

Fundamentally, the social dynamics of the internet turbo-charge this extremism. When the amount of content available online is near-infinite, why wouldn’t you gravitate towards the content that is the most of whatever it is you’re searching for? Why watch a video where a cook bakes a 10 pound cake when you could watch a 50 pound cake? Why watch someone give away a thousand dollars when you could watch someone else give away a hundred thousand dollars? MrBeast recognized this early on and he’s correct - this is how things work with social content. People always want bigger and crazier and more extreme.

by Jeremiah Johnson, Infinite Scroll |  Read more:

Image: MrBeast

[ed. Reveal parties, celebrity outfits, weed, $400 million gift planes... everything.]

Tundra tires
via:

‘Aquamosh’: Plastilina Mosh’s Weido Pop Masterpiece

During the commercial heyday of Mexican rock, bands made their mark by fusing different genres. Artists such as Caifanes mixed post-punk and arena rock with pre-Hispanic music, while others like Café Tacvba and Maldita Vecindad borrowed elements from ska, punk, son cubano, cumbia, disco, and more. But few artists deftly combined as much as Monterrey’s Plastilina Mosh.

The duo, composed of Juan José “Jonás” Gonzalez and Alejandro Rosso, made wildly exploratory music using both traditional instruments and state-of-the-art tools like computers and samplers. They made their mark right from the get-go with their 1998 full-length debut, Aquamosh. It was an amazingly creative and fun mishmash in which everything from lounge to industrial coalesced into a nearly flawless record. It helped establish Plastilina Mosh as auteurs of experimental hook-laden music that still sounds fresh decades after its release.

Plastilina Mosh started in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon in 1997. Jonaz had played in a metal band called Koervoz De Malta and Rosso, a classically-trained musician, played keyboards in the prog-leaning outfit Acarnienses. Both had interest in a wide range of music, from acid jazz to punk.

Around this time, Monterrey was becoming a mecca for music in Mexico. The Mexican rock boom – which started with bands like Caifanes and Botellita de Jerez in the late 1980s – had its epicenter in Mexico City. But as the 90s progressed, attention began to shift to Monterrey, with the G-funk-inspired Control Machete, the power pop-meets-rap rock of Zurdok, the Britpop-leaning Jumbo, the Latin rhythms of El Gran Silencio, and many more. The press dubbed this generation of bands La Avanzada Regia. Loosely translated, it means “The Regal Avant-Garde.” (“Regio” is a nickname for people from Monterrey.) (...)

Today, their status as elder statesmen in the Mexican scene is secure. They paved the way for more Mexican music fusionists like Nortec and 3BallMTY, groups that put together genres like norteño, cumbia with electronics, and hip-hop. Much like the Beastie Boys and Beck in the United States, the group’s music predicted a generation that’s grown up on short-form video and eclectic playlists, where hip-hop, corridos, and rock mix together without a second thought.

by Marcos Hassan, Udiscovermusic |  Read more:

[ed. Glad to see the boys finally getting their due. Here are a couple videos from their post-Aquamosh period:]
Plastilina Mosh returned with Juan Manuel in 2000, abandoning the adrenaline-inducing punk attitude of Aquamosh to delve into dance music, disco and trip hop, all with their fun-loving anarchic spirit in place. Later, they leaned toward melodic experiments with songs like “Peligroso Pop” and “Perverted Pop Song,” showcasing their ability to make picture perfect power pop without sacrificing their experimental instincts.

Castígame Diviértete Sé que gozas y me gusta 

[Punish me I know that I have behaved badly Have fun I know you enjoy and like]

Te quiero igual y, No sé ni como aguantar, Ni controlar mis deseos de morderte, En donde no te puedes mirar, Mientras busco distracción en el radio, o en tu conversación, o en una estúpida canción

[I love you the same and, I don't even know how to endure, Nor control my desire to bite you, Where you can't look, While I am looking for distraction on the radio, or in your conversation or in a stupid song]

y me detengo con tus ojos cristalinos, Como gotas de champány sin embargo no dejó de pensar en lo suave de tus labios cuando sueles besary el sabor de tu saliva cuando empiezas a amary entiende lo que digo esto es fácil solo sigue el manual no tiene tanto problema es cuestión de escuchar no busques una tangente es fácil como decir que yo te gusto como tú a mí

[And I stop with your crystalline eyes As shampán drops And yet he kept thinking In the soft lips when you usually kiss And the taste of your saliva when you start loving And understand what I say this is easy Just follow the manual You don't have so much problem It's a matter of listening Don't look for a tangent It's easy to say that I liked you like you like me like you like me]

[ed. Bob Dylan they ain't.]

Ping Pong Bot Returns Shots With High-Speed Precision

Ping pong bot returns shots with high-speed precision (MIT News).

Image: David Nguyen, Kendrick Cancio and Sangbae Kim (with video)

"Building robots to play ping pong is a challenge that researchers have taken up since the 1980s. The problem requires a unique combination of technologies, including high-speed machine vision, fast and nimble motors and actuators, precise manipulator control, and accurate, real-time prediction, as well as higher-level planning of game strategy."

“If you think of the spectrum of control problems in robotics, we have on one end manipulation, which is usually slow and very precise, such as picking up an object and making sure you’re grasping it well. On the other end, you have locomotion, which is about being dynamic and adapting to perturbations in your system,” Nguyen explains. “Ping pong sits in between those. You’re still doing manipulation, in that you have to be precise in hitting the ball, but you have to hit it within 300 milliseconds. So, it balances similar problems of dynamic locomotion and precise manipulation.”

Multi-Agent Risks from Advanced AI

Executive Summary 

The proliferation of increasingly advanced AI not only promises widespread benefits, but also presents new risks (Bengio et al., 2024; Chan et al., 2023). Today, AI systems are beginning to autonomously interact with one another and adapt their behaviour accordingly, forming multiagent systems. This change is due to the widespread adoption of sophisticated models that can interact via a range of modalities (including text, images, and audio), and the competitive advantages conferred by autonomous, adaptive agents (Anthropic, 2024a; Google DeepMind, 2024; OpenAI, 2025). 

While still relatively rare, groups of advanced AI agents are already responsible for tasks that range from trading million-dollar assets (AmplifyETFs, 2025; Ferreira et al., 2021; Sun et al., 2023a) to recommending actions to commanders in battle (Black et al., 2024; Manson, 2024; Palantir, 2025). In the near future, applications will include not only economic and military domains, but are likely to extend to energy management, transport networks, and other critical infrastructure (Camacho et al., 2024; Mayorkas, 2024). Large populations of AI agents will also feature in more familiar social settings as intelligent personal assistants or representatives, capable of being delegated increasingly complex and important tasks. 

While bringing new opportunities for scalable automation and more diffuse benefits to society, these advanced, multi-agent systems present novel risks that are distinct from those posed by single agents or less advanced technologies, and which have been systematically underappreciated and understudied. This lack of attention is partly because present-day multi-agent systems are rare (and those that do exist are often highly controlled, such as in automated warehouses), but also because even single agents present many unsolved problems (Amodei et al., 2016; Anwar et al., 2024; Hendrycks et al., 2021). Given the current rate of progress and adoption, however, we urgently need to evaluate (and prepare to mitigate) multi-agent risks from advanced AI. More concretely, we provide recommendations throughout the report that can largely be classified as follows. 

• Evaluation: Today’s AI systems are developed and tested in isolation, despite the fact that they will soon interact with each other. In order to understand how likely and severe multi-agent risks are, we need new methods of detecting how and when they might arise, such as: evaluating the cooperative capabilities, biases, and vulnerabilities of models; testing for new or improved dangerous capabilities in multi-agent settings (such as manipulation, collusion, or overriding safeguards); more open-ended simulations to study dynamics, selection pressures, and emergent behaviours; and studies of how well these tests and simulations match real-world deployments. 

• Mitigation: Evaluation is only the first step towards mitigating multi-agent risks, which will require new technical advances. While our understanding of these risks is still growing, there are promising directions that we can begin to explore now, such as: scaling peer incentivisation methods to state-of-the-art models; developing secure protocols for trusted agent interactions; leveraging information design and the potential transparency of AI agents; and stabilising dynamic multi-agent networks and ensuring they are robust to the presence of adversaries. 

• Collaboration: Multi-agent risks inherently involve many different actors and stakeholders, often in complex, dynamic environments. Greater progress can be made on these interdisciplinary problems by leveraging insights from other fields, such as: better understanding the causes of undesirable outcomes in complex adaptive systems and evolutionary settings; determining the moral responsibilities and legal liabilities for harms not caused by any single AI system; drawing lessons from existing efforts to regulate multi-agent systems in high-stakes contexts, such as financial markets; and determining the security vulnerabilities and affordances of multi-agent systems. 

To support these recommendations, we introduce a taxonomy of AI risks that are new, much more challenging, or qualitatively different in the multi-agent setting, together with a preliminary assessment of what can be done to mitigate them. We identify three high-level failure modes, which depend on the nature of the agents’ objectives and the intended behaviour of the system: miscoordination, conflict, and collusion. We then describe seven key risk factors that can lead to these failures: information asymmetries, network effects, selection pressures, destabilising dynamics, commitment and trust, emergent agency, and multi-agent security. For each problem we provide a definition, key instances of how and where it can arise, illustrative case studies, and promising directions for future work. We conclude by discussing the implications for existing work in AI safety, AI governance, and AI ethics. (...)

***

While coordinated human hacking teams or botnets already pose ‘multi-agent’ security risks, their speed and adaptability are limited by human coordination or static strategies. As AI agents become more autonomous and capable of learning and complex reasoning, however, they will be more easily able to dynamically strategize, collude, and decompose tasks to evade defences. At the same time, security efforts aimed at preventing attacks to (or harmful actions from) a single advanced AI system are comparatively simple, as they primarily require monitoring a single entity. The emergence of advanced multi-agent systems therefore raises new vulnerabilities that do not appear in single-agent or less advanced multiagent contexts. (...)

Undetectable Threats. Cooperation and trust in many multi-agent systems relies crucially on the ability to detect (and then avoid or sanction) adversarial actions taken by others (Ostrom, 1990; Schneier, 2012). Recent developments, however, have shown that AI agents are capable of both steganographic communication (Motwani et al., 2024; Schroeder de Witt et al., 2023b) and ‘illusory’ attacks (Franzmeyer et al., 2023), which are black-box undetectable and can even be hidden using white-box undetectable encrypted backdoors (Draguns et al., 2024). Similarly, in environments where agents learn from interactions with others, it is possible for agents to secretly poison the training data of others (Halawi et al., 2024; Wei et al., 2023). If left unchecked, these new attack methods could rapidly destabilise cooperation and coordination in multi-agent systems.

by Lewis Hammond, et. al, Cooperative AI Foundation |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Not looking good for humans. See also: The Future of AI: Collaborating Machines and the Rise of Multi-Agent Systems (Medium); and, Vision-language models can’t handle queries with negation words (MIT):]

***

In a new study, MIT researchers have found that vision-language models are extremely likely to make such a mistake in real-world situations because they don’t understand negation — words like “no” and “doesn’t” that specify what is false or absent.

“Those negation words can have a very significant impact, and if we are just using these models blindly, we may run into catastrophic consequences,” says Kumail Alhamoud, an MIT graduate student and lead author of this study. (...)

They hope their research alerts potential users to a previously unnoticed shortcoming that could have serious implications in high-stakes settings where these models are currently being used, from determining which patients receive certain treatments to identifying product defects in manufacturing plants.

“This is a technical paper, but there are bigger issues to consider. If something as fundamental as negation is broken, we shouldn’t be using large vision/language models in many of the ways we are using them now — without intensive evaluation,” says senior author Marzyeh Ghassemi, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Institute of Medical Engineering Sciences and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems.

Vision-language models (VLM) are trained using huge collections of images and corresponding captions, which they learn to encode as sets of numbers, called vector representations. The models use these vectors to distinguish between different images.

A VLM utilizes two separate encoders, one for text and one for images, and the encoders learn to output similar vectors for an image and its corresponding text caption.

“The captions express what is in the images — they are a positive label. And that is actually the whole problem. No one looks at an image of a dog jumping over a fence and captions it by saying ‘a dog jumping over a fence, with no helicopters,’” Ghassemi says.

Because the image-caption datasets don’t contain examples of negation, VLMs never learn to identify it.

[ed. Great. Knowable unknowns vs. Unknowable unknowns.]

How To Explain Lab-Grown Meat Simply

Winston Churchill once wrote that in the future, “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” Churchill was arguably predicting and describing lab-grown meat (or cultivated or cultured meat, as the burgeoning industry and activists are trying to rebrand it). Almost a century after Churchill made his prediction, it’s almost here. Over the last decade, the science of lab-grown meat has made striking advancements, and has the potential to fundamentally change how humans eat and produce food.

But if you’re not a scientist, it can be difficult to know how to understand or explain lab-grown meat. Here are the basics, and a few common misconceptions about cultivated meat, debunked.

Why Is Lab-Grown Meat Better for Animals and the Environment?

The Short Answer:

Lab-grown meat offers a potential way to feed our appetite for meat without inflicting so much damage on animals and the environment. If it’s able to be produced cheaply at scale — still a big “if” at this point — it’s a product that could eventually eliminate factory farming, methane from cows and other pollution, save water and limit deforestation.

The Longer Answer:

Make no mistake: most humans these days like eating meat. Between 1961 and 2020, the average person’s yearly meat consumption almost doubled, according to Our World In Data, from around 50 pounds to 92 pounds. In the United States, the average person eats a staggering 280 pounds of meat per year.

But there are a number of serious environmental and ethical issues with the meat industry as it currently exists, and lab-grown meat was created in hopes of overcoming them.

Perhaps the most obvious is the pain and suffering inflicted on animals in order to produce meat. The list is too long to recount in full here, but in factory farms, where approximately 99 percent of livestock is raised, most of the animals are mutilated, dismembered and separated from their parents as a matter of procedure. They are crammed into confined spaces barely bigger than their bodies, forced to live in their own feces and slaughtered in gruesome ways without anesthetic.

Over 100 billion animals die in factory farms every year. For many, that’s reason enough to transition away from eating meat. But it’s not the only reason.

The meat industry also takes a staggering toll on the environment. Livestock production accounts for around 14 percent of all greenhouse gasses and 37 percent of all methane emissions, according to the United Nations. The meat industry is the driving force behind deforestation around the world, most notably in the Amazon, and industrially grown feed crops are responsible for decades of topsoil erosion, a serious problem that has the potential to cause catastrophic food shortages within decades.

How Exactly Is Lab-Grown Meat Made?

The Short Answer:

Lab-grown meat is made by extracting a single cell from an animal and placing it into a solution with nutrients that cause the cell to multiply and develop into muscle tissue. Once enough tissue has been formed, it’s removed and shaped into a nugget, burger or other meat product.

The Longer Answer:

Unlike plant-based meat replacements, lab-grown meat is actual, bona fide meat. What sets it apart from traditional meat is that you don’t have to slaughter billions of animals to get it.

The process begins by extracting a single stem cell from a living animal — a cow, for instance. Stem cells are unspecialized, which means that they have the ability to develop into any other type of cell (muscle, fat, etc.). That single stem cell is then placed into a broth with nutrients and proteins that cause the cell to develop and multiply; this process is called culturing, and the nutrient broth is commonly referred to as growth medium. The stem cell and growth medium are collectively placed in a bioreactor that creates the necessary atmospheric and temperature conditions for growth.

That’s the gist of the process, but there are some more nuances and complications that are important to note. For instance, although growing muscle tissue is sufficient to recreate a chicken nugget or ground beef (often made with some plant-based ingredients in the mix), some companies also want to recreate meat products that have structure and visible fat in them — a cut of steak, for instance. To accomplish this, they place the stem cells into a different growth medium that allows some of the cells to grow into muscle and others to become fat, a process known as co-differentiation.

Additionally, there are several different ways of shaping muscle tissue into the final meat product. For highly processed foods like chicken nuggets or hot dogs, it can be sufficient to simply mold the muscle tissue into the shape of the product in question. For meat products with more complex textures and compositions, such as steak, a 3-D printer is often used instead, as this allows manufacturers to specify and fine-tune the compositional properties of the meat. (...)

Does Lab-Grown Meat Hurt Animals?

The Short Answer:

The initial development of lab-grown meat often utilizes something called Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS), which requires the slaughter of a cow. Companies are aggressively searching for cruelty-free alternatives to this, and some have already removed it from their process entirely.

The Longer Answer:

While lab-grown meat is the best shot we have of eliminating the suffering of animals in factory farms, there remains the thorny issue of fetal bovine serum (FBS). One of the most important parts of the lab-grown meat process is finding the right ingredients for the growth medium in which the cells are cultured. The broth needs to have the precise mixture of vitamins, sugars, proteins and nutrients needed to culture the cells into meat, and it just so happens that one of the most efficient ingredients to help accomplish this is FBS.

by Seth Millstein, Sentient Food |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

River Eckert (with George Porter Jr, Terence Higgins, and John Fohl)

[ed. Pretty amazing for someone so young.]

How Ships Escaped the Great Stagnation

In January 2024 the largest passenger ship ever built, Icon of the Seas, set sail from Miami on her maiden voyage. Icon is five times larger than the Titanic by gross tonnage (the internal volume of a ship) and spans 20 decks containing more than 2,500 passenger rooms. At full capacity she can carry nearly 10,000 people – up to 7,600 passengers along with 2,350 crew. Passengers can enjoy 40 bars and restaurants across eight ‘neighborhoods’, plus several theaters and a top-deck aquapark comprising seven swimming pools and nine waterslides. The ship is 365 meters long and 65 meters wide, giving a population density equivalent to approximately 420,000 people per square kilometer. That’s about 70 times the density of London and 50 percent higher than Dharavi in Mumbai, often cited as the world’s densest urban area.

 

Airplanes today fly no faster than they did in the 1970s. In many countries, road speeds have decreased. Flying cars never showed up. In developed countries, the tallest buildings have only inched higher. Most rich countries produce less energy per capita than they did 20 years ago, and the cost of building new physical infrastructure like railways seems to rise inexorably. Yet cruise ships continue to grow: a natural experiment in what can be achieved outside the constraints that have stifled progress on dry land. (...)

The great stagnation in everything but cruise ships

New buildings, airplanes, bridges, and trains built today are often barely distinguishable from those built decades earlier, apart from often costing much more money. There is some incremental progress, especially in safety and energy efficiency, but in many areas we have stopped making performance records at all. In some, like the speed of the fastest passenger airplanes, we have even gone backward. (...)

The cruise industry, in contrast, continues to break records. The title of world’s largest passenger ship has been broken nine times so far this century, including three times in the last five years. The trend for ever-larger cruise ships accelerated around the turn of the millennium when Carnival Cruise Line’s Sunshine became the first passenger ship to exceed 100,000 gross tons in 1995. By 2008 Oasis of the Seas had more than doubled that record at 226,000 gross tons. (...)

Passenger numbers have also increased from just over 7 million passengers per year in 2000 to 31.7 million in 2023. The industry suffered badly during the Covid-19 pandemic, beginning with the high-profile Covid outbreak aboard the Diamond Princess off the coast of Japan in February 2020, resulting in the quarantine of the 3,700 people on board. Subsequent lockdowns, capacity limits, and mask mandates that persisted long after widespread vaccination all contributed to depressed passenger numbers. But new megaships like Icon have driven a strong post-Covid recovery, and passenger numbers and revenues in 2023 surpassed pre-pandemic records. 

Part of the reason for the relatively slower progress of physical infrastructure projects, compared to rapid progress in digital technologies, is sheer technological difficulty. Software products can be built rapidly and iteratively improved. Mistakes can usually be easily rectified by editing offending lines of code. When, on the other hand, Ford discovered in the late 1990s that ignition switches in its cars could cause fires, it had to recall 14.9 million vehicles.

But not all differences between the rates of progress in the worlds of bits and of atoms can be explained by technological difficulty. In the United States, housing, medical care, and childcare costs have risen faster than overall inflation since 2000, while consumer electronics, digital services, and small manufactured goods have become significantly cheaper in real terms. British researchers found something similar: in industries where increasing supply requires building new physical infrastructure, like houses, electricity pylons, power stations, and new railway lines, prices have risen. (...)

Compared with large-scale construction projects on land, the cruise industry is something of an outlier. Large modern cruise ships are sometimes even cheaper in real terms to manufacture than flag carriers of the past when measured per gross ton in 2024 dollars. The steady improvement of European shipbuilding suggests that it isn’t technological difficulty, a lack of skills, or the prices of raw materials that make infrastructure expensive in Europe, but flawed rules and institutions.

Cruise fares have also fallen in real terms. A cruise forum user unearthed a Royal Caribbean brochure from 1983 that shows pricing for its first dedicated cruise ship, Song of Norway. The prices indicated are per person based on two people sharing a room. The cheapest seven-day Caribbean cruise fare is $995 (about $3,000 dollars in 2024 prices) per person for an interior room. An equivalent cruise in 2024 aboard Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas was roughly five times cheaper, at around $600 dollars per person. A balcony room in 1983 cost $1,750 ($5,500 per person in 2024 prices) while a balcony on an equivalent weeklong Caribbean cruise aboard Wonder of the Seas (constructed in 2022) only cost around $1,000 per person in 2024. Even on Icon, which is in greatest demand, a balcony cabin costs around $1,700 dollars per person.

And it’s not simply that cruise lines are managing to cram more people into a smaller space on modern ships. If we divide the gross tonnage of a ship by its passenger capacity we find that each passenger on Icon of the Seas has about 33 percent more space than they would aboard Song of Norway. (...)

Cruise ships spend their lives either temporarily docked at a port or out at sea, where they impose almost no localized negative externalities and there is therefore little drive to subject them to national regulation.

They also have a trump card they can play to escape regulation that might come their way: the flag of convenience. Each ship sails under a specific nation’s flag, obliging it to abide by the laws and regulations of that nation. Cruise liners, because they are mobile, can choose which flag to fly. (...)

Cruise ships are held back – by land

Cruise ships could be even bigger and more numerous. The main limiting factor is not the ships themselves, but the land-based infrastructure with which they interact, such as ports, bridges, and canals.

The issue with ports is depth. Engineers therefore aim to maximize gross tonnage (the overall internal volume of a ship) without excessively increasing its length or draught (how deep a ship projects into the water). Typically, a heavier ship would be built with a larger draught to provide stability, but this curtails the range of ports that large cruise ships can access. Popular tourist destinations like Venice and Santorini have ports that can no longer accommodate the largest cruise ships. Deepwater ports like Miami and Barcelona have the necessary depth to handle vessels with significant draughts and typically provide better infrastructure for large numbers of passengers. As large cruise ships proliferate, more artificial deepwater ports like the international cruise port in Cozumel, Mexico, are being built to meet demand.

While the depth of existing ports constrains the maximum draught of cruise ships, the height of key bridges limits size in the opposite direction, placing a cap on the maximum sailing height. This was illustrated recently when Icon of the Seas could barely sail under the Great Belt Bridge in Denmark during her maiden voyage from the Turku shipyard in Finland to her final destination in Miami. The bridge has a clearance of 65 meters above sea level, requiring Icon’s engineers to partially disassemble the ship’s masts and travel at high speed during the lowest tides to safely clear it. Symphony of the Seas has retractable funnels that allow it to shrink from its usual sailing height of 72.5 meters and squeeze under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge (clearance 69 meters).

With ports limiting maximum draughts and important bridges restricting maximum sailing heights, the latest generation of megaships has expanded outward, resulting in the distinctive wide profile of modern vessels. The largest cruise ships are now too wide to use the Panama Canal, which can only take ships up to 51.5 meters in width, and must instead sail around Cape Horn if they are being redeployed from America’s East Coast to the West Coast or South Pacific.

by Michael Hopkins, Works in Progress | Read more:
Images: uncredited

Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha - Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line (Phillips Collection)

Image via:

Neil Young

"Roll in Peace" 1970 (The Loner/Cinnamon Girl)

Dan Steven
via:

Over 13 Million to Lose Health Insurance Under GOP Plan

The House leadership late Sunday released the GOP’s plan for cutting health care spending to pay for tax breaks for the rich and large corporations. It whacks both Medicaid and the expanded subsidies that make individual plans sold on the Obamacare exchanges affordable.

While they pitched their plan as a modest program designed to appeal to Republican moderates, there is no way they can generate more than $700 billion in savings without making major cuts to both programs.

Mainstream media coverage is aiding and abetting the subterfuge. “Republicans Propose Paring Medicaid Coverage but Steer Clear of Deeper Cuts,” the New York Times online headline read this morning. “House bill includes work requirements but not deeper reductions some fiscal hawks demanded,” the subhead in the Wall Street Journal read.

Using Congresstional Budget Office estimates, Democrats on Capitol Hill immediately released an analysis that showed 4.2 million people will lose Obamacare coverage over the next decade under the plan. It is largely due to expiration of the expanded premium tax credits passed in 2022 that made the plans affordable for millions.

Another estimated 1.8 million people will lose coverage through new rules making it harder to enroll. The bill calls for shortening the enrollment period, demands more income verification paperwork and excludes non-citizens from the program.

The Medicaid cuts would go deeper, driving an estimated 7.7 million people from the rolls. The GOP bill includes a moratorium on Biden-era rules for streamlining the enrollment process; an 80-hour monthly work requirement (unless you’re a student or pregnant); a monthly redetermination process for eligibility; and denies enrollment to non-citizens without “satisfactory immigration status.” The latter provision eliminates so-called dreamers (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) from qualifying for the program.

Very few people on Medicaid are able-boded, working age adults who are unemployed. Work requirements are not designed to help them find work; they are meant to drive people from the rolls through increased paperwork for the already employed, which is more than half of all working age recipients.

The combined effects of those changes will drive the uninsured rate back into double digits — possibly as high as one in every eight Americans.

There’s more. The proposal, which will be marked up in the House tomorrow, eliminates the 90% federal match for the nine states that have yet to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which allows individuals earning up to 138% of the federal poverty line to qualify for the program. It also gives states the right to impose up to a $35 co-pay for every service (capped at 5% of income), which will discourage many people from signing up and discourage those already in the program from seeking health care when they need it.

Little room to lose votes

With narrow majorities in both houses, the Trump-loyal GOP leadership can’t afford to lose many votes. It’s questionable whether the proposed plan will mollify Republican representatives in swing districts or Senators from conservative states that have come around to embracing Obamacare’s health coverage expansion.

On the same day the House plan was released, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote on the op-ed page of the New York Times that “slashing health insurance for the working poor … is both morally wrong and politically suicidal.” In August 2020, Missouri voted by a 53% to 47% margin to enshrine expanding Medicaid under Obamacare in its state constitution over the objections of the state’s GOP leadership. (...)

In true GOP fashion, there are several provisions in the bill aimed at appeasing corporate lobbyists and their employers. The bill repeals the rule passed by the Biden administration that requires minimum staff-to-patient ratios in the nation’s nursing homes. It also reins in the middleman charges that pharmacy benefit managers lard onto prescription drug costs. It allows insurance companies to deny future coverage to anyone who once fell behind on their exchange plan premiums. And it further delays cuts in the extra payments some hospitals receive for serving a disproportionate share of the poor.

What’s noticeably absent from the bill is any effort to limit insurance companies’ upcoding in Medicare Advantage plans, which costs taxpayers as much as $80 billion a year. Simply paying MA plans the same amount as their members would cost had they remained in traditional Medicare would save more money over the next decade than all the provisions in the bill released Sunday combined.

by Merrill Goozner, GoozNews | Read more:
Image: KFF

[ed. Think homelessness is bad now?]

Kazuo Ishiguro: A Pale View of Hills

Kazuo Ishiguro still remembers where he was when he wrote A Pale View of Hills: hunched over the dining room table in a bedsit in Cardiff. He was in his mid-20s then; he is 70 now. “I had no idea that the book would be published, let alone that I had a career ahead of me as a writer,” he says. “[But] the story remains an important part of me, not only because it was the start of my novel-writing life, but because it helped settle my relationship with Japan.”

First published in 1982, A Pale View of Hills is a charged family story that connects England with Japan and the present with the past. Now along comes a film version to provide a new frame for the mystery, a fresh view of the hills. Scripted and directed by Kei Ishikawa, it is a splendidly elegant and deliberate affair; a trail of carefully laid breadcrumbs that link a mothballed home in early 80s suburbia with wounded, resilient postwar Nagasaki. Middle-aged Etsuko is long settled in the UK and haunted by the fate of her displaced eldest child. Her younger daughter, Niki, is a budding writer, borderline skint and keen to make a name for herself. Niki has a chunky tape-recorder and plenty of time on her hands. She says, “Mum, will you tell me about your lives before, in Japan?”

In awarding Ishiguro the Nobel prize for literature in 2017, the Swedish Academy paid tribute to the emotional force of his prose and his focus on “memory, time and self-delusion”. These are the themes that colour all his fiction, whether he is writing about the below-stairs staff at a stately home (The Remains of the Day), sacrificial children at an elite boarding school (Never Let Me Go) or aged wanderers in Arthurian Britain (The Buried Giant), although they seem closest to home in A Pale View of Hills.

The story lightly excavates the author’s family history and his own hybrid identity as a child of Nagasaki, transplanted to the UK at the age of five. Fittingly, the movie version premieres at the Cannes film festival, where it risks getting lost amid the palm trees, yachts and bling. Cultural dislocation, in large part, is what the tale is about.

I’m tempted to view Niki – the bumptious young writer from whom no family secret is safe – as Ishiguro’s alter ego. Actually, he says, she was conceived as “more a ‘reader proxy’ than a writer one”. She’s our entry point to the story; possibly our red thread through the maze. It’s hard to believe today, he adds, but most contemporary British readers were resistant to Japanese stories and characters and needed a reassuring western presence to help ease them in.

Niki is played in the film by Camilla Aiko, a recent graduate of the Bristol Old Vic theatre school. She sees the character as the story’s truth-seeker, the eyes of the audience, and the picture itself as the tale of two women who struggle to connect. “It didn’t cross my mind – maybe it should have – that I was playing Ishiguro,” she says.

What she shares with the author is the same blended cultural heritage. Aiko is British mixed-race – her mother is Japanese. “And the thing about being mixed-race is that I find it difficult speaking for Japanese people or British people because I’m not sure which side I’m on. In Japan I’m a foreigner; here I’m Asian. As an actor I’m someone who tries to slip through the cracks.”

Niki isn’t Ishiguro. Nonetheless, the author admits that there are parallels. He says, “Where I see myself in Niki – and I was reminded of this watching Camilla Aiko’s fine performance – is in her sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes coy and cunning curiosity when coaxing memories from her mother of another, more troubled time.”

It is the mother, after all, who looms largest in the tale. Etsuko in a sense has led two lives and been two different people. In 80s England she is a respectable widowed music teacher. In Nagasaki seven years after the atomic bomb dropped, she’s a harried young bride, contaminated with radiation and a potential hazard to her unborn child. She needs a friend or an escape route, whichever comes first. But she is never an entirely reliable narrator – and the family story she tells Niki finally doesn’t add up.

What did Ishiguro’s own mother make of A Pale View of Hills? “I believe it remained special to her among my books,” he says. “A little before I started the book, with cold war tensions intensifying in the Reagan-Brezhnev era, she said to me she felt it was important she should relate to me some of her experiences in Nagasaki. Partly because I was of the next generation, but also because I was wanting to be a writer and had a chance to pass things on … A Pale View of Hills didn’t use any of her stories directly, but I think she thought the book was some sort of evolution of them, and closer to her than the books I wrote later.” Ishiguro’s mother died in 2019, aged 92. After watching Ishikawa’s adaptation, he thought: “What a pity she wasn’t here to see this film.”

Cinema is an enduring passion for Ishiguro and influences his writing as much as literature does. His favourite recent films include the Oscar-winning animation Flow, about a small soot-grey cat who survives a great flood, plus the French legal dramas Anatomy of a Fall and Saint Omer (“Is French justice really conducted like this? Or are these hallucinatory versions of French courts?”).

A few years back, between novels, he wrote the screenplay for Living – a quietly wrenching adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru, relocated to London and starring Bill Nighy and Aimee Lou Wood. The poster for Ikiru, incidentally, can be glimpsed on the street in A Pale View of Hills.

Loving film can be a double-edged sword. Is it a help or a hindrance when it comes to having his own work adapted? Hopefully the former, Ishiguro says, so long as he maintains a safe distance. “I have a strict rule not to attempt to adapt any of my novels myself,” adds the writer, who is speaking to me by email. “As long as I keep well in the background, I don’t think I’m necessarily a hindrance. I always emphasise to film-makers that they have to own the film – that it shouldn’t be approached reverentially.”

Merchant-Ivory managed a near perfect adaptation of The Remains of the Day. Mark Romanek and Alex Garland crafted an appropriately haunting, chilly version of Never Let Me Go. Both films preserve Ishiguro’s distinctive style and flavour. The restraint and simplicity; the sense of deep mystery. Both, though, remain films first and foremost. They have been allowed to migrate and adapt to a new habitat.

“This is personal to me,” he says, “but I lean toward the film version moving the story on – not being a faithful translation the way a foreign language edition of a book might be. I know many novelists who’d be annoyed to hear me say this … The thing is, I watch many, many films and when an adaptation of a well-known book doesn’t work, 95% of the time it’s because the film-makers have been too reverential to the source.” Books and films are very different, he thinks. “They’re sometimes almost antithetical.”

In A Pale View of Hills, Etsuko hands her story on to Niki. Niki, in turn, will write it up how she likes. So this is a family story about family stories, aware of how they warp and change in the telling. Every tale is subject to the same cultural static. They are adapted and extrapolated, lost and found in translation. One might even say that’s what keeps a story alive.

by Xan Brooks, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images:Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP; Pale View Partners; YouTube

[ed. See also: Living review – Bill Nighy tackles life and death in exquisitely sad drama (Guardian).]

The Most Widespread Global Restaurant Chains

via:
[ed. See also: Mixue Ice Cream & Tea (Wikipedia). Chinese.]

Globalization Did Not Hollow Out the American Middle Class

For years, I’ve been calling for the U.S. to promote manufacturing. When Americans started getting excited about reindustrialization, I cheered. I was a big supporter of Joe Biden’s industrial policy, and I even praised Donald Trump for smashing the pro-free-trade consensus in his first term.

Trump’s tariffs haven’t changed my mind about any of that. Yes, the tariffs are a disaster. But they’re not a disaster because they promote manufacturing; indeed, they are deindustrializing America as we speak, by destroying American manufacturers’ ability to leverage supply chains and export markets. When America has finally realized the futility of Trump’s approach, it will be time to turn once again to the task of reindustrialization — in fact, that task will be even more urgent, given the damage that Trump will have done.

And yet at the same time, I think there’s a misguided narrative about globalization, manufacturing, and the American middle class that has taken hold across much of society. The story goes something like this:

In the 1950s and 1960s, America was a smokestack economy. Unionized factory jobs built a broad-based middle class, and we made everything we needed for ourselves. Then we opened up our country to trade and globalization, and things started going downhill. Wages stagnated due to foreign competition, and good manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas. American cities hollowed out, and we became a nation of winners and losers. The college-educated upper middle class thrived in their professional jobs, while regular Americans were forced to fall back on low-wage service work. Eventually the rage of the dispossessed working class boiled over, resulting in the election of Donald Trump. (...)

Like all such narratives, this one consists of layers of myth wrapped around a core of truth. But not all grand economic narratives are created equal — in this case, the layers of myth are thick and juicy, while the core of truth is thin and brittle. Everyone knows about the China Shock paper and the collapse of manufacturing employment by about 3 million in the 2000s. That’s the core of the story, and it’s very real. But there are a lot of big important economic facts that place that story in perspective, which most of the people talking about this topic seem not to know.

Ultimately, the trade-driven collapse in manufacturing was only a small part of the economic story of America over the last half century.

America is not actually that globalized

Pundits and politicians alike talk incessantly about the flood of cheap Chinese goods into America. But overall, this is a small percent of what we buy. The U.S. is actually an unusually closed-off economy; as a fraction of GDP, imports are much lower than in most rich countries, and lower even than China: (...)

In terms of imported components, America manufactures most of what it uses in production. China’s exports to the U.S. are actually more likely to be intermediate goods rather than the consumer goods we see on the shelves of Wal-Mart — another thing the typical narrative misses. But even so, China makes only about 3.5% of the intermediate goods that American manufacturers need: (...)

The American middle class was never hollowed out

Americans, as a people, are startlingly rich. This isn’t just true because a few very rich people pull up the average. If you take median disposable household income, the U.S. comes out way ahead of the pack:

Note that this includes taxes and transfers, including in-kind transfers like government-provided health care.

Other countries may have protected their manufacturing sectors, but middle-class Americans are richer than the middle classes in other countries.

And middle-class Americans’ income has not been stagnant over the years. Here’s real median personal income, which isn’t affected by the shift to two-earner families:

This is an increase of 50% since the early 70s. I wish it had been more, of course, and it has its ups and downs, but 50% is nothing to sneeze at.

As for middle-class wages, they’ve grown less than incomes, since some of the increased income has been in the form of corporate benefits (health care, retirement accounts), investment income, and government benefits. But they have still grown:

Wage growth has resumed since the mid-1990s, despite increasing trade deficits. Note that the China Shock, which threw millions of manufacturing workers out of their jobs, utterly failed to stop wages from resuming their upward climb. Wage stagnation and hyperglobalization just don’t line up, timing-wise. Jason Furman has another good chart that shows this very clearly:

A lot of commentators have gotten so used to the idea that incomes are stagnant that they have trouble believing this data is correct. But as Adam Ozimek points out, the Economic Policy Institute — a pro-union think tank that frequently complains that wages are too low — chooses a very similar measure for median wages. EPI writes that wages “have not been stagnant”, but “have…been suppressed”.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:
Images: Maximillian Conacher on Unsplash; OECD/Wikipedia; US Census Bureau.]